I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

I don’t suppose anyone needs me to tell them that this, Maya Angelou’s coming-of-age autobiography, is an exquisite book.  It’s gorgeously written, unflinchingly honest (I think that’s what boggles my mind most about the idea of writing about one’s own life – that nerve it takes to allow oneself to be so naked,) and at time sharply painful to read.  I couldn’t tell you why I never read it before now, but I also don’t think I’ve ever been in a better place in my life to recognize it for the masterpiece it is (some spoilers.)

The book paints Angelou’s life between the ages of three and seventeen, following young Maya from her early childhood in Arkansas to the North and West and back again.  The everpresent ugliness of racism permeates her experiences, as do the struggles of this young girl to discover who she is being forged to become in the crucible of extreme, cruel circumstances.  By degrees, she starts to understand what the world is, the place that people tell her she has in it, and the place she tries to carve out for herself.

Different elements are at play here, all employed tremendously well.  There’s stranger-than-fiction slices of life, like the story of a particularly charismatic worshipper whaling on the preacher in the middle of his sermon.  There’s beautiful character work, like the exploration of Maya’s brother Bailey and how deeply affected he is by the existence of their “Mother Dear.”  There are searing, horrendous passages, like the description of Maya’s rape as an 8-year-old.  There are intellectual ruminations, social commentary, poetic beauty, heartbreaking truths, and fierce individualism.  It’s at once a story containing fathoms and the story of one specific child.

I particularly love the deft exploration of race, including the influence of colorism and the intersectionality of being both Black and a girl.  Angelou covers the terrifying (Momma embodying the caregiver of every Black boy who’s ever had to agonize over his safety in an unkind world when he doesn’t come home at night,) the dehumanizing (the white dentist telling Momma there’s no way he’ll put his hands in Maya’s mouth,) the unifying (everyone crowded into the store to listen to a Joe Louis fight on the radio, needing him to win as a reflection of their own legitimacy as a people,) and the soul-crushing (the speaker at Maya’s graduation talking about the top-of-the-line equipment and new teachers brought in to improve the white school, while the Black school is getting money devoted only to its athletic facilities.)  In both large and small moments, threats of violence and microagressions alike, American race relations work their way into Maya’s life, and it is in that tempest of hatred, fear, and ignorance that she must come of age.

Just superb.  There’s nothing more for me to say, except that I feel fortunate to have read it.

Warnings

Sexual content (including abuse of a child,) violence, language (including racial slurs,) drinking, and strong thematic elements.

Forms of Love in the Delirium Trilogy

Since love is at the center of the battle in the Deliriumseries, it’s no surprise that relationships are of the utmost importance.  In this world, love has been given a new name, amor deliria nervosa, and it’s been branded a disease, a putrefaction, a subversion.  Those who refuse the cure for the disease are driven out of society and forced to survive in brutal, spartan conditions if they’re lucky, locked away to rot or executed for dissidence if they’re not.  It stands to reason that, in order to risk so much and defy everything one has ever known, it requires a force like love urging them forward.  (Some spoilers.)

As such, we know it’s only a matter of time before Lena, who’s been obsessively counting the days until her cure, falls in love with a boy and realizes the agony and ecstasy for which the uncured throw everything away.  It’s no surprise that meeting Alex is her awakening to what life can truly be, as well as how broken and festering her society is, and she breaks faith with all she’s ever been taught in order to cast her lot with him.  However, the series doesn’t leave love as clearcut as that.  Lena’s relationship with Alex isn’t her salvation, and it’s threatened by the people who fear it.  After the first book, the story becomes about carrying on despite the loss of love, about standing for the right to love in and of itself, rather than just the right to love a specific person.  It edges toward the possibility of loving again after love lost, opening your heart to someone new even as you’re still blinded by the dazzle of that first love.  I’m not crazy about how things shake out on this front in the third book, but I still appreciate the way the series as a whole explores love in a more complex way; for a young adult series, that’s pretty laudable.

But what I really appreciate is that this fight isn’t only for romantic love.  While romance gets the most dedicated focus, other forms of love are just as forbidden, and people who find themselves struck by them will give up just as much for their right to feel it.  I like Lena’s repeated remembrances of her mother, who endured several failed procedures and was lost to Lena in childhood.  There are some great notes about how Lena’s mother is regarded suspiciously by other parents for the way she behaves with her other children.  Other mothers don’t sing, Lena realizes in retrospect, and when young Lena scrapes her knee and the sidewalk and her mother holds and comforts her, she’s practically committing a public indecency.  In this world, a woman’s love for her daughters is called a disease.  Similarly, I love the story of how young Raven winds up running away to the Wilds.  Happening upon an infant Blue, abandoned and near death, Raven gives herself over to this baby so fully and so immediately that she leaves her entire life behind her.  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

I’m grateful for that.  As an aromantic, I don’t experience romantic love, and if that was the only kind of love explored in the book, I would have felt pretty left out.  I mean, don’t get me wrong – romantic love is all over stories in every medium, and I’m used to seeing plenty of it.  But when the obvious thesis of the story is “love is right and healthy, and those who try to take it away are the ones who are sick and wrong,” I’d be a little uncomfortable if I felt I had more in common with the “non-love” side.  Not that I’d run around advocating the cure, but if it was only for romantic love, I wouldn’t see getting cured as any great loss for me personally.  By including more all-encompassing forms of love, like familial love and friendship, the book includes stakes that would apply to me as well, and I like that.

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: The Hunger Games

It makes me sad to send The Hunger Games a Dear Hollywood Whitewashers, because I love Jennifer Lawrence and I love Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, but this was not a role I think she should have been given (this post equally applies to Gale, Haymitch, and other Seam residents, but Katniss is definitely the eye of this particular storm.)  I’m not calling out any one specific person here.  Troubles began when Katniss’s original casting call was only open to Caucasian actresses and were exacerbated when director Gary Ross and author Suzanne Collins both dismissed whitewashing concerns as nothing a little hair dye or makeup couldn’t fix.  A seal of approval from the series’s writer might negate this argument for some, but I’m sticking with it.

The quote we’re examining today isn’t one of these justifications or dismissals.  Instead, these words are from Katniss, the description she gives of herself and other Seam folk in the first book:

“He could be my brother.  Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes.  But we’re not related, at least not closely.  Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another this way.  That’s why my mother and Prim, with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place.  They are.  My mother’s parents were part of the small merchant class…”

Now, I get that “olive” doesn’t absolutely, no-question mean someone is non-white.  It could arguably suggest a more typically Mediterranean complexion, and Google Imaging “olive skin” provides results as racially varied as Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, and Aishwarya Rai – including, yes, a small number of white people.  However, in my experience, white authors don’t use the word “olive” to describe a white person’s skin tone.  They might use words like “pasty” or “tan,” but in all honesty, they’re more likely not to mention their skin color at all.  Characters of color are far more likely to have their skin tone specified, while white characters much more frequently only have their hair or eye color described – “white” isn’t considered a necessary detail to give, since it’s generally the default assumption for white readers (In the quote above, notice that Katniss’s mom and Prim aren’t specifically noted as having light-colored skin.  Give them light hair and blue eyes, and we fill in the rest.)

What’s more, The Hunger Games gives us two class-based subsets of District 12, both of whom whom have colorings distinct enough that residents can be easily identified as “Seam” or “merchant class.”  It seems strangely coincidental if the (relatively) better-off merchants are all noticeably lighter than the impoverished coal miners – given the below-ground profession of most of the population, the “Seam look” can’t simply be blamed on them getting more sun – and it’s notmeant to highlight a racial disparity.

To be fair, I’m not specifically saying that Katniss is Native American.  Or Asian.  Or Latina.  Or Black.  The impression I get is that, due to years of racial mixing, Panem has races that present-day America doesn’t.  If I was casting Katniss, Gale, and Haymitch, I’d have probably looked for mixed actors who couldn’t be immediately labeled as “[insert race here!]”  So, I can’t say what Katniss “is,” but I strongly feel that she is not white.  Casting her as such, in my opinion, stripped the films of a lot of potential richness and of course denied an actress of color the rocket to mega-stardom from playing this extraordinary role.

Buster Keaton Interviews (2007)

This collection makes for a nice read, with lots of anecdotes and insights straight from the horse’s mouth.  I’d recommended reading it bit by bit rather than in one or a few sittings, but it’s definitely a good time.

Just what it says on the label, this book compiles sixteen interviews with Buster Keaton.  Some are a page or two, while others exceed twenty pages.  There are print interviews, transcribed TV interviews, and a few interviews translated from foreign-language publications. 

It surprises me a little that the overwhelming majority of the interviews come from the last ten years of Buster’s life, during the Keaton renaissance of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  There are only three that were actually conducted during his silent career, and then, they’re very early in his silent career – the last of them was written in 1923, just after he finished Our Hospitality.  I wonder if that sort of thing, celebrity interviews, just wasn’t done very often in the ‘20s?  The first two, in fact, are more informational than anything else, with no more than a few short quotes from Buster.  The third, though, is interesting to me.  The interviewer spends a lot of the article commenting on the interview scenario, Buster’s friendly but shy demeanor, and the interviewer’s suspicion that she could get a lot more of the “real” Buster if they weren’t in a studio office with suits running around.

Fortunately, the later interviews are packed to the gills with the real Buster.  There’s plenty of plain-talking observations on Hollywood then and now (well, in the ‘50s and ‘60s,) animated stories about a particular scene from this or that film, polite brushoffs when the interviewers start waxing too philosophically on the Genius of Keaton, and notes from the interviewers about how engaging and personable Buster is.  What’s interesting is that, particularly in the ‘50s, Buster’s work had only recently been rediscovered and had started to be shown again on late-night TV and, rarely, in theaters.  So, many of these interviewers talking to Buster about his long and illustrious career have never even seen the classics they’re asking him about.  That must have been so weird, especially when you’re talking about silent movies.  It makes for a rather unusual interview dynamic, with Buster telling these interviews what particular shorts or features were about, but I think it also speaks to how resonant Buster’s work is, seeing these interviews asking him to describe movies they’ve only read about.

Some fun stories about particular films (The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and Seven Chances get a lot of time devoted to them for the features, and The Boatand The Playhouse are probably the most talked-of shorts,) covering amusing filmmaking challenges, Buster’s process, and, of course, stunt and technical mishaps.  He also shares quite a bit about his vaudeville career, his history with Fatty Arbuckle, and the difficulties of the MGM years.  Word of warning, though – the same stories get repeated in manyinterviews, which is why I’d recommend reading the book more gradually.  Obviously, it’s perfectly natural for Buster to tell eight reporters in a ten-year span the same anecdote about the rolling-boulders sequence in Seven Chances, but reading it eight times in the same week is a bit much.  Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here, and some nice tidbits – even with things I’d already learned elsewhere, I like to read Buster telling about them, and I love how consistently he fascinates his interviewers with everything he accomplished in his amazing career.

A Few Remarks on Peeta Mellark and Gale Hawthorne (or, Why I’m Team Katniss)

Before we begin, let’s put aside the fact that romance in books or movies isn’t a requirement for me.  Let’s ignore the fact that many a love triangle has overrun otherwise engaging characters in compelling stories, and let’s not comment on the fact that the central triangle in The Hunger Games doesn’t generally display Suzanne Collins’s writing skills to their utmost.  None of these reasons compare to why, in the Team Peeta vs. Team Gale debate, I’m forever Team Katniss.

First things first:  once she realizes how both Peeta and Gale feel about her (and that takes a while, because it’s hard for Katniss to believe that virtually anyone gives any sort of damn about her,) she tells both boys that romance isn’t the cards.  She doesn’t do it especially artfully, but she’s earnest in her assurances that it’s not about anything either of them did.  Although “it’s not you, it’s me” has a reputation for being a cliché, when she says it, she means it.    

The past baggage and present dangers behind that “it’s not you, it’s me” are formidable.  Let’s start with her conviction that she can never get married, because she feels she can never get pregnant, because she’s terrified at the thought of her child being sent into the Arena.  This is the world the characters live in, and that’s a huge, horrifying prospect for a 16-year-old girl to come to grips with.  With fears like that inside her, it’s no wonder she’s not in any sort of headspace to be in a relationship.  Then, of course, there’s the small matter that she’s incredibly busy with super-important stuff throughout the trilogy.  Whether she’s trying to survive a sadistic televised battle to the death, satisfy the Capitol propaganda machine so the president won’t murder everyone she loves, or figure out how to be the symbol of a revolution her actions inadvertently helped inspire, she’s got a lot on her plate.  For much of the series, she’s in straight-up fight-or-flight mode, and she doesn’t have much time to process her feelings for either boy, which are complicated and confusing in both cases.

And really, once she’s said no, there’s nothing else she should have to say.  But she cares about both Gale and Peeta and feels she needs both of them in her life (plus, she’s Katniss, so she’s inclined to assume responsibility for other people’s pain regardless of whether it’s actually her fault.)  So she tells them all of this – that she’s in no place to even begin to think about a life that includes anything like that, and at the moment, she’s working hard enough just trying to keep herself, her family, and her friends alive.  She tells them all this, and while the two boys have different reactions over the course of the story (in Peeta’s defense, he’s often at least slightly more understanding than Gale,) there’s a tendency in both to throw their hurt feelings in her face.

Now boys, I get that Katniss is pretty amazing.  I’m not surprised that either of you is in love with her.  But would it kill you to give her a little space?  Like I said, Peeta, you tend to be a bit better, so you’re further down on my irritation list, but I can’t stand it when you two get huffy or angsty or passive-aggressive about Katniss not dating you.  Because I love her, too – in a fictional-character platonic sort of way – and I see the way she beats herself up over your moodiness.  She has enough massive stress, major responsibility, and misplaced guilt without you mooning over her, and she doesn’t need any more.  You both say you’re your friends, so maybe act like it.  Stop making her feel bad about herself, recognize that she has way too much to deal with right now, and give her the support she (again, your friend) needs without making her feel guilty for not falling into your arms the way that you want.

Why Horcruxes? (Harry Potter)

In a meta way, the introduction of horcruxes in the Harry Potter series is a means of explaining why Voldemort is the cockroach of evil wizards, the one who never seems to die completely.  Certainly, having horcruxes, with their own rules, artifacts, and infamy within the wizarding community, is a lot more articulate than “Because Magic,” and the task of finding/destroying them gives Harry and co. a real handy quest to go on in the final book.  But almost ever since we first heard about them, I’ve wondered what it is with Voldemort and horcruxes (spoilers.)

It can’t be denied – horcruxes are extremely powerful and useful, in a horrible way.  Through making a horcrux, a witch or wizard creates a safeguard against death.  This potent bit of dark magic allows them to tear off a piece of their soul and hide it somewhere, so that, if their body is destroyed, a part of them lives on and is able to come back.  However, this assurance comes at a high, terrible price:  the spell requires the caster to murder someone.  It’s in fact the very act of murder that causes the soul to tear in the first place, because the soul can’t go through something so reprehensible and remain intact.  This is why the wizarding world isn’t full of wizards who continually spring back up like weebles; the spell is such an atrocity that it seems many in the community won’t even speak of it.

But hey, what’s a little murder to Voldemort?  In The Half-Blood Prince, we learn that, as far back as his sixth year at Hogwarts, future genocidal dark lord Tom Riddle is found researching horcruxes, and already, his ambitions are set high – in a “purely academic” discussion with Professor Slughorn, he asks if there’s a limit to how many times the soul could be split, speculating that six would the ideal, most magically-strong number of horcruxes to create.  Slughorn tries to deny what’s happening in this conversation, but he’s horrified that Riddle would consider even a hypotheticalmagic situation that required him to kill six people.

That’s the thing, though.  Obviously, it’s obscene, just one of many red flags that Riddle is a dangerous psychopath, but why horcruxes specifically?  Even if Riddle doesn’t have particular qualms about killing, what makes a 16-year-old want a sevenfold magical insurance policy (six horcruxes, plus the part of his soul that remains in his body) against death?  I suppose we can posit that, already, he’s making his future plans to rise to absolute power and knows he’ll meet resistance.  Any aggressive power struggle is going to involve physical risk, and since his new world order involves wiping out Muggle-borns, he’ll be seen as an ethnic-cleansing monster.  Viewed this way, it’ll only be a matter of time before an army rises up to fight him or someone tries to assassinate him.  Is his obsession with horcruxes just sadistic forward-thinking?

That’s part of it, I’m sure – he knows he’ll be a target – but I think it goes deeper than that.  I think Voldemort is terrified of dying in any context, and I think he feels magic should allow him power over death.  As a child, when he first meets Dumbledore and learns about his mixed magical heritages, he immediately guesses that his absent father must have been a wizard and his deceased mother a Muggle.  “My mother can’t have been magic, or she wouldn’t have died,” he reasons.  Most people fear death, understandably, but Voldemort’s seems to go beyond that.  His first response to learning that he’s a wizard is to assume that it will automatically prevent him from dying, and when he realizes this isn’t true, he starts seeking a specific way to use magic to do just that, by any means necessary. 

Coraline (2002)

I’ve seen a few of Neil Gaiman’s TV efforts now – Neverwhere and his Whoepisodes – and I’ve listened to the radio adaptation of Neverwhere, but this is the first book of his that I’ve read.  As with his TV work, I like Coraline’s slightly off-kilter, somewhat dark, very British fantasy.

Coraline Jones has just moved with her parents into a large old house divided into flats.  She spends her early days exploring, getting to know the eccentric neighbors, and wondering about the door in her living room, the one with the bricked-up passageway that once led to the empty flat next to hers.  One day, though, home alone, Coraline opens the door to find the wall gone.  At the end of the passageway is a twisted through-the-looking-glass world containing Coraline’s Other House and populated by her button-eyed Other Parents.  Gradually realizing that her Other Mother has malevolent intentions, Coraline sets out to defeat the villainess.

This is a really neat book.  It’s definitely pitched for kids but still greatly accessible for adults.  I like Gaiman’s calm, observational prose in the face of all the crazy, scary things that happen to Coraline.  Our heroine is similarly unflappable, though not uncaring.  There are huge stakes in this story and Coraline knows it, but she approaches her challenges with a cool, rational head and bravery that’s more decisive than innate.

I think this quiet, collected attitude, on the part of both author and protagonist, makes the creepiness of the Other World even creepier.  Coraline goes through the door to find a world that’s just a little bit “off,” but the sense of skin-crawling foreboding builds slowly, teasingly, until you can hardly imagine how she’s able to keep her head.  The Other Mother is particularly horrific, no surprise. 

Overall, it’s a fine entry to the “And We Read This to Kids?!?” collection, with lots of menace and scary images.  Those British, I tell you – after all, kids love Doctor Who in Britain, and even before they get to the “exciting” stuff in Harry Potter, he’s being raised by unscrupulous relatives who make him live in a closet.  Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t talk.  The U.S. gave us Lemony Snicket, who killed the Baudelaire children’s parents and destroyed their home in a fire in the first chapter of the first Series of Unfortunate Events book before shipping them off to living with an abusive criminal so covetous of their inheritance that he schemes to marry a 14-year-old.

One of my favorite parts of the book, however, is a secondary character:  the cat who can similarly pass between worlds and sort of ambivalently helps Coraline in her fight against the Other Mother.  (Just “the cat,” by the way.  As it explains to Coraline – in the Other World, it can talk – “Now, you people have names.  That’s because you don’t know who you are.  We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”)  In a way, it’s sort of a more even-keeled version of the Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere:  clever, enigmatic, more than a little imperious, and usually nowhere in sight when Coraline wants it around, but still generally on her side.

Warnings

Some major scariness for kids and disturbing elements.

Relationship Spotlight: Emma Woodhouse & George Knightley (Emma)

How do you like that – this is the third of seven major Jane Austen romances I’ve reviewed, and I’ve yet to get around to Lizzie and Darcy.  That just speaks to how many fantastic relationships she cultivated in her works, and Emma/Knightley is one I’ve always appreciated.  Not as fun as Catherine/Tilney or as searing as Anne/Wentworth, perhaps, but of all of Austen’s pairings, these may be the two who do one another the most good.

I really like how often Austen’s romances show the characters as friends before they’re lovers.  Emma and Knightley are a particularly great example – their families have been close since before Emma was born, and Knightley has always been a fixture in her life as a friend and neighbor.  There’s attraction, of course – buried so deep that neither is aware of it for most of the book – but more than that, there’s a sense of companionship, of familiarity.  These are two people who can speak the absolute truth with one another.

Not that Emma is always crazy about that.  She spends a good portion of the story as a doted-upon, well-meaning but misguided young woman, and there aren’t many who can recognize her faults like Knightley.  She resents his chiding on the grounds that he doesn’t pay enough attention to important things like position and perception, but she values his opinion more than she can say:  Knightley’s words can get under her skin like no one else’s, can prick at her conscious and make her realize how shallow or foolish or insensitive she’s been.  For Knightley’s part, Emma challenges him, and it’s more than just her stubbornness or pride propelling her.  More than once, she opens his eyes to something he’d dismissed or failed to recognize, and he’s a better person for it.

This facet of their relationship is good for them both, but especially for Emma.  She’s spent much of her life being the little lady of the house, and she’s both used to flattery and unused to being denied.  Essentially, she’s been raised to think the sun rises and sets by her flashes of brilliance, and though she’s a bright woman well positioned to do good in her community, this indulgence threatens to spoil her.  With Knightley there to remind her she’s as fallible as anyone, she can mature and learn to be her best self.

It’s a little thing, but I also love the way Knightly demonstrates so much care toward Emma’s father, a fussbudget hypochondriac whom she clearly adores.  Unlike many in town, who desire Mr. Woodhouse’s society but fail to consider his delicacies or try to accommodate him, Knightley seeks to put him at ease in potentially stressful situations.  He regularly visits, knowing Mr. Woodhouse enjoys company but rarely ventures out, and when an excursion is held at Knightley’s estate, he prepares a selection of knickknacks and curiosities to occupy Mr. Woodhouse while the others are out, all from the comfort of Knightley’s finest chair.  That scene, to me, tells so much about Knightley, and it’s obvious that Emma could never be with a man who doesn’t regard her father like she does.  It’s funny; maybe it’s just my aceness talking, but stuff like that makes me root for a relationship much faster than heat or chemistry.  They can making longing eyes at one another as long as they want, but if they connect on a personal level and cherish the same loved ones, values, or even hobbies?  I am allover that.