Little Bee

Stuck with the selections at Newark Airport's Hudson News*, I picked up Little Bee for my flight to LA. And, despite distractions from fellow passengers, I found myself utterly engrossed.

I don't want to give too much away -- the book's back cover explicitly warns against it -- but the book is told from the perspective of two women, one of whom is a refugee living in London. So I'm admittedly biased, since I'm soaking up anything London-related these days, but what really struck me were the passages on displacement told from the asylum seeker's perspective, since they struck home.

"I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows."

"I am only alive at all because I learned the Queen's English. Maybe you are thinking, that isn't so hard. After all, English is the official language of my country, Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we speak it so much better than you. To talk the Queen's English, I had to forget all the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen could never say, There was plenty of wahala, that girl done use her bottom part to engage my number one son and anyone could see she would end in the bad bush. Instead the Queen must say, My late daughter-in-law used her feminine charms to become engaged to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn't end well. It is all a little sad, don't you think? Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had."

* Note: Fail, Newark Airport, fail! According to their website, there's a Borders in Terminal A. Not true! (Also fail: no bagels at LAX's Terminal 4!)

Enchanting

While I wouldn't recommend the book -- it was overly stylized, unrealistic, and (worst of all) dull -- this passage touched me:

"She recounted everything in that special Maya way, her eyes lighting up, her lips dancing in half-smiles, her hands flying everywhere. Prem stopped listening and concentrated on the aesthetic spectacle of Mayaspeak, trying not to hear the actual words."

Black

"Nearly every culture has a history, and some still have a practice, of mourning rituals, many of which involve changes in the dress or appearance of those in grief. The wearing of black clothing or mourning jewelry, hair cutting, and body scarification or ritual tattooing all made the grief-stricken immediately visible to the people around them. Although it is true that these practices were sometimes ridiculously restrictive and not always in the best interest of the mourner, it is also true that they gave us something of value. They imposed evidence of loss on a community and forced that community to acknowledge it. If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up."

The Love Of My Life, Cheryl Strayed

Remix

First, a disclaimer: despite going to law school, I know very little about intellectual property or copyright law, although the field has always fascinated me. My curiosity is particularly heightened right now, since I'm reading Lawrence Lessig's Remix.

I'm only halfway through the book, but Lessig begins by discussing the difference between "RO" and "RW" culture. Essentially, a ''Read Only" culture is one in which culture is consumed in a static manner: think about reading a book or watching a television program. To contrast, a "Read Write" culture is one in which people "read" culture and then "add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them." For example, think of the millions of online satires on Youtube, where people splice together videos from different sources to make a point. Some of the examples that Lessig employs are the Bush/Blair parody and the music of DJ Girl Talk.

I guess, in a way, this blog is a wee foray into the RW culture: juxtaposing passages that I'm reading/have read with other things that strike my fancy. It never occurred to me that I was engaging in RW culture, but what a fascinating concept...

Addendum: You can download a free version of Remix here!

Addendum 2: A fascinating article on Remix culture and authorship here.

The Travel Bug

Even though I've been there, Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul is making me want to pack my bags...

And then you read something...

Happy 2010, everyone. Apologies for the long lag since my last post. I was in a bit of a predicament: I wanted to post, but I was in a reading rut.

First, I went through a series of books that were mind-blowingly inane.

Then, I started 2666, which was fantastic, but I just couldn't finish it. It's a massive tome, and with all of the life changes, I couldn't devote enough time to the novel to truly do it justice.

And then, just when I was giving up hope, a friend lent me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Have you ever read something that's so incredibly beautiful that it feels like every line is piercing your heart? That you're going to explode from the sheer beauty of the prose? It's been years since I've read something that's moved me so deeply... but it's nearly impossible to excerpt here. There's no one line, no one passage, that jumps out at me: nearly every page had me laughing and thinking. So, with that caveat, here is a sample of how absurdly talented Jonathan Safran Foer is. (By way of explanation, the novel is narrated from the perspective of a nine year old boy.)

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet."

And that's just the first page.

Of course, now I find myself in a new predicament: how am I going to read anything in 2010 that tops this novel?

Stream of Life

Stream of Life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.