Digging in their heels

So, this week's novel in class was Toni Morrison's Paradise. It was sometimes hard to follow, but certainly had some hard truths to tell. The story takes place in the mythical Ruby, Oklahoma, a black community established in the wake of the further disenfranchisement of freedmen in the south. The founders of the community were push from Mississippi and Louisiana to their first "Haven." When things stagnate there, a splinter group eventually moves on to Ruby. But, in any closed community, stagnation and dissatisfaction are inevitable. A society that doesn't change is destined to fail. Humanity is meant to continue to grow, to learn, to adjust. Differences beget advancement. The danger in Ruby is not only physical inbreeding, which is beginning to produce deformed children, but the mental inbreeding which produces a deformed mind and conscience.

"Hollywoodizing" Hollywood Debauchery

I loved the movie Less Than Zero when it came out 21 years ago. I watched it many times. I cried many times. All those pretty people leading meaningless lives, and pretty Andrew McCarthy as Clay trying to save his friends from that meaninglessness. Now I've read the novel, and Clay isn't quite as sympathetic a character in print as he was on film. And the characters in the book weren't just doing drugs and having casual sex. I don't really want to give too much away. It's still a good, depressing read, just as I found the movie to be good and depressing. I understand Ellis has been given a hard time about his writing - all the loose morals, gratuitous violence and such. But, when being a good American means, primarily, being a good consumer, why not numb yourself. It seems to me that Ellis is trying to point out that when your goals and interactions are meaningless - there's not one relationship of any depth among the characters - you have to escape somehow. I think when Hollywood cleaned up the story for the movie, they squelched its impact. The parents of the movie actually seemed to be concerned for their kids. Not so in the book. Ellis's felony indictment of American society is reduced to a misdemeanor. My recommendation: see the movie for the brooding performances of Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz and the realistic, stunning, and ominous performance of Robert Downey Jr. Read the book to really get the point.

Erica Jong and Francesca Lia Block

So, we were reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying for class this week. And coincidentally, I picked up a book at the library (I always have to have something I'm reading just for me) called Quakeland, by Francesca Lia Block. Both books are about women trying to navigate the perils of romantic relationships in the feminist world. Both are about women trying to figure out just who they are. I must admit, I preferred Quakeland. It had a spirituality to it that was lacking in Fear of Flying. But both books were certainly realistic, just from points of view of different types of women with similar problems. Much of the difference comes from the different eras - Jong wrote in the early '70s; Block's book came out this year. Yet both books touched me deeply. I am, after all, a woman in the feminist world. I was raised during those first couple of decades of feminism. Intellectually, I understand that my life is my own intellectually. But my role models hadn't quite internalized those changes that feminism brought about. Block's Katrina, Jong's Isadora, and I are still trying to make independence and self-reliance work, to find out what a healthy relationship means to feminists like ourselves. I hope I figure it out soon.

Why haven't I read this guy before?

You know, I don't consider myself a conservative stick-in-the-mud, but I just read my first Thomas Pynchon novel, and that's sure how I felt. See what happens when I get shoved outside my comfort zone? I've always loved to read, but this was certainly something new. I'm used to your standard novel - standard conflict, standard exposition, standard climax - you get the picture. A nice normal story arc, easy to follow, easy to analyze. Pynchon knocked me on my ass! What the hell is going on here? I asked myself. No standard stuff here. The novel was all over the place, with observations from Oedipa, the main character, about life, love, the postal service, sex, drugs, men, business - the list goes on and on. And is she having a paranoid fantasy, is her dead ex-lover playing a posthumous practical joke on her, or is she really involved in some underground scheme to foil the U.S. Postal Service, traditional love, and the gods know what else.

And even though Pynchon - through his mouthpiece Diblette - tried to discourage me from analyzing the novel, by the gods I did my best. Well, I had to write my essay on something. But it was a puzzle to be sorted out anyway. I had to try to extract some kind of meaning from it. Ha! I really don't want to give it - or what I think it is - away. My own convoluted little brain added its own ideas to the mix and came away with the meaning best suited to me. That might be just what Pynchon had in mind.