Ha!

So, I finished a book that I did not assign for class (and no it is not the long, complicated David Grossman novel of which I have managed 15 pages a night before falling alseep, book on head).  Alison was writing something about Ayelet Waldman and I asked to borrow the book Bad Mother (you should know, reader(s) that I never buy books at Amazon and yet I always link these books to Amazon, why is that?).  In 18 chapters Waldman recounts her marriage, her life as a lawyer and a writer, and her children -- but more than all of this she recounts her experience of being a mother and her obsession with being a "bad" mother.  A bad mother is a mother who is not perfect; and while I appreciate Waldman's argument that we are often inundated with images of maternal perfection as the only ideal, I also think that this theme gets old fast.  Waldman clearly wants credit (amusing dinner party credit) for being a bad mom.  And her writing is not sufficiently amusing to maintain that tone, but after chapter 10 or so she calms down.  And what is clear from then on is not that she is a bad mother (although she, like all the rest of us is imperfect) but that she is an anxious mother.  She is anxious about how her moods will impact her children, how her expectations will distort them, how her hopes will stifle them, how her desire to be her own person and continue loving her husband as the number 1 chosen person in her life will bring the whole family down.  Waldman is, in part, in love with her own anxiety.  But she is also honest about that anxiety. 

Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here:  she has one million children....i.e. more than 2).  In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from.   But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe.  She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.)   And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off.  In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world.  But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit?  What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable.  But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.

So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent. 

And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband.  Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.

Litany of failures

Ok -- so I returned the Julia Franck book to the library 3/4 read (and overdue to boot -- a 3$ fine and I did not even like or finish the book).  If someone knows what happens to the boy left in the train staion feel free to fill me in -- but since at p. 279 Helene was not even pregnant with him yet I had to give it the heave ho.  Perhaps it would be a better book were I not so tired.  I exchanged it for David Grossman's new book To the End of the Land.  I suspect it will take more brainpower than I have in the last week of classes; we shall see.

And if you want to follow a funny/exasperating set of posts over the worst children's book in the world (The Giving Tree) then go to Andrew Sullivan's blog: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/  It took a while for my view of this as a dangerous piece of blather about a child getting everything to the detriment of the poor tree comes out in the comments.  And my few readers will, perhaps, be relieved that I shall stay silent about the Giving Tree and Jesus. 

And tomorrow is Passover -- I can post on reading the Haggadah.....

True Journey is Return

Or so says Odo, the founder of the principles on which the planet Anarres is organized in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.  All I know is that there are three weeks left in the semester and time is flowing like Niagara Falls and I am Sam Patch in a barrel (Upstate NY reference -- will have to seek random [or not , wikipedia] internet link.....here!).  I am currently reading Ursula Le Guin's The Telling, but it is not working for me and I just started the quite dark and grim The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck.  So far so good, not much to say yet.  My class starts reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower this week.  This is hardly even a blog post.....

How did one week go by?

OK, let's see -- it has been quite a week in my world and while reading is happening thinking much beyond the reading I have been doing for my class is not happening (that is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite books, ever).  But I also finished the truly dreadful Witch of Hebron by James Kunstler and am dipping in and out of the T.C. Boyle short story collection Wild Child (bought for the title story, which was disappointing -- on the other hand the stroy "1300 rats" was pretty much just what you would want out of a story with that title).  So, Kunstler.  He is the author of the beautifully titled World Made by Hand.  Can a book be good if the only good thing about it is the title?  (More below on the title.)  Kunstler (peak oil man of The Long Emergency, nonfiction),  imagines life post oil, post nameless war and post various diseases, in a small town along the Hudson river north of Albany, NY.  Without oil, gasoline, electricity, communications systems and essentially every other means of modern comfort (which seems to include egalitarian gender relations) the people of Union Grove face many difficulties: the crazed and violent gang of thugs that scavenge, fail to apprecaite hard work, but allow Kunstler to offer up some pretty disgusting punishments; the disappearance of some men who went to trade in Albany; and the arrival of a quasi cult like christian group that has been moving north after facing worse difficulties in the southeastern US.  Oh I can't even go on with its silly plot.  So the Witch of Hebron continues the celebration of the simple life, of men who fish and hunt and treat their women well and women who...well, other than the witch, women who pretty much stay off the page unles their buxom boutnies are being discussed.  Kunstler, I suspect, fanstasizes of being a medieval lord -- and it is as tiresome as it sounds.

But the title -- he captures simply in a title the important feature of life post-apocalypse: that it (like life post state of nature) must be made by hand -- not because we eat slow and love our goods handmade -- but because we understand that politics, organized living together, can only be made 'by hand.'  Not by god, not by superiors, but by us.  Sadly he has ruined a perfectly good title with two novels of nonsense.

TV!

Ok, I interrupt my focus on books for a post on television.  One of my people, who is a fan of all things girls-in-the-past, has been watching the Waltons.  What a great show.  Two things I have noticed in the three episodes we have seen thus far (season 1, so long ago). First off there are elderly people in the show -- not only that, those people have actual lives: hopes and dreams -- they get angry and sad and happy.  They live lives that are rich in themselves and not simply as appendages to some other, younger, better folk.  And when I started thinking about this I wondered -- where are the elderly people on TV -- not as jokes or occasional side kicks -- but just ordinary people, who happen to be over 70?  Second thing -- the adults in this show get to have children and yet not be fully absorbed at all times by those children.  Children are shushed and shooed away and real conversations happen between real adults (ok, on TV) -- relationships are explored and, again, people get mad and talk about why they are mad and their anger is just a part of adult life -- not a tragedy, but a normal response to stress or uncertainty.  I will, I am sure, have other observations over the next few weeks (it could take us months to get through all of the seasons!).  I had tried the Waltons once before and we started with a stretch of tragedy episodes: appendicitis and Mama got polio -- my people dislikes the tragedy shows -- but this time we are on a good run of ordinary tales of people in the world (or as some who know me might note: earnest and dreary ordinary tales of people in the world.  And do I love anything more than earnest and dreary from my forms of art?  I do not.).

Now we are getting somewhere

Ok, I think I have found it: Julie Bertagna, Exodus (1st book), Zenith (second book), Aurora (forthcoming, 3rd book) -- premise -- global climate change, an island in (or what is left of) Scotland, a small community that finally recognizes that their island will not survive one more winter of rising seas.  A girl who finds record on the internet of new cities that were created above the water.  So will people follow Mara's recommendation that the islanders set out crowded into boats to find these cities in the sky?  They will (although part of what makes these books so good is that there is lots of questioning about why anyone would pay attention to a 15 year old).  But what awaits them at the city is not what anyone expected.  This postapocalyptic text eventually presents six different postapocalyptic communities -- five different responses to living in a world that is mostly under water.  These communities run the gamut of socio-political arrangements, and differing responses to these radically changing conditions.  Mara creates what is (or will be by the third book) a new community with representatives from most of the others presented.  It is not yet fully clear what shape the new community will take.  But the collection of people include a group who have lived for the last 50 years on islands underneath the far reaching stabiliazation beams of those who live in the sky, abandoned and almost feral children who are beginning to be born with webbed feet, one other survivor of Mara's home island, a boy who lived his life on a collection of lashed together ships and oil riggers, and the virtual memory/interaction of/with a boy who lives in the city in the sky.  There are children, infants and adults.  There is considerable disagreement about what to do and where to go and how to live.  And the conditions under which they live are certainly challenging.  So what the final book should have is a set of principles for how this disparate group can come together and live in such a way that they will not simply begin the next cycle of humans destroying the earth. 

Am now working on the sequel to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand -- which, despite its most excellent title, was truly awful.  The sequel is so far proving to be equally medieval fantasy.  And so far no takers for reading The Years of Rice and Salt together.  (784 pages but you can get a  used copy for only one penny!)

What I want out of my postapocalyptic tale....

...is not what I got in Sigrid Nunez's Salvation City.  (Just a moment of self-congratualtion -- that would be my first successful blog link -- thank you to Alison for telling me how.)  Salavation City is a town in southern Indiana that has suffered less from the impact of a world-wide flu pandemic.  Cole is rescued from an orphanage by Preacher Wyatt and comes to live in his evangelical home after both of Cole's parents have died from the flu.  The book seems to want to pose the liberal atheism of Cole's parents against the warm evangelicalism (with some dark under-roots) of the Wyatt's.  But in all the book is disappointing.  First off, don't tell me this is about a world post-flu pandemic and then give me virtually no details about what has happened in this new world (one mention of an emaciated President (female!) 10 days after surviving her own bout of flu) -- but no discussion at all on the impact this pandemic has on government services, democratic values, transportation systems, food distribution or any of the other postapocalyptic details I seek.  The people of Salavation City seem to be waiting for the rapture and their doing better from the pandemic itself is either because they are nicer to each other or because they are isolated.  Cole seems less interested in their religion (although he tries) and similalry distanced from the memory of parents that did not seem so great anyway (is this just the truthful voice of a young teen ?  I was wholly unconvinced when he expressed sadness over their deaths because he quite convincingly describes his parents as distant, demanding, cold and isolated).  Eventually other things happen -- but nothing so interesting to report here....

I am now reading (actually re-reading, but it took me 125 pages to figure this out) Sharp North.  It starts out quite well in a small community in a northern woods somewhere responsible for a system of electricity generators.  There is certainly mystery and drowning cities and plans for revising the world (both the world we are in and the one we have lost).  But it too is still not quite what I want.

So what do I want: an event, survivors, a system for thinking through how to live not just for next week but for the next years and generations.  With enough potential threats to keep thinngs moving along -- but no zombies and no cannibals.  I want an explanation of how to rebuild and I want evidence that such a rebuilding makes sense.  And I want this from a protagonist who is not particulalry heroic in a world where being strong and smart may not be the key to survival.  So reader....any suggestions?