Plot Points
Personal note. Our fathers left us, and the only arbiter we had was the book of judges. Daddy: last seen in 1994. Allen Ginsberg: dead in 1997. Stephen J. Gould bowed out in 2002. Ever seen a grown man cry massive tears? Ever seen them clawing at the carpet. It sent tingles into my fingertips; I've never felt shivers down my spine. Thousands of nameless men castrated 2003-2006. And here A. D. dreaming increasingly bearded dreams of being progenotor, paterfamilias, breeder. Here A. D. dreams of setting the next generation right in an accelerated culture whne every year the generation gap swells, a huge redshift in human mutual understanding that will rip nations at the seams, just you wait.
This is my attempt to break free of The Easy System, which runs: go out, find some specific detail, describe it, maybe drink (and produce Wine (Part whatever)), rest and relax and gloat. Wow, they sure are a lot of words. But lately, I've been more of a fan of getting into one thing deeply, or leaving some record of meanderings in this culture that drowns the seeker all too easily. So here is my review (or maybe more accurately: commentary) of a book I found on the street and subsequently inhaled: Skinny.
What sucked me into the plot was haunting level of identification with the main character. Far too many scenes, incidents and wry observations are just overdramatized events from my own life. The book is pegged as an exploration of the sister bond, but the two sisters are essentially my brother and I. Giselle is the top medical student, the perfectionist and control freak who is at no point in control. She is the emotionally blunted, avoidant, introverted anorexic. Again, the author dramatizes. Having gone through the life-force bending, emotionally blunting, overcontrolled and overstressed MCAT process, there is no way I couldn't understand. Her younger sister is the "athletic" and outwardly well-adjusted one. You should see me and my brother as we partitioned off the niches. It avoided a lot of sibling rivalry: I gradually gave up on all sports, and he chose to focus on them. His level of personal adjustment exceeds mine. I'm beginning to suspect that he'll end up as the "artistic" one, and I'll be consigned to being the robot skullface of Moloch, striking some disgusting Faustian bargain. Their bond is tender but there is a repulsion there that's never really explained. Oh, the father is absent, and I'll tell you the descriptions of father-absent households fit. They come from an immigrant household, capturing perfectly the absurdity I feel when I'm taken to have some sort of attachment to a country that is nothing but haze in memory, and the occassional aversive volley of gunshots, a country that gave me nothing but a second alphabet, an unpronouncable last name, an in the occassional mund an assumption of exoticism, of "otherness". (I have to mention this: I just found out that when the war in the former Yugoslavia broke out, Susan Sontag flew into Sarajevo, and in the ruins of the newspaper building put on a performance of Waiting for Godot. This seems fiendishly appropriate.) Meh. Read the book if you want. I say this with shame, but I didn't understand the ending. I guess it fits into my own goddamn fear of the goddamn future. Deeply unsettling; ribbed with pathos. 7/10.
Next book to note: Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture.
Consider: "Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature."
This is my attempt to break free of The Easy System, which runs: go out, find some specific detail, describe it, maybe drink (and produce Wine (Part whatever)), rest and relax and gloat. Wow, they sure are a lot of words. But lately, I've been more of a fan of getting into one thing deeply, or leaving some record of meanderings in this culture that drowns the seeker all too easily. So here is my review (or maybe more accurately: commentary) of a book I found on the street and subsequently inhaled: Skinny.
What sucked me into the plot was haunting level of identification with the main character. Far too many scenes, incidents and wry observations are just overdramatized events from my own life. The book is pegged as an exploration of the sister bond, but the two sisters are essentially my brother and I. Giselle is the top medical student, the perfectionist and control freak who is at no point in control. She is the emotionally blunted, avoidant, introverted anorexic. Again, the author dramatizes. Having gone through the life-force bending, emotionally blunting, overcontrolled and overstressed MCAT process, there is no way I couldn't understand. Her younger sister is the "athletic" and outwardly well-adjusted one. You should see me and my brother as we partitioned off the niches. It avoided a lot of sibling rivalry: I gradually gave up on all sports, and he chose to focus on them. His level of personal adjustment exceeds mine. I'm beginning to suspect that he'll end up as the "artistic" one, and I'll be consigned to being the robot skullface of Moloch, striking some disgusting Faustian bargain. Their bond is tender but there is a repulsion there that's never really explained. Oh, the father is absent, and I'll tell you the descriptions of father-absent households fit. They come from an immigrant household, capturing perfectly the absurdity I feel when I'm taken to have some sort of attachment to a country that is nothing but haze in memory, and the occassional aversive volley of gunshots, a country that gave me nothing but a second alphabet, an unpronouncable last name, an in the occassional mund an assumption of exoticism, of "otherness". (I have to mention this: I just found out that when the war in the former Yugoslavia broke out, Susan Sontag flew into Sarajevo, and in the ruins of the newspaper building put on a performance of Waiting for Godot. This seems fiendishly appropriate.) Meh. Read the book if you want. I say this with shame, but I didn't understand the ending. I guess it fits into my own goddamn fear of the goddamn future. Deeply unsettling; ribbed with pathos. 7/10.
Next book to note: Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture.
Consider: "Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature."
posted by A. D. at 9:26 PM
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