March 4, 2005

• Before you start in on my newest very-fun-to-write (and hopefully fun to read) essay, I want to share with you a lead that one of my readers, the whip smart and funny Davis McDavis has discovered about the questions I pose about the film Osama in the post, Questions from a Wonderstruck Me. Because I love his writing, and because I want to be sure he receives full credit for providing us all with the answer, I’ve copied and pasted his insight below:

  DavisMcDavis’s Insight into the Scenes in Question in the film Osama:
  Now I’m curious about the two things you mentioned. Not having seen the film, I have no opinion of my own, but it appears those two scenes have also flummoxed viewers on the IMDB discussion board for this movie. The lock thingy is apparently that the mullah is allowing the girl to choose which lock we will be locked into her house/room with, as the mullah keeps all his other wives locked up. It is supposed to be ironic that the only choice for a woman in that society is which lock she will be locked up with. By contrast, in the US she would be allowed to choose what color Juicy Couture sweatpants she would wear to yoga, but she wouldn’t be allowed to pull them up high enough to cover her ass crack. Is it progress? I think so – but we can do better!

  The bleeding thing I don’t know, but I’ll bet it has something to do with vaginas.
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  Interesting stuff huh? Three Cheers for DavisMcDavis!

  Now on to my newest essay, which has nothing to do with the depressing realities of locked up women or bleeding vaginas. Enjoy!

  My Precious
  &copy The Author, 2005

  I was six when I was first introduced to the rounded sounds, the devilishly harsh edges, the smooth textures, and that glorious smell that was to seduce me into a love affair that would cling to me for a long time to come. Dolled up in barrettes in the shape of blue poodles and a sweatshirt with sleeves that were encrusted with green snot, I was about to be awakened in a deeply profound, amazingly exotic, and very adult way. The awakening came when I read the following sacred words aloud with my class: “The sun is up. Buffy is up. Buffy and Mac are up.”

  It wasn’t the message itself that was so appealing, but the sudden awareness that those strange inky blots—previously mere interruptions from the pictures in my bedtime stories—had actual meanings. Prior to my introduction to the sordid tale of Buffy and Mac and their glorious rising sun, I had always thought that those ugly black symbols provided loose guidelines to as how long a person had to invent a story about the illustration before they turned the page. These symbols didn’t have any “set” rules per se. I imagine this assumption was due to spending much of my early childhood receiving bedtime stories from my very inventive granddad, who apparently was attempting to make my children’s books (and his repetitive reading of them) more interesting.
  When I learned that these blots were words, and they were a way of documenting a very specific story, I felt like I had made a startling and new discovery. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that everyone else in the world already had figured as much.

  My craving for the written word became so intense, that I remember my frustration at the time consuming process of reading aloud. Since that was the practice in my first grade class, it never occurred to me that you might just simply look at the page and read silently to yourself. I remember sitting on the living room floor, my arms crossed, my book thrown angrily aside. I was scowling at my mom.

  “What do you mean, read to yourself? How do I just look at the page and know it?”
  “Try it,” she said.
  Amazing. The thoughts of the author were suddenly, magically, my thoughts. It was like being telepathic. It was heaven.

  As I grew older, my nightlight burned hot as I read until the early hours of the morning from Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, and To Kill A Mockingbird. When my eyes finally dropped closed for the evening, my dreams were vivid and beautiful assumed continuations of the story I had been reading.

  As I entered adolescence, entire warm summer days were spent sprawled out on a beach towel on my family’s deck with a glass of O.J. and some toast to nibble, reading and re-reading Catcher in the Rye. During the school year, I would spend the days leading the life of a healthy, active teenager: student council meetings, Advanced English classes, play and choir rehearsals. But after school, I would become a quiet recluse, holing up in my room, heaping down and flannel blankets into a warm nest for which I would burrow into and devour Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and the existential crises penned by Camus and Hemmingway.

  As an adult, I devour novels with more passion and hunger than most porn stars play at in their films. Reguarly occurring emotions that I experince in my quest to be brimming with words include:

  • Pride
  I hold my reading up high, bringing the text to my face, flaunting the weathered cover for all too see-be it Dostoevsky or the newest issue of McSweeney’s.

  • Greed
  Witness my excessive spillage of precious paperbacks!

  • Lust
  I am frequently distracted at work by explicit fantasies of what the next page might hold.

  • Gluttony
  I am happy to grow soft as I suck each word to the bone and salivate greedily for the next.

  • Envy
  I oftentimes charge furiously through books, just to get my hands on the most recent acquisition my husband has started reading.

  As long as I can keep Wrath out of the mix, I think might escape the burning throes of hell, if there turns out to be such a place.

  My husband is also afflicted, making us enablers for each other. With barely enough money to stock our refrigerator, we guilty spend money on publications of all sorts: comic books, paperbacks (used is preferential—our addiction is so bad that we could not possibly afford new at the volume we consume them, unless we submit to the corporate whoredom of Amazon—which we are not to proud to do), and magazines (oh, how I salivate to see my fresh weekly New Yorker glistening at the top of my mail pile, or better yet, a nice, fat, book-sized Granta or Tin House).

  Although I enjoy social interaction, and I am by no means the bearer of a “bookworm” personality, my list of favorite authors is undoubtedly longer than my list of actual friends. John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dave Eggers, David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Isabel Allende, and Yukio Mishima, Walker Percy, William Faulkner, and oh I’ve got to stop because this list is going and going and I fear the list will never end. And please don’t think that this list is some sort of indication that I am a “book snob.” I enjoyed Jemma J. and Bridget Jones’s Diary as much as the next girl. But I do admit, these books might be better classified as “acquaintances” rather than tried and true friends. But they are welcome, celebrated guests in my home never the less.

  Recently, I have fallen hard for an author who is new to me. In his book, Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins weaves a delectable tale of epic proportions while entertainingly nudging along a philosophy that challenges society’s view on existence. Robbins writes, “The drama unfolding in the universe—in our psyches—is not good against evil but new against old, or, more precisely, destined against obsolete” (Robbins, 326).

  While this philosophic thread seems to be the reason for the fiction, this does not in any way imply that the vehicle that supports it (the story) is lacking. Although the philosophy is sometimes heavy handed (although it never takes itself too seriously, in fact, it oftentimes pokes great fun at itself), it never detracts from the jubilant and outstandingly brilliant comedy of the writing. The story is sheer entertainment from the very first page. So entertaining in fact, that I am savoring this read. I am currently 10 pages away from finishing and I have forced myself to break so that I can make it last just a little bit longer. I wouldn’t possibly conceive of ruining this story for you by providing a summary (not even the book jacket does this), as the completely unexpected, unpredictable plot is an intrinsic element of this book’s charm. Someone who caught on to my admiration of Vonnegut recommended Tom Robbins to me, and I am now certain that I enjoy Tom Robbins even more than my stud Vonnegut (no hard feelings, Kurt).

  This year I have opened my home to other great authors as well. While it is hard to keep track of just how many penning ladies and gentlemen I have been involved with since this time last year, a few spectacular names of new authors immediately come to mind. The sexiest of them all is Oscar Hijuelos.

  Oscar won my heart with his whammy of a novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Not only does Hijuelos completely rejuvenate the footnote (he uses this traditionally academic documentation strategy as a way to delve into the microscopic elements of character development), but he also is able to write grit, melodrama, and erotica in a seamless, sophisticated, Pulitzer Prize winning style.

  Mikail Bulgakov sauntered into my life early this winter with vodka on his breath and an incredible book for me to read, The Master and Margarita. While I regularly I revel in the devil-may-care logic of Mexican and Latin American magical realism, reading a Russian author’s version of this beloved genre was a refreshing adventure. This book was laugh-out-loud funny and reminded me of the wonderment I had reading Alice in Wonderland for the first time, except this very adult book features naked witches, the devil Himself, and a talking cat named Behemoth.

  My adventures continued with a little boy named Pi and his journeys across the sea in a tiny boat shared with a starving and feral tiger. Yann Martel deserves all the acclaim he has received, but what I think of most when I reflect on his writing is not the authors poignant philosophical observations, nor his vivid writing and imaginative plot, but rather an eloquent statement that he makes in the forward of his novel, Life of Pi. Martel states, “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the alter of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams” (Martel, XII).

  If I were to throw the dinner party of my dreams (which would happen only in my dreams, since many of the attendees are very dead), with all my favorite authors, plus Che Guevarra, a handful of my friends and family, and Madonna (if she felt so inclined), I would be sure to include Yann Martel’s sentiment on the invitation.

  I am not addicted to the written word for its sex appeal alone. I am simply grateful for writers who produce wonderful work, for without them, my brain would starve. Their thought inspires my thought. Their stories prompt my stories.

  As all of the fundamentals of existence, the effect of art is majestically, profoundly, and irrevocably prismatic. When I read a good story and it prompts me to write a good story, my thoughts and my reality change. When someone else reads my work and they are inspired to write because of it, the prism refracts anew. Soon reality as a whole is bathed in a new light, as we evolve thanks to the gadfly of art. My friend Tom Robbins’s 1000 year old character Alobar sums this constant recasting of reality when he comments on modern society in the novel, Jitterbug Perfume. “We’re standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. The sham is everywhere. But wait, now. Don’t let me spoil the party. Things will change. Even now, I’m curious to see what’s going to happen next” (Robbins, 319).
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  **I hope you enjoyed this essay. As an added bonus for all of you who want to prolong your time reading about reading, I’ve included one of my all-time favorite poems, Eating Poetry by Mark Strand. If you are sick of reading about reading (or if poetry is not your bag), skip this and head straight to the comment box and be sure to leave me your reading recommendations. As always, thanks for reading and take care!

  Eating Poetry
  by Mark Strand

  Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
  There is no happiness like mine.
  I have been eating poetry.

  The librarian does not believe what she sees.
  Her eyes are sad
  and she walks with her hands in her dress.

  The poems are gone.
  The light is dim.
  The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

  Their eyeballs roll,
  their blond legs bum like brush.
  The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

  She does not understand.
  When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
  she screams.

  I am a new man.
  I snarl at her and bark.
  I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

  • 12:27 am
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