A very sad day for music fans. I would have thought that the people who had bought tickets for the 50 upcoming concerts would definitely get their money back, surely its the same as when you buy a faulty product, and get your money back.

R.I.P Michael Jackson.

As I listened to The Shack, I could not help wishing I had the book to underline or highlight specific points.  The Shack will provide many opportunities for meaningful discussion for any group. Mack’s journey provides the reader with examples of the power of forgiveness, faith, and love.
 
I highlight some of the points that I enjoyed or may provide a wonderful opportunity for a deeper conversation about the book. I enjoyed the character’s discussion with God regarding relationships and conversation on the relationship between God the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.  One of my favorite classes in school was Religion, because we took books like this or Scripture and discussed various topics every day.
 
The Shack examines God's love, while examining a human’s capacity to reflect God’s love in life. Pure love is like God’s love. Pure love is faithful, compassionate, and trusting. It inspires and encourages honesty, forgiveness, and acceptance. 
 
Love is founded or based on trust.  If trust exists in a relationship, love is nurtured and grows, allowing believers to experience something close to Heaven. Mack’s relationship with his father and his relationship with God were broken because trust did not exist or it was destroyed in its infancy.  Mack viewed his father as a “Man of God”, because he knew the Bible and spoke God’s words. His father used nouns to describe the beauty and wonder of God’s love, but he failed to understand pure love is a verb that requires constant and consistent action.  His father’s failures destroyed trust and stunted the development of a relationship with his son and his son’s relationship with God.  Mack's father’s words (nouns) about God’s love were inconsistent with his actions.  His father’s failure to appreciate that love or trust in a relationship as a verb nurtured distrust, resentment, and misunderstanding.  In the absence of trust, love is restricted and temperamental. 
 
Many Christians experience restricted or temperamental love for God at some point along their spiritual journey.  A Pastor or layperson can influence an individual’s relationship with God in the same way Mack’s father influenced Mack’s relationship with God.  For example, individuals may witness believers using their faith as a noun rather than as a verb. People may attend services at various Churches where people praised Jesus in everyway, but fail to actively participate in their faithful journey outside of reading the Scripture or on Sunday.  The disconnection between words and actions may cause others to doubt the teacher understands God and the Scriptures taught.  Mack’s father was a “religious people” who talked about God, but struggled to exhibit God’s love in his daily actions.  As Mack follows along his journey in The Shack, the reader can appreciate his struggles in his relationship with God.  The struggle is part of the learning process and the lessons or mistakes allow for deeper relationship and a greater appreciation for God’s pure love.
 
Also, Paul Young’s choice of characters is insightful and provides interesting material for additional conversation.  For example, Missy’s character provides a wealth of discussion.  People admire or love children because we all start off or are closest to God’s reflection of pure love in the early stages of life. As we grow and life presents various challenges or disappointments, the light of pure love may diminished.  The happiest people are those who have maintained the childlike ability to love in the face of the most tragic experience.

Needless to say, I would enjoy reading this book and recommend it for any group.

I heard a lot about this book, mainly from the rising popularity of the movie “Precious”. Initially I did not have much interest the movie, but a co-worker brought the book to work so I took a look at it. It was an easy read and looked very well written, so I decided to check it out.

I've been reading a lot of criticism of Oscar Wao.

What people sometimes don't like: use of the "n-word", profanity, sexual imagery, representation of women characters, no translated Spanish, obscure references. None of that bothered me. In particular, I thought the Spanish-English combination was pretty cool-- it had a cadence; it's a language in and of itself. Plus, the way that Spanish was presented makes a lot of implicit commentary about language, power, and culture. It puts the "assumed" reading public on new ground where different types of knowledge, norms, and expectations exist. No "let me translate my experience for the American public". No, no. Oscar Wao isn't a touristy, voyeuristic, reading experience about the "other".

No.

It's: this is Santo Domingo, no explanation, no justification, no rationale to "make this fit" (for who?). It's: on with the story. It's: this is diaspora New York. This is diaspora New Jersey. Welcome to the diaspora. Welcome Haiti. Welcome Cuba. Hello immigration. This book is thrumming with the energy of the sometimes uneasy, sometimes playful, sometimes creative, sometimes oppressive marriage of cultures that's always evolving in the Caribbean.

Long story short, I think all of that (profanity etc) adds up to capturing, more often than not, the type of Watcher Yunior is, the types of things that Yunior chose to report. There's more than one way to tell a story. Yunior tells the story of the Leon's in a particular way. For a specific reason. It'd be a different story and voice if Beli wrote it.The Uatu the Watcher/Yunior and Galactus/Trujillo connection to the novel is pretty cool, too. It's a neat way to go about narrative and storytelling.

One of the most provocative ideas that's floating around Oscar Wao is this idea about comics, sci-fi, and fantasy as being genres that are ready made to tell the story and history of communities effected by the diaspora, that are still living in the very real shadow of it.

Diaz says:

"What's ironic is that no one internalizes social norms in society as do minorities in that society. So in other words, whatever criteria there is for literature, nobody follows that more to the letter, I think, than people who are literary minorities. There is this kind of colonial baggage, as Homi Bhabha always reflects, the idea that the Indian becomes more English than the Englishman. I think it, in some ways, has limited our usage of narrative that would be revelatory, or transformative in our artistic production. Again, I don't want to say that everyone has been limited in this way, but I think it's true in general. So that if you're a person writing about a Dominican diasporic experience, to hew too closely to canonical ideal of what literature is would limit you. The conventions of what is canonically known as literature can't hope to encompass these radical experiences that you undergo when living in a diaspora like the Dominican one. And sometimes the only way to describe these lived moments, the surreality and ir-reality of some of the things that people like myself have experienced, is through lenses like science fiction. The joke is you're Dominican living in the Dominican Republic in 1974, and you get transported to the U.S. from the campo, where you started out living in an open air house with no electricity, with no bathroom, living in a world that's extremely closed and sealed in some ways, with no access to education, and almost a sense of living outside of time, though of course you never will live outside of time. It's the sense you then get, when you're transported to a place like central New Jersey. I think the narrative that would logically be most useful would be not only space travel, traveling between two planets, but time travel. Jumping between two entire existences, two entire temporal moments, is what it feels like. These conventions you find in science fiction are awesome in trying to discuss some of the tensions and weirdness of being a person of color, being a third world person traveling between the third world and the first world. And even the terms "first world" and "third world" already imitate science fictive travel between planets. So I'm like, why not? Those resonances are right there. It's like having this huge, wonderful, gorgeous, rich, ripe, delicious mango hanging over your desk. But because you've been trained that mangoes are not the kind of food that one eats at a desk, you just willfully ignore them. How could you ignore such wonderful interconnections? And thatís why I find science fiction important and useful."

I think this is an amazing book. Obviously, I can go on about it ad infinitum. It's a novel that can't be exhausted. My favorite character besides Oscar, is La Inca.

Edward P. Jones (African American), a very different kind of writer than Diaz, makes an interesting commentary about being a writer of color in his novel "The Known World". It's a novel, on the surface, about slavery. But so much more. Interestingly, he's got elements of fantasy and the realistic supernatural in his novel, too. Uses it as a way to talk about history, language, culture, the present. Hm. He won the Pulitzer for it. I think Edward P. Jones might be the greatest American writer living. That's another story, another day.

Yay Diaz!

This book blows my mind. Absolutely blows it.

Colson Whitehead, an African American writer (and winner of the MacArthur "genius" grant), recently wrote a novel called Sag Harbor.   It's a coming of age story about an upper middle class black kid in the 80's. During an interview with NPR, Whitehead talked about how Diaz influenced his novel, especially the structure of it. Fascinating stuff.

A few readers have complained about Diaz's style, though. Not everyone is in love with it.

I'm thinking about identity a lot as I'm reading Diaz.

Culturally, Diaz identifies as Dominican and African. In America, that translates, I think, depending on who's interviewing him, being Dominican. Diaz, however, when it comes to "being an American", is quick to tell people that as much as he's Dominican, he's African. And. Well. In America, as an African, he also identifies as black. And American. So. Four strong cultural identities running through the Diaz pen. I think for Diaz what gives the identities their unique flavor is history. Language, too.

Which. It's kind of crazy to think about the influence of the Diaspora on the Carribean vs. the States. Rita Dove made an interesting comment once about the Carribean experience of the Diaspora...something along the lines of (paraphrasing)..."it creates a schizophrenic identity."

So. Identity. Also thinking about how within each cultural home that we have, there are even more slots that we're put in: the cool kid, the nerd, the beautiful one, the popular one, the pious, the hardhead, the clown, the witty one, the "community girl", the quiet one, the talented one...on and on.

Diaz says a little bit about what he's trying to explore cultural identity-wise (and so much more) in Oscar Wao:

"My interest is that the Dominican Republic was just kind of a proxy for talking about what I consider The American Condition. I know that the book makes strong arguments to point out that they are analogous, that the Dominican Republic and the United States are just so uncommon. For me, it was more that The American Condition cannot be understood if we only deploy realistic narrative lenses to understand it. The American Condition is the condition of Melville, it’s the condition of Faulkner, and it’s the condition we’re always talking about, and yet all of them, in their attempts to embrace what we call The American Condition, they all end up having to deploy bizarre narratives, because otherwise you can’t get your arms around it fully. Part of what makes Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison very interesting is that both of them understand and are interested in The American Condition – which is apocalyptic, which is a wrestling between curse and blessing – and I feel like their work is a perfect example of how we cannot understand ourselves without deploying a full range of narrative devices we’ve invented, and that includes science fiction, horror, fantasy, because it’s only there that we admit what’s really happened to us. It’s only in science fiction that you actually get the preoccupations that 99% of the people live under, which is totalizing power. If you only read literary traditional fictional work, you would never think there are any dictators.”

Satrapi is my kind of girl: smart, open, willful, brave, independent, imaginative, creative. Speaks her mind.

So far, I like Persepolis.

I've started reading a book about Shii'sm in Islam-- the book, more than anything, is a crash course in history as it's happened through the lens of Muslims. Iran is mentioned a lot. The book has helped me to read Persepolis in light of a fuller historical picture and context. Iran has a long, complicated, history. I was surprised to find that Iran is more secular than I've understood it to be...and that there's also a history of outside rule. The Iranian people have been "taken over" many times. So. In that spirit, it seems as if the current political broo-ha in Iran isn't anything new to Iranians. Anyway. In some ways, Iran's position in the Middle East is completely unique.

Thanks to Satrapi, I finally get what's behind the animosity between Britain and Iran. I've also found out that Iran is a country that has a lot of political variety.

It's strange to see myself as an American on the periphery of Satrapi's narrative. Strange to see what America looks like through her eyes.

With that said, one thing reading Satrapi has helped me to be clear about: the older I get, the more relevant history becomes. I think history has demonstrated that people can make the mistake of being passionate about the wrong things. Sometimes those mistakes have a high price. And. For better or worse, history doesn't offer too many explicit instructions about what to do about those kinds of mistakes, what to do about the consequences of our mistakes. Only clues. People have to work out the lessons of history in the present.

The next page that I read in Persepolis begins:

"Marji, run to the basement! We're being bombed!"

Today, I'll start reading Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi.

Persepolis is an illustrated coming-of-age-autobiography. It's a graphic novel/graphic memoir about Satrapi's experience growing up during the Iranian Revolution.

Usually the subject matter for graphic novels and comics stays in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy-- things that most people (except the geekiest among us) would consider "made up" or "not true". I'm totally in love with the idea of using graphic novels to tackle experiences that happen to people in real life.

I hope the graphic novel becomes more accepted as a literary genre.

Comics and graphic novels have been the new "in" thing, in some progressive contemporary writing circles: think people like Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Russell Edson. Jonathan Safran Foer, for instance, in a novel he wrote about a kid who tries to come to terms with his fathers death on September 11th, includes a comic flip book at the end of the novel. When you flip the pages, you witness (thanks to an interpretation drawn by the main character's child-like hands) an airplane hit the Towers, the Towers catch on fire, and a stick figure of the kid's father falling, falling, falling.

The name of that novel btw, is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Foer is a smart, refreshing, writer. Funny, too. His first novel, Everything is Illuminated, is brilliant. It's all about being Jewish (Foer is) and trying to understand your family's history and culture from the perspective of a twenty-something who was raised on MTV.  I think Foer wrote his first novel when he was 28. To most writers, pumping out a novel in your 20's is young-- young or not, Foer is the real deal. He's oh...32 now?

Back to Satrapi.

Lots of provocative things going on when a writer chooses to weave autobiography and graphic novels together. I'm interested in listening to Satrapi and finding out why she made the choice.

On the cover of Persepolis, there's an illustration of Satrapi in veiled head covering. She's frowning. Flipping through the book, I see more than a few pages that deal with the restrictions and reasons and rebellions and support that come with the veil in Iran. The controversy of the veil (what it means, how for some it has religious meaning and for others not) is here to stay. So. I'm all ears about how Satrapi weighs in. From my quick skim of the book, I get the feeling that it wasn't a welcome addition in Satrapi's family.

The current, on-going, rupturing in Iran that was triggered by the elections has been the subject of a few Satrapi tweets and blogs about Iranian politics.

In the preface to Persepolis, Satrapi writes:

"...This old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from truth. This is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don't want those Iranians who lost their lives in prison defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten."

Satrapi's preface explains, in a quick nutshell, a lot about Iran. It's another lens to view the current political and social climate....

My first Diaz encounter happened when I was an undergrad. I had the pleasure of reading his short story collection, Drown, for a Contemporary Lit course.

For what it's worth, here's part of the reason why I think the novel deserves the Pulitzer...it also happens to be what I'm mulling over "Cover Thoughts" wise, too:

Oscar Wao is a tremendous achievement. Writers of color owe Diaz a profound round of thanks. Toni Morrison does a good job of explaining why, in a preface to a collection of essay-lectures that she gave at Harvard back in the 90's. Even though Morrison occasionally poses the "why" in terms of white and black, I think it applies to Diaz. Morrison says:

"For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial 'unconsciousness' or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writely imagination of a  black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be "universal" or race-free? In other words, how is "literary whiteness" and "literary blackness" made and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be 'humanistic'? When, in a race-conscious culture, is that lofty goal actually approximated? When not and why? Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer...Thinking about these matters has challenged me as a writer and a reader. It has made both activities harder and infinitely more rewarding. It has, in fact, elevated and sharpened the delight I take in the work that literature, under the pressure that racialized societies level on the creative process, manages to do. Over and over again I am amazed by the treasure trove that American literature is. How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art. How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for an mined a shareable language for the words to say it."

I think Diaz has found "the words to say it."

Not only does Diaz say "it," but I think he establishes, almost single-handedly, the legitimacy of a literary canon that does not assume "literary whiteness" or the narrative conventions of "literary whiteness." Remarkably (and maybe for some it's no surprise), resisting that assumption includes others-- it doesn't exclude.

The literary canon that Diaz envisions finds common ground, for better or worse, because of the Diaspora and Middle Passage...I love that Diaz never forgets that both events had ramifications and meaning (even if it's romanticized) for writers who aren't labeled "of color".

Derek Walcott (a West Indian poet), who's words appear as an epigraph in Oscar Wao ("Either I'm a nobody or I'm a nation"), goes further, saying:

"So any writer coming from the Caribbean...any book of his that comes out...the easiest thing is to make it referential: to say, well this is like Dickens; this is like Steinbeck. That is so stupid and so lazy, because obviously, since the language is English, the influence of any writer is universal. The influence of William Saroyan on English is universal. On Hemingway. On Steinbeck. It was equally a heritage of someone working in the English language as much as anyone, even if you were Indian or Black. We're talking now about...an English critic saying, 'My God, here's a novelist from Ife. Here's a novelist from Hong Kong. Here's a novelist from Toronto. Here's one from Malaysia. Here's another from the Port of Spain. What is happening? What is happening to English literature?' It isn't that it is getting colored, whatever. It is suddenly the confrontation of this dam that broke; this writing coming out is of very fine quality."

Walcott later states:

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

I think Diaz understands that-- and understands that for some writers and critics, the novel has asserted that the English language is "special property"; "special property" that comes with a host of narratives, stories, histories, cultural beliefs, and maybe most importantly: silences and amnesia. The result of his insight? Oscar Wao.

That's what I'm thinking about as I'm looking at the cover of Oscar Wao. I can't wait to read it a second time. 

It has been hard to put this book down. Reading about Ayaan's youth in Somalia has been part history lesson and part awakening for me about what goes on in other parts of the world.  This books begins with a sort of genealogical record of her family. In Somalia, it was important to recite your clan's line back hundreds of years. And Ayaan could do so. She was the oldest of three children from her mother. Her mother rebelled against an arranged marriage and married a man she loved.  Ayaan's father was a political leader of sorts. Because of him, their family moved out of Somalia because of rising political tension over Somalia keeping its ties to the clans or becoming one state as the president put it. But many people were fighting the president for many reasons.  So,  her family fled to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and later Kenya.

Those are just some of the facts but the details of her childhood involve intense beatings from her mother, an even stricter grandmother who had her circumcised without her mother's permission, and a beating by a teacher that caused bleeding in her skull and hospitalization.   

In Somalia and Ethiopia, Christianity is spreading . Her family had told her that covering her entire body was important because if a man sees a woman's neck or leg, it could throw them into a frenzy and cause chaos in society.   

To her mother and grandmother, her life's goal is to be a good Muslim girl and obeying the teachings of the Quran.  But she is struggling with what she's seeing: girls taken out of school at age 12 to get married, going through puberty and having questions about her religion.

Ayaan was able to finish school and go on to secretary school because her father was away or in prison so he had not arranged a marriage for her.  But he comes back and the inevitable happens.  Ayaan is being sent to Canada to meet a well meaning man who is supposed to be her husband.  She's making plans to run away. I've come to the half way point in the book, because now it says her Freedom.   

I checked this book out in February 2007. How do I know that? Because I had a fine on my library card for it when I went to check it out again.  I have seen this book in passing many times over the past two years.  Most recently, a passenger on the Metro had it in hand.  The determined stare of Ms. Ali on the cover never left my mind.  The axiom that magazines subscribe to has truth to it:  people respond to seeing the eyes.   If you want to sell a cover, show the eyes.  Her eyes stood out to me.

I know very little about her except that she was a political leader born in Somalia and was now living under armed guards in the United States.  She looked rather young.

I'm reading this book because I want to know who she is, what she has done and what that piercing yet gentle stare means.