Regular service postponed

This is it, folks. It's the end of everything! The storm cometh, leaving a wide swath of destruction through the middle Atlantic states. Hurricane Sandy brings the wrath of God upon the hapless citizens of the coastline! Rain! Snow! Waves! Floods!

Birds! (Probably!)

Regular service on Big Island Rachel's media empire is postponed until we are no longer doomed.

"Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko

"Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko is one of my three favorite books of all time. The other two are "The Book of Salt" by Monique Truong and "Paradise" by Toni Morrison.

Looking at this list, I discern a pattern: I like dense, modernist prose that plays around with time structure and explores intersecting themes of race, gender, class and sexuality. I also like 20th century American women writers of color. I took a whole class on them in college.

I first read "Ceremony" in that 20th century American women writers of color course (we never could come up with a shorter title). One of my biggest regrets of college was that I sold all of my books at the end of every semester and have had to re-purchase my favorites as a grown-up, like "Ceremony." I love this book. Every time I read it, I fall in love with it all over again: the language, the characters, the blending of myth and fact, the triumph of good over evil.

"Ceremony" is about a Laguna Indian named Tayo, a World War II veteran and survivor of the Bataan Death March who returns to his reservation a broken shell of a man. He's dealing with a complex tangle of emotions relating to his experiences both in the war, where he witnessed wholescale slaughter and the death of his brother; and in the American Indian communities within and around his reservation, where he sees his friends and neighbors give in to apathy and despair.

"Ceremony" illuminates an individual grappling with a state of mind that might be best described as "cultural trauma." According to the authors of "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity," "cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their identity in fundamental and irreversible ways." American Indians have endured a centuries-long physical, geographical, and political assault on their culture and way of life, and each individual in the community must face daily the repercussions of this assault. Tayo falls into despair and madness not just because of the war, but because the cultural framework which might have helped him heal has been systematically dismantled by historic oppression by the United States government. It's not an easy or comfortable topic to explore, but it is rewarding and necessary.

After a long stay in a mental hospital and a year or so of aimless drunken debauchery with the other veterans on the reservation, his family sends him to a medicine man in a last ditch effort to make him into a useful member of the tribe again. The medicine man and Tayo perform a ceremony. And here's where things get interesting. In the world of the Laguna Indians in this novel, "ceremony" refers not only to the traditional Scalp Ceremony that the medicine man and Tayo perform around a campfire one night; it also refers to Tayo's entire process of healing, which takes years, from the time he returns from the war to the very end of the novel. In this process, he discovers that his personal journey is simply part of a much larger ceremony that was set in motion generations before, which was begun in order to counter-act a massive, evil ceremony set in motion by witches at the dawn of time.

Furthermore, the book "Ceremony," the one I'm holding in my hand, is ITSELF part of this larger healing ceremony. The writing of "Ceremony" and the reading of "Ceremony" is part of the ceremony described in the book. Layers within layers, folks, that's what this book is about.

As I said, the book plays around with time structure. In Tayo's mind, all the events of his life and the life of the tribe are happening right now, so we jump around from his childhood days to his experiences in the war, from traditional Laguna folktales to the history of his own immediate family. It can be a bit of a challenge to follow, especially at the beginning of the book when we're still getting to know the character and his life, but everything necessary to know is mentioned or at least hinted at in the first 30 pages of the book, so if you can make it that far, you're golden.

When Tayo begins to heal and take an active part in the ceremony of his life, the time line of the book evens out and takes on a much more linear progression, which isn't always to its benefit. I actually start to get bored when Tayo hunts the spotted cattle on Mount Taylor. It's the longest the book has followed a single storyline happening at a single point in time up until now, and it feels a little dragged-out. I understand why it's written that way. Tayo's mental state is very clear when he is performing this part of the ceremony, much less muddled with memories and pain, so we get a very clear idea of what's happening at this important part of his life. But it just--keeps--going. It's a chunk of the book that I feel I have to slog through to get to the good stuff on the other side. Fortunately, the ending of the book is really dark and twisted, though still happy in a way, so I can read through the hunt knowing I've got something good waiting for me on the other side.

Final Grade: A.

"The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin

I don't normally read non-fiction outside of my comic books.

This happened. And then they hushed it up!

But I was in LAX after my sister's wedding, killing time before my LA to New York City flight by browsing the airport bookstore because all bookstores are a siren call to me even if they're showcasing "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "50 Shades of Gray" (Grey? I have too much personal integrity to look it up). Airport bookstores always stock books of the zeitguiest, so I was unexpectedly exposed to a whole new set of reading material I would never seek out for myself. "The Happiness Project," by Gretchen Rubin, was one of those books. Since it was my inspiration for re-starting this blog, it feels fitting to dedicate my re-inaugeral post of Big Island Rachel's Books to a review of "The Happiness Project."

Did I like it? Yes. Am I incorporating some of it's material into my life? Absolutely. But was it perfect? Of course not. I had some major problems with the way the author presented her project, and it will surprise no one that the things I found most problematic were--wait for it--gender roles.

So "The Happiness Project" is one person's attempt to optimize her happiness. I like this sort of thing. It's lifehacking, shortcuts to making things easy for yourself, and as I said, I found a lot of stuff in the book useful. Rubin did tones of research into what happiness is and what makes people happy from a scientific standpoint. This wasn't a touchy-feely spiritual book (though there was a chapter on spirituality), it was a fact-based attempt to be the happiest person the author could be in the circumstances she was currently in.

Some things I took away: if you ACT happy, you will FEEL happy. No more walking around with slumped shoulders and a sour look on my face, no more "I'm too tired" to smile at my customers. Do things you're passionate about. You get more energy from doing something you love than you do from sitting around doing nothing, even though you think the sitting-around time is what's going to energize you because hey, what's more energizing than resting? On a related note, there's more happiness in "project happiness" than there is in "instant happiness." Hence the increase in my blogging and the decrease in my cartoon watching. I'm going to get more happiness from updating my regular blog, my books blog, and my Tumblr--and of course the radio show--than I am from re-watching "Sherlock" (which I'm actually doing while I type this, because shut up, it's a good show).

So those are the things I liked about the book: practical advice for optimizing your happiness with the life you have right now.

Here's what I didn't like, and like I said, it has to do with gender roles, so I'm about to off on one of my famous feminist rants. You've been warned.

Rubin says at the beginning of her book that fifty percent of a person's happiness is genetic and can't be altered. Twenty to thirty percent of happiness is based on things that can't be altered, like birthplace, age, and gender. Her project was focused on the ten to twenty percent of happiness that a person can directly affect. Which is all well and good, but back up a second--gender? Are there measurable differences in a person's happiness depending on whether they are male or female? To me, that's very interesting, but Rubin never brings it up again, even when she clearly needs to.

At the time she wrote the book, Rubin was a professional writer working from home. She had a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, and was happily married to her husband. There was a whole chapter on how she tried to be happier in her marriage, which in my mind was the perfect time to bring up the issue of happiness varying between genders. She states at the onset that she tends to nag her husband and get resentful of the fact that she does more housework and childcare than he does without getting the praise she wants for it. Her solution was to stop nagging, do what had to be done herself without waiting for her husband to do it, and stop expecting praise.

Excuse me while I bang my forehead against the keyboard. \g9i u09349qutqn 39804uoeiuar9082%. There, I'm done. I'll give Rubin credit for saying in her wrap-up chapter that she was afraid this approach would lead to her husband doing even less household word, and I'll give her husband credit for actually doing the opposite and stepping up his game when Rubin changed her approach. But there is something HUGELY problematic about a woman asking herself how she can be happier and determining  that more housework and less recognition for it are the answers.

Happiness is a complicated issue for women. We don't have the same cultural space that men do to be unhappy and angry. Women are trained to please and we're expected to be happy all the time, whereas men are allowed to have their teenage angst and their quarter- and mid-life crises. If Rubin found happiness in re-establishing traditional gender roles in her marriage by just shutting up and doing more housework, more power to her, especially if she got the end result she wanted, which was for her husband to pitch in without her nagging him. But there wasn't a single sentence in this book devoted to exploring the complex relationship between gender and happiness, and considering that one of her chapters is about marriage and another is about her children, it should have come up.

The lack of discussion around the issue made me furious a couple of times. Rubin relates a difficult Saturday when her kids aren't getting along, and she snaps at her husband because he spent time at the gym and then took a nap, leaving her to deal with the fighting, crying kids all day while he had leisure time alone. After she snaps at him, she feels bad because one of her happiness resolutions was to stop saying mean things to her husband. And damned if I didn't want to throw the book across the room, not because I disagreed with her handling of the situation--it was her happiness project, not mine, and I'm neither married nor a mother, so what do I know?--but because she didn't take the opportunity presented by that story to bring up any number of studies done on how many more hours a week women spend than men on housework and child-rearing, and how that affects the happiness of women and the stability of marriages. In a word: problematic.

Sometimes I wonder if people get tired of me pointing out sexist shit. And then I wonder why people don't get tired of all that sexist shit instead. Because I sure do. I'd love to wake up tomorrow to a world where I don't have to point out that it's problematic to write a book on happiness and not explore gender roles. Until that happens, I guess I'll just have to keep pointing it out.

Final grade: solid B. Good writing, well researched, but not feminist enough for me.

"Just Kids," Patti Smith

To my shame, I don't know a lot of Patti Smith's work. But she performed at a ceremony held by my company two years ago, when she received some kind of honor or degree from us, I'm not clear on the details, and by all accounts, she rocks. Her memoir, "Just Kids," won the National Book Award in 2010, and since I like reading about New York City and she has a connection to my job, I put the book on my library request list and waited. Patiently. For four months.

Being broke sucks.

The book is an account of Patti Smith's early years in New York City, from 1968 to about 1975, specifically her development as an artist and her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe is famous for taking pictures that cause Midwesterners to protest outside of museums--bloodied male genitals, riding crops stuck up asses, that sort of thing. I'm not going to post any of his work here because I don't want to get fired, but you can Google him if you're in a secluded area.

The book is a slow burn compared to most memoirs I've read. What keeps it going aren't deep dark secrets and soap opera revelations--just an aside, the memoir most guilty of this is "The Kiss," which is a memoir about a woman who had a sexual relationship with her father--but rather a series of quiet, thorough, and penetrating examination of the question, "From whence comes the artist?" It's a story that focuses on the artistic processes of Smith and Mapplethorpe, on how they developed as artists and as people.

I wouldn't recommend this book to people who like cinematic literature. The book isn't plot-driven, and it definitely feels like the author is looking back on a time long past, so there really isn't much of a sense of urgency in her writing, which is compounded by the fact that she uses very simple, straightforward language. Once you get into her rhythm, though, it's amazing how her simple prose can hit you right in the solar plexus. Alone, phrases like, "We were still intimate," or "Robert was asleep on the couch and Fred was crying," don't have much impact, but when read as part of the whole, they're heartbreaking.

Not a lot of people write like this anymore. There's something very Left Bank/Lost Generation about "Just Kids," with it's simplicity and search for meaning beyond the lense of nostalgia. Recommended for people who know a little about the art scene in New York City of the late 60s and early 70s, and of course, rock aficionados.

Freebird Books

Let me just take a moment to sing the praises of my neighborhood bookstore, Freebird Books. It's only open on the weekends, and sometimes on Thursday and Friday nights, and sells used books. The smell that comes out of the door is like a spice market, all old paper and moldering book glue and the smugness that comes from people who take their reading very, very seriously.

Some used bookstores are little more than literary Salvation Armies. Need self-help books from the 80s? Eleven copies of a Tom Clancy novel? Outdated Farmers Almanacs? These bookstores of ill repute take anything and everything and leave heaps of books on the sidewalk with a hand-scrawled $1 sign, knowing perfectly well that they can't give that crap away. It reminds me of my uncle's lake cabin up in Washington state, where a couple of chairs and an old record player sat unguarded on the porch for years, waiting for someone to steal them so my uncle wouldn't have to haul them to the dump himself.

Other used bookstores, like Freebird, take themselves, as I said, very seriously. Freebird is like Beacon's Closet, a used clothing store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that has never bought a single item from the sacks of clothes I bring in, even when--and this is a bit odd--I'd bought the articles in question from Beacon's Closet a few months before. Beacon's Closet has a shelf in their buying room for people to leave clothes that the store won't take but will donate to charity; this shelf is always groaning with cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Likewise, Freebird Books has given their basement space to a charity that collects books for prison inmates. There's something vaguely elitist and distasteful about the attitude held by both Beacon's Closet and Freebird Books--if it's shite, we'll give it to the less fortunate--but on the other hand, I love both of these stores for the quality of their merchandise, so I guess I'm just the sort of terrible, terrible person that these establishments serve.

Freebird Books doesn't just sell books I'd like to read, but books I'd like to own. A truly dedicated reader--someone who can be reading three books at a time and still feel the need to read every ad on the subway--doesn't necessarily need to own many books. As a reader, I like getting rid of books on my bookshelf almost more than I like acquiring them. But certain books I need to keep. It's a compulsion. I need to keep "The Book of Salt" and "The Red Tent" and all ten volumes of "The Sandman." It doesn't matter if I only read them once a year or once every two years. Their existence on my bookshelf is proof that I am who I am; these are the books that so perfectly describe who I am on the inside that getting rid of them would be like leaving parts of myself on the stoop for the neighbors to cart away. Unthinkable.

Freebird is full of these books. If it were my bookstore, I would do everything in my power to prevent people from buying any of the books on my shelves. There would be too much of me in them. I suspect that the person who owns Freebird feels the same way, because I go there frequently, spend a lot of time taking up space and reading the merchandise, and I've only ever bought two books from the place in the one and a half years that I've been here. Yet the staff never asks me to leave, or asks if I'm looking for anything, or even pays me much attention while I'm there. It's like shopping in Amsterdam--they ignore you until you have your item and your credit card in hand. Sometimes I'm there for hours and no one even comes up from the back of the store to say hello. Once or twice I think I've gone in to find it totally empty, no staff or shoppers or anything. If it wasn't right next door, I'd probably suspect it of being a fairy store, only there at certain times of the moon, and capable of whisking me hundreds of years into the future in a single afternoon.

They have book club that meets once a month, but they only read post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature, which hits a little to close to home these days for my comfort.

Amy Bloom's "Away"

I love street books.

People in Brooklyn frequently abandon--actually, I should say liberate their used books on street corners and stoops. There are so many books available for free to any random pedestrian that it took me almost two years of living in New York before I even used my library card. To anyone who knew me at the Hawaii State Library, this is a shocking statistic. I used to go there at least twice a week, schlepping home six books at a time, not because I was going to read them all, but because I'm a book junkie. I love the sensation, the smell, the sight of all those little black marks swarming across the page. The Brooklyn street book phenomenon--they're like finding bottles of wine or bags of weed just sitting there for anyone to take.

Anyway, this review is about a street book called "Away," by Amy Bloom. Fine adventure reading, about a Jewish woman, Lillian, fleeing persecution in early Soviet Russia. She comes to New York City's Lower East Side in the 1920s after her family is murdered in a pogrom and falls in with the thriving Yiddish theater crowd. But her city life is cut short when she learns that her little daughter may still be alive and living with cousins in Siberia. Lacking the funds for an ocean voyage back to Russia, she takes off overland across America, intending to walk the Yukon Trail and sail the Bering Strait to get her daughter back.

One of the things that sets this book apart from the other things I've been reading is how the author deals with secondary and tertiary characters. Lillian's story unfolds in real time, but the people she encounters--her lovers and friends--we get to see their entire life stories, and their eventual deaths, laid out in a few pages just after Lillian leaves them to continue her journey. It's kind of like the series finale of "Six Feet Under" (SPOILERS) when the show flashes forward into the future to show the deaths of every main character. And it's deeply moving, because it reminds the reader about mortality and the fragility of life and all of that good stuff that is the REAL reason we read books: to experience life and death in the miniature, in the hopes that it will better prepare us for our own.

Monique Truong's "Bitter in the Mouth"

Plot twists are hard to pull off.

Quick clarification: by "plot twists," I don't mean the part of a Law & Order episode where they figure out who the murderer is. The surprises that happen in mysteries, detective stories, and a lot of stuff that ends in "noir" aren't really plot twists because the reader expects them. A mystery, by definition, is going to have a big reveal or two at the end, so that reveal isn't a plot twist. It's just part of the plot.

No, a plot twist happens in all the OTHER kinds of stories, where the reader has been bopping merrily along the path laid out by the author, following the plot under a given set of facts, and then, BAM! Something gets revealed that changes all of the previous facts and assumptions the reader's been following this whole time. A good plot twist has to be completely unexpected, but also completely logical, requiring little further explanation.

"Luke. I am your father."

The plot twist in "The Empire Strikes Back" is a perfect example. The viewer knows that Darth Vader has a hard-on for this Skywalker kid, seeing as he blew up the Death Star. And Luke has vowed to kill Vader and defeat the Empire because Vader killed his father and the evil Empire is evil (I think. Aside from blowing up planets that are strongholds for violent insurgents, do we ever get a good explanation for why the Empire is evil? I haven't seen the movies for a while, so if you know, put it in the comments, I'm happy to be schooled in Star Wars lore.) The baddies and the goodies have all the motivation they need to hate each other as soon as the movie begins. Since that isn't a mystery that needs solving, the audience isn't expecting the plot twist. And the twist itself immediately makes perfect sense in the context of the story. "Luke, I am your father." "No, that's impossible." "Search your heart, you know it to be true." Three lines of dialogue, and everything the audience knows about Vader, Luke, and the whole Star Wars saga up to this point changes. The twist is simple, elegant, and adds depth and pathos to the story.

Now, consider "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (and my incredible geekiness). All of the Harry Potter books are guilty of the clunky, awkward and gratuitous plot twist, but "Prisoner" is my favorite book in the series, so it's going under my knife. The big reveal at the end is that Sirius Black didn't betray Harry's parents to Voldemort and then kill Peter Pettigrew; Peter Pettigrew betrayed Harry's parents, faked his own death, framed Sirius for everything, and has been living in disguise as Ron's pet rat for 13 years. It takes an ENTIRE CHAPTER AND A HALF to deliver this information, all of it crammed down the reader's throat in one enormous chunk of exposition worthy of a James Bond villain. Furthermore, the big reveal doesn't fundamentally change the way that we view the characters or the story up to this point. It doesn't shift our perception of the events of the book or give them any depth or pathos they didn't already have.

That's why plot twists are difficult to pull off properly, because they aren't really about plot at all. They're about perception. A plot twist doesn't change the story so much as it changes the way the reader views the story. The characters experiencing the twist can be moved by it as well--Harry and Luke are both surprised as hell when the truth comes out--but if the twist doesn't change anything about the reader's relationship to the story, then the twist has failed as a literary device.

All of this just for me to say that I didn't much like Monique Truong's novel "Bitter in the Mouth."

Seven years passed between Truong's first novel, "The Book of Salt," and her second, "Bitter in the Mouth," and I had such high hopes. "The Book of Salt" is easily one of my favorite novels of all time, at least in the top 5, if not the top 3. Basically, it's about the gay Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas when they were living in Paris in the 1930s. It's an amazingly rich and dense book about food, language, colonialism, travel, love, family, betrayal, and identity. I'll review it the next time I read it, which will be soon, because I love that book like a fat guy loves cake.

But Truong fell into a sophomore slump with this one. "Bitter in the Mouth" is about a young woman, Linda, from the South who grew up with undiagnosed synesthesia, which causes her to taste words. I think Truong was trying to write one of those Faulkner-esque Southern family dramas, and to a certain extent, she succeeds. The best parts of the book are the descriptions of Linda's relationships with her family: distant mother, doting father, heinous grandmother, beloved great-uncle. But any bits of the book dealing with her synesthesia, which is about half the book, just drag the whole story to a screeching halt. Much is made of Linda keeping her sound-taste sense secret from the rest of her family, and while there is inherent drama in the distance created between family members by any kind of secret-keeping, synesthesia isn't a strong enough vehicle to carry such emotional weight. As far as secret mental disorders go, it's actually kind of lame, especially compared to the other family secrets revealed in the book: rape, adultery, closet homosexuality, cross-dressing, cancer, none of these events get as much attention in the book as Linda's synesthesia. I feel that Truong placed undeserved importance on this one aspect of her narrator's life story, and that's not even my biggest complaint with the book.

The reason I opened this post with a discussion of plot twists is because "Bitter in the Mouth" has two of the worst plot twists I've ever encountered. The first occurs exactly halfway through the book, and while it did alter my perception of Linda and her family, it also required about 50 pages of exposition immediately following the big reveal. That's basically as long as all of the big plot twists revealed at the end of all 7 of the Harry Potter books. The second plot twist comes about ten pages before the end of the book, and those last ten pages are used to, again, explain the plot twist. I say that these are the two worst plot twists I've encountered because (1) plot twists that require extensive exposition/explanation are just bad writing, (2) both of the big reveals could have been revealed at the beginning of the book for much bigger narrative impact, and (3) the second plot twist is treated as a cathartic moment between Linda and her mother, but doesn't actually address the main reason they are estranged from each other. Linda was raped when she was 11, and her mother maybe knew about it, or covered it up, or was in love with the rapist--something of that nature, it's never really revealed. Truong spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book setting up the rape as an example of how awful Linda's mother really is and how the rape was proof that Linda's mother never loved her. Then at the end of the book, Linda and her mother lay all their secrets out on the table so they can love and trust each other again, and neither one even mentions the rape. What. The. Hell.

Of course, I did read this whole novel, so it wasn't actually that bad. It's just that whenever I find myself walking down the street and talking to myself about the books I read, I spend a lot more time bitching about "Bitter in the Mouth"'s faults than I spend praising its virtues. Those plot twists really ruined an otherwise solid novel for me. As I said, a good plot twist is difficult to pull off. And after walking to Brooklyn Heights and back yesterday, mumbling to myself about Star Wars and Shakespeare and Fight Club and Harry Potter and Edith Wharton, I've determined that a plot twist, even a really good one, is evidence of good-but-not-great story. I think about great novels like "The Age of Innocence," or plays like "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet," and the thing that they all have in common is a dreadful sense of inevitability. We learn the endings of "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" at the beginning of the plays: Macbeth will be king, but not for long; Romeo and Juliet fall in love and commit suicide. Edith Wharton is the queen of inevitability. Her characters never make brave or grand choices; they make realistic choices, practical choices, and obvious choices, always following the paths set for them by society and their own human limitations. There are no plot twists in the truly genius tragedies of the ages, because the most poignant tragedy is the one that's spotted from miles away, and the audience can only sit and watch as it rushes toward us, inevitable, immutable, and unchangeable.

However, that kind of storytelling is even more difficult to pull off then a good plot twist. You have to be damned talented to keep an audience enthralled when they already know the ending of the story. And you have to be willing to go bleak--really, really bleak. Not everyone wants to write bleak tragedies; not everyone wants to read them. A story with plot twists is more likely to be a comedy, or an adventure story, or a comic book (comic book plots are constructed almost exclusively out of well-done plot twists, which is why I enjoy them so much). I like to read those, too. My reading diet is mainly composed of comedies and plot twists, with great tragedies thrown in like the rare shot of whiskey in my afternoon tea.

That actually sounds pretty good right about now. I'm going to have tea with whiskey and read another book. What a twist!