Summer dabblings

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains- flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. Almost.”

True to Murakami’s surreal, eerie style, Sputnik Sweetheart follows the hopeless narrator “K” as he helps Miu find his friend Sumire on a small island on Greece after she disappears. The story focuses almost entirely on Sumire and her thoughts in a diary left behind about her attraction to Miu as the two try to find her. As he finds out about their encounters he learns more and more about Sumire and the woman and consequently feels more attached to her even though she has inexplicably disappeared  from the island.

It is not so much Murakami’s prose but his use of metaphors to create infinite possibilities of what actually happened that captivates such a large group of readers. As he mixes the real and the unreal he forces readers to come up with their own interpretations. The characters are given life precisely because Murakami lets us infuse our own personal experiences and beliefs onto the metaphors he uses to describe and warp a situation. In the end, the reader must decide what the novel means to him or her- it is left wide open for interpretation. This, I believe, is the true beauty of Murakami’s simple and stirring style which is both light hearted and utterly terrifying at the same time. He often lulls us into a feeling of security, though always there is an unsettling feeling of something nasty waiting to happen. Murakami is enigmatic in his simple writing yet manages to evoke a deep sentimentality and empathy in readers to these characters, a true artist in this respect.

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Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine extends the analogy of a CIA funded psychiatric electroshock experimental procedure on hopeless patients to economically shocking an entire population with our capitalistic, profiteering, American free market ideals. She makes it that black and white, following our money grubbing fingers from Central and Latin America, Asia, and finally the Middle East. She tells a woeful, guilt ridden tale that makes you ashamed to call yourself an American. Her main target is Milton Friedman and his lackeys, the Chicago Boys, Chilean students who went to the University of Chicago to get educationally brainwashed to run Chile like Friedman wishes, completely free market style under the militaristic and barbaric dictator Pinochet. If I’m making this sound exaggerated, it’s not – page after page I honestly felt more and more horrified of what the CIA can and has done. However, the analogy of the “shock” doctrine got repetitive and old towards the end, dragging on and on – we get it already, you’re relating it to shocking a patient into submission and subordinance, the patient being the foreign masses subject to United States’ tyranny. And her use of sentimentality does get a little wearing on the nerves as well. As someone who’s not too well versed in politics, the book was a good way to figuratively wet my feet in the topics of the IMF, CIA, World Bank, Milton Friedman, and other people/organizations you would find if you googled “Evil”, “Free Market capitalism,” or “Arrogant American jerks who screwed up other countries”, but for others I’m sure there’s a tendency to roll your eyes at the sentimentality. Though I would argue in the beginning her passion and her disgust with the nation keeps you captivated and interested as she throws you number after horrifying number of brutal murders and depressing economic crises directly related to our economic and militaristic nosiness. A good but depressing read that will introduce you to the international economic effects of unleashing a terribly arrogant America with too much money and too much power onto the world.

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“At twenty-three, Dexter Mayhew’s vision of his future was no clearer than Emma Morley’s. He hoped to be successful, to make his parents proud and to sleep with more than one woman at the same time, but how to make these all compatible? He wanted to feature in magazine articles, and hoped one day for a retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be. He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

A witty love story written by David Nicholls, One Day has already hit it big with the masses and is already made into a movie (little too quick guys). Dexter and Emma had one almost-did-it night that was unfortunately on graduation night. While they both had mixed feelings that night, they still dutifully wrote each other letters while they were apart attempting to find a job in ruthless world, staying steadfast friends with very strong undercurrents of unresolved feelings. While Dexter can’t seem to keep a girlfriend for more than a night, Emma’s romantic forays are contrastingly barren and empty. Their careers are also at polar opposites, Dexter makes it big in the TV business while Emma is stuck squandering around in fast food chains and other dead end jobs. They stay glued to each other as best friends despite their differences, and manage to help each other through the years. It is not only a story of love but also of friendship and growing older; David Nicholls writes a very realistic and subtle story of two idealistic young twenty year olds who gradually reevaluate their viewpoints as maturity sets in. In this respect it’s a very touching portrait of two people’s lives that is totally believable and utterly sentimental at the end of it which makes it a love story that stands out in a sea of other romance novels.

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“Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”

Arguably Martin Amis’ most famous novel, Money makes you feel that you are inebriated the entire time you read it. It’s one hangover to the next as the narrator, John Self, drinks and fucks his way through his supposed suicide letter. The entire novel is prefaced with it as a suicide letter, but by the end he has chosen another path.

John Self, the owner of a movie script he has created loosely based off his own life, is in no shortage of cash. He spends his days alternating between his “friends” blowing his cash on any vice you could ever think of. Amis writes in a typical black humor, witty British style that is so perfect for this self-deprecating, self loathing, yet totally shameless anti-hero. This novel is a commentary on our love affair with money, how it can buy you anything – women, fame, beer, any drug under the sun, and also make your life one big hangover. Reading about his antics honestly made me feel a little hungover and drunk myself, the sprawling, pathetic narratives we have in our own heads when we’re at our lowest, the desperate need for human warmth, the lure and seductiveness of money. Needless to say, I was more than a little relieved when I finally finished it. Money was a good read but definitely painful and gruesome. Not for the faint hearted.

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The Healing of America is a refreshing look at other countries’ healthcare system that is, for once, honest and Moore-free of “France rocks” or “Cuba is awesum”. Reid acknowledges our country’s strength but also its weaknesses and goes on an international trip to Canada, Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and Taiwan to see how their healthcare works and some pointers we can take from them. I truly appreciate Reid’s realistic tone in his search, he does not glorify or tone down any of these foreign countries’ systems and humbly states that rather than America arrogantly denouncing other systems as “big government” or “socialist” with such rabid paranoia, we should look to incorporate some of their best features into ours. In the end he acknowledges that we have our own socialist healthcare already, as evident in Medicare and MediCal. True to his journalistic nature he reports what he sees and experiences and leaves it up to us to pick which system or what points in each to take and adopt into ours. In the end, though, it is clear that he thinks American healthcare sucks. And there’s no getting around it, it really does.

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“Play the game, but don’t believe in it- that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way- part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates. Learn how you operate.”

A classic novel which explores the issues of African Americans during the 1950′s, the title itself explains the invisibility of the underdog and how all blacks are seen through the stereotypes created by those in power. We follow an unnamed narrator through his journey from the outwardly racist South to the sophisticated North as he discovers the same type of racism still exists, in a more oppressive, systematic way. Often confusing and jarring, we are very much put in the mind of the bewildered narrator. He is educated from college in the South yet he has trouble playing politics with the communist party which has plucked him from a street riot having discerned his ability to make impromptu, rallying speeches. In the end he embraces his stereotype, using it to his advantage to slip from people’s consciousness. Ellison makes it clear just how subtle and complex a system can be in oppressing blacks during that time period.

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“She spoke pretty well, and so people thought she would float easily into the oblique nuances favored by Chinese intellectuals. For them, it was all about allusion: more beautiful than definition. But she never seemed to talk that way. Language fluency was only language fluency. It didn’t make her Chinese”

Lost in Translation, an incredible first novel by Nicole Mones, stars the troubled young Alice Mannegan as she escapes an overbearing, racist Senator of a father to try to disappear in China. She works as a translator and lands a job to romp through China on the search for Peking man with an American archaeologist and two other Chinese archaeologists, one of whom she falls in love with. The plot to find Peking man is a little simplistic, the writing dry and sometimes even wince worthy. But it is often speckled with gems of short paragraphs that illuminates the depth of Mones’ knowledge of China (she worked there for years) and the tentative attempts to close the huge gap between the knowledge of China and American relations. What makes this novel great are the interactions between the Americans and Chinese and within the corrupt Chinese government itself, revealing the depths of what it means to be truly “Chinese”. As Alice struggles to resolve her feelings about a father whom she is ashamed of and what to make of her new identity in China, she falls in love with the Chinese archaeologist, Lin. The two struggle to see eye to eye as they court each other in the context of their own cultures, rife with misunderstandings, impatient with each other’s methods of communication due to cultural differences.  The dialogue is often half in pinyin Chinese, with an English translation following right behind it. Sometimes Mones uses the English translation of a Chinese saying directly, or uses Chinese grammar in English. Either way, she does this seamlessly, without the story seeming too choppy or hard to understand. Overall a good book to see the effect of the change of China on its people, to see what the Chinese keep and what they throw away in regards to their culture and tradition as their doors are increasingly open to Western ideas and people.

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“Baldy Li, our Liu Town’s premier, had a fantastic plan of spending twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space. Perched atop his famously gold-plated toilet seat, he would close his eyes and imagine himself already floating in orbit, surrounded by unfathomably frigid depths of space. He would look down at the glorious planet stretched out beneath him, only to choke up on realizing that he had no family left down on Earth.”

Brothers, written by the very controversial Yu Hua, is an epic tale of two brothers as they sink or swim in the temperamental historical tides of contemporary Chinese history. Yu Hua, himself having lived through the Cultural Revolution and seen the rapid “opening up” of China due to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms chronicles this schizophrenic turnover through the eyes of two brothers. He uses a semi fantastical method in portraying their lives, the hyperboles and surreal violence based off the horrible truths during that time.  Inevitably there will be a great loss in the translation of any work, I can see the meanings of idioms lost- there is too much connotation, history, and culture hidden in each saying. I believe this will hinder any American reader very much (and it did for me), unable to see the humor or wisdom in some of the more ridiculous parts, sometimes knowing that you have a concept of what Yu is trying to get at but not fulling understanding it in its context.  Written with stark, sometimes perverted humor, there are many wince worthy moments. True to Chinese writing, the sentences are short and heavy with meaning and allusion which means it is lost on deaf ears when translated in English.

The novel was written in two parts published in 2005 and 2006 respectively, right when the transformation of China began for the 2008 Olympics. Yu Hua weaves in the rapid superficial beautification of China in quite well, from over the top virgin beauty pageants with hymen reconstruction surgeries to the modernization of a humble village town housing a multimillionaire, we see the transformation of the fearful Liu town during the strict authoritarian rule of socialism  turn into the capitalistic hyperbole of ravenous consumers and ruthless businessmen.  All throughout this transformation the two brothers take different paths after sharing a particularly painful childhood where they are violently orphaned and forced to fend for themselves. Baldy Li, a crude, sex-obsessed fast talker goes through the rollercoaster of Chinese history following its ups and downs and becomes a multimillionare – literally rags to riches- and Song Gang, a sensitive bookish scholar tries his hand at business and ultimately fails. The ridiculous and sometimes humorous antics of Baldy Li is coupled with the melancholy and depressing events of Song Gang and makes you feel as if you are bipolar, laughing in one moment and sobbing in the next. While the two do not have much contact throughout their later years, they keep each other in mind during their happiness and sadness. Throughout tumultuous Chinese history, we are reminded that through it all, their bond as brothers remain stronger than what the Cultural Revolution, rapid modernization, or extreme materialism put them through.

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“In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

Many of us have heard the term “Joy Luck Club” thrown around, usually in a not so nice way. Most of us have heard of Amy Tan. I personally had tried to stay away from her, the double dragons on the front cover with the so cliche red font on edition I got on the front – I bought it on a whim many years ago at bookworm due to its cheap price. Always thinking, how damn Chinese can you get when I saw her Chinese styled covers on her novels in bookstores. I have enough of my mom’s broken English and constant nagging, why would I read an entire novel about it? And so I had these preconceptions, aligned faithfully with the American viewpoint and the quiet snickering of students at the out of style cover that seems to be equated to the humorously bad English that old Chinese women tend to have.

The book itself is a series of vignettes based on four American-born Chinese daughters and four Chinese mothers who have come to America from China under extraordinary circumstances. True to Chinese style, they tell their stories half in myth, half in reality. The real tragedy is the inability of the mothers to communicate with their daughters about their past and the daughters’ feelings of insecurity and inferiority due to their constantly critical mothers. As the vignettes interweave and combine with each other through time and space, we see the two generations struggle to connect and belong in each others lives. Heart-wrenching, funny, bittersweet, curious, and beautifully written, I actually finished ashamed that I had stayed away from this book like the plague. This novel deserves the praise and the fame that Tan received, and truly illustrates reality in the feelings of immigrants and their children in their half identities – not fully American nor fully Chinese – and the effect on their lives and relationships.

 

Literature Lives!

Seems like it’ll start being a semester update. I really do need to clean up my writing and write from the personal more. I took a science fiction class (or “speculative fiction”, as the prof likes to call it) and it was exhilarating and  eye opening. It had less to do with fantastical worlds of make-believe and more about the disturbing similarities between our present world and the not so unbelievable dystopian novels . I’m inspired by the attention to detail, the little efforts people place into their creations, to flesh out their characters and situation to a vivid reality. The diligent reader will notice these details. And we do all of these things, writings, art, photography for our own well being and maybe to snap the public out of a state of disavowal. We are nothing without our creations, and our creations are nothing without us. (Lifted shamelessly from Children of Men).

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“Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene form midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature- or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.”

With that, we are quietly submerged into the hours “after dark” in a sketchy amusement district in Japan. We follow the paths of Mari, Takahashi, Eri, and various other people who come awake in the night time. As night settles into its rhythmic slumber, these strangers meet and disperse, coming together to unburden their dark secrets onto each other. Family problems, youthful discontent with the world, a sister who won’t wake up, a brutally assaulted prostitute. Along with the dark secrets of the past that float to the surface and the angsty tension of young adults, there are witty banters and thoughtful dialogues. Between these exchanges are the grotesque happenings of Eri’s slumber as she slips alternately between reality and the trappings of television. Only under these circumstances do these people from various backgrounds come together and when light arrives, the memories of the night fade along with the shadows. Murakami is subtle, rhythmic, and absolutely mesmerizing in his writing, painting a dark wondrous portrait of the night.

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The Island of Dr. Moreau

 “And even it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone…” 

The Island of Dr. Moreau displays the Victorian fear of vivisection as the burgeoning of the science of biology began in this time period (mid 1800s). As theories ideas of man as the top of the evolutionary ladder begin to crumble, Wells explores the horrifying experiments conducted by Moreau to “speed up” evolution by attempting to turn beasts into men. The island is a feeble attempt to create a society of beasts turned into men, and flimsy rules are created to keep the beastmen from reverting back to their primal selves. Perhaps it is a critique on no matter how much humans believe themselves above the instinctual nature of beasts, we still create laws to keep us from falling into these very desires. In Dr. Moreau’s attempt to create men, he has shown that we are all beasts at the core.

R.U.R

A three part play by Czechoslovakian author Karel Capek, this is the play that coined the word “robot”. R.U.R, standing for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” illustrates the human desire to create human replacements in the labor force. Domin’s belief is that in creating robots to do our work, all humans can live in a state of aristocracy and leisure. But we all know that all aristocracies fall. Domin’s girl, Helene, takes pity on the emotionless robots and convinces an engineer to give robots a soul. With the soul robots essentially become more effective humans, angry that they have been made into slaves. As the last people on earth, Domin, Helen and a few others are kept alive only to give the robots the secret of creating more of their own. R.U.R is an anti-utopian play that shows the faulty and devastating belief in creating an entire population to serve as slaves.  R.U.R. is a fast and interesting read.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

 The book that inspired Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  questions what  ”human” really means and whether or not it can be quantified. In an alternate world in which WWIII has demolished Earth and most humans have recolonized on Mars, only a few humans still remain on earth: the police force to “retire” androids who have escaped from their slavery on Mars, and humans deemed too affected by the radioactive dust to be allowed on Mars. Rick Deckard, the premier officer who retires androids, uses an empathy test to determine who is android and who is human. The binary between human and machine is dispelled as Philip Dick explores the nebulous grey space between human and android and shows us how our “humanity” is truly irreducible.

The Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler, the first African American womyn writer in science fiction, deserves a little recognition. The Parable of the Sower is a dystopian novel written about another end-of-the-world scenario. Unlike other dystopian novels in which the world ends in a fiery of apocalypse, the setting of this novel is brought about in a steady, slow decline of society. In a state of environmental disaster and economic catastrophe the people of the suburbs have created a giant gated wall to keep out others who raid, murder, and steal from gated communities like theirs. Lauren, our main protagonist, suffers from a condition called “hyper empathy”, in which she experiences another perceived person’s feelings, good or bad. She writhes in arousal when she senses her friends having sex and feels the pain of her friends’ gunshot wounds. Her weakness gives her the awareness and extra caution needed to survive the destruction of her community as she creates her own travelling group of friends, heading North to rumored safer areas. The novel documents her travels and her navigation through the destroyed earth, constantly on guard of her belongings and the safety of her companions. What keeps her going is her idea of “Earthseed” and the hope that she can one day plant this idea and recolonize on Mars since Earth is so irreversibly destroyed by humanity.

     Butler writes simply and honestly, creating a compelling story and a critique we can’t ignore, a hypocrisy in which keeping ourselves safe while keeping others out only puts us in greater danger. It serves as a projection of our future state if  we continue our exclusionary practices to only serve ourselves. Lauren’s “condition” is something we could all use as humans, a much needed trait for our increasingly apathetic and selfish world.

Perdido Street Station

I write this totally unbiased review based not on China Mieville’s stunningly bad boy looks and totally rad political stance (Marxist) but in full appreciation of the novel he has written. In a bold redefinition of “fantasy”, this steampunk novel is prominently anti-Tolkien. What does that mean? It means the destruction of the easily categorized good and evil in a nostalgic world of Tolkien in which we can discern the good from the bad by the color of their clothes. Rather than using the traditional fantastical setting of medieval times, placing hobbits and elves in beautiful rolling hills of the Shire and Sauron far far away in some volcano, good and evil are mixed in the dirty world of Bas-Lag. Grime and corruption is physically evident in the city of New Crobuzon, where crime and the government are intricately interconnected. As punishment for crimes, the government enforces the reconstruction of humans and animals, creating a whole host of grotesque creatures that extend beyond our imaginations. In a crime for a woman murdering her baby, her baby’s arms are grafted on her face so she will never forget her actions. Prostitutes are remade for the full pleasure of clientele, and any fetish and perverse desire can be materialized in the red light district. In a city with no sense of origin or solidarity, citizens live in fear of the government and the thugs. With this dark, dreary milieu in mind, imagine the unleashing of conscience eating, multi-dimensional flying monsters called “slake moths” into the city. The city wants to recapture them to continue making a profitable illegal drug called “dreamshit” but our noble protagonist wants to destroy them. Not for any sort of inspirational reason of saving the citizens of New Crobuzon, but because one of those monsters is specifically after him. This sets the pace for the book as our protagonist and his motley crew attempt to bring down these monsters for their own sake.

    Along with this thrilling chase, there are undercurrent themes of the detrimental affects of unregulated capitalism and the commodification of body parts. As people’s body parts can be taken apart and remade, there is no longer a sense of origin or purity in the “whole”. There are only three true humans in the entirety of the story: his girlfriend is half bug and half human, his client is half bird and half human, his lackeys are wrymen, and his assassins are half frogs. Perhaps the creation of all these different creatures and the hierarchy created mirrors the  institutional racism evident in our society. At one point in the novel, the half frogs decide to go on strike and are brutally squashed by the army using tear gas. That sounds way too familiar to our own history to be brushed off as an innocuous event in a fantasy book. China Mieville creates a vibrant tapestry of fascinating characters and interweaves all types of problems present in our society today, exploring new depths in the intersection of the fantasy/horror/sci-fi genre. Instead of getting lost in fantastical escapism in the gritty world of Bas-Lag, we uncomfortably see the injustices in Bas-Lag paralleled in our own world.

 

The 20th Century Novel

So the fact that it took me 20 tries to log into my wordpress account shows how long it has been since my last posting. I was reading throughout this whole semester for my English class, though to be honest I could have read more consistently, and I could have actually finished one of them. Well, in any case, I really enjoyed this English class despite the sometimes abstract lecturing style of Professor Donna V. Jones:

Look how cute she is!  Don’t let those glasses fool you though, her lectures are intimidating and really over my head sometimes. She studied abroad in Germany for awhile so she throws in a lot of German words when she talks about her novels. This class was pretty great, in that the workload isn’t too bad: the books are interesting and she has profound things to say about them. It makes me really want to switch over to a humanities major, one that make you think deeply about how you relate to the world and how the author tries to convey certain aspects about human nature through every character they conjure up, every situation they think of. If you think about it, authors are so incredibly smart. Everything is an allegory, every book, every character, every line is a character case-study speaking to a larger human condition.

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La Bête Humaine by Émile Zola

“This thought of smashing a train became the obsession … the one disaster sufficiently huge and sufficiently steeped in blood and human suffering for her to be able to bathe her enormous heart in it…”

“The Human Beast” for those not well versed in French (me) is exactly what the title suggests. In Zola’s characters lie savage, primitive instincts that must be tamed to survive in the modern world. For some, it may be easier than others and it is a commentary of the those who live in the Old World and those who can adapt in the New World. It is a tale of social Darwinism, love, affairs, death, trains. Aunt Phasie, Flore, Misard, all reside in the countryside and make up the idea of the “Old World”, the world in which they are not able to suppress their passions and their beliefs in an ever changing world around them. Trains cut through their days, slicing them up into little pieces, disrupting their lives, letting the know that the world is moving past them without them in tow. Jacques and Severine make up the New World, where they are able to shift their identities whenever they see fit to adapt effortlessly with the rest of the world. In the end, it is jealousy that brings everything to destruction. The quote I provided above is about Flore, the Amazon warrior who could not bear to see Jacques and Severine together. She is a total badass and I think of her as the last beast standing in the face of an anthropomorphized modernized, technological world that doesn’t care about the people it crushes along the way. The ending of the novel is very clear in this: a runaway train without a driver carries hundreds of young soldiers to the warfront. The train has a mind of its own, a beast that we cannot control to certain death- whether it be in a crash or to war. Can we ever control the way our future will be, especially with technology?

Sister Carrie, by Thomas Dreiser

“She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.”

So I wasn’t a fan of Dreiser mostly because his writing is really dry and he has a weird Journalistic style that reports with an overbearing narrative that reminds me of disney fairy tales. This novel is basically about a young woman coming to the big city from the countryside and how she gradually adapts to become the next big thing. She has an extraordinary talent in judging the value and price of items and what it takes to be among the social elite. In the end, though, she realizes that true happiness is not the product of money. This novel is actually empowering for woman, especially in the time period it was written- she comes to the city all by herself, makes a name for herself (though with the money of one of her suitors), and leaves her man in New York once he becomes a shameless mooch off of her money. It’s sad for the boys involved, but it’s actually somewhat optimistic for women. Too bad she never finds true happiness. It’s a long rambling read with a moral lesson that practically smacks us in the face at the end…nothing special in the writing style at all.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives”. If one were to state what Clarissa Dalloway accomplished in one day, it would be a rather uninteresting summary: she spends her day rushing through London on last minute errands to perfect her party, all the while doubting her importance in life and wondering about the decisions she had made in her past. The majority of the novel takes place inside these characters heads. Yet, her party signifies much more important ideas than the flowers, decorations, or dress. Virginia Woolf is making a larger statement here: Clarissa Dalloway embodies the everywoman, the seemingly insignificant insecurities and shortcomings that ordinary women represses for the sake of fitting into the mold that they have imposed on themselves. Her party becomes a break in the monotony of the day, a few hours of stillness in the chaos they surround themselves with in order to avoid the silence, the problems they must face themselves, behind all of the chatter within the mind.

So I cheated and pasted the conclusion of my essay as my review. Reading Mrs. Dalloway the second time around was perhaps even more extraordinary than the first time I read it. While my English teacher in high school emphasized the symbols and idea of disavowal, my professor emphasized the disavowal of the war and how Mrs. Dalloway’s day was an allegory of the characters’ denial of responsibility for it. I think the two thoughts really came together well though I definitely used my high school ideas of Mrs. Dalloway more and merely polished it and developed it more with the insights Professor Jones gave me. It also hit a personal note with me again for different reasons than in high school. The chattiness of the mind, the interior mind that we have a conversation with all day every day, is where most of the action happens. The external world is merely an expression of our interior world. The greatest battles we have are within our own thick skulls, and to quiet the chatter and really isolate what we’re hiding behind all of it is an extraordinary feat that Clarissa manages to do at the end of the book.

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

The book was about Adrian Leverkuhn, a musical genius developed by his beloved teacher Kretchzmar and later, the devil in a pact in which he gives up his ability to love. His loyal friend, Serenus Zeitbloom narrates the story shakily, giving accounts of Adrian that are both admirable and fearful at the same time. Their relationship resembles the relationship between Nazi Germany and its citizens- fierce loyalty without reason. Zeitbloom, like loyal German citizens, are wooed by purity of the “volk”, the reversion back to a simple life. This is represented by Adrian’s newfound ability to tap into the pure, unmodified core of music. I personally felt that the book was way too difficult and verbose for me, especially when I do not know much about music as it is. There were many chapters in the book that were just students at Adrian’s school debating about philosophies that I did not understand. There were also times where I realize that I had reread entire chapters without realizing it because I didn’t understand or remember it the first time I had read it. Anyway, if you’re a musician and if you’re really knowledgable about Nietzsche, go for it.

Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe

“It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in the motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say mother is supreme. You think you are the greatest suffere in the world? Do you know that men are sometimes banished for life? Do you know that men sometimes lose all their yams and even their children? Do you know how many children I have buried- children I begot in my youth and strength? twenty two. I did not hang myself, and I am still alive. If you think you are the greatest sufferer in the world ask my daughter, Akueni, how many twins she has borne and thrown away. Have you not heard the song they sing when a woman dies? For whom it is well, for whom is it well? there is no one for whom it is well..“

I read Things Fall Apart in high school as well, and my college professor gave me a more theoretical idea of it than what my high school teacher did. I don’t recall much of it in high school, but this reading of it was more about the decline of the “epic hero”, Okonkwo, and the rise of the realist novel. The epic hero is someone who does not change when he encounters the world. He begins and ends the journey exactly the same person, and the obstacles he overcomes do not require any sort of interior battle. Think Odysseus. Achebe is the pioneer of realist novels for Africa, an answer to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which Africans are only the background and can only utter primitive words. Umofia is not just another paragraph in a textbook – Umofia is filled with real people with real emotions and experiences. Okonkwo as the epic hero, then, can not survive in a rapidly changing modern world because he does not have the ability to critically analyze himself or the culture he resides in.  When it comes to white men coming to change their culture, he is unable to accept the change and self destructs. The ending of the book is especially haunting and disturbing. After Okonkwo kills himself, a missionary thinks to himself: “Perhaps he could make an interesting chapter in his book. Or maybe a reasonable paragraph, at least”. We, as readers, are likely to be outraged because Okonkwo is a real person to us and he is more than a paragraph or a book. I have new respect for Chinua Achebe.

Neuromancer William Gibson

“The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over,”in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”

For you matrix fans, this is where it all began. An escape into the modern world of Japan but really most of it takes place in the alternate world of the matrix. Gibson is a pioneer in the creation of cyberpunk, a mix of unthinkable technology and noir. Also an introduction to postmodernism, or at least an aspect of it. What does postmodernism mean to me after this book? It is a displacement of the original and the inability to find the origin and source of power. It is about the reducibility of the human soul, how we can all be reduced to code and manipulated for some higher power. It’s a nifty, flashy read that is sometimes hard to understand with all its technological terms but mostly a crime drama set in the sinister idea of the matrix. Gibson writes a cautionary tale of what we might lose of ourselves if we were to allow ourselves to be lost in the consensual hallucination of the matrix.

 

odds and ends

It’s been awhile but I have been busy busy busy with life and I mostly didn’t update because of MCAT studying/test taking. I read two books between the last time I updated and now. The English class I am taking right now is like high school English on steroids.. it is quite intense and complicated and gnarly. But it’s good gnarly, like my brain is being massaged and my neurons are firing as fast as they can to wrap my head around Lukac’s theory of a novel and my pleasant professor’s lilting, slightly accented speech slipping just past my intellectual capacity…

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Mary Roach is seriously a one of a kind gal. This book is all about the science of sex, presented in the most entertaining style ever.  Forget your biology textbooks for the reproduction section- just pick up this book. She digs deep into the history of brave scientists who dared to study about sex and do crazy experiments in which one has to wonder who would actually volunteer themselves as test subjects. For example, some of these experiments were conducted in one of the scientist’s attics.. something about how far sperm can travel once ejaculated. If that isn’t shady, I don’t know what is.

It’s quite an interesting work, but not for the ‘eww-sex’ kind of people. It’s also not smut or sexy at all. It’s science. Pure, uncut science that tries to explain a biological function that we don’t usually think of as a scientific process. The lights are dim, things just kind of fit, and someone thrusts and hopefully someone finishes. Thank goodness we have Roach to clarify why certain things are pleasurable from a scientific viewpoint.  It’s about time that we get rid of the taboo for sex and really see it for what it is- a daily, necessary part of all of our lives.

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Kazuo Ishiguro writes of an old school butler on his first vacation ever from Darlington Hall. At this point, Stevens is past his peak as a fine butler and reminiscing about his old days serving his master while driving through the countryside.  I did not really know the duties of a butler, but as I progressed through the book I got a better idea of what Ishiguro was getting at. Stevens was a great butler and it was reflected in his service to Lord Darlington- but this was at the price of his individuality, his values, morals, beliefs. What does it mean to be so programmed as to put a master always before oneself? Is there any dignity in that? His own colleague could not seem to destroy the facade that he always wore as ‘the butler’ and nothing else. It was only until too late that he realized he had lost a potential companion, a real chance of being a human.

Ishiguro writes like this, melancholy and surreal, as if the entire thing were a dream. He’s also quite subtle and writes about quotidian things, daily little happenings that somehow become significant in the end. I can’t wait to see the movie adaptation to Never Let Me Go.

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Reading La bete Humaine..

 

crunch time

“It was as if that great flush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe,”

I thought a more personal picture would be more fitting here, considering I read this book while on a massively extravagant cruise ship, looking out the window every now and then.I’m sure anyone who’s ever studied “The Stranger” is familiar with the quote above, the almost last words of an emotionless man awaiting death. The novel is rife with existentialism and nihilism, of which I’m not too familiar with. The protagonist describes his days in a sort of lifeless, emotionless fashion that makes him sound rather dead inside, only responding to physical needs of sexual pleasure, cooling off by swimming, ‘marriage’ just because it seems like the right thing to do, and falling short when it came to expressing the necessary emotions for shooting an innocent man and not being able to cry at his mother’s funeral. It’s a very depressing read, the tone is sparse and dry and completely emotionless, making me feel a little sad at the end when he says that he hopes his spectators will view his execution with hate. I don’t really know what to make of this book.

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“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world- or anybody who just reads and runs – I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to splite the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children”

“Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose?”

Another Salinger book about the Glass family, told through the perspective of the second oldest – Buddy- and mostly about Seymour, the oldest who committed suicide in Bananafish. Raise High was about Buddy’s attendance at Seymour’s wedding to Muriel (remember the annoying chick in bananafish?) and his experience with the bride’s side of the family.  The Glass family tends to point out seemingly boring observations and make it deeply symbolic and often makes me feel like I’m missing the bigger picture. However, with the dedication that Salinger wrote, I felt.. strangely better about myself. Because I am an “amateur reader”, one who is not, Salinger believes, marred with extensive literary knowledge and criticism which keeps me from my own ideas. I am free to make my own interpretations of the text.  I don’t know what to make of it.. earlier I had thought that Franny and Zooey had an opposite message from Catcher, but in reality I think he has the same message for all his books and short stories- a unifying theme that everyone who is innocent eventually turns into a bunch of phonies… but it is our job to not judge them as such.  Buddy’s overly verbose, self-indicting writing style is also bursting with emotion – all his words seem to be barely touching the surface of his admiration of his now dead brother. Even now that his brother is dead, he feels the needs to point out the weaknesses in his writing such as the cliches (he apologizes and points out anything that is traditional in writing and is always mildly embarrassed by it) as if Seymour was still going to read his works and criticize them like he used to. I feel like it would definitely polarize readers  – some might like his exuberance and wordy descriptions and observations to be deliciously meta, others may find it tedious. I liked it in Raise High, but I got a little exasperated with his style in Seymour. Reading through Buddy’s floundering and dithering was exhausting, but always worth it when he gets to talking about memories with his brother. The Glass family is interesting and intriguing, a family worth studying. How come there aren’t any Salinger classes out there?

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I came across the book downstairs, obviously a book my sister had read for a class (due to all the post it notes) and read it all in one setting. It is a short story about a young historian who takes on a job for this crusty 109 year old widow for her husband’s memoirs. He falls in love with the mysterious niece who is taking care of the widow, one with arresting green eyes (or are they?) who seems to be held captive by the old lady. Their relationship, however, is something much stranger than that. It’s spooky, weird, and awesome because it’s got a hint of magical realism that the authors down south seem to be pretty good at.

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“As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood. We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it could be,”

I have an intense professional crush on Atul Gawande, meaning.. well, if I ever become half the doctor he is, I would be pretty damn happy. Complications, I feel, is deeper and more compelling than his second book, Better. He states that complications in medicine arise when “the gap between what we know and what we aim for” exists, that is, when doctors (who are human after all) attempt to reconcile their habits and biases to achieve machine like perfection.

The cases he present are unusual ones which can not rely solely on data or on a doctor’s judgment, rather on an uneasy compromise between the two. The cases are also really interesting – a case of flesh eating bacteria (in which Gawande somehow, SOMEHOW, figures it out even though there is less than  5% chance it is a case of flesh eating bacteria.. what a guy), someone who gets surgery to stop blushing (I think I need that..), unsolved cases of inxplicable nausea and chronic back pain, and also various anecdotes of being a doctor- conferences (shiny new things! yay!), the ethics of autopsy, and so on.

Anyway, the book really illuminates the realities and responsibilities of being a doctor that seems to  be over simplified in the public’s opinion.

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So this book, I have to say, took me completely by surprise. When I go into books blind I always have this preconceived notion of what it might be, which tends to be totally and utterly incorrect. I thought it was going to be a slow, dense read about some aristocrat family and one of the daughters is a little unconventional or something  (maybe she has a dragon tattoo?). Maybe the popularity decieved me into believing it was going to be an intense read.

I’m not much into mysteries or crime drama  (actually I’m not at all – I have not ever read a single Dean Koontz book) but this one certainly had a very compelling story. After 30 pages of mumbo jumbo libel law stuff, the book was impossible to put down. It was about a 40 year old mystery of the rich Vanger family in which the almost dead father of the family hires a savvy journalist and eventually a skilled researcher (in this day and age, more like hacker) to figure out the crime. As they come closer to the verdict, the suspense builds…

There is an underlying theme about abuse against women that goes unnoticed in Sweden. At the start of every new part of the book, Larsson includes statistics about violence inflicted upon women. I’m not sure why he wrote these, or if he had any personal vindication about “Men who hate Women” (this was the original title of the book) but he made it a theme throughout this book. Stieg Larsson is also the head of the biggest science fiction fan club in Sweden, cute. Also, he’s dead .. but the two books following this are already out!

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well that was a hefty post. These are books I read since the last time I updated..  so much for two books a week. I’m working on The Remains of the Day but mostly I’m just studying for the MCAT, which is seriously a full time job. Also I finally got my Nikon d70!!

 

a little bit of discontent

“It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.”

-Franny

I’m tempted to summarize it like some haters (or lovers) of salinger’s:

[F: why is everyone so ignorant?

Z: why are you so ignorant?!

Franny cries. They talk about God.]

It’s funny how the books in which not much happens have so much more significance than books that have lots going on. For example, if you were asked exactly what happens in Mrs. Dalloway, you couldn’t come up with anything that would not sound boring and kind of inane. In any case, much of Franny and Zooey occurs in a cramped apartment with only two changes of scene: the bathroom and the living room. Half the time Zooey is in the bathtub! The picture I’ve chosen represents a good chunk of the book too: the two siblings lying down in the living room and arguing with that familiar bitterness  and cynicism that defines Salinger.

I wasn’t aware of the relatedness of Salinger’s characters until they mentioned Seymour (Remember Bananafish from Nine Stories?) and then it hit me during the second half of the book that Salinger is writing about a single family in some of his nine stories and in his last book, Raise High the Roof Beam. There’s a very interesting transition between Franny and Zooey’s part, narrated by the oldest sibling of the Glass family that makes you step back and realize the story is shifted farther away from you by this extra narrator.  I don’t really understand the purpose of this, but it makes you a more active reader because he asks you to decide for yourself if the conversations are about religion or if it’s simply familial love.

So what is this book about? The Glass Family comprises of two rather ordinary but a little batty adults with 7 extraordinarily intelligent kids. Franny has a breakdown by all the phoniness of college life (she said that quote up there^) that we can all relate to so well with Salinger’s Holden. Zooey is her older brother who berates her for her attempt to return to a sense of purity by saying a prayer endlessly – the “Jesus prayer” to reach a sort of Nirvana of sorts- an idea she got from Seymour’s books. We all know about Salinger’s infatuation with eastern religion so it came as no surprise when Zooey, who is kind of like a smarter, more mature Holden, calls Franny a hypocrite/phony/snob herself by thinking that she is above people in career choice and in religion.

The dialogue between Zooey and Franny is so intense that I forget that it’s Zooey talking and think it’s Salinger himself. I think after reading this book I got the wrong message from Catcher. Salinger’s views aren’t so cynical and condescending as I once thought they were. The bottom of line of this book was that nobody, not even the whiz kids of the Glass family, is above the “masses” (aka phonies?), that even if they don’t get the deeper meaning behind plays, books, religion, or what have you, the bottom line is that art is never beyond the people. This idea is exactly the opposite idea I took from Catcher, and I thought it was kind of a beautiful thought coming from a stuffy old aloof (dead) guy.

Anyway, I really loved this book and wish we could have read it in conjunction with Catcher. It reminds me a lot of the Royal Tenebaums, all these smart kids with their dysfunctional ideas, bitter, angry, still trying to find the answer to a question they wish they never thought of.

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“…beauty was only part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.”

Little Children is a beautifully written book about a sleepy little suburb rife with discontented married couples, families, and the usual suburban blues of -how the hell did I end up here, I was supposed to be so much more – kind of mentality.

It’s mainly about Sarah and Todd, who start an affair due to their respective unhappy marriages and their own disappointments of how their lives had turned out- Todd, an unemployed stay at home Dad, and Sarah, a stay at home mom who used to be a fiery feminist during college and grad school. The child molester who moves into town catalyzes turning all the good behaving citizens into impulsive, angry adults  shoving aside the consequences for their actions. Todd joins a local football league and forgets about studying for the LSAT, Sarah intricately plans her affair with Todd, Richard decides to finally go to san diego to meet Slutty Kay, his online crush, Larry lets out his inner vigilante by relentlessly harassing the child molester. Basically his move into town unleashes everyone’s inner desires and destructive nature. In the end, however, nothing of consequence happens because they realize that their children would have to deal with their choices. And ultimately it brings all the adults back from their fantasy summer lives into reality.

Also the ending in the book is pretty damn good. It nicely summarizes the tone and feel of the book, the four of them – Sarah, Mary Ann, Larry, Ronnie- bumming cigarettes from each other and letting all their previous plans they worked so hard for disintegrate into the night.

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going on vacation! brought four short books with me: the old man and the sea, the stranger, kafka’s short stories, and the lake in the woods. Wish I had a Kindle now.

 

you! write something!

It’s a book update, finally! I may shift all my random emotional whiny bullshit over to my tumblr, so if you’re into that, check it! Then again it might overflow into here every now and then.

So this post took a really long time to write because there are a total of five, yes, five reviews. The first two are nonfiction and the last three are from my ethnic studies class. If you’re not into the whole doctor thing, I would recommend skipping the first two reviews.

“…by offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world. An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it. Choose your audience. Write Something” – Gawande

Yeah, he bolded it in the book. Actually, he didn’t, but you should bold it in your mind!

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Mountains Beyond Mountains

“It seemed [his mind] like a place of hyperconnectivity. At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. “

Who is Paul Farmer? He is a really impressive guy. Like really, really impressive. He’s done so much that I feel it would be a chore to describe him. In fact, this book kind of answers that question.

The title of the book comes from the Haiti proverb “Beyond mountains there are more mountains”. These words pretty much describe the issues in international health. Farmer is a medical anthropologist/doctor/super human being who took an interest in Haiti during a trip there in his younger years whom Tracy Kidder (the author) takes an interest in and follows around for a few years. He is the founder of Zanmi Lasante, a clinic oasis in the middle of extreme poverty of Cange where he offers all patients free health care. Working primarily as a TB doctor, he makes house calls to patients many miles away, hiking hours just to make sure his patients are taking medication. His capacity to work hard is only surpassed by his incredible empathy for his patients and always puts them first of his priorities at all costs. During medical school he only comes back to Ha-vahd for his midterms and tests. Later, when he gets his M.D. and lands a place in Brigham and Woman’s hospital in Boston, he extends his travels to his colleague’s project in Carabyllo, Peru and in the prisons of Russia. And that’s not even the hardest part: trying to get enough money to fund his programs and drugs – expensive drugs, too. Kidder introduces us to the world of grants, showing us that it takes more than just a really hard working doctor to make all this happen. It takes money, and lots of it. Wherever TB is, he’s there. His idea of an easy time is to give conferences on medical anthropology (which he practically defined and wrote many papers for), AIDs, and TB.

The book is a heavy and dense read, covering medical aspects (gruesome descriptions of TB sufferers), philosophical aspects of being a good doctor, and political aspects of how we should view international health (put more money into it!). Farmer has some ideas about life and how to see poor people that I still need to digest and analyze. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be Kidder, following this incredibly smart and hard working guy around, barely keeping up with him during house calls, being stranded on rickety high ways. It must have been tough. But nobody ever complained because Farmer always did whatever it was with less food, less water, and less sleep. In between Haiti, Ha-vahd, Carabyllo, and Russia he manages to have a wife and a kid. It’s truly inspiring how hard people can work.

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“…to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in messy, complicated connection between the two. It is to live a life of responsibility. The question, then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”

“The choices a doctor makes are necessarily imperfect but they alter people’s lives. Because of that reality, it often seems safest to do what everyone else is doing- to be just another white-coated cog in the machine. But a doctor must not let that happen – nor should anyone who takes on risk and responsibility in society.”

Atul Gawande is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, an associate professor at Ha-vahd Medical School and Public Health. He was also Clinton’s health care lieutenant in 1992 and senior adviser to the Department of Human and Health Services (this was before he got his M.D.). This is his second book.  In the wee hours of the night, he fights crime. Oh yeah, he also has a wife and three kids.

What is it with doctors and their ability to write well? (*cough* Khaled Hosseini *cough* Paul Farmer *cough*). Unlike Kite Runner, however, Gawande writes specifically about the changes that can and should be made to health care today. Gawande’s title refers to the constant need for betterment of oneself as a doctor through diligence, ‘doing right’ [to patients], and ingenuity. He uses personal anecdotes of his time in the hospital in and out of the United States as well as personal interviews with colleagues to illustrate these three virtues.

Diligence is about attention to detail. And Gawande means that in the most intense way possible: washing hands consistently (you might think that’s a ‘duh’ kind of thing but he proves otherwise), mop-up polio vaccinations given to millions in India (think ‘door to door’), and improved health care in warzones (make-shift hospitals, what?). For ‘Doing Right’ Gawande explores the details of patient-doctor contact such as naked-ness and whether the need for a chaperone is necessary, malpractice law suits, doctors overseeing executions, and trying the bestest they can for their patients. For ingenuity, he talks about the apgar score used for babies, the bell curve (reminding us that we will never escape it), and on the level of performance, even when you don’t even have a scalpel to do surgery (India).

These stories are widely varied and all have very important themes of doing your darndest for your patients – I mean, the guy thinks that he should put aside some of his money in a fund for patients that suffer from doctor’s mistakes instead of nasty malpractice lawsuits. However he does have a lot of points to drive home. The idea of ‘the science of performance’, that is, the quantification of the quality you give to patients, is a very important concept that all doctors should strive for. He urges everyone to be a “positive deviant” and to learn by example. I think this is very respectable and a really intelligent way of inspiring hope and challenging people at the same time to change what’s not working. I mean his essay “The Cost Conundrum” was the inspiration behind Obama’s health care reform! Beat that!

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Lahiri is truly a masterful storyteller, especially of relationships and love. This was one of the books we read in which the ‘ethnic’ aspect of it wasn’t terribly obvious. It was much more subtly woven in, and for that, Lahiri was a much more compelling writer that the other authors we studied. Her stories were well balanced between India and America with all ages and all areas of the spectrum of American-ness – second generation kids, immigrants, visitors, tourists, refugees, beggars- you got it all. Most of the stories also have an interesting relationship story behind it, startling realistic, the couple’s problems often deep rooted. What is even more intriguing is that the entire book is artfully balanced part of a larger ‘story cycle’ as we learned. All the characters are connected and complement each other, often across stories. Interpreter of Maladies is a very solid, intricately woven and well thought out novel of short stories.

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“I am in the 7-11 of my dreams, surrounded by five hundred years of convenient lies,”

“We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We were children;  we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive”

Alexie is a darkly funny writer of many books about “Indians” (Native Americans is not a term he is fond of) one of the stories in this book was made into the movie Smoke Signals. It’s a really emotionally dense book drawing on the themes of survival, anger, and a lot of self destruction that occurs on the reservation. Mostly, though, Alexie tries to defamiliarize the stereotype of the typical contemporary Indian and in the process therefore causes us to realize the process of familiarizing the stereotype – Tonto, the silent and dumb sidekick to the Lone Ranger. My prof put this book in a “post-apocalyptic” genre because of its sense of doom and the characters “left” after the said metaphorical disaster are merely trying to survive on the reservation. It’s important to realize that we don’t think of Indians in a contemporary manner anymore- we only think of those pictures of Indians in tipis in our textbooks with huge headdresses, shamans, scalping, and other stereotypes. In this series of short stories, Alexie shows that their only escape from this lives is through imagination (it’s not as cheesy as it sounds- in fact this is probably one of the darkest books I’ve ever read).  Check it, Alexie was on Colbert!

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“You cannot divorce yourself from yourself. You know you are the hyphen in American-born. Your identity scrawls the length and breadth of the page American-born-girl. American-born-Filipina. Because you have always had one foot planted in the Midwest, one foot floating on the islands, and your arms have stretched across the generations, barely kissing your father’s province, your children’s future, the dreams your mother has for you. Because you were meant for the better life, whatever that is, been told you musn’t forget where you come from, what others have done for you. Because all your life you’ve simply been told. Just told. Because a council of ancestors-including a few who are not yet dead, who are not even related to you- haunt you, you do your best. You try. You struggle. And somehow when you stand in the center of a room, and others look on, you find yourself acting out your role. Smart American girl, beautiful Filipina, dutiful daughter.”

Sorry about the long quote, but I couldn’t shorten the quote without losing content. Evelina Galang writes about Filipina-Americans who all either suffer from their family’s expectations or reject tradition and pave their own ways by not becoming mothers, dutiful daughters, obedient wives. I personally identified with this book more than most of the other books we read for this class mainly because of the binary of what we as second generational women have to choose. We can take the path less traveled, or we can follow what is pretty much a fool-proof formula.  Other interests besides marrying are supposed to take the back burner- exactly who the rebels in Galang’s short stories are – artists, photographers, dancers, lovers, directors. I especially liked the last chapter, “Mix Like Stir Fry” in which the protagonist is described as the “all-american girl” and gradually fades into something more than that. It is probably the most perfect ending to all the books I’ve read this semester. Galang finishes the story and the book by telling us to forget the binary and the stereotypes and to “go on with our lives”. They will not see you and your beauty, she claims, and she tells us to pay them no mind. It’s incredibly uplifting.

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next up: Franny and Zooey

goal: to finish anna karenina by the end of the summer… I think I haven’t really liked a ‘classic’ yet. It’s kind of my transition reading, I can’t handle more than 4-5 chapters at a time. blegh.

bought: raise high the roof, girl with dragon tattoo, complications, smoke and mirrors, the remains of the day

 

spring 2010, heart strings!

gal

What a semester! It was like one giant sneeze of what just happened? I feel exactly like that girl in the picture (by David Choe, who is pretty badass) a thousand different things at once. So I’ll divide my life since I’m so good at doing that!

School:

I am slowly beginning to realize what an education is and how much impact it has on me. Berkeley is so amazing in addressing so many issues relevant to us. I took an Ethnic Studies class, Physics, biochemistry, and a public health class dealing with “death and dying”. It was an interesting mix of hard science + prevention science, living well + forming my identity. Ethnic studies was particularly interesting. I went into that class not really knowing what to think of it, just taking it because some of my friends were. I realized that the things we were learning in class was happening to me in real life, and I had been blind to these things all my life. How many times have I criticized my own race? I wasn’t even aware I was uncomfortable in my own skin until this class and I thought, how can I change my perception of myself and how can I learn how to love who I am and be comfortable within myself? Public Health was mildly interesting – kind of like a common sense class of how prevention>treatment and constant denouncing of physicians. The mantra of the “upstream-downstream” approach was pounded into our brains practically every lecture, but I do appreciate the diversity of the speakers and I have to say I did learn a lot. Physics in itself is like probably one of the most important sciences ever. It is practically the way everything works and it’s pretty damn fascinating even though it can get pretty difficult. I will always admire people who just understand physics easily and just know it off the top of their head like it’s arithmetic. Thanks to all my friends who helped me!

Extra Curriculars:

Premedism is out the window!! I feel like this semester I have definitely started looking into my career more seriously instead of blindly following my peers. By following them I have also been sucked into the negative energy of “what if I don’t get in?!?!?!” and other scary statistics that pretty much will guarantee you will never amount to anything unless you have a 4.0 GPA. I got out of that, thankfully, thanks to AMSA and workshops as well as just talking to people and realizing that there are so many interesting people out there from all walks of life whose destination was the same as mine. But while they were enjoying themselves, I was beating myself up about my grades and about how I wasn’t doing enough to fulfill the “magical checklist” of what it takes to get in. I realized that I was missing out on exploring things by following the straight and narrow and I ultimately chilled the fuck out. I also really want to go somewhere, anywhere just to get a new perspective and see how other places are functioning- India, Africa, China, Nepal- anywhere!! I don’t know how I’ll have time to do this since I’m doing this sports medical internship next year and thinking about leading an alternative breaks trip but maybe sometime during break.  I’m so jealous of my friend who’s going to Peru.. traveling is such a lifechanging experience and he’ll come back all changed and inspired and exhilarated.  I’m still unsure if I’m going to apply this year or next year, but either way I’m going to do it with a smile on my face.

I feel like I’m just getting the lay of the land of Berkeley and people are doing fascinating things. I learned this semester about community and how I am so incredibly detached from it. I’m just so amazed by people following their hearts and joining something to be a part of. During our alt breaks trip, one person expressed that she felt very disheartened by our whole trip, that the trip was just presenting to us a big problem that can’t be solved. And the response that one of the residents from the ministry told us that we should do what tugs at our heartstrings the most. It’s not up to us to solve all the problems in the world, it’s up to us to follow our heart and do what we care about the most. I was thinking about that, and it was part of the reason I let my research and work position go, because ultimately I was only doing these things because I thought it would be required (and to an extent, it is) and not because I was really that interested. Work exhausted me, research was the menial task of repeating one test per week which I found boring. I wasn’t learning and I was getting tired and they were keeping me from doing what I really wanted to do. So I feel like everyone should just stop doing what they think others want of them and do what they really want. In the end you’ll be happier and more fulfilled than anything other experience could give you.

Suitcase also got me thinking about what we were doing for our community, what our services meant to the people we served, and how we think of ourselves as volunteers. We never get a chance to properly reflect in Suitcase because it’s always so late at night and everyone just wants to go home. One of the coordinators in the clinic I work in is particularly inspirational in this way – getting us to talk and listen no matter who it was. While Suitcase did make more aware of the homeless issue in Berkeley, I felt like I learned more than I gave. I learned more about how to be a human, and how to shut up about school and take time to just ask people how they’re doing. I feel like the organization makes you a better person and makes you discover who you are and what you like and how to talk to all different kinds of people and see them without any judgment. It’s a safe space to talk to not only the clients you’re treating, but Suitcase also attracts certain types of people who are who I think of “solid” people. People that care and who are a little weird and maybe a little cliquey at first but ultimately have these amazing ideas about humanity and empathy and the power of change in small steps. I really admire these people and the seniors who are leaving and I look forward to growing within Suitcase as a person.

Family:

I don’t like discussing too many things about my family mainly because I’ve never really gotten a good response when I’ve talked to people about it. Then again, I don’t really know what I define as a good response.. all I know is when I have I’ve felt even more self conscious and shittier than before. So I guess I just wanted to say that my family this semester has really affected me this semester, and it’s partly the reason why I went home so much to just be the buffer between them. It’s been really hard and I really appreciate my roommate for listening to me while she was going through her own troubles… On one hand I sometimes regret that I don’t talk about it much, but I can’t really expect people to listen and be truly empathetic to me when I don’t really spend that much time with certain people, anyway. At one point it was really bad and it was the day of our house party, and instead of just taking time to deal with it, I took a shot and talked to someone else about THEIR problem and I just kept burying the problem deeper and deeper. It turned into nasty little outbursts to my friend when I was in bad mood and I really regret not just releasing some of that negative feeling in a healthier way, but at the time it made sense since I was so stressed out about school/work.  In a way it worked, I don’t really feel the need to talk about it.

And partly the reason I’m going to be in sac alllll summer is because of my family. Hopefully things will line up and be better before I leave for school in the fall.

Emotions and overall well-being:

My health was put on the back burner this entire semester. I probably gained a good 5 pounds and got significantly less sleep than last semester. Just mostly stress and harder classes kind of took control over me and I just put having fun over sleep when we went on random thursday night adventures. We went camping right before finals and slept underneath the stars. It was so nice and I wish I could have done this more over the semester… Next semester!

Relationships

Friends!! I befriended someone we became real tight, like best friend statussssss. Like to the point where he would call me up and I’d be down to do whatever, whenever. And I probably saw him everyday during RRR week studying and downing coffee together. We were honorary bros….and we weren’t for like a week…and then we were again, but with certain reserves. Like my roommate pointed out, bros can’t be bros forever and I was supposedly some legendary magical pixie (from TV tropes) and apparently have some crazy power of being a very lovable person to the opposite sex.  I spent the last night in Berkeley patting his head feeling absolutely terrible for letting something like this happen. How could I had not seen the signs? I’m stupid, I know, and I guess we’re both on the path of healing. Just me feeling awful and him telling me summer will be a good breather. Hopefully we’ll both be on the pathway of the awesomeness we had before he told me next semester, because he’s such a fun person to be around, sober or not!

As for being single, I guess I haven’t really exercised it. I’m just happy to have more time for myself and my friends and housemates because I seriously have a lack of solid girlfriends who will have no risk of crushing on me…. or am I? Girls and boys better watch out, I’m on the prowl…… juuust kidding. Kind of.

I also think I haven’t really been hanging out with people enough due to certain people taking up more than my time than others… like I hadn’t seen some people all semester whereas I’ve seen certain people like everyday.

Anyhow, I need to update on my reads from ethnic studies this semester. Supposed to be a book blog first!

for those interested:

http://visualizerlove.tumblr.com/

it’s not me, I swear.

 

you the millionare I’m the slumdog

so here I am, “dead” week on this blog. and all I have to say is, everyone needs to chillllllllll outttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

first of all, thanks for the comments! I am officially moving away from the darkside of pre-medism and moving to what going to medical school is all about, doing what you want and if they want you, then aight, if not, then clearly it wasn’t meant for me. No use stressing over it just gonna do what I want!

What has caused the change of heart? Kaplan + health conferences. Everyone in UCSF/Stanford are like the chillest people ever. They did not have 4.0′s. They just did what they loved and UCSF loved them for it.

So  I just discovered the visualizer+ radiohead. Now when I listen to radiohead I see the birth of the universe every time and I have to say I appreciate the music more.

Spur of the moment camping with Lan and her friends above clark kerr (way, way,WAY above Clark Kerr) was really amazing. We were in the middle of nowhere in the pitch dark, climbing up steep pathways, who knew where the next turn would lead us? We were so weak in the cold, eating the ridiculous amount of food we brought for just one night (frito bowl anyone?), complaining about the cold, looking at the stars, huddled around the small fire made with cardboard and sterno in a tuna can (DIY!!). One of her friends with this really sexually experienced gal – you would have never guessed with her perky nonchalance and her ability to hike up a really steep hill about twice as fast as the rest of us – and I was so amazed by the openness of which she shared the logistics of polyamory, pleasure, and personal deviousness. Morning came and we saw how high up we were, staring out across Berkeley on a beautiful platform and reflecting and soaking up the sun.

My ex-roommates bridal shower was really boring. It was just a bunch of women from her church talking about their respective marriage experiences and I zoned out. If only people spent as much energy on their relationships than on marriage. I was kind of happy she wasn’t that interested in all the silly little details in a wedding – most of her answers to their questions were “oh.. I haven’t thought about it”. Mostly she just seemed happy to be marrying someone she really loved and bored with the whole decoration aspect. Their relationship was unconventional but she didn’t seem too concerned and man I support their relationship with my whole heart. There are some couples that just really complete each other.

You know what’s really important when you are seriously dating someone? Their family. Think about how much energy you want to spend on impressing their family and then ask if it’s really worth it. The thought of dating someone with a normal family scares me. On what wavelength would we relate on? It’s a different world I have no access to, life has too much to offer me than to impress someone who’s gonna judge me anyway. I feel that way a lot, but maybe it’s self destructive to avoid normal people.

So I found my “bro”, the quintessential best friend who I eat, drink, visualize, work out, study with. Sometimes I think we just named ourselves that because we’re both looking for that kind of relationship (college is lonely, just fyi) and it’s been great even though he gets on my nerves sometimes. And I let him know, and it’s great.  But yeah sometimes I wonder if it’s artificial the way we instilled this idea of “best friends” on each other and we’re just acting out roles dictated by other relationships real or false of “bros” or if we are really that interested in each other. I need a girl version of this fool cuz bros can’t be bros forever.

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will update at some point: interpreter of maladies, lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven, her wild american self.

list of books to read over the summer:

push
blood oil
mountains beyond mountains
a single man
eating the dinosaur
a passage to india
secret garden
little children
belljar
franny and zooey
anna karenina
of human bondage
pride and prejudice
the things they carried
smoke and mirrors

going to read all this in between my MCAT classes, ha!

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gonna finish this semester visualizing the birth of the universe over and over again:

http://www.blalocksirp.com/new-music/742-geographer

 

the cycle

I am by no means an activist. There’s a certain image that comes along with activism that I don’t really like, and to say you are one puts yourself in the risk of being boxed into this angry, complaining, whining bunch of no-good lazy students. And honestly a part of me still kind of believes in this, even though I’ve been trying to destroy how I see people before I see them.  But I admire activists. They are the true heroes of this community, actually standing up for what they believe in. They stick out like a sore thumb, ready to be hammered back into place but they do it anyway. Other times I think they’re in love with attention and shocking people and in general need to chill out. Depends on the issue, I guess.

I feel like I’ve been  harassed a lot lately, making me more and more fearful of walking late at night. That strip next to people’s park now scares the shit out of me and I no longer hesitate to ask friends to walk me back. I don’t know what happened.. so many things have happened and I feel bad if I cross the street for my own safety and I feel bad if I suck it up and continue on the same street, prepared for the worst.  There’s this entire block with no lights where homeless people sleep, and it’s not so much their presence but the swaggering young adults that are out late at night, smoking, joking, laughing that scares me.

One time this guy was smoking and staring at me for an entire block as I walked closer and closer. I didn’t want to seem racist or anything so I continued on the same block keys in my hand ready to strike (like it would help). It was terrible because I felt guilty for feeling this way.  Another time a roughed up looking guy was swaggering towards my side so I tried to cross but then he crossed with me. Scared, I crossed back and instead of crossing with me yelled at me, but then I realized it was more of a plead – “Where are you going? Why does everyone leave?”  but at 11pm or midnight, you don’t think of anything except the worst.

I feel awful about this. What kind of feeling of community is this? A group of punk kids were yelling obscenities while walking down the streets today. My first thoughts were they were annoying high-school punks trying to get a reaction out of people they pass, laughing and joking and telling people they’d beat them up. Most people ignored them but when it was my turn to get harassed I yelled back telling them to watch what they say and other random heat-of-the-moment threats. They got scared but laughed, quickening their paces. I wanted to rant at them, I wanted to instill in them the kind of fear they forced on everyone else just trying to get home. I wanted to tell them- YOU are the reason why nobody stops and says hello anymore, why everyone rushes between their house and campus – because of people like YOU people are scared to be on the streets – YOU are creating a hostile environment and this is why girls are so scared of walking outside once the sun sets. I wanted to tell them they were perpetuating fear, I wanted to tell them they were being idiots who weren’t thinking about how they were perpetuating stereotypes and how they were causing other people to build up their guards around their hearts. It’s already hard enough to be open, everyone’s already so hurt that nobody’s willing to share themselves anymore.

But of course they really had nothing to do with that.. it was just my natural train of thought as I was walking away, angry that I was so scared when they were passing me, waiting for their ridiculous obscenities.Later, a swaggering drunk was horribly out of it and blocking the whole sidewalk trying to walk. Other people crossed seeing him come towards him. I was coming from behind him and briefly considered crossing the street just to be safe. I just waited for him to swagger heavily to the right and passed him quickly on the left. I should have asked him if he was okay. It would have been the right thing to do but it was dark and I just wanted to get home. If I was a boy, I thought, would I have stopped?

Mike Bishop told us at our alternative breaks banquet that one of the greatest achievements you could have had on this trip was to engage with someone with true authenticity. It’s hard enough to get people to connect much less do anything helpful for their community.

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You are not your grade. Everyday I struggle to get through the day, the question of applying to medical school crosses my mind at least once an hour, weighing my options, all the what-ifs, planning internships, looking for opportunities. I’m so sick and tired of it, this constant stress of trying to be the best and outcompete everyone. And feeling like a failure next to all those students who have it made for them, who have all their opportunities lined up for them, who are pretty much set. The jealousy, bitterness, annoyance with it all… is this what it means to be premed? This constant feeling of inadequacy?

ups and downs, helping each other get through this.. being premed is like being pledge class for a frat.. the pain bonds us.

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“falling in love is easy.. staying in love is hard”

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Taking English 125D next semester – Mrs. Dalloway, Never Let Me Go, Neuromancer, Things Fall Apart