Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Warning: this sighing, shuddering, and kvetching is all about how a good book resolves its conflects with a (to me) soul-killing ending. So I will be spoilering it.

Found this book listed in my local library's catalog: House of Dolls, Francesca Lia Block (Harper, 2010), and since that's the genre I'm currently trying to tackle, I put a hold on it; Audrey dropped it off for me yesterday, and I read it in one sitting.*

And, well...

"Never has" is a phrase that stomps through the mind with two-ton lead boots, quashing all memory of past experience, but I'm sore tempted to use it here:
Never has such a finely-crafted work of literature
left me so depressed and demoralized.

I was not depressed by the dark themes of war, or grief, or living in fear of a fickle and jealous being you cannot control. I was ... confused (?) and slightly disturbed by the overt sexual overtones in a book aimed at pre-pubescent girls:

(Quote): "The first time Madison Blackberry lay them down next to each other in the white lace canopy bed and their arms brushed, Wildflower and Guy knew they never wanted to be seperated." (unquote)

But hey, I know that girls growing up in this generation are a lot more aware of sex and sexual pressures at nine than I ever was, so it makes sense that a girl of that age would play that out with her dolls. So that didn't depress me (much) either.

And I really liked how the author brought the dolls to life: Definitely Level 4: fully alive toys... at least, within the world of their Edwardian (?) dollhouse (built by a great grandfather for the grandmother) -- the dolls can even open and read all the books in the vast library (and the collection of Life Magazines from the 1970s), even though no human would have been able to make books that small with turnable pages and print.

And I liked the mix of dolls in the house: two from the Grandmother's time (a celluloid fashion doll, and a fairy doll) and three from the present day: (a small ragdoll with a wire poseable body, a G.I. Joe type doll, and a small jointed teddy bear). That sort of odd collection is how doll families come together.

Also, the author wrote in the Omniscienct Narrator voice really well, without a single wink or nod to the Reader, but quietly, in the background, so what you really noticed was the story, not the Author.

No, what did did depress me is how all this complexity and deep themes got resolved: with pretty dress (handmade by Grandmother) and Mother staying home to Be With Her Children (While Father is a strong, protective shadow in the doorway) for the human protagonist. And for the dolls: with pretty dresses, sex with boyfriends, and a baby in the cradle.

That's what it's all reduced to? That's the world we're painting for our nine-year old girls?

One Hundred Years Ago, E. Nesbit contributed to the Suffregette movement by writing ten-year old girl protagonists who wanted to grow up and explore the Antartic. And now, we're writing girls who want nothing more than a long silk gown, a War Hero Boyfriend (to play the hurt/comfort game with), and a baby??!

That's depressing.

*Granted, it's a slim volume, of small dimensions and wide borders to the pages (I guestimate < 9,000 words, since there are illustrations, too).

There's a meme floating around our hearing world that poor, suffering d/Deaf people have no sense of music or rhythm, unless good-hearted hearing people translate the songs into sign language for them (and, naturally, throw in some pantomime to suppliment the signs, since sign language is obviously lacking). And, I'm afraid, my last post fed into that stereotype.

So, now, I'm posting an antidote. Your vid players are not broken -- there is no melody or voice-over behind this performance. It was created by a Deaf man for a Deaf audience. And he clearly has a strong sense of rhythm (at least, to my eye -- some of this has been playing as a brainworm in my head).

From what I can gather, based on the written comments, and people replying to replies, it's a satirical review of the book To Become a Human Being -- another "book of wisdom" where a privileged white dude mines the exoticism of the "great aboriginal peoples" for fame and profit.

Much of this vid flies right over my head. It will take a while of guessing and trawling online video dictionaries to fill in the signs I'm missing. So I'll just give the timestamps and translations of the sentences I'm certain of.

( And I'll put it behind here. )

...And I'm fuzzy on the ending, where he wraps everything up and gets to the point. I wish there were a handshape-based sign dictionary online (there is one in print, arranged in order based on phonemes, but I find video easier to follow than line drawings). Until then, I'll have to make best guesses on the English words, and type them into the search boxes until I come across the signs I recognize but don't yet know...

Still, this gave me a laugh, even though I missed about half of it.

Most of this is taken from a comment to trouble, but with some stuff added, and other stuff removed:

Reason One: This weekend, as a project (as yet uncompleted), I decided to collect various examples of local cities' "name logos;" I was surfing around the cities official webpages, and snagging the .jpgs.

Anyway, on Virginia Beach's homepage was the announcement that two branches of their public library would be temporarially closed. At first, my heart sank, thinking: "Economic Trouble!" But that wasn't it at all.

They were closing the branches for one weekend, to replace the old circulation desks with shiny new ones that are ADA*-compliant!


Reason Two: Today, while I was visiting my own home-branch library, I had the opportunity to point out to one of the librarians that people were leaving those rolling step-stools in the aisles, making it hard for wheelchair users to navigate. I suggested a few friendly signs to remind patrons to return the stools to the end of the aisles when they were finished with them.

And she thought that was a very good idea, and she would pass the suggestion on to the woman who makes all the library signs. She said she'd never thought about that before, but of course that made it harder for me, and I shouldn't have to deal with it.

Awareness Win!!

Reason Three: The books I can nao haz:

The Artemis Fowl Files, by Eoin Colfer.

I saw posters for some of these books near the (what used to be) the Y.A. section, and remembered hearing an interview with the author on NPR. I didn't remember what the author had said, but I did remember putting the series in my mental "I want to read that!" file. Only. The YA section wasn't the Y.A. section anymore -- they're still reorganizing the library, and today was the day to move the Y.A. books. They'd already shelved F-
Z, but the first half of the fiction section was still on the carts (It was when the librian was retrieving the Artemis Fowl books from the book cart that I mentioned the idea of friendly, helpful signs).

Anyway, I've read the first chapter of the first novella in the volume, and apparently, the series is about fairy land as imagined if fairy land is now as technological and urban as Modernday Earth. I like it very much, so far.

Sun Dancing: A Vision of Medieval Ireland, by Geoffrey Moorehouse. This one is a complete blank. I got it because I thought maybe I should just get out of my comfort zone of genres I know I like. I picked it up because I liked the font in the title. It turns out, reading the informantion on the flyleaf, that it's an historical novel about Early Christianity. That's why I put it in my bookbag, instead of back on the shelf.

Emily the Strange: Lost, Dark & Bored (Volume 1), created by Bob Reger, Illustrated by Buzz Parker, Written by Bob Reger et al. This was from the Graphic Novel section, though it really seems to be more a graphic anthology of short stories. The physical condition of the volume is poor to bad (pages are tattered and falling out, but so far, they seem to be all there.

This is another one I know nothing about, but decided to borrow because I want to branch out and become more comfortable with the literary form, and also, I was drawn to the cover.

---

*That's the Americans with Disabilities Act (realizes not everyone reading this necessarily knows that)

There are neural pathways in my brain that have long been disused. They now feel quite overgrown with weeds and criss-crossed with giant, sticky, spiders' webs.

(In what is, perhaps, my most unfortunate metaphor yet, I take out my machete, and work my way down those pathways once more.)

I'm enjoying Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. I really am -- but --

The book developed out of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The author is Martha C. Nussbaum; the copyright holders are the Preseident and Fellows of Harvard College. That should tell you something.

I have not read anything this densely and formally academic in eighteen years. Although I got my education at fairly competitive colleges, they were not Harvard. And although I know something of the Enlightenment from my education in English literature and the history that went with that, I did not focus on Political Philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present.

I also have this vague sense that, in order to read this book as the author intended, I should go through the pages with a neon yellow highlighter, and work up an outline, for each chapter and section, jotting down main points and questions in a dedicated notebook as I go, so I can be prepared to study for the midterm.

( A sample paragraph from this book, and my reaction to it, the latter of which proves that, deep down, I am still ten years old. )

Still, it feels good to give the brain a hefty bit of exercise (and yes, it feels like exercise)

I caught this from lizbee. The original asks to tag five people. But she doesn't believe in tagging (and neither do I). So I got infected with a different variant.

Grab the nearest book, open to page 123, find the fifth sentence. Then post the next three sentences. Then post a comment (that last bit is new, since I last did this meme).

Just so happens, I went and got a "new" book to reread, and brought it into my computer room just yesterday:

Shakespeare's Imagery and what it tells us by Caroline Spurgeon (argh! I wish this book would stay open without me holding it!):

If we add to this, what we all know, that skim milk struck him as a poor drink, while cakes and ale seemed good to him, that ginger and a cordial appeared to him of more comfort than cold porridge, it is but one more proof of how completely he shared in the tastes and weaknesses of our common and suffering humanity.

Shakespeare also noticed the women's sewing and mending which he saw going on round him, and there is clear evidence of his observation of and interest in needlework in the many images he draws from it and things pertaining to it, such as a bodkin, a silken thread, a twist of rotted silk, or an 'immaterial' skein of sleave or floss silk and needles, threaded and unthreaded. The tiny size of the eye of the latter is used with effect by Thersites when he declares--in spite of Ajax--that Ajax has not so much wit 'as will stop the eye of Helen's needle, for whom he comes to fight,' and the sharpness of its point lends vividness to Imogen's assertion that she would have watched Posthumus waving farewell in his ship

..........til the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle.

There! As you can see from the length of those sentaces, her fondness for extended lists, and of embedding actual quotes from Shakespeare within them, those lines actually came from Page 124, even though I started counting on 123.

The thesis for this book is an interesting one: that Shakespeare's attitudes about life, and his experiences, sort of "leak out" for the world to see through the images he uses to explain things when the explicit topics his characters are speaking about are something else altogether. She focuses on the plays, and skips the poetry, because in poetry, the poet is consciously looking to extend a metaphor. But in the plays (which were being written and produced at what would be breakneck speed for us), there's must less time for that. She's basically playing the psychologist's game of "Free association" with Shakespeare. But instead of having him lying there on the couch, we have his plays.

Oh, and once she she got the idea, she went through every play, line by line, and cataloged all the images he used, and in what context, and the attitude he expressed about each of them in 1935, before computers or search engines even existed, so I bow before her mighty research-fu.

In typing up that last bit about sewing and needles, however, it occurs to me that that might have been a professional interest, rather than his acute sensitivity to the "fairer sex." After all, women were discouraged from taking part in the theater life, so when a costume is in need of repair, the actor himself would have to fix it.