Not a Jolly Holiday

This past weekend I read the original Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers and it seriously pains me to put the following words to page (or screen, as it may be).  This book may have been charming in 1934 when it was published, but it has not aged well.


First, it probably didn't help that I've seen the movie version a gazillion times and I was constantly comparing book Mary Poppins to Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins.  While Mary Poppins in the movie is stern but kind, whimsical but sensible, Mary Poppins in the book is vain, mean and self-centered.

Second, the use of magic in the book seems somewhat backwards to me.  In the movie, while she's sometimes reluctant to use magic, Mary Poppins makes wonderful things happen.  The magic is a way for Mary Poppins to relate with the children: Jane and Michael.  In the book on the other hand, she happens to have this magical thing about her but she constantly denies that anything magical has happened.  Rather than the magic bringing Mary Poppins closer to the children, she uses it as a way to push the children away.  Magic is supposed to be what makes Mary Poppins such a wonderful nanny, but book Mary Poppins seems reluctant to share her magical world with Jane and Michael.

Die-hard fans of the book may argue in favor of the book's superiority to the movie because it includes so many scenes and elements that the movie omits.  A few examples:

• Only the two oldest Banks children appear in the movie.  The book also includes two toddler twins: John and Barbara.
• Mary and the children go shopping and meet Maia, one of the Pleiades.
• Mary has a birthday party in the Zoo with the animals.  The children attend.
• Mary takes the children around the world using a magic compass.
• The children and Mary go to Miss Corry's shop to buy gingerbread square.

There's a reason the musical omits these elements: they're not exactly as charming in execution as they sound from the descriptions.  My biggest disappointment with the book: the character of Bert (who's not a chimney sweep but a match man) only appears in one adventure at the very beginning of the story, and all he seems to be able to say is "Golly!"

In the end, I'm sorry to say that it would take a lot more than a spoonful of sugar to make this medicine go down.

On the Road

This weekend I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I had tried reading this book before, and never got past the third chapter. This time around, I made it all the way through but only because I allowed my brain to check out every so often, when the story got tedious. This is one of those books that goes over better after a few drinks or if the TV is on in the background.

I think the thing that bothered me most is that the narrator, Sal, seemed rather one-dimensional and Dean, the protagonist being described from Sal's point of view, went from being crazy to being crazier. Not a character development that would make him particularly sympathetic. There were too many characters but not enough that I actually cared about. The idea of hitchhiking across America would be a great theme for a novel, but this one falls flat. Overall, I feel about this book the way I feel about J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, I can understand why someone would like it, but that someone is definitely not me.

Truman Capote once said of On the Road "That's not writing, that's typing." I must admit, I'm with Capote on this one.

Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

It is not even noon and already today is an marvelous day. Let me count the ways:

1. It is October but the sky is clear and the sun is out. Also, it is warm enough for flip-flops.
   
2. My heart is at ease with school matters.
3. I finished Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman at five this morning and decided that today I will speak without contractions.
4. Despite waking at two and reading until five, I managed seven hours of sleep, which is a respectable amount. Would that I could sleep this much every day.
5. Morning tea is always a pleasant pastime, but morning tea with a friend is doubly lovely.
6. I have already written half of this week's literature paper and it is only Sunday. I might just finish early this week.
   

On the Nightstand

People who know me well know I have a very small attention span. They also know that my reading tastes tend to fluctuate according to my moods. At any given time, I am usually in the middle of at least six or seven books, with several more in the queue. For this reason, it can sometimes take me several years to finish one book, while other books might take me only a few hours. It also means my nightstand is continually buried beneath a mountain of books.

Here's what's on the list right now:



Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte
I've read the part about the belligerent bunny and the amorous parrot. While I haven't gotten to the ducks yet, this book is great for people like me, who are polygamous in their reading preferences. The beauty of this book is that since each chapter is fairly self-contained, I can pick it up after several months and still have a good idea of what's happened.




Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
I have been working my way through this book through sheer force of will. Don't get me wrong, I was a loyal fan of the wizarding universe for years. Then the books got so long and complicated that my poor pea-sized attention span was no longer able to manage it. I purchased this book the day it came out and I'm still only halfway through. Last time I picked it up, I could hardly remember what had happened in the first couple hundred pages (not to mention the previous six books) and I can't keep track of the trillion or so characters so I'm continually confused. But I refuse to be deterred and I will finish reading this book, if only so that I can have that sense of completeness of having read the entire series. If you talk to me about the Harry Potter books, don't worry about giving away spoilers... I've already skimmed through and read the ending. (This has been my habit since book 4... you know, when the books started getting seriously long. I am not a patient reader.)


Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird
My freshman year in college, Prof. Burger gave the keynote address during orientation and he talked about 4th dimension and how to intersect a ring with a sphere. Right in the middle of his talk, 500 beach balls cascaded from the rafters of Chapin hall so he could illustrate his point. This was the first clue that math--real math, not that ridiculous arithmetic junk they teach in high school--is seriously cool. In the end, math became my way to decompress and unravel my brain from the labyrinth of literary reading. To this day, I read math books for fun, but I don't read them cover to cover. Instead, I pick a book up and read a section or chapter now and again. (My other favorite math/logic books are Raymond Smullyan's The Lady and The Tiger or What is the Name of this Book?)


Thirteen Detectives by G. K. Chesterton
A collection of detective stories, by the creator of the famous Father Brown. What I love about these stories is the language. It has a similar feel to the Sherlock Holmes stories, where characters say things like "elementary" or call each other "old chap."






Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose
Another book that I dip into every so often. I rarely read more than one chapter at a time and I often choose the chapter depending on what area of my writing I think needs the most work on a particular day.






Take Joy by Jane Yolen
This is my bedtime reading. I like to read a small section of this book before going to sleep so that I always remember that writing is a joy, not a chore.

Like in that Insurance Commercial

You know that feeling when you read a book, and you're about three chapters into it and all you can think is "where is the author going with this?"

But then you have this sneaking suspicion that this author knows what she's doing--maybe because you've read previous books, or maybe because you want to give her the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't really matter why you keep reading. All that matters is that you're willing to trust the author and go along for the ride.

And you know that feeling you get when you reach the final chapters of that same book and the author managed to pull off what you thought was impossible and the ending totally delivers?

That was exactly how I felt when I read Carolyn Mackler's Tangled. Having read all of her previous books (in fact, I wrote a term paper on her books last fall) I was excited... but also slightly terrified... to read this book. This is a new approach for her, juggling four different point of view characters (two of them are boys!), and telling a story in short spurts rather than one long narrative that spans the entire novel.

I was worried about a lot of things. Like what if it wasn't really one story? What if it turned out to be four loosely-connected novellas? Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with novellas, but if I'm sitting down to read a novel, I have certain expectations. Like, I need an overarching narrative, however loose that narrative may be. And I want to see the characters grow and change throughout the book. How on earth was Mackler going to pull this off if she was jumping from one character to another and if each character's story takes place in a different time/place than the other stories?

When I read Jena's story, my apprehensions grew exponentially. Jena's character is an archetype we've seen in Mackler's work before (in particular, the protagonists in her first 3 books all have certain similarities to Jena). But the thing that always made Mackler's depiction of this archetype satisfying in her other books is that, in the end, the smart-but-not-very-popular girl who's insecure about her looks always seems to learn to accept herself as she is. It's a message of empowerment that I always looked forward to in Mackler's work. Needless to say, by the end of Jena's section of Tangled I was devastated. It felt like the message was: life sucks, and it keeps on sucking.

With each subsequent section of the book, I grew more relieved. At first, I was worried that we would be getting a "grass is always greener" moral and that the point of the book was just to show that even so-called popular kids have problems. But I should have known that Mackler wouldn't settle for an answer that easy. In the end, this book isn't just about seeing the other side of a situation or understanding how the other person feels. Really, this book is about reaching out to that other person. The structure of the book perplexed me at first. We see a lot of "before" and "after" moments with these characters, but we rarely see the actual change. Most of the time, the moment of transformation happens "offstage" between sections and are mentioned only in passing. Then it occurred to me that this book really isn't about change at all. The fact that these characters will change is a given, but what truly matters is how these characters help to transform one another.

This is an interesting departure for Mackler. While her previous books have mostly focused on one protagonist's path to self-discovery and acceptence, this book emphasizes the importance of connection with others. In the end, I had nothing to worry about, but in doing so, I became all the more invested in wanting to see how Mackler was going to pull this off. Suffice to say, she did so beautifully.

I should have known all along that I was in good hands.

Genius isn't Easy...

Finally, a book that speaks to me!

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb is officially the funniest book I read this summer.

Of course, this humor is not for everyone. The more pragmatic among you might be thrown off by certain unrealistic details, like the poison blow-darts that make the victim succumb to incessant farting. Some of you might also not fully appreciate the narrator's voice. But then again, it's hard to appreciate genius in its own time. And those of you out there who like to sympathize with the parent/teacher/mentor figures are likely to be disappointed since in this book, all the adults are morons. Except maybe for the Motivator; he's not too bright, but he's a bad@$$ so that makes him cool.

If you read this book and you're not laughing out loud, it's probably just because you're not smart enough to see the beauty in the humor. Thankfully, most kids are smart enough to get this humor, so in the end, it doesn't really matter what you think.

Let's Be Existential for Moment

Yesterday I had a chance to see a preview performance of Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot, with Nathan Lane as Estragon, Bill Irwin as Vladimir, John Goodman as Pozzo and John Glover as Lucky. All in all, it was a great performance, albeit the execution was a bit on the literal side. For a contemporary revival of the minimalist classic, I had expected the production to take a few more liberties. But I'm quibbling about the miniscule. In total, the production was great and very true to the script. Perhaps the crowning moment was Lucky's famous "think," expertly performed by Glover.

But the issue of literal performance has stayed with me and has made me wonder: how much should plays or movies diverge from the original written text and still maintain the story's integrity? I felt that Godot might have taken more liberties, particularly in the direction of minimalism, given Becket's string of progressively more minimalist plays that came after Godot (Play and Rockabye come to mind.) It seemed that certain things like the costumes and set could have been even more simple, stark and bare than they were. I suppose, though, that this is the beauty of a Becket script in that each motion, each expression is carefully mapped out, leaving little room for such liberties. Even the most minimalist of his plays are still very detailed in the stage directions, allowing us the confidence of knowing that a script closely follows depicts Becket's original vision.

But what if that's not Becket's original intent at all? What if the subsequent plays challenge us to reinterpret the earlier ones and perhaps adapt them to a more minimal, stripped down vision? As a writer, this question is an important one because with every subsequent work we produce, we provide our readers with more context through which to view earlier works.

This brings up questions for me particularly as a writer who wants to write both for children and adults. If I have started my publishing career with short fiction targeting the literary market, what will happen when I move on to teen and pre-teen fiction? I suppose many writers also have this question relating to genres... if they start out in one genre, what will happen if they decide to switch?

I have no idea.

Tings Dey Happen

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see "Tings Dey Happen," a solo show by Dan Hoyle. What an incredible performance. Not only did Hoyle capture the speech patterns of dozens of different characters, but he made each character distinct in their mannerisms and even tones of voice. So much so that when Hoyle came back onstage for the Q&A, I was surprised at how "American" his English was.

The play centers around Hoyle's experience as a Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria and gives a us a unique view of that culture and its people. What makes this show especially successful in presenting a view of Nigerian culture is that Hoyle places the audience in his shoes. What I mean is, the characters speak to the audience as if we were the Dan Hoyle, Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria. This allows the audience to experience the culture the way Hoyle himself experienced it, and has a far more powerful effect than if he had simply narrated the story as himself.



While some critics may frown on Hoyle's appropriating the voices of such a diverse group of characters so different from himself, I find that claim to be ridiculous. It's called acting, folks; that's the whole point. What is more, Hoyle treated his characters with respect and we can tell from his performance that he has a real affection both for the culture itself and for some of the individuals he met during his travels. If anything, it's some of the American characters who come off looking more like humorous caricatures than the African ones.

After the performance, we had a chance to sit in on a Q&A session with Hoyle, where he talked about developing the show and his experiences in Nigeria. That was probably my favorite part of the evening because we got a look at his creative process in putting together this performance.

All in all, it was a Wednesday evening well-spent.