Wednesday Words: This one, somehow, seems oddly appropriate to being on vacation overseas…

They were all in high spirits and good humour, eager to be happy, and determined to submit to the greatest inconveniences and hardships rather than be otherwise.

– Jane Austen, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Marrakech!

Hello,

Just a quick note to let everyone know I am writing this from the lovely Riad dar Maia, AKA my hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, where I have just landed for a combination of academic conference + really freakin’ needed vacation. (What proportion those two things are occurring in is something best left undiscussed on this quasi-public forum… but who knew there were such perks to being a demographer? The International Population Conference is high in my esteem already, and it doesn’t even start until Sunday!)

The only YA/kidlit I brought were Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE and Phillip Pullman’s THE SUBTLE KNIFE — I still haven’t read past THE GOLDEN COMPASS! — but, in a break from form, I brought tons of adult fiction. Almost finished THE CITY & THE CITY on the plane — now I can do it in a cafe in Morocco’s city square!

I probably won’t be posting much, in other words, although you never know. Frankly I haven’t been posting much anyway of late, and it’s possible this can I stress again how MUCH-NEEDED this is vacation will be just the thing to get me back into book chatting…

Wednesday Words: Yeah, I’m still thinking the first thing is more damnable.

“I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever.”

– China Mieville, THE CITY & THE CITY

The only essay I know in which a famous author wonders publicly why no one likes his writing.

Seriously, I am a bit puzzled by this essay by Wallace Shawn, AKA The Sicilian from THE PRINCESS BRIDE. I mean, I feel kind of sorry for him! No one likes his plays!!

Actually, it mostly makes me really want to see one of these plays for myself so I can see whether they also make me feel the way he says his audiences, to his surprise, react to his work — angry, “stricken and miserable,” “hurt, or baffled.” …Do they have a plot? Do they have a terrible plot? Do the actors turn to the audience and hurl insults, or weapons? I am so curious.

(I did like this line: “One plays with sentences the way a child plays with matches — because they’re unpredictable.”)

Contrasts.

This review of IraqiGirl puts it well:

Some of Hadiya’s thoughts are universal among teenagers; other concerns stand in sharp contrast to those of her intended American audience. It’s precisely this contrast that will help an American audience empathize with her challenges.

Meanwhile, I may have mentioned that I am, through an odd set of circumstances, a member of my school’s student council. Last night (after about 20 students came to the usually staid and bureaucratic council meeting to speak in favor), the council voted 18 – 0 (with 6 abstentions) to pass my “legislation”:

The Associated Students of Madison supports its LGBT students by supporting the National Equality March on October 11 in Washington, DC, whose single demand is: Equal protection under the law in all 50 states for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Nice! Now time to get rolling on fundraising for the few hundred students who would like to get to DC if only we can get the money!!

The vagaries of memory… in a narrator?

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.

If my previous calculus textbooks had been like this, I would probably be good at calculus.

Papers should also be required to be neat and legible. They should not look as if a stoned fly had just crawled out of an inkwell.

– Serge Lang, A FIRST COURSE IN CALCULUS, 5th edition

I bought this one on recommendations on the internet, and so far it is so much better than the actual required text for the calc class I’m quasi-taking. Even if the reason I got it so cheap is that the printer didn’t separate the pages right. I like to think it adds a little rustic adventure to my calc experience as I ponder how to turn the page…

Wednesday Words: Oh, what a beautiful moooooorning….

Mornings would be beautiful if they didn’t happen so early in the day.

– David LaRochelle, ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT… GAY

Today’s Wednesday Words are painfully appropriate, since a friend is picking me up at 7:15 in the A.M. (I’m a grad student so I don’t have to do things like that!)

And the title of this post comes from the awfullest of my dad’s ways of waking me up as a kid… his own mother had sung it unironically.

Free Books! …and makeup?

Lenore is running a contest to win free books… and makeup. Not to mention an interesting interview on how the cover of THE STOLEN ONE (the book prompting the contest, which I have not read) came about.

What are y’all’s favorite covers? TWILIGHT is an all-time favorite of mine — I picked it up, before I’d heard any of the hype, because of the alluring apple image. Sometimes choosing books that way doesn’t work out; THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS had a cover that grabbed me (mostly for its fairy-tale imagery, which suits the book), but the story was a bit meh. It set up a kind of cool fairy tale world, but there weren’t enough surprises (the evil characters stayed evil and you knew who they were from the get-go, etc), which made it feel moralistic, in the sense that it reduced the story to its moral, which as I recall was something about not being selfish, or something. I suppose that’s a bit true to fairy tale conventions, but I like my fairy tales, these days, with a twist.

I’ve already talked about how much I love IRAQIGIRL’s cover. We originally had a very different design, but I prefer the one we ended up with. (It helps that I like pink!)

(Click the picture to see IraqiGirl’s cover in larger size.)

Shooting the moon

Sorry for the sparse posting. Although I have about eight different gay teen romance posts half-written, they have to wait, because I am spending today learning math in my backyard.*

I am not particularly good at math because I have no intuition for it. But I am excellent at logic, and therefore I believe I can learn to be, well, good enough at math. But after being very frustrated by my math textbooks — I can do many of the problems, but I have no sense of what they’re actually telling me — I decided to google around for intuitive explanations of basic math. Why didn’t I do this earlier?

Therefore I leave you with this quote, from my great find of the day:

Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.

(The site has excellent explanations of exponential and logarithmic functions too; the above link is to a page on calculus. And once again, as I read this stuff, I think about how I could have been good at math, and am sad. But it’s not too late! Dry-as-dust textbooks can’t keep me down!!)

* It’s surprisingly relaxing reading textbooks when you can do it in the shade next to a lake… oh, did I mention that my backyard is on a lake?! I love my new home. Also, this is the part of the day when reading in the backyard with a big mug of tea becomes reading in the backyard with a big glass of wine. Which also definitely improves the math experience.