Long-Distance once again

T left for China. It is a sad day. I hope you had a safe flight. Think of me when you eat wontons.

MURAKAMI UPDATE

I've read three Murakami novels in the past few weeks, and I think he really is best when he gets to the heart of the matter without all the frou frou technical aspects of writing. It's the same story -- where does love live in our consciousness? -- but from different sensitivities. "Kafka on the Shore" really didn't do it for me -- too meta and referential to past literatures. It felt more like an homage to past loves and the idea of fate. I guess I don't agree with that. I don't really think anything is predestined, but I do believe in "meant to-be"s. Don't even know if that makes sense anymore. I think Murakami is most appealing when he shows how much work you have to put into love and how mistakes are possible and intrinsic. Maybe I just don't have that same awe of him anymore, now that I realize he writes about the same topic over and over again. He's human, and it seems like, deeply, awkwardly introspective. Which can be nice and comforting, too.

currently listening to:
Unforgettable
Nat King Cole

xx t

SALINGER PASSES AWAY

I've always loved how sturdy Salinger's books were, both physically and emotionally. They really do just hold up over time, don't they? That iconic small, palm-hold-able novel with the rainbow stripes diagonally at top. Never read "Franny and Zooey" but "Nine Stories" remains one of my favorite short story collections of all time.

Sad news, then, that such a beloved author has passed away. Read about him here.

peace,
T

IN PREPARATION FOR MY STINT ON CASH CAB

T, this is how I knew that tidbit about not naming your pig Napoleon. You didn't even ask! These were on an awesome clearance at Barnes & Noble on a rainy day.

DID YOU KNOW that when telephone area codes were first assigned, New York, the largest city in the country (and hence the one most frequently called), was given 212 because it took the least amount of time to dial on a rotary phone?

From David Hoffman's "Little-Known Facts About Well-Known Places New York" published by Metro Books.

Inquisitively,

C

PUSH

Aw, 300 posts!

I'm RB (re-blogging) this one, from EW.com:

Push

reviewed by Margot Mifflin

Like a starker, black urban version of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Push is the painfully graphic story of a battered child named Precious Jones, who bears her father's babies first at 12 and again at 16. Suffering abuse by both parents and serving as a virtual slave to her apartment-bound, welfare-dependent mother, Precious lives in hopeless isolation in Harlem, until she enters an alternative school where she meets other troubled girls and, cheered on by a devoted teacher, learns to write.

Written in the fractured vernacular of this subliterate teenager, Push — the poet Sapphire's debut novel — is only partially successful: Precious' phonetic dialect and stunted vocabulary inevitably flatten segments of her story. Such limitations stand out when Precious, who calls her mother ''muver'' and refers to Down syndrome as ''Down Sinder,'' breaks out of character to make grown-up observations — for example, that crack addicts ''give the race a bad name.''

Nonetheless, Precious' hard-luck story sings with poetic beauty and resonates with ugly truth. ''I'm alive inside,'' she writes after attending a meeting of incest survivors, whose confessions are a balm to her shame. ''A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning.''

It's thrilling to see Precious test the wings of her newfound verbal powers, funny to decode her botched locutions (like ''insect'' survivors), and sad to watch her revert to frustrated illiteracy when, after progressing by leaps and bounds, she's thrown a tragic, unexpected curveball. Ultimately, however, Precious gains control of her life through writing (''the boat [that] carry you to the other side'') and finds her heroes (Langston Hughes and Alice Walker among them) through books. Push is an imperfect novel — the ending is lackluster and the dialect is iffy — but its affecting combination of childlike tenderness and adult rage leaves little doubt that Sapphire's talents as a poet translate artfully into her fiction. B+

---

The movie inspired from the novel won the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and received nods at the Golden Globes. And um, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz provide supporting roles. Hm.

currently listening: Bat For Lashes

A CHILDHOOD LOVE RESURRECTED

Could it be? YES! "The Baby-Sitters Club" defined my childhood reading experience. Ann M. Martin and Scholastic are revamping the series and even introducing a pre-quel! Awesome. Read the article at The New York Times.

Happy 2010! Going to watch "500 Days of Summer."

xoxo t

OBAMA'S READING LIST

... I'm disappointed! I thought he'd be more edgy. I don't know, maybe some Toni Morrison or Isabel Allende in there. The president's choices kind of reminds me of men who like to read, but don't understand the point of literature. Literature for literature's sake. Read the full article here.

-t

HOW OUR BOOKSHELVES COMPLETE EACH OTHER'S

Well, Borders was having a favorite paperbacks buy 1 get the 2nd 50% off sale for the holidays. I had told myself that I wasn't going to buy any books for awhile, because I have no room for all of them, and was going to check out books from the library instead - but how could I resist...there were so many good reads right there, looking irresistible on the table, calling out my name. So I bought Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. I pummeled through half of it in one sitting and I think it's about to change my life. Glory to whole foods, and down with the 'food-like substances' that clutter our world. Or mostly, that clutter our grocery stores.

Pollan makes me feel bad for downing that bag of Cheetos on the train ride home because, really, what are Cheetos if you really stop and think about it?? He makes me rethink buying non-fat milk, cheese, yogurt, bread, cereal. He makes me want to eat fruits and vegetables mainly, and meat occasionally, but more as a side dish than a main course.

And I like how T and I are going to trade volumes, this for Omnivore's Dilemma and vice versa. Since we've moved out our closets and bookshelves have not been complete.

PS. My other book, for 50% off, was The Alchemist :)

xoxo,
C

STEAL THIS BOOK

The most stolen books from bookstores. Funny how they all appeal to what punk-ass James Dean wannabes wanna read, huh? The ever elusive Eugenides is actually interviewed in this short, charming article from The New York Times.

calling it a night! tiffany

PUPPY SALON

I wanted to follow up on T's last post with photos of Muffin getting her haircut by my mom. She was so good for the camera!

PS. T, you're reading The Shipping News? Did I ever tell you about how boring that movie was? Hopefully the book's much better. Introspection doesn't always translate very well onscreen.
PPS. There was SNOW in the Santa Cruz mountains today. California's catching a cold.

xoxo,
C

GROUND UP

In my most recent search for decent coffee in California (I miss you Porto Rico coffee!), I totally remembered that I read a pretty bad book called "Ground Up" (by Michael Idov, a slate.com writer) a few months ago. I wish it was one of those breezy, fluffy reads, but it totally pretended to be significant and symbolic toward the end. Nooo. That's always the downfall. Embrace the fluff. Let sweeping generalizations and the fallacy of human relationships fall into someone else's lap. Prefrrably someone cute and sappy. Ne-yo, you reading this? Call me. A hip-hopera is waiting to happen.

Aw, Ender is waiting by my side. Gonna go play with my (four year old) pup.

xoxo tiffany

INFORMING YOU I'M INFORMED

Gourevitch speaks about the U.N.'s frustratingly paternalistic view of the Rwandan court system:

"The Rwandan government regarded the UN's decision to keep its resources [evidence] to itself as an insult. The very existence of the UN court [International Criminal Tribunal] implied that the Rwandan judiciary was incapable of reaching just verdicts, and seemed to dismiss in advance any trials that Rwanda might hold as beneath international standards."
--We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

I think it's wise to remember that this type of bullshit goes on in the U.S. as well. Take a look at this website, Native American Legal Update. According to the Indian Civil Rights Act, tribal courts can only imprison offenders for up to one year, or fine them $5000, or both. What I remember from my tribal law class is that anything beyond that must go through the state or federal system, which has an extremely high turnover rate, meaning most of the cases never even make it into court. There's also something about tribal courts only having jurisdiction over tribal members. Meaning: Ringo Starr goes onto the rez, kills someone, he cannot be persecuted by the court! That's bonkers!!! Seriously.

A quick review of "We wish..." The subject is the Rwandan genocide, and Gourevitch's take is a moral one. How are foreign nations complicit with the build-up of a Hutu-Tutsi rivalry? And more devastatingly, how did foreign nations continue to prolong the genocide by providing the resources to sustain fugitives?

It gets off on a rough start because of the overwhelming amount of names and information dropped. It also veers from the personal--first person accounts from genocide survivors with philosophical inputs from Gourevitch-- to fact-heavy political accounts. The juxtapositions can be jarring, especially when Gourevitch interprets detail to microscopic amounts. Know that it gets better and that the pieces come together. Gourevitch is a welcome narrator and because what matters here, as in all memoirs and histories, is that the prose is strong enough to sustain any self-serving or leisurely asides en route to the story arc.

The last third of the book is the most fascinating, for it focuses on the aftermath of a genocide. The point is-- the genocide isn't a thing of the past. It continues to deeply effect its citizens, its relationships with neighboring countries, and the rebuilding of a nation. It's also the section that focuses most on Rwanda itself -- for most of the book, Rwandans are featured, foreign countries are featured, but Rwanda the country, aside from physical descriptions, is not well represented. In the final leg, Gourevitch's Rwanda finally emerges and its voice is General Kagame: well-spoken, realistic, and aware. Kagame makes sporadic appearances throughout, but here he has room to breathe and expand on the future. Fascinating, sobering stuff.

Also, I thought I would point out that Gourevitch has one of those faces that look different from every angle! I couldn't really tell which pictures of him were actually him. Kinda weird. Check it:

Am I right or am I right? It's like, dashing journalist, mugshot, and disheveled, balding yuppie. I would have never guessed he had such pointy teeth underneath.

xo, tiffany

VISUAL AIDES

Talking about a memorial in Nyarubuye, Rwanda, where unburied dead are displayed:

"...I doubted the necessity of seeing the victims in order fully to confront the crime. The aesthetic assault of the macabre creates excitement and emotion, but does the spectacle really serve our understanding of the wrong?... Even as we look at atrocity, we find ways to regard it as unreal. and the more we look, the more we become inured to--not informed by--what we are seeing."

-- Philip Gourevitch in "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families"

photos by Vergara

Contrast that with New York based photographer and sociologist Camilo Jose Vergara's take on "Invincible Cities" and his work for Slate.com. His most recent photos are of 125th and Lexington in Spanish Harlem - exactly where I used to get off on the 4 & 5 express trains Monday through Friday to teach at an after-school program. What does it mean that Slate.com can commission an outsider to take photos to track "progress" or to "document" regular people in their everyday lives? How do we choose to represent urban, under-served populations to the masses? Sometimes the intention of the artist, or photographer, differs from how his audience receives his work. Is this worrisome? I like how Slate has decided to call this intersection the most "complicated, disturbing, and lively intersection" of NYC. Staff writers need to leave the East Village once in a while.

Why does art and documentation feel so exploitative at times? Gah.

tiffany

DISCOUNT BUYS

In an effort to practice driving, my mom and I have been going on random errands together. Today we visited Marshall's. (I am not a very good driver. Yet. I'm working on it.) Remember when I announced the National Book Award winners and expressed my interested in reading "The First Tycoon"? Well, the discount gods heard my thunderous cry and I found a hardcover copy at Marshall's for ten dollars! What a buy. It's a little beat up, sure, but it's new and all mine. Also, I bought chardonnay vinegar:

There's no expiration date, haha. But the other bottle of vinegar I was looking at doesn't expire until 2014. I think I'm safe. I also realize that the point of Marshall's is to buy clothing and shoes, but whatever. I'll take what I can get.

Anyone have any recommendations for good places online to buy books? I need to stock up on books before I go to China in February!! (Not that I don't have a pile sitting at home.)

currently listening to:
Once Upon A Time There Was An Ocean
Paul Simon

time to edit essays! tiffany

ANOTHER MURAKAMI

Yay, some morning commute reading material. Haruki Murakami's After Dark.

And I got a mini Bodum French Press. Now I just need some coffee beans. Exciting!

xo,

C

FREE READ

DvF enjoyed this book so much she's sponsoring it on dailylit.com.

Go to dailylit.com to read "Madame de Stael: The First Modern Women" in its entirety until January 2010. Sponsored by wrap-dress inventor and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. Pretty cool.

currently listening to:
Never Ending Math Equation
Modest Mouse

xoxo t