toastykitten

I am in a writing mood right now, plus I don't have to go to work today.

Reading:

Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Fifth Book of Peace" - Half fiction, half memoir, this is about Kingston's struggle to find a way out of war and to bring peace to everyone. The book is divided into four sections - Fire, Water, Paper, Earth. Fire is about the Oakland hills fire that destroyed her home right after her father's funeral. Water is a fictionalized account of her time in Hawaii using a character from one of her previous books, Wittman Ah Sing, during the Vietnam war. Wittman is a war resister who evades the draft by flying to Hawaii with his white wife and their mixed-race son, where they meet all sorts of people and encounter the idea of "Sanctuary". I forget where Paper and Earth split off, but these chapters are about the years after the Oakland fire, where Kingston gathers a group of war veterans, mostly from Vietnam, but from Korea and WWII, too to start a writing workshop, so they can write their way out of their pain. I admit, I disliked the Water chapter the most for somewhat irrational reasons. The entire book is well-written; it's just that I prefer reading about Kingston's actual experiences as opposed to her fiction, which seems to me to be thinly veiled autobiography anyway. She mentions that she started the writing workshop for veterans as partly as a way to help her brothers cope with the trauma of war, but they don't come. (It makes me wonder how her brothers felt, fighting in the Vietnam war.) This book was published in 2004, but the workshop had been going on since the original Iraq war. Overall the book is good, but you have to have patience with the way the narrative jumps all over the place, and also when Kingston seems to drop in weird non-sequiturs and then never addresses them again. The workshop's writing has turned into the new book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Excerpts can be read at Bill Moyers Journal website.

I still think from what I've read so far of her writing, that Woman Warrior was her best work. Interestingly, in this book she clarifies what actually happened with her parents when they immigrated here. She felt safe finally telling their stories for real now that they were dead and can't be deported.

Watching:

Top Chef 4 Star All Stars: Top Chef is one of those Project Runway spin-offs that was actually successful. This episode was a one-off before the start of Season 3, and pitted Season 1 against Season 2. It was so funny that the arrogant pricks from each season ended up being the team captains and basically went head-to-head against each other. I do have to say, I liked Stephen a lot more this time around.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: There's been some discussion online-the powers-that-be at HBO decided to center the story on a part-white Sioux doctor who marries a white woman, neither of whom actually appear in the work this was based on because "Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project," Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year. I didn't really read all this stuff going in, but dude, this guy thinks only white people watch HBO? And that white people care only about watching other white people? Talk about low expectations.

I should preface this by saying that I know literally nothing about the Sioux or most Native Americans and their stories. Anyway, although I liked the actor who played Charles Eastman, because he reminded me of a young Chow-Yun-Fat, I thought his story fell kind of flat. There was decent acting in those scenes, but if his entire purpose was to connect the viewer with the rest of the Sioux who were forced from their land, it didn't really work. The story overall was very affecting, and really depressing. I didn't think the film itself, as a stand-alone product was that bad, and it made me want to find out more about the Sioux. Obviously, though, I know nothing about what actually happened or I would be more pissed off, probably. I would argue, though that we didn't get to see enough of the Sioux, and saw too much of the American government.

Pam Noles' post about Bury My Heart.

Statement by Hanay Geiogamah, Professor of Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Director, UCLA American Indian Studies Center - he had some serious issues with it.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the book.

John Tucker Must Die - Teen movie fluff. It was enjoyable and not deep at all, even though we are informed that the main character likes Elvis Costello and Dave Eggers. Introduced me to the stereotype of "vegan is code for slut". When did that happen?

Hey, LibraryThing is doing an Early Reviewers thing. Register to receive a book to read and blog about. Of course, I signed up after all available copies of the books listed are probably taken. They will have new books in July.

I have been obsessively reading the New York Review of Magazines. Which apparently is different from The New York Review of Magazines. I read mostly the stuff on the first link, which has a Magazine Death Pool blog, and reviews of other magazines such as Jane and Wondertime. It also featured a story on the now-defunct IPA, which was the distributor for many indie magazines, who folded in the wake of its bankruptcy. (Kitchen Sink and Clamor shut down because of it.)

Anyway, it's a pretty interesting read (at least for me), but also kind of snarky when they shouldn't be. For example, they bitch about being able to find most of Entertainment Weekly's content online in other forms, and imply that this means that the magazine is probably going to lose circulation over time because their subscribers can get it for free. That's faulty reasoning - a lot of people don't go online in the first place, and it's easy to read a $2 magazine on the train. Magazines are in this weird space right now - there's more and more magazines being launched everyday, but also more folding as they find out that they can't keep up with the Internet or find enough advertisers to support their content. On the flip side, there are some magazines that manage to defy the odds and actually increase circulation and pickup. The recent launches like Good and Geek seem to be doing okay, and magazines have started branding themselves in order to stay in business - such as Readymade and Dwell. It's a trend that I don't like, but which seems inevitable. (I mean, I saw Dwell-branded sheets in freaking Macy's at high-end designer prices - they look nice, but do people actually buy sheets based on a magazine they read?)

Hmm, I just had a thought: magazine publishing industry similar to the garment/sweatshop industry?

I'm still reading A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. I'm almost done with it, but I keep having to stop, because it gets really tedious sometimes. It's not that it's boring or hard to read - it's written in a very familiar tone, but she says the same thing over and over again. I also think she gives way too much credit to Buddhism. (It's not as simple or as bloodless as she seems to think it is.) I don't know how much she studied Buddhism before reading this book, and she doesn't mention it that often, but the implication is that people would be much better off if they approached religion as Buddhists do. It's weird that she keeps interrupting the history of Western conceptions of God with mentions of Buddhism, because it's totally distracting. Other than that, the book itself divides chapters into different conceptions of God - God of the Philosophers, God of the Mystics, etc. And now I'm on the one where maybe God is dead.

Which one should I read first?

Can't Stop Won't Stop, by Jeff Chang
Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman?
Hokum, by Paul Beatty
Comfort Me With Apples, by Ruth Reichl

Hmmm....

I watched Brokeback Mountain last night, and surprisingly, I didn't cry. I think I was distracted by all the hype (even though I don't think it was undeserved) and I kept waiting for certain moments that I got impatient and underwhelmed when they did arrive. Heath Ledger was excellent. A lot of it reminded me of what Ang Lee tried to do in Hulk, in using quiet space to enhance the emotional aspects of particular scenes - but that doesn't work in a comic book world.

Also, the love scenes were totally worth the price of admission.

Project Runway 2 - Daniel V. and Andrae win the Banana Republic challenge, with a dress I could see myself wearing. However, knowing Banana Republic, they will charge $250 for it when it probably only costs $45 to produce, if that. (It will eventually go on sale.) Santino insults the people who are judging his work, and finds himself on the same chopping block as Diana and Marla. How many eye-rolls did you count? I won't miss Marla, but I liked Diana, nerd-girl, and I think she was probably just way too young for the show and in over her head.

For once, the Asians on reality show have not embarrassed me in any way. How is that possible? Chloe's outfit was actually interesting this time, but I hated the fabric she chose for the reversible jacket. And how cute is it whenever she talks about how she's trying to make the cheap fabric look expensive? The girl has seven sisters (ha! she beat my family); she knows how to be resourceful. And because I would totally do that.

Scrubs - my favorite fucking sitcom ever has returned, and there are two episodes each week. Yay! It seems like they went all out this season, as we have a Bruce Lee parody scene where surgeons wear their masks like ninjas with Kung Fu Fighting as the soundtrack. I was laughing my ass off, as they nailed all the cliches perfectly. This is my second favorite episode after the one with Brendan Fraser.

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen - I've been reading this on the train ride to and from work, and it's pissing me off that it took me an entire week to finish this book. Mostly because I expect that short a novel to only take me a day or two to finish. Anyway, I really liked this book, but wow, did I hate the protagonist, Fanny Price, that I was supposed to be rooting for.

Fanny Price has no faults, other than being too gentle. She's moral and easily fatigued and has a lot of passion that is apparent to everyone and that's what they fall in love with - the fact that she feels things exquisitely and she's so damn moral. She's a total Mary Sue and I generally expect better from Austen. Fanny Price gets what she wants in the end, but not because of any real action on her part - it's mostly because everyone else flames out spectacularly that changes other people's mind about Fanny. If we are to believe that Fanny is such a perfect person, then the guy she does wind up with doesn't even really deserve her, as he's a dumbass. Upright, moral, but still a dumbass easily fooled by flirting.

I loved Mary Crawford's character, as she is everything that Fanny Price is not. She becomes a two-dimensional caricature at the end, but for most of the novel, she's charming, manipulative, smart, perceptive, and calculating. She seems to be genuinely nice to Fanny, and thus have a trace of humanity within her, and to care for her suitor, but have a difficult time deciding whether her love or her quest for comfort comes first.

Next up for reading is Sense and Sensibility, which, incidentally, is another Ang Lee movie. Hmm. I think Ang Lee needs to do more Chinese movies. I miss them.

This review of A Million Little Pieces, stolen from Long Story, Short Pier sums up my thoughts on Frey exactly and saves me the trouble of actually reading the damn book:

Frey sums up his entire life in one sentence from p. 351 of this 382-page memoir: "I took money from my parents and I spent it on drugs." Given the simplicity and familiarity of the story, you might wonder what Frey does in the other 381 pages. The story itself is simple: he goes through rehab at an expensive private clinic, with his parents footing the bill. That's it. 400 pages of hanging around a rehab clinic.

...

There they are, the most childish dreams of every little rich white boy: being down with the brothers and the Mafia. The tough guys. The Jazzmen. Having friends with connections in those two equally artificial cities, Vegas and New Orleans.

There, now you know why he couldn't get his book sold as fiction.

I've been going through my old notebooks on which I doodled and took notes for most of college. I discovered, my final exam for the Chaucer course, which was taught by a cranky, bitter, old professor, where he wrote on my paper "You seemed pretty clueless in your midterm about Chaucerian tragedy - maybe you were missing the day I dealt with it in class. You still take Fortune too seriously - she stands for 'circumstances' - but you make a lot of excellent points in this paper. Good job." Ugh, it hurts even as I type it, and you know what hurt more? He wrote this in pencil!

He was the only one who had the temerity to insult his students that badly, though. (My friend got roasted pretty badly.) Most of my professors were pretty awesome - nice but they never put up with any bullshit.

I just finished re-reading bell hooks' Remembered Rapture: the writer at work, and I think I liked it better this time around. I still get annoyed by the repeated mantra "race, sex, class", but I think that's because I haven't read most of her work. Also, "breaking silence", which is a theme that comes up often in identity politics, and is most often assumed to be an act of empowerment for people of color, especially women. I have my problems with it, because I am often a silent person, and I don't really know how to describe my feelings about it, other than that silence often isn't valued properly. I don't mean in the sense of "not speaking up", but of taking the time for contemplation, for taking time to articulate, refine, think, etc. Does that make any sense?

I liked her take on Zora Neale Hurston, and her discussion of Emily Dickinson. Hooks apparently has the same taste I do in literature.

I just started Reading Lolita in Tehran. So far, it's a pretty engrossing read, and reading this right after Remembered Rapture brings up some interesting thoughts. Both are concerned with the systems of oppression, one overt, the other, rendered invisible, and it's fascinating to see how these women navigate their way to rebellion, to expression.

But packing is no fun.

Irritations:

Xanga - For Chrissakes, people, stop it with the media. I like looking at pictures, but do not make the site start playing a song without a warning. Any song. Kill, kill, kill.

McAfee - First of all, I paid for your friggin product already. Second of all, your pricing is deliberately misleading, because I had to read the fine print in order to find out that my $25 rebate is contingent on me keeping the box, which I don't have because it was bought over a year ago. And third and worst of all, you made me use Internet Explorer to update the goddamn product. Ew, gross. Next time I'm buying Norton.

Traffic. When does traffic not irritate me? I reiterate, driving in San Francisco is like being stuck in a live-version of Grand Theft Auto with no gun. Driving in the rest of California is playing a game of "Who's gonna be the bigger asshole?"

The Observer book reviews suck.

A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain - finished maybe 2 weeks ago? I think I'm in a reading rut. I have plenty of unread books on my shelves, but I don't want to read them. Anyway, this book is awesome. Bourdain, a "rebel" hotshot chef in NYC, who also wrote Kitchen Confidential (behind-the-scenes look at four and five-star restaurant life), travels all over the world in search of the perfect meal. If that sounds like a gimmick, that's because it is. How else are you going to convince somebody else to pay for your trips around the world? A Cook's Tour is also a TV show for Food Network, which Bourdain is kinda ambivalent about.

Highlights of the TV show - Bourdain being forced to try the weird Asian foods, including, but not limited to durian, bird's nest soup, and balut. He should be happy he wasn't forced to try the stinky tofu. I think that stinks more than durian does, which he ended up liking a lot, describing it as similar to eating stinky cheese.

Highlights of the book - Bourdain eviscerating Berkeley vegans, beginning a rant with "And not one of them knew how to cook a fucking vegetable." His bitching about not being able to smoke in San Francisco restaurants is classic. I don't have much sympathy for him, though, because I hate cigarette smoke. Bourdain going to the Sahara and going crazy because he wants to eat a lamb but no one has any. So then he buys one himself. Bourdain snarking on other Food Network personalities, and an obvious hatred of anything having to do with Emeril and Bobby Flay.

I find Bourdain's melodramatic tone really funny, because he obviously watches way too many gangster movies. There's a lot of places where he's like, "And this reminds me of the scene in Goodfellas..." and then follows it up with, "Oh my God, we're going to die."

Now I am waiting for someone to lend me Kitchen Confidential.

Local media disappointed that traffic gridlock not achieved; the rest of the Bay Area returns to grumbling about their "long-ass commutes" and ignoring the existence of BART workers. Reporters heard bitching about having to stop speculating on what might happen and having to focus on what actually happened. Newspapers pissed off at having to stay up past the midnight deadline as the union kept asking for "one more friggin' extension."

That has been playing in my head all day, because the whole situation just calls for Onion headlines.

The RZA is this month's guest editor for Boldtype. Boldtype is a monthly newsletter of recommended books. It's the spirituality issue, which is relevant, since it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. (Why don't I have any Wu-Tang Clan on my iPod, though? This must be fixed.)

There's an interview with the RZA, in which he won my heart by saying: I actually collect a lot of books so I can have some common ground with everybody. I get that from coming up in New York where you get all types of people walking around. Books are a common denominator with everyone.

Jorge Luis Borges The Mirror of Ink
Roald Dahl A Taste of the Unexpected
Homer The Cave of the Cyclops
Anaïs Nin Artists and Models
Anne Frank The Secret Annexe
George Orwell In Defence of English Cooking
Michael Moore Idiot Nation
Hunter S Thompson Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson
Noam Chomsky Doctrines and Visions
Jamie Oliver Something for the Weekend
Zadie Smith Martha and Hanwell
F Scott Fitzgerald The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
Gabriel García Márquez Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen
PG Wodehouse Jeeves and the Impending Doom
Franz Kafka The Great Wall of China

Race row may spoil Penguin's birthday - it's pretty disappointing that they're basing the pocket titles on past sales of authors, so that means they've passed up Achebe and Baldwin. That will not stop me from getting the books I just listed, in one form or another. I couldn't find them on Amazon; maybe they're only printing in the UK? - that would be very upsetting, but I'm sure eventually some of them will show up on half.com or something.