But I want ALL the figs

I just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath after ordering it off of Amazon earlier this week! I loved it. One of my new faves. Tracing the psychological journey of young girl coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, The Bell Jar is rich in colorful descriptions and capturing prose. Esther, the protagonist, struggles to make life decisions that ultimately cripple her and send her into a downward spiral of psychosis.

Ahhh, the beauty of a well-crafted metaphor:

"...I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

Plath's insights into life are disturbingly real.

You have no idea how many times I have considered the same concept in choosing a life-path. If choose to be professor, how can I be an artist? If I choose to be a writer, how can I be a international peace worker? If I choose to be a designer, how can I be a translator? Sigh. We have to choose. We have to be specialists. We can't let the figs plop off the tree.

Fortunately, most are able to grapple with this reality a little better than Plath and her fictional counterpart. Ultimately, I think we find that the figs we do select tend to be quite appealing in their own right. Thank goodness for that.

Things Fall Apart

I just finished reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It was certainly one of the more interesting reads I've had of late. The story is based in tribal Nigeria, centered upon a male character who strives for manliness above all else. He praises bravery, masculinity, strength, titles, self-determinism, and all things machismo. The whole story I was waiting for when he was "going to get it." When he was going to realize how ridiculous patriarchal society is. How destructive blood-thirst is. How treating women as inferiors is disgusting.

As a woman reading this tale, I'm not going to lie, many things made me angry twinged with sadness, and that is why I think Achebe told his tale quite well. Any author who can rouse such emotions (even negative ones) has a gift. There are many issues that popped up within his writing such as sexism, culturalism, imperialism, religion, story-telling, respect, war, justice, status, and so on. While I had trouble getting into the book because I thought the tale would be overly simple, I am quite pleased with array of questions and slice of African culture that this novel has to offer.

Emerson on My iPod

Now that my American Lit final is over I am done! Done. Done with undergrad work forever. I don't really feel much. I thought it'd be pretty excited, but I'm more or less feeling like I always do. Huh.

My favorite American Literature author that I read this semester would have to be Ralph Waldo Emerson. We read his Nature, "Self-Reliance", and The American Scholar. actually found a podcast of Nature on learnoutloud.com for free, so I listened while some guy with a deep voice read my homework to me on my iPod. Let me tell you, that is the way to do class assignments!

I think what Emerson was writing 100+ years ago is still relevant today. He values the thoughts, actions, and judgment of the individual. He disdains the concept of society because he believes it destroys the virtue of its individual members. He calls it a "conspiracy" against man. He says, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," as well as, "Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers". He is outraged that people are not forging new ideas for themselves.

I would ask, doesn't every generation struggle with the creation of a new identity? In today's age where non-conformity is common, is traditionalism the new individualism? And is it even possible to not let society chose our paths for us? We can't all go live in the woods and develop our own transcendentalism.

Ian McEwan's Amsterdam

My latest read was Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. It has won considerable recognition in the literary world, most notably as the 1998 Booker Prize winner. Don't let the title fool you though. Most of Ian McEwan's book, Amsterdam, takes place in London.

It is a story about two men in upper-class London. Clive Linley is an accomplished musician who embarks on a journey to compose a masterpiece that defines the millennium. Vernon Halliday is the editor of a prominent newspaper with waning readership. The conflict is nestled in decisions of morality. Is it better to accelerate one's career or to protect those in need? Should Clive delve into his composition at the risk of others? Should Vernon publish sensitive information that would destroy a popular public figure? The moral dilemmas are believable, raw, and engaging. Clive and Vernon do not struggle with the morality of their own decisions, but find it quite acceptable to reprimand one another for their life choices. They see the flaws of their friend, but never their own. This is the realism that McEwan tugs at.

However, the random unity of realism that colored the pages throughout the book converges into a realism that could never exist. The ending was too obvious, too easy, and an author that can sustain a beautiful narrative for 183 pages ought to be able to carry it on for only ten more. In an attempt to show authorial cleverness, the end lacks the subtlety and finesse that defines the greatness of the rest of the piece.

Dream Lives of Butterflies

I just finished reading Dream Lives of Butterflies by Jaimee Wriston Colbertson. I love the melodic sentences and eloquent language of her writing. I felt very engaged by her novel. Most of it is set Saint Louis and some in Hawaii.

I enjoy the compilation of short-stories-turned-novel method of literary fiction. That is something I wish to do someday--write a novel of 'excerpts' that weave together to create a beautiful unified piece of disparate characters, settings, themes, and images. I believe the idea is similar to the six degrees of separation theory, and can function as a great organizing principle for modern literature.

The only criticism I have of this book is that the connections between stories were not strong enough. Some of the characters fell off never to reappear again. I can't handle that. If I am given partial understanding, I must have full disclosure (or at least really big hints). You can't tell me Lucy had a troubled childhood graffitiing rocks and then dismiss her. You can't tell me a story about a woman getting groped on a plane by a stranger and drop her to be never mentioned again. Argh. Don't get me wrong, the interweaving that did take place was intricate and extremely meaningful, but unaddressed concerns can become a little too frustrating.

Don't ever make your reader feel unsatisfied when all is said and done.

Snow

When I peeked outside this morning and saw several inches of snow and an unplowed road, I was sure classes would be canceled. To my dismay, they weren't. I wrapped myself up in a hundred layers of clothing, scarves, hoodies, hats, gloves, coats, and boots and armed myself with an ice scraper in a effort to rediscover my car somewhere in the white abyss. After driving at about 10 miles per hour with a death grip on the steering wheel the whole way into campus, I cursed whoever decided that it would be safe for us to be out on those icy roads.


My day was painfully boring. I met with a professor, sat at work with no tutoring appointments, watched white flakes fall from the sky out the window, and checked my email every five minutes waiting for a cancellation. Just when I thought the university was cold and heartless, the announcement came that evening classes were canceled. Thank goodness. I rejoiced that my American Lit test will be pushed back as I shoveled my car out for the second time today.

On a brighter note, I just discovered EZ Borrow in the library. Yes, I know--I'm a senior English major, and I've never used the service before, shame, shame on me. It turns out all Pennsylvania schools have a system of sharing books between university libraries. I am not confined by the choices good 'ole Shippensburg and other state schools offer to me. I have been eyeing Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, a modern Turkish classic in Borders for the past few months, and now I can read it for FREE! If I love it, I can buy it, if not, there's no loss. Why didn't I discover this system years earlier?