I’m doing that thing again…

You know, the one where I have a ton of things to post about like visiting friends, new homes, delicious food, good times, and the holidays (oh yeah! And early Christmas presents!  WOO!), but I haven’t the time to do it.  Strangely, for me, the Christmas holiday has been tied to sad feelings for a long time, so I constantly battle self reflection and social examination with the desire to put up a Festivus pole, celebrate the Solstice, Decorate trees, bake cookies, and wrap more gifts than I should because wrapping with wire ribbon and shiny paper makes me happy… it’s the simple things, folks.  So I’ve been doing some literary and musical meditation, and what better way to share my holiday spirit than to get you all thinking? I intend to post more, but we’ll see how the travel-crazy holidays effect that.  

On with the quotes, my darlings… can you detect a theme?

“If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”
— Neil Gaiman “Murder Mysteries”

~*~

“There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won’t remember and that she can’t even let herself think about because that’s when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it’s always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.
Whenever it rains you will think of her. ”
— Neil Gaiman (accompanying text for Tori Amos’s album Strange Little Girls)

~*~

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.” 
— Harold Bloom

~*~

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

~*~

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”"
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

~*~

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost…but won’t. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

— Sylvia Plath

~*~

It has certainly been a while, hasn’t it? 

We moved to our lovely new place in Baltimore with some difficulty and exhaustion, but move we did.  The kitchen is amazing, and the soaking jacuzzi tub is divine!  We traveled home to help a one @DjLunchbox move to his new abode on the weekend of Halloween and handed out candy to the kids in my parents’ neighborhood.  Both Jack and I got sick to varying degrees, and only this week are we starting to feel better and back to normal.  There have been visits to local restaurants, a visit to the Walters Art Museum to see the Heroes: Mortals and Myth in the Ancient World exhibit and a lecture that had me resorting to my old intellectual elitist mentality, unfortunately.  But hey, I’ve accepted it.  We headed back to Brewer’s Art for the Baltimore Tweetup this week, and finally got to put some faces to the Baltimore names we’ve been seeing flit over our screens.

All in all, it’s been pretty wonderful.

So why the deep thinking recently?  I’m not asking you for answers, I suppose, but throwing thoughts against a screen to try and figure things out.  I’m feeling a very real, very visceral need to read Anna Karenina again.  Every year or two I revisit the novel, cover to cover, and every time I read it I gain a little deeper insight into the human condition.  I need something from that text, specifically.  It’s full of love, passion, lust, hate, lies, death, hope, and social and emotional roller coasters that only the classic Russian novels provide for me.  It’s beautiful language, and sometimes you need to be surrounded by someone else’s beautiful things and thoughts, and complex emotions and feelings in order to put your own world into perspective.  I’ve always argued that people watch reality TV for the same reason they went to the theater to see Shakespeare, or to the Colosseum to see gladiator games — Not for violence or cruelty, or tragedy alone, but to see other people going through something far worse than yourself.  For me, literature and music are the only things that can provide that kind of escapist comfort.  There’s something beautiful about language and imagery, and for me, reading all of Anna Karenina is to get to this one paragraph:

“She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever. ”

-Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Part 7, Chapter 31)

No, it’s not enough just to read that paragraph. Yes I need to reread the entire novel.  And maybe War and Peace again as well.  I’ve neglected classic literature for far too long, and I need to remedy that immediately.  Before it would be a short span of time — a month or two, at best — but this time… this time I am left feeling marooned after many months away.  Anna always brings me out of a black cloud kind of week or month.  Literature can do that for me.  Othello and Hamlet do that for me.  Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” does that for me.  Casablanca does that for me.  Francisco de Zurbaran’s The Crucifixion (1627)  will always do that for me.

I wonder what the books or plays impact the worlds of others as profoundly as  Anna Karenina impacts mine… (hint… )

Click here to learn more about Banned Books Week

Every year “Banned Books Week” is celebrated during the final week of September (This week — 9/29 to 10/6).  With all the hub-bub, I missed half of it, and I was only reminded about it by Andrea.  There is a long history of individuals and groups making efforts to stop both children and independent individuals from reading books that they determine as “dangerous” or “corrupt” or “endangering the religious and moral fabric of our society.”  I have been very fortunate in my life to have encountered only teachers and mentors who encourage reading and critical thinking (including the idea that just because you read something you aren’t necessarily going to be swayed by it).  In fact, there was only one book in my entire life that I can remember ever being “banned” for me, and it was by my parents.

I was in 4th grade and my older cousin was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and she loved it.  Of course, I wanted to read it too!  I took it out of the library and found it missing from my bed that very same day.  At the time, my parents were upset about my desire to read something so emotionally jarring and that contained such adult issues.  I was told that I could read it in a few years.  It didn’t sit well with me, obviously, and I found the hiding place where my mother had put it–in her desk drawer.  Admittedly, it wasn’t very creative, but then maybe it wasn’t meant to be (I’ll have to ask Mom about that).  I read it, every day putting it back in the drawer, waiting to get to the parts that my mother was so concerned about.  I never really did figure out what it was she was objecting to.

According to the American Library Association, more than 400 books were challenged in 2007. The 10 most challenged titles were:

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
(Click here to see why these books were challenged.)

Of course you have your old standards on these lists too:  Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Satanic Verses, Catch 22, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, and Animal Farm.  Then there are ones you might not (or maybe you do) expect:  Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, Invisible Man, Heart of Darkness, A Day No Pigs Would Die, A Light in the Attic (Shel Silverstein!  Can you believe it?!), The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms.  I must say, I’m shocked not to see Sartre’s No Exit on the list. John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Areopagitica  were, though. 

So what is there to do?  Lots of libraries in the Pittsburgh area are having discussion sessions about banned books, displays explaining the reason for the effort to ban certain books, and opportunities to learn more about the histories of said books. 

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main location
4400 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Will have a Banned Books Week display

(they had an event too, but it was last weekend)

The Carnegie Teen Staff keeps a blog too and they had an entry about Banned Books Week. I have to admit, I’m slightly disappointed that only a single blog post was devoted to this considering the event they had and the duration of the awareness campaign.  They’re doing good things to get teens excited about reading, so I can’t complain too much. 

Go read a banned book this week (I personally like the Forbidden Library listings.  They include quotes from the challenges of the books).  Think for yourselves.  Let me know what you’re going to read (or if you plan on it).