Be prepared to weep

I stumbled upon this site through some intricate web of cross-links between different people's blogs and twitters, etc.  So I'm not sure exactly how I came to it.

I think it is a wonderful and moving site and hope you'll take a look.  Bring a box of tissue with you...

Days with my Father

http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/

Anne Needs...

Oh my this one is funny!  Go to google and type in [your name] needs and then search.  Write the first ten (10) things that are listed.  Here's mine:

Anne needs to win sexiest vegetarian!  Never happen, I'm not a veg...

Anne needs to retire  this was about a zoo elephant in the U.K.

Anne needs no man  heh

Anne needs a spanking oh my!

Anne needs a group of at least six people for what?

Anne needs Facebook  apparently there is a woman named Anne Needs

Anne needs a job  well, ya!

Anne needs a Jobby Job  in case you didn't get it the first time

Anne needs no enhancement  hmmmm, I wish

Anne needs to remember to blink  I LOVE this one!!!

Book Review - The Shadow of the Wind

This weekend I found myself irretrievably lost in what I now consider to be one of my favorite books: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  Translated from its original Spanish, the novel is a masterfully written contemporary version of the Gothic Novel.  As keenly written as a classic gothic novel, Shadow of the Wind tells the story of Daniel, a young boy who falls in love with a mysterious book, also titled The Shadow of the Wind, and its even more mysterious author.  The book, long forgotten in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, chooses Daniel as its new owner, and he is, almost literally, owned by the book for the rest of his life.

Set in Barcelona following the heart and sprit-breaking Spanish Civil War, the story is dark, enigmatic, frightening, tender, compelling, and even bawdy, as the mystery of The Shadow of the Wind unfurls like newly emerging leaves on a tree: one by one filling in the picture until the branches are covered and a new vision emerges.  The main story is complex and the underlying plot lines both add to and illuminate the main lines.  

As Daniel grows from a 10 year old boy to a young man with his own passions and uncertainties, he is irrevocably drawn into the mystery of the author, Julian Carax, who wrote The Shadow of the Wind and the mysterious figure who seems to be systematically acquiring and destroying all of the remaining copies of Carax's books.  As the shadowy figure pursues Daniel, so does another, more frightening, nemesis, for whom Daniel is just a pawn in a confounding and deadly game of vengeance.  Though the characters are plagued, throughout, by ghosts and apparitions, it is reality that turns out to be the most dangerous and disturbing, as Spain and Barcelona-- its people, its government, its physical being, and spirit itself-- are slowly crumbling beneath the weight and darkness of Civil War and the atrocities (physical and spiritual) that man has wrought in the name of bettering the country and the "race".

The story climaxes, not wholly surprisingly, more or less where it started for the main characters: in the crumbling remains of a mansion that simultaneously represents both their moral destruction and redemption, where life has been both brutally taken and passionately shaped.  The final showdown, accompanied by a twist in plot that is, even amidst the fantastical string of events that propels the story, slightly cliche, was still rewarding if too brief.  

For such a twisting, tangled, deeply involved plot, the culminating events were mildly disappointing in their brevity.  Everything was satisfactorily resolved, even a few seemingly mundane details that I missed in my feverish reading, but I longed for a more profound turn of events in the final battle so to speak.

In the end, the story is one not just of mystery and intrigue, but of the crushing and dispiriting impact of power, greed, and dehumanization, where one's fate may not be one's own, and where the human ability to forget compels us to make the same catastrophic mistakes over and over again.  It also unveils the redemptive power of simply caring, deeply, about the fate of another.  As one of the characters exhorts Daniel, as long as we are remembered, we live.

The 1940s era setting of Barcelona, with it's own Gothic and exotic air, lends structure and life to the story as well.  A city emerging, ever slowly, from a devastating civil war at the same time as the world at large is emerging from WWII and into an era of television and technology, Barcelona seems to creak with the pains of the aged trying to outrun time.  

The Shadow of the Wind is, ultimately, a rewarding, fantastical story, very worthy of a read.  I highly recommend it!

Bus driver, MOVE. THAT. BUS!

I feel a bit like there is something blocking my view right now.  Something that is preventing me from seeing things as they really are.  It's a distinct possibility that the fact that I am blissfully disconnected from the world at large may have something to do with it.   

I've also kind of hit the wall when it comes to writing lately.  But I feel some words coming on.  

Dateline

So, what's new since November 6?  Well, I've sort of started working again.  I got a contract job doing some freelance editing for the same organization my husband works for.  I did my first job two weeks ago.  It's safe to say things are starting out slowly (which is perfectly fine when you haven't "worked" at all in two years).  I put in about nine hours working on the final edits for a monthly e-newsletter and a semi-annual printed newsletter.

I find that I'm very unsure of myself all of a sudden.  I'm a good editor.  And, at least in my professional life, I'm a good writer.   But I felt very insecure at first.  Was I catching everything I should?  Was I being overzealous?  Was I using the right style for the publications?  I think deep down, I know that I did a good job, but until I get back into the swing of things, doubt hovers over me like a big fat pigeon just waiting to take a crap as I walk past.

Books

I've been making a conscious effort to spend more of my "free" time reading actual printed material and less of it browsing the various news/entertainment/garbage that I often find myself consumed with on the internet.  Since we don't get a newspaper out here in the sticks, nor do we have TV or radio, I kind of rely on web based news and podcasts for my contact with the world at large.  But dang, it is SO. FREAKIN'. EASY. to get sucked in my the myriad crap on the web. 

Take Facebook:  I love it for making it soooo easy to keep in touch with people with whom I might otherwise have little or no contact.  It's also brought me together with some people I'd lost touch with and are pleasantly back in my life now (at least virtually).  But it is also a TIME SUCKING DEVIL!  I have read far more lists of "25 Random Things" in the last few months than I have actual news articles.  OK, maybe not more (I don't have that many friends), but I do occasionally feel like my reading time has been disproportionately allocated to Facebook rather that say, the New York Times.

So, in my effort to stop wasting time, because   A) I have no one to blame but myself, and B) who the heck has so much time they can waste it?, I've also been trying to minimize the time I spend in front of the computer screen.  So far, I've been only marginally successful.  I have, however, managed to rearrange my time so that I've gotten a lot more "real" reading in.  

I've always been a book lover, but since I had my second child, book time has been much reduced.  And when I've had book time, I always feel like I have a hard time focusing on just reading to learn and enjoy.  My mind is always half focused on something related to mothering/cooking/cleaning/bill paying/errands, etc.  Just when I think I've figured out what the hell Thomas Friedman is talking about, my brain cuts in with crap like: "Oh my gosh, did I pay the electric bill yet?  It's due on Wednesday.... do we have milk?  What about peanut butter for Nathan's school lunch... and when is his diorama due...?" etc., etc., etc.

Again, here, I'm totally distracted.  I can't even write a about a book I read without launching into the realm of domesticity.  Sigh.

So, anyway, books.  I recently finished reading two books:  Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaefer (sp?) and Annie Barrows.  A friend gave me Guernsey because of the authors' name.  :)  Good thing too, because I thoroughly enjoyed it but probably wouldn't have otherwise picked it up.

I had bought Seven Days in the Art World based on an "other books you might like" suggestion at Amazon.  I bought my mother in law an art book for Christmas and this one came up as a recommendation.  I don't usually heed Amazon recommendations, but this one intrigued me.  Seven Days in the Art World consists of seven vignettes portraying different elements of the world of contemporary art.  Lets see if I can remember them all:  the auction, the art fair, the critique, the prize, the studio, the magazine, and the biennial (not in that order).  The book as a whole paints broad strokes.  Though packed with great detail-- information, facts, gossip-- I still found myself looking for a definite conclusion that tied the elements together.  I really wanted the author to suggest some opinion of what it all meant.  It was fascinating.  I learned a lot about the art world that I didn't know.  That's not saying a great deal since I'm not really big into contemporary art and thus, not knowing much about the market, the artists, or the mood, is probably to be expected.  I did enjoy the book though.

I really enjoyed the vignette format.  As a distracted mommy-reader, I liked that I could get a cohesive picture from the book even though I often had to put it down and return to its days-- if not weeks-- later.  The subject matter was also interesting.  I loved learning about an art auction.  I mean, I can't even begin to imagine a world in which one could, or would, pay several million dollars for a preserved head of a bull (Hirst) or a little round flower with a happy face (Murakami).  But it exists!  I'm not saying one shouldn't if one is so inclined, but I can't fathom being a part of that world any more than I can fathom being a part of a bullfight or cliff diving.

Likewise, I am always drawn to ethnographic texts.  I love immersing my brain, even if just temporarily and from the outside, in a a cultural context removed from my everyday life.  The things that impact our culture-- art, music, literature, technology-- impact our lives even if we don't recognize them as we go about our day to day.   Maybe I am hopelessly behind the curve, but I wonder how many people carrying Louis Vitton handbags with the classic LV logo in lively pastels realize that they are carrying a piece of Takashi Murakami art?  I certainly wouldn't have (not that I knew what a Louis Vitton handbag looked like before I read the book and googled it).  But I'm fascinated by the concept that a luxury consumer good can be art and vice versa.  

So, I'd recommend the book for sure.  But be warned that it's a lot of fact flinging and name dropping without drawing a lot of conclusions.  But that's ok; it never hurt anyone to have to come up with their own ideas about something, right?

Now, onto Guernsey.  The friend who gave me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society did so because I share a name with one of the authors.  She handed it off with the caveat "It's kind of 'chic lit' but it's not bad."

Well, I passed it along to my parents, all of a half hour after I tore through it in one day, with the exclamation "I can't tell you how enamored I am with this book!"

I won't claim it's high literature or anything particularly intellectually challenging, but it is a truly enjoyable, endearing story with lovely characters and vivid, engrossing descriptive narrative.  The characters came alive for me.  I read several reviews that felt like the character were all written in more or less the same voice.  I didn't find that true, but do agree that, taken together, they are not on  the whole all that distinct.  However, their likability and liveliness more than made up for it in my reading.

What really grabbed me was the unusual perspective on WWII history.  The story on the whole was light, but  there are certain passages that evoke the depth of the tragedy of WWII and its aftermath.  The novel takes place in post WWII Great Britain, first in London and then the Island of Guernsey in the English Channel.   Again, I learned something new: for all the studies of WWII that I did in high school and college, I never learned that the Channel Islands had been occupied by the German military.  Intent on eventually invading the English motherland itself, Germany occupied Guernsey for five long, harsh years.

The characters that make up the Society, and their unique stories, bring alive a time of hardship that Americans never knew.  And certainly no one in my generation ever has.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the lively characters who created it one dark night during the German occupation, illuminate just how important community is and how it can save the spirit.

That which has no common thread...

I can't just leave well enough alone, now can I? I've been playing with the format on my blog a lot lately.  I've been bored with what it looked like.  I'm liking this better, but I still don't feel like it's that great.  Ideas welcome.  :)

OK, I have one last thing to say about Proposition 8 and then I'll stop (for now): 

What is marriage if not the acceptance of a voluntary obligation to support another person as a family member?

Why is that so difficult for people to accept?  If an individual in a homosexual union chooses to accept all the same responsibilities, in the eyes of the law, that I have chosen to accept in my heterosexual union, who am I-- indeed who are you?-- to deny them the right to do so?  Why is his or her marriage any different in the eyes of the law?  

I believe people have every right, in their personal choices and actions, to follow their beliefs, be they based on religious tradition or otherwise, and personally reject the legitimacy of gay marriage.  I believe in and respect the right of any church or religion to oppose the concept of gay marriage and/or of homosexual relationships.

But one's personal beliefs and religious practices should have no bearing of how the law respects individual rights and privacy.

(Thanks to my friend Julie for helping me really crystalize my thoughts on this and articulate it better that "For Pete's sake, what is wrong with you?")

Go See it:

So, I have a movie recommendation.  A friend lent it to us, and I have to admit, I wasn't very interested.  But after watching, it I give it a thumbs up.  So go out and rent Brick.

It is a detective story of sorts.  The characters are high school drug dealers.  When a young guy's girlfriend turns up dead, he goes to extraordinary lengths to find out what happened.  Think "The Usual Suspects" meets "Heathers" (for those of you old enough to remember Heathers, that is), meets teen angst, but edgier.   I thought it was a really well done film and story.  The actors are really good as well.  My only hurdle was that I kept thinking "Dude!  These are so not high school students!"  But hey, willful suspension of disbelief and all that.  Here is a nice review of the film (though they did get the name of the girlfriend wrong, hmmmm).

Go read it:

The 19th Wife.  Realy nice novel.  Not nice like pleasant; nice like, well written, compelling story, well balanced mix of fact & fiction playing off of one another.  Again, it's in that murder mystery/detective genre.  Sort of.  And it's historical fiction.  Sort of.

The 19th Wife weaves together the tale of Brigham Young's apostate wife Ann Eliza (#19) and the 19th wife of a modern day polygamist who is murdered in the basement of the home he shares with 25 or so wives and so many kids no one keeps count.  The excommunicated son of the modern day wife #19 unfurls a puzzle that leads straight back to Ann Eliza Young and the legacy that brought his family to where it is today.

The author aptly blends the memoirs of Ann Eliza with his own fictional liberties, never losing touch with 19th century pioneer religious fervor.  And he almost seamlessly ties the two stories together, leaving no doubt that the legacy of polygamy had wrought the awful consequences of a contemporary murder mystery.

I enjoyed the book throughout, even with a few sloppy story lines that detracted from the rich and authentic feeling of the main plot line.  And if you've ever been to, or even heard of, Colorado City (formerly Short Creek) you will thoroughly enjoy trying to envision the scenes in their place in the desert.