Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables of Green Gables

"Yes, it's red," she said resignedly.  "Now you see why I can't be perfectly happy.  Nobody could who had red hair.  I don't mind the other things so much--the freckles and the green eyes and my skinniness.  I can imagine them away.  I can imagine that I have a beautiful rose leaf complexion and lovely starry violet eyes.  But I cannot imagine that red hair away.  I do my best.  I think to myself, 'Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven's wing.'  But all the time I know it is plain red, and it breaks my heart.  It will be my lifelong sorrow.  I read of a girl once in a novel who had a lifelong sorrow, but it wasn't red hair.  Her hair was pure gold rippling back from her alabaster brow.  What is an alabaster brow?  I never could find out.  Can you tell me?"

"Well, now, I'm afraid I can't," said Matthew, who was getting a little dizzy.  He felt as he had once felt in his rash youth when another boy had enticed him on the merry-go-round at a picnic.

There's nothing I love more than reading books about the places I go when I travel.  When I took a recent spring break trip to Canada (where it was way too cold for right-thinking people take spring break trips) I decided I had to read Anne of Green Gables, the literary pride of Prince Edward Island.

First of all, Prince Edward Island is awesome.  It's easy to see why Anne, the novel's impulsive, imaginative hero, would be so captivated by her new home: it's pleasant and bucolic, but the abundance of red clay at the farms and red sand on the beaches gives it an otherworldly kind of feeling.  It certainly doesn't look or feel like anywhere else.  Green Gables, the house where Anne is taken by accident to the elderly couple Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert (who wanted to adopt a boy), is a real place, and you can tour it--or you could, if you were smart enough not to visit it in what is essentially Canadian winter.

Matthew and Marilla are charmed by Anne, who talks a mile a minute about the things she imagines.  And to be fair, Anne is pretty charming.  Her overactive imagination is the optimism of someone who's had a hard life as an orphan, a way of shaping the world into something more palatable.  Green Gables, though she sets about immediately renaming local landmarks to suit her sense of whimsy (a local pond becomes, for instance, the Lake of Shining Waters), is the first place commensurate with Anne's capacity for wonder.  The no-nonsense Marilla, while secretly enamored by Anne, endeavors to rein in her impulses, which result in some reliably amusing scrapes.  One of my favorites involves the twelve-year old Anne, permitted to throw a tea party, accidentally substitutes wine for cherry cordial and gets her best friend roaringly drunk.

Eventually, Anne becomes a young woman.  At sixteen, she graduates from high school and--oh, Canada--immediately becomes a schoolteacher herself.  Over the course of the novel, she becomes a part of the Cuthbert household, and ingratiates herself into the society of her small P.E.I. town, and becomes generally loved by everyone.  There are few very high stakes--although Montgomery manages to wring a great deal of unexpected pathos out of a bittersweet ending--but the small niceties of domestic Canadian life prove to be surprisingly compelling, because Anne is a compelling character.

Many women--only women, honestly, but only a few of them Canadian--have told me that these books meant a great deal to them as a child.  Why is that?  I enjoyed the book a lot, but something about Anne, even a hundred years and fifteen hundred miles removed, continues to resound for young girls.

The Last Interview and Other Conversations: Hannah Arendt

I think that Watergate has revealed perhaps one of the deepest constitutional crises this country has ever known . . . . And this constitutional crisis consists--for the first time in the United States--in a head-on clash between the legislative and the executive. Now there the Constitution itself is somehow at fault, and I would like to talk about that for a moment. The Founding Fathers never believed that tyranny could arise out of the executive office, because they did not see this office in any different light but as the executor of what the legislation had decreed--in various forms; I leave it at that. We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive. But what did the Founding Fathers--if we take the spirit of the Constitution--what did they think? They thought they were free from majority rule, and therefore it is a great mistake if you believe what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of the minorities, because they believed that in a healthy body politic there must be a plurality of opinions.

Oh, Hannah Arendt, how I love thee so. I picked up this drink after having had a couple of drinks and stumbling into our downtown, locally-owned book store. I did not need to buy any books (the twin, leaning towers of books mirroring each other from my desk and my night stand is, well...embarrassing). But, alcohol emboldens the spirit, and I walked out with this book, part of an entire series of last interviews (all with the same title except the person's name) and an unabridged copy of The Count of Monte Cristo (the latter has been laid down as foundation for what aspires to be my third leaning tower...).

The book contains four transcribed conversations with Arendt, including her last interview before dying. In each of the discussions, she pontificates about all sorts of issues related to political philosophy, language, and international affairs.

Being general in nature, the book provides a decent overview of her philosophy, albeit more superficial. This is both the book's strength and weakness. It is substantially easier to read than her substantive works. This is consistent with my experience reading similar books, like The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature and Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Unlike these two books, however, which encompass longer dialogues focused on a specific topic, this book of Arendt conversations is quite short, and more aimless. The dialogues in this book feel more like the segment at the end of The Daily Show, where some author and Jon Stewart shoot the shit for a couple of minutes. That is, the range of topics is broad; we get a quick sense of Arendt's view on something, and then we move on to a new topic.

Being a big fan of Arendt, this treatment was not substantial enough for me. Nonetheless, I might recommend it to someone who wants an easy primer on her work, while considering diving into her more substantial work. (though, honestly, Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is plenty read-able for that purpose).

That said, I think at the end of the day, the point of this book is not really to help anyone understand Arendt better. Rather, it's for the fans out there, like me, who cannot get enough Arendt and are willing to spend a small amount of cash and a small amount of time diving into her brain. In that regard, the book was perfect.

And, don't worry, folks, my next heavy read is going to be a real Arendt book, so this won't be the only Hannah Arendt appearance on Fifty Books. I know you were all worried.

To close, one more Arendt quote, to appeal to the documented pretensions of wannabe philosophers (like myself):

And to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general convictions, et cetera. Everything which happens in thinking is subject to a critical examination of whatever there is. That is, there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. So how I can convince . . . I think nonthinking is even more dangerous. I don't deny that thinking is dangerous, but I would say not thinking, [not thinking is even more dangerous].

Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed

He walked out to get the newspaper.  What it carried on the front page woke him: TREMONISHA SMARTS, WELL-KNOWN BLACK PLAYWRIGHT, ACCOSTED BY PSYCHO.  He read the story.  It said that a man dressed in a gray leather  coat, matching beret, and dark glasses had entered Tremonisha Smarts' apartment two nights before, and shaved all of her hair off.  His twisted explanation: this is what the French Resistance did to those women who collaborated with the Nazis.  The man had said that because of her "blood libel" of black men, she was doing the same thing.  Collaborating with the enemies of black men.  Ian blinked and read the story again.

Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing is set in the New York theater scene, where progressivism is eating itself.  Ian Ball, the protagonist, is a black playwright whose new play, Reckless Eyeballing--about a black man convicted of the title crime against a white woman and put to death--is a cynical ploy to get him off the "sex list," those playwrights whose work is blacklisted by feminists.  But his artistic allies are up in arms over what they see as his betrayal of black men, who are the punching bags of feminist art.  His play is moved to a smaller theater in order to make way for a play rehabilitating Eva Braun.  ("She may be a Nazi whore to sexists like you," a white feminist tells him, "but to many of us, she epitomizes women's universal suffering.")  Meanwhile, a mysterious vigilante dubbed the "Flower Phantom" is attacking female playwrights by shaving their heads.  The climate is toxic:

During the intermission Ball went out into the lobby.  Average everyday normal middle-class people were congratulating him and patting him on the back, while the white feminists stared at him stonily.  He could tell that their black feminist friends had really enjoyed the performance of Ham Hill's defense attorney but wouldn't let on before their white sisters; one came up later and told him so.  The fellas had said that a lot of feminists were okay when you had a one-on-one relationship with them, but when they were around the sisters they'd get all fired up.  The academic black Marxist-Leninists were in one corner sneering, and the black avant-garde members of the audience segregated themselves from the rest of the people in the lobby.  They were standing near the wall, sulking.

At first, it seemed to me that Reed wants to skewer everyone in this universe.  Ian is certainly venal and cynical, and often as sexist as his critics imply, but no one in the novel is far away from being a cartoon.  His mentor, who hasn't written a play in decades, wants to write about the Armenians because Jews have stolen all of his "black material."  It's a satire of how easily progressive factionalism can deteriorate into selfishness and solipsism.

Or is it?  Early in the novel, Ball's director, a Jew named Jim Minsk, is invited to speak at a small Southern college only to be murdered in a bizarre scapegoating ceremony reminiscent of the killings of Jews in medieval Europe.  It's so bizarre, and so out of place (but fun, in a morbid way) that my first thought was that it was a metafictional thing where Reed was creating a scenario as shallow and over-the-top as Ball and his peers might.  (For one thing, it suggests a complete misunderstanding of the way that Evangelical Southerners perceive Jews--which, in my experience at least, is wholly positive, if not always informed.  Something like the faraway admiration with which children regard the tooth fairy.)

But ultimately, I think Minsk's murder is Reed's ominous reminder of who the real villains are.  Late in the novel, Tremonisha Smarts, the black feminist who takes over direction of Ian's play, essentially apologizes for the way she allowed herself to be manipulated by her white feminist allies, the ones who revere Eva Braun.  Even the racist cop, Sergeant O'Reedy, who says things like "[e]verybody knew that all black men did was rape white women," ultimately comes to see himself as an Irishman whose ethnic identity has been co-opted by Anglo forces.  This conclusion seems to take a lot of teeth out of the satire, not to mention being less than generous to women and Irish-Americans.  Far from being "reckless," in the sense of casting a satirical eye everywhere around him, Reed seems (to this WASP, at least--take that how you will) to cast his gaze in one direction, and resort to some easy answers.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck--after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by the visitation of God." What could the world do without juries?

Roughing It is Mark Twain's account of his travels to and through Nevada, continuing to California and then Hawaii. I was mainly interested in the book because, while reading Harry Reid's book, I came across a lengthy and hilarious passage from this book. I figured it would be a funny way to learn a bit about this state that I've now been living in longer than anywhere other than my hometown.

Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist is well-deserved. Using a combination of pithy characterization, much hyperbole (so much hyperbole), and funny situations, Twain describes a crazy Nevada. It's not the wild west that we usually think of, but a land of unique absurdity.

In one episode, for example, Twain and some fellow miners strike it rich when they find a strand of gold that is sure to render them all rich. All they have to do is remember to start working the mine within a set period of time. Instead, they spend all their time planning how they will use their wealth. Of course, they forget to actually start working their mine, and so their riches are lost. The epitaph to the book, refers to this episode, and will probably always be one of my favorite epitaphs of all time:

To Calvin H Higbie, 

of California, 

An Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a 

Steadfast Friend,

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

By the Author

In Memory of the Curious Time

When We Two

Were Millionaires for Ten Days

The book is a series of anecdotes, that are chronological but not more than loosely connected in terms of plot. Indeed, there is not really a plot at all for the whole thing. Nonetheless, it hits upon some recurring themes, one which is particularly interesting now: this idea that people came to Nevada with the hope for easy riches. Many of the anecdotes are about the narrator's hard luck and his turn to mining as a get-rich-quick scheme. Because of Las Vegas's (well deserved) reputation as a land of--if you're lucky--easy opportunity, I cannot help wondering if there is a connection.

However, I would not recommend reading this book if what you're looking for is a deep analysis of contemporary Nevada culture. Rather, it's worth reading simply because it's so funny. In a, I hope not misguided, attempt to capture this hilarity, here is an abridged version of one of the stories. Twain is traveling by stage coach on his way to Nevada. At one point the stage coach driver shares this story:

I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clear through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was a while ago. But Hank Monk said, "Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time"--and you bet he did, too, what was left of him!

A couple days later, the coach that Twain is riding in picks up another passenger. They get to talking and then the passenger says, "I can tell you a mot laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once . . . ." Twain (the author) then re-writes, word for word the same story about Horace Greeley. A couple days later, after some more changes of passengers, they have a cavalry sergeant in their stage coach; after talking a little while, this sergeant recounts, again word for word, the same story about Horace Greeley. In this chapter, Mark Twain has four different people recount this story; each time Twain reprints each word. They encounter another person who begins to tell this story, Twain cuts him off and says:

Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change. 

Twain the author then describes what happens:

     We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.

     I am aware now, that I ought not to have asked the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for after seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed and re-crossed the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eight-one or eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers always told it, the very Chinaman and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. It has come to me in the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men. I never have smelled any anecdote as often as I have smelled that one; never had smelled any anecdote that smelled so variegated as that one. And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote. Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great Overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in print in nine different languages; I have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music. I do not think that such things are right.

A made-for-TV movie.

(Forgive the nineteenth century language and the self-indulgently long block quote). I hope I have not butchered this anecdote.

I will refer to one other anecdote from the book, but because it was so good, and because I don't think there's anyway to do it justice, I link to it here. In it, Mark Twain describes how the fine citizens took to the new United States Attorney sent to Carson City. The entire thing had me laughing outrageously. In fact, I took a part of it and made it my facebook cover photo. If the block quote was insufferable, please take 10 minutes and read the linked anecdote.

Recommended for anyone who wants a fun read, a read about Nevada's early days as a territory, or just a chance to have fun with Mark Twain.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

And the confusing point is this: All useful things have a price, and are bought only with money, as that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.

Carson McCullers really only has one subject, I think: unrequited love.  More than anyone, she understands what it means for love to be unrequited--only very rarely are people consciously spurned by the objects of their affection.  Rather, most love goes unspoken, unseen by the person it adores, and often unacknowledged even by the person who possesses it.  Sometimes it's a romantic love, but not always, or even often: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about the unrequited love of an entire town for the mute John Singer, and The Member of the Wedding is about Frankie's inability to share in the love of her brother and his fiancee.  The homosexual desire of the Captain in Reflections in a Golden Eye is buried so deep that even he doesn't even recognize it.

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," the central novella of this collection of McCullers' stories, examines unrequited love in its most teen-movie of forms: the love triangle.  Miss Amelia, a bitter and taciturn shop-owner, is suddenly softened by the arrival in town of a hunchbacked dwarf claiming to be her cousin.  Cousin Lymon and Amelia open the title cafe together, which brings a new life to the town that parallels their own heightened feelings for each other.  But when Amelia's ex-husband, an amoral lout named Marvin Macy, returns, she watches helplessly as Cousin Lymon develops a puerile attachment to him.  He lurks around the cafe, causing mild trouble, until Amelia and Marvin Macy finally come to blows--and Cousin Lymon, at the last second, attacks Miss Amelia from behind.  Marvin and Lymon destroy the cafe on their way out of town:

They unlocked the private cabinet of curios and took everything in it.

They broke the mechanical piano.

They carved terrible words on the cafe tables.

They found the watch that opened in the back to show a picture of a waterfall and took that also.

They poured a gallon of sorghum syrup all over the kitchen floor and smashed the jars of preserves.

They went out in the swamp and completely wrecked the still, ruining the big new condenser and the cooler, and setting fire to the shack itself.

They fixed a dish of Miss Amelia's favorite food, grits with sausage, seasoned it with enough poison to kill of the county, and placed this dish temptingly on the cafe counter.

They did everything ruinous they could think of without actually breaking into the office where Miss Amelia stayed the night.  Then they went off together, the two of them.

I especially love the "terrible words" they carved on the tables--McCullers is a virtuoso at adding the telling detail, but she's just as canny about leaving some things out.  I also loved when, in a story called "The Jockey," the diminutive title figure carefully takes out a cigarette and cuts it in half with a penknife so it's his own size.  (McCullers loves weirdos--jockeys, dwarves, etc.)

The other stories are shorter, more experimental.  "Sad Cafe" has so many of McCullers' hallmarks--the small southern town, the physical oddball, etc.--that it might be the work of a particularly good imitator.  The other stories see her treading unfamiliar ground.  There are stories set in Ohio, and in New York City, where McCullers lived most of her adult life, but which seem outside the realm of her interests.  But each of them has the same lyric quality, the same interest in human failures and frailties, and the same vast empathy.

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

It even seems to me now that it was, that town, constructed of certain refuse particles of my past, for I discovered in it things most remarkably and most uncannily familiar to me: a low pale-blue house, the exact counterpart of which I had seen in a St. Petersburg suburb; an old-clothes hop, where suits hung that had belonged to dead acquaintances of mine; a street lamp bearing the same number (I always like to notice the numbers of street lamps) as one that had stood in front of the Moscow house where I lodged; and nearby the same bare birch tree with the same forked trunk in an iron corset (ah, that is what made me look at the number on the lamp). I could, if I chose, give many more examples of that kind, some of which are so subtle, so--how shall I put it?  ...abstractly personal, as to be unintelligible, whom I pet and pamper like a devoted nurse.  Nor am I quite certain of the exceptionality of the aforesaid phenomena.  Every man with a keen eye is familiar with those anonymously retold passages from his past life: false-innocent combinations of details, which smack revoltingly of plagiarism.  Let us leave them to the conscience of fate and return, with a sinking heart and dull reluctance, to the monument at the end of the street.

Hermann, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair, stumbles one day across a vagrant who could be his doppelganger.  The vagrant, Felix, seems unimpressed by their resemblance, but Hermann sees in it a fantastic opportunity: He will murder Felix, and make it look like his own suicide.  It will be the perfect crime.  The only problem, we find out at the end of the novel--spoiler alert here, for what it's worth--is that Hermann is mistaken; Felix looks nothing like him.

Despair is a lot of things.  It's a farcical "up yours" to Dostoevsky, whose ponderous morality tales Nabokov despised.  Hermann, like Raskolnikov, wants to engineer the perfect crime for no other reason than because he can, because he believes in his own fortuitous position in the world.  Hermann points out that "Felix" means "happy" or "lucky," but it is Hermann who sees his own impeccability in the mirror that is Felix.  It's also, like much of Nabokov's work, a sly treatise on literary criticism.  Hermann "reads" himself into Felix, and the consequences are disastrous.  At some level, everything Nabokov writes seems to tell us we can't possibly get anything out of reading, while reveling gleefully in the contradictions of that very statement.

But I like thinking of it most as a condemnation of the ego.  In a way, when we look at other people we see only ourselves; Hermann only takes this idea to its logical conclusion.  But Nabokov suggests that all kinds of sight and sense--everything we know and perceive--is contaminated by our inescapable ego, and that we're perpetually gazing at the inside of our own skulls.  Our world "smack[s] revoltingly of plagiarism," but it's these echoes--repetitions, doubles, doppelgangers--that Nabokov found so endlessly fascinating.

It's also incredibly funny.  Nabokov makes much of Hermann's feckless wife, Lydia, who once tore the final pages out of a mystery book so she wouldn't be tempted to spoil it for herself, and then promptly lost them.  (Come to think of it, Nabokov's a lot like that--a mystery novel with the end torn out.)  Equally comic is her cousin, Ardalion, a failed and fatuous painter who only Hermann can't tell is having an affair with Lydia.  Nabokov has a reputation, and an earned one, for difficult prose, but Despair, like Lolita, is as readable and compelling as the schlockiest genre fiction.

Despair was the first of Nabokov's novels that he translated into English from Russian.  All known copies were, apparently, destroyed by German bombs in World War II.  The version that exists now is a second translation, with improvements, made many decades later.  It's easy to imagine Nabokov, translating the novel for a second time, laughing at the idea that his novel had its own doppelganger--one that no one else could ever track down.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

'Is it true,' she said, 'that England is like a dream?  Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so.  She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.  I want to wake up.'

'Well,' I answered annoyed, 'that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.'

'But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?'

'And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets bu unreal?'

'More easily,' she said, 'much more easily.  Yes a big city must be like a dream.'

'No, this is unreal and like a dream,' I thought.

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea presents the story of Bertha Mason--whose name is really Antoinette Cosway--the mad wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, who is imprisoned in Rochester's attic and appears, from time to time, to light things on fire and generally make things difficult for Jane.  Bronte's depiction of Bertha can seem almost like a parody of Victorian literature, which banishes to the metaphorical attic both the victims of colonialism (think of the slaves on Thomas Bertram's plantations in Mansfield Park) and women who, unlike Jane Eyre, cannot be meek or pure.

Rhys starts by situating Antoinette in a difficult place in her native Jamaica: she is a Creole woman of both black and white descent, and therefore a kind of outsider even before she meets Rochester and is spirited away to England.  Her black neighbors treat her family with suspicion, calling them "white niggers."  In a frightening, evocative scene which the novel never is really able to reproduce, Antoinette's black neighbors burn her family's estate to the ground.  Antoinette's brother dies in the fire, and so does her parrot:

I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight.  He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching.  He was all on fire.

The parallels to Antoinette/Bertha, who spends much of Jane Eyre setting stuff on fire and eventually dies in a conflagration of her own making, are clear.  Like Coco, Antoinette is a beautiful thing doomed to suffer at the hands of oppressive forces.  Rumors of her mother's insanity dog her all her life, but no one seems interested in recognizing this destruction as a pretty good reason to go insane.  Antoinette becomes the mad Bertha, yes, but Rhys wants us to ask why.

Rhys style is laconic, spare, and effective.  It leaves out much more than it says.  Rochester is never named, though he is the narrator of half the novel.  She has a knack for leaving out key information that makes the novel mysterious and compelling, but not particularly easy to read, despite the simplicity of its language.  The reasons for the dissolution of Antoinette and Rochester's marriage--he comes to believe that she has married him to steal his money, I think, partly thanks to a troublemaker who claims to be Antoinette's brother--are difficult to follow.

The most unforgivable thing about Wide Sargasso Sea, though, is that it makes no real attempt to reproduce the character of Mr. Rochester, whose sarcasm and megalomania are the some of the most compelling aspects of Jane Eyre.  It seems like missing the point to judge Wide Sargasso Sea by the quality and character of Jane Eyre, I know.  But it wouldn't take much tweaking to turn Rochester, who is already a quite suspicious and not quite trustworthy character, into a bitter, scheming colonialist.  He spends most of Jane Eyre running roughshod over Jane's psyche, after all.  But Rhys doesn't seem interested in Rochester, especially, even as a narrator; it's Antoinette she wants us to think about it.  That's all well and good, but why make Rochester a narrator at all?

I wonder how much one might get out of this novel if they'd never read Jane Eyre.  But I also wonder if it might not be better--and able to stand on its own considerable merits--without the ghost of Jane Eyre hovering around.

Steig's Shrek!, Kant's Critique of Judgement, Steig's Yellow and Pink, and Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

So they got hitched as soon as possible and they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who fell afoul of them.

I took a class this week on teaching philosophy through children's literature and for it I read Shrek! and Yellow by Williams Steig along with Kant's Critique of Judgement and Hume's Diaglogues Concerning Natural Religion. Shrek! was definitely the closest to my reading level, so it made the cover photo.

Mostly I learned that since graduating college my brain has completely forgotten how to read. In the opening small group talks, I admitted that I didn't understand the difference between what Kant describes as "pleasant" (which is subjective) and "beauty" (which isn't). My discussion leader said "It all comes down to 'subjective universality'" at which point I turned my book around to show him my high level annotation where I had circled the phrase "subjective universality" and written, in large letters "WTF IS THIS." Needless to say, I struggled with Kant.

After three hours of class and a lot of brainwork, I think what Kant is trying to say is that beautiful things (sunsets, waterfalls, Leonardo DiCaprio in the 90s) produce a universal reaction in all humans; it's not grounded in individual perception or taste.  Kant discusses how matters of taste ("Canary wine is pleasant" for example) vary from person to person, but subjective universalities like beauty don't. I then got sidetracked wondering whether or not I found Canary wine to be pleasant. Shrek!, who is uglier than his parents put together and can "spit flame a full ninety-nine yards and vent smoke from either ear," both illustrates and challenges Kant. He is a great example of subjective taste: he compliments a witch on her "ugly stench" and falls in love with a princess because she's ugly, but he doesn't seem buy into the subjective universality of beauty (since he hates flowers and children). I think that was it?

Hume was a little easier, although I found the format of dialogues a little confusing. My limited Hume knowledge from college slash the internet told me that he was an atheist, so when he kicked things off by stating that clearly God exists because "No man; no man, at least of common sense, I am persuaded, ever entertained a serious doubt with regard to a truth so certain and self evident." From there, Philo (who is sort of Hume) spends his time dismantling Cleanthes "a posteriori" (a word I had to look up) arguments for the existence of God. Cleanthes' general argument is that the universe's design mimics the design of human inventions, and we clearly understand that books have authors, therefore, the universe has an author with human-like qualities. Philo says the analogy falls apart because the things are too dissimilar (and that we can't make the assumption that a human-like God created the universe since we've never witnessed the "origin of worlds"). He starts to make an argument about how everything could have just randomly come into being on its own, but he stops short of saying there isn't a God.

In Steig's Yellow and Pink two puppets argue about how they came into being, but this time Pink (the Cleanthes of the two) gets to be the skeptic. Yellow argues that they could have been created by chance (a branch falling off a tree, being struck by lightning, and rolling down a hill over some paint), and Pink tries to deconstruct his argument by asking questions about the likelihood of such a process creating such perfect puppets. The best part (but also the most troubling part for the atheist in me) is when the guy who made them (and left them out in the sun for their paint to dry) comes to pick them up at the end: "'Who is this guy?' Yellow whispered in Pink's ear. Pink didn't know."

Overall, I highly recommend both Steig books. Kant and Hume, if you want to impress people at dinner parties, are best read on Sparknotes if at all.

Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt

As much as cisgender persons may like or dislike their bodies, and engage in altering or enhancing them, they don't deny that their bodies are their own. It's a knowledge so intimate that it remains largely subconscious. When it comes to that physical self, for a transgender person every waking moment, every conscious breath, is a denial of who they truly are. For these people their bodies are at odds with their ideas of themselves, or their ideas of who they should be. They are estranged from the very thing that sustains them in the world, and there is no way to reconcile this conflict through psychological counseling or behavioral conditioning There is only one way out of the alienation, and that's to make the body congruent with the mind. 

I first heard about the Maines family when I read a Boston Globe article about them with my ninth graders a few years ago. The Maines family adopt identical twin boys, Wyatt and Jonah, at birth, and as the twins move through toddlerhood Wyatt begins to express his desire to dress and live as and be a girl. His parents react the way we hope all parents would: they listen. They don't buy in right away, and the dad, a conservative veteran, takes longer than the mom, but they eventually help Wyatt transition into life as Nicole. The transition is fraught: medical treatment for young people wishing to transition is still a somewhat experimental science, her school won't let her use the girls' bathroom, parents of students pressure their children to alienate her, and so on and so forth. The book tracks Nicole's life starting with her parents' childhoods, all the way up to her recent graduation from high school after winning a landmark court case earning transgender children the right to use the bathroom designated for the gender with which they identify (an especially relevant issue these days).

There are parts of the book that are heart-wrenching. Wyatt, at age 2, tells his father earnestly that he hates his penis and his father, despite not fully believing or understanding him, reassuring his kid that "Everything is going to be okay." Wyatt and Nicole's childhood poetry and essays are scattered throughout the book and give a window into just how scary and overwhelming this experience was for her. The victories, both personal and legal, feel huge in comparison, and watching Wayne Maines, the father, grow into the advocate and champion he is by the end of the book is almost a more exciting transformation than Nicole's.

Nutt researched and wrote this book beautifully. She writes with empathy about each member of the Maines family and gives us the background we need to fully understand where they all are at each stage of this transformation. More importantly though, she gives clear, well researched, scientific descriptions of transgender life (as well as other gender permutations) explaining things in ways that make it hard not to understand and sympathize. There is nothing preachy or self righteous about her prose, and she manages to be matter of fact while still being warm and understanding.

One of the later chapters, where Nutt discusses some pretty outrageous anti-transgender legislation, ends with this quote from political activist and writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, which I especially liked:

"The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person's life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person's gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person's gender is what lies within her, or his, heart. How do we test for the gender of the heart, then?"

If you teach, parent, work with, or interact with other humans on a regular basis, I would recommend reading this book. There's more to this issue that one girl's story, but this feels like a great place to start.

Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence

He had come to this new country, the youngest country on the globe, to start a new life and flutter with a new hope.  And he started with a rabid desire not to see anything and not to speak one single word to any single body--except Harriet, whom he snapped at hard enough.  To be sure, the mornings sometimes won him over.  They were so blue and pure: the blue harbour like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark-brown cliffs, and among the dark-looking tree-covered shores, and up the bright red suburbs.  But htel nad, the ever-dark brush that was allowed to come to the shores of the harbour!

Richard Somers and his wife Harriet are taking an extended holiday in Australia.  To Somers, recently hounded out of England on suspicion of being a German spy--much like Lawrence himself--Australia represents a new beginning, not just for himself, but as a "new country" that exists as something of a blank slate.

But as the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are, and Somers cannot quite escape his own moody self-isolation and aloofness.  When he falls in with a secret organization of fascist paramilitary groups called the Diggers and their leader, a Sydney lawyer who goes by the name "Kangaroo," he flirts with the idea of contributing his skills as a writer to their cause but cannot commit.

The Diggers are certainly dangerous.  Kangaroo talks to Somers a lot about his deep love for the people of Australia, which comes off as creepily paternalistic, if not something darker and more heinous.  (Somers thinks of Kangaroo "keeping the nation in his pouch.")  But it's not at all clear whether Lawrence himself, who was known to flirt with racist and fascist ideals, thinks that the Diggers' philosophy is all that bad.  Like all Lawrence books, the mushy mysticism tends to be hard to pin down, and open to frequent reversals; it seems as likely that we are meant to be suspicious of Kangaroo as it is that we are meant to see Somers' inability to participate in the Diggers' mission as a kind of tragedy.  You might expect a book about a well-meaning man who falls in with a charismatic, but insidious figure, yet I think you might legitimately ask who here is well-meaning and who is insidious.

It leads to, however, one of the more powerful scenes I've ever read in Lawrence's books: the dying Kangaroo, shot in the gut after an otherwise successful raid on a labor organizing rally, demanding Somers' love while wasting away in a hospital bed.  Somers cannot bring himself to do it; rather than presenting a blank slate, the strange and empty Australia has made him recede farther into himself, in a kind of emulation of the land's blankness.

Kangaro  has all of Lawrence's flaws: It goes on too long, it's something of a mess, its philosophical meanderings go from incomprehensible to reprehensible and back again.  The best thing about Kangaroo, as it always is with Lawrence, is the prose, and it's worth reading just for the vivid and skillful depictions of the Australian landscape:

But he was looking mostly straight below him, at the massed foliage of the cliff-slope.  Down into the centre of the great, dull-green whorls of the tree-ferns, and on to the shaggy mops of the cabbage-palms.  In one place a long fall of creeper was yellowish with damp flowers.  Gum-trees came up in tufts.  The previous world! -- the world of the coal age.  The lonely, lonely world that had waited, it seemed, since the coal age.  These ancient flat-topped tree-ferns, these tousled palms like mops.  What was the good of trying to be an alert conscious man here?  You couldn't.  Drift, drift into a sort of obscurity, backwards into a nameless past, hoary as the country is hoary.  Strange, old feelings wake in the soul: old, non-human feelings.

It's these "old, non-human feelings" that drive Somers away from the company of other people, and make him unable to return the love of Kangaroo.  Lawrence talks a lot about a "dark god" whose identity is warped whenever he is named--as Christ, or Thor, or whatever--and you can see the way that Lawrence, fleeing from the sour gentility of Europe, embraced Australia as a kind of place where that mysticism might be recovered.  Like Lawrence, Somers eventually leaves Australia, and heads to the United States.  Lawrence never wrote a book about the U.S.; the one book he wrote while living in New Mexico was about (old) Mexico.  That's a shame; I'd like to have seen America through Lawrence's eyes.