The Weakness of the Inner Sanctum

              I recently finished reading the book "Picture Perfect" by Jodi Picoult. It was the first of her novel that I have read that was not a murder mystery. This reeled me in because the aspect that I usually find most appealing about her books is the fact that she integrates the technicalities of a murder trial with the heart wrenching backstory. Putting in stark contrast the emotional bloody throbbing of human nature with the cold, measured precision of courtroom proceedings. When picking up the book, I expected it to be derivative of these earlier books, but it was extremely different.
            "Picture Perfect" follows the tale of Cassie Barret. Or should I say, Cassie Rivers. Cassie is intelligent, mildly attractive, sensible and quiet in mien but what sets her apart from most women is that she is married to the most famous movie star in the United States, Alex Rivers. This is not to say that they have a perfect life. Oh no, Cassie is haunted by dreams of her childhood best friend, whom she watched die and her alcoholic mother, while Alex still cannot separate himself from the boy whose father forced him to "be a man" by spending days in snake infested bayous and earning bruises in New Orleans. In fact, the reason that Alex became an actor, as Picoult basically tells us, is to escape the person who he has become. That he does not know how to be someone decent, and this tortures him. Tortures him so much, in fact, that it leads him to brutally beat Cassie for something as benign as leaving his sneakers (of which he has many pairs as he is a star of epic proportions) outside. Cassie "escapes" by running away with her new friend (and possibly romantic interest?) Will Flying Horse to his families' reservation in South Dakota. But eventually returns to Alex, only to "leave him for good."
                If you could not tell by the tone of my summary, the book disgusted me. Its not to say that JOdi Picoult's books are the epitome of valid and layered adult fiction, but she is better than the trash I found myself reading. For one, Cassie and Alex's love story was not believable. They "got married six weeks after {they} met," and Cassie became totally integrated into his life as a movie star. They had the perfect wedding in Tanzania with all movie star trappings and moved back to Alex's mansion. There were no minute details to make it believable or even plausible. And even while I cringed at Cassie's beatings, it repulsed me how spineless she was, how SHE apologized to this man who broke her ribs for breaking a glass. How even after moving away for six months, she still returned to his side, a shadow that moved with him wherever he went. She continued to shape her form around his needs, becoming more of him than of her. I tried to understand  by comparing it to an addiction, you have to never have another drink of snort again to be completely clean, you can't let yourself slip up like Cassie did.
              But I guess I don't understand love, I can't fathom any emotion that would make Cassie come back; any gift. How can Cassie still call Alex her love? her other half? One can never fully trust someone again after they have damaged you so completely. There is an irrevocable difference between what has come before, and what life will proceed as. Cassie is spineless, and she has dug her own grave. By refusing to get out of her abusive entanglement with Alex she has sacrificed herself, her innermost sanctum to his wills and promises. And while her neck is "hung with a necklace of purple bruises" what is most violated is her soul.

Playing with Power

There is blood, so much blood beneath the polished facade of the Peoples Revoltutionary Council. Blood of the people of Sessamekesh, blood of fellow government officials and most of all, the blood of the royal line. An army uniform is a good hiding place for a snake. And a snake that hides well, in the case of General Citizen and his guards. In the book, Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card, many such snakes hide or come to light depending on the skill and rank of the uniform that is its host. However the thing is, in governments, there are usually many snakes. So what happens when there are too many of these reptilian miscreants in a room? The snakes kill! Behind the analogy of this post and the many subtle metaphors in the book, an underlying theme in Orson Scott Card's creation is the power struggles and revolts within the corrupt structure known as the "people's government. Which is not so aptly named as the "people" do not realized what "their" government was up to.

               One example of this theme is General Citizen. When Rigg is arrested by General Citizen, he begins to trust the solid, clever and almost fatherly figure in his crumbling life. What Rigg doesn't know about General Citizen is where his loyalties lie. This uncertainty and slight vagaries about his general person make Rigg find it hard to believe that the General is totaly on the government's side. It turns out Rigg is partially right about General Citizen, he is actually working with Rigg's mother, the former queen Hagia Sessamin, to overthrow the People's Government and return the royals to power in Sessamekesh. After finding this out, Rigg trusts Hagia and Citizen and this turns out to be his downfall. Already the corruption of youth and not only government is apparent in the book: a boy cannot trust his mother because of the power struggles in the government. Rigg has been through so much in his life, but this still takes him by surprise, although he does not say this outright. As the male heir to the royal throne he expects some plotting towards him, but not the backstabbing of his own mother. Up until this moment Hagia's actions have seen maternal and she has expressed the desire to become a "true mother." But Hagia bearly knows Rigg so she justifies her actions as secluded from her hormones. I think that Rigg's mother is drunk with the idea of ruling the empire so she forgets her love for family and exchanges it with a lust for power,   a common theme that the royal house has fallen for for. Their possesions have been taken from them, they are at the mercy of the common people. No wonder Hagia Sessamin wants to break out.

                 Correlating with this fictional government, common theme in historic governments has been power struggles.I compare this book to the movie J. Edgar. As much as this movie is, obviously, about the head of the FBI himself (J. Edgar Hoover), it is also a movie about political manuevers, personal and proffesional relationships and the thirst for power that encompasses almost all of us. This is evidenced as General Citizen and Hagia Sessamin are supposedly in love, which is why Hagia chose him to lead the revolt.  This correlates with the relationship between Hoover and his assistant Clyde Tolson as depicted in the movie. Is it romantic? Political? There are many disagreements about these two men, but one thing is certain. Their relationship affected Hoover in some way and his politics which sparked controversy and much criticism. In my opinion, I think that you know you are in trouble when leaders make important decisions based on personal relationships.

Power is a huge player in any organization or even family. Who holds the power, what they do with it and how are all extremely crucial to any group. This is why the power struggles in Pathfinder are such a huge part of the book. In a corrupt government, power is the chief prize. Hagia and Citizen both hope to gain power and Rigg is caught up in the middle. I guess there is always power to be taken, but it is you who must decide whether to use it for good or bad.

Sonnet

A mirror: a bottomless, faceless plane

A faithful audience for which to vogue

An alter upon which tears fall like rain

A ruler of impressions: none go rogue

An endless love affair: thankless and cruel

Thank god mirror impressions are fleeting

You are boiled down to naught but gruel

A slew of flaws with one chair seating

But what of beauty? Impressions pleasing

Showing your countenance fully in bloom

A tantalizing glance, mirror teasing

Where high self esteem and pride now assume

A tool for your id, measures volume; mass

Yet what is this fateful mirror but glass

Claudette Colvin: An Unheard Shout

         Recently I finished the book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose. I had been devoid of reading material after I finished the books on my kindle and was wanting for some new stories to sweep me up into their fantastical and implausible world where everything turns right in the end and the characters either always know exactly what to say or turn muteness and societal awkwardness into something worth reading about. I picked up this book thinking that it was the fictional antidote to my boredom but found something entirely different. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice was about a civil rights figure, a pioneer, who stood up for her rights and spurred the segregated African American community of Montgomery Alabama by refusing to . And all at the age of 16. However, Colvin did not stop there, even after facing a difficult teenage pregnancy with a married man, Colvin struck out at segregation again when she was asked by lawyer Fred Gray to testify in the groundbreaking trial Browder vs. Gayle. I was shocked. It wasn't because I had thought the book to be fictional, but because I had never heard of her before.
              In Social Studies lessons on segregation and the civil rights movement Rosa Parks is the name most referred to, or even little Ruby Bridges, commonly known as the first black child to attend a white school. I have admired these people all my life, but Claudette Colvin was a teenager like myself and broke barriers 9 months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. I think the reason why Colvin is so unknown today is because she was a teenager. Teenagers were known to be unruly and irrational. Therefore it was easy for white people to ignore as just another rash act by a black teenager rather than a formal protest for her rights and a stand for her people. While this was the reason that many whites ignored it, I also believe that the african american community did not want a teenager at the face of their civil rights movement as teenagers are changeable and not recognized as conscious and educated adults that a court of law might take seriously. As Hoose states in the book, "{Rosa Parks} wasn't a teenager....{or} feisty and emotional as Claudette was rumored to be..." Both of these subtle motivations probably prompted her fading away into the back pages of history books, as well as the fact that she got pregnant right afterwards and, in her words, "they all {the NAACP} turned their backs on me when I got pregnant." Claudette herself felt bitter at the time and remembers thinking, "Hey I did that {refusing to give a seat to a white person on the bus} months ago and everybody dropped me."
                I think that teenagers not being respected as valid members of society and having their actions dismissed as merely hormonal or rebelliousness is a problem in todays society and was a problem even back then. Young people have important things to say and they deserve to be heard. Dismissing someone just because they are young is not only insulting (as Colvin felt), but also damaging to a society that might have benefited from the ideas spoken.  Rosa Parks might have been a better candidate for spurring the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6 because she was "widely known as an activist," "respected by both the black professional class and ordinary workers," "light skinned but not white," "and struck almost everyone she met as a contained, pleasant, committed and levelheaded individual," but I believe that Claudette did not deserve her chameleon like status as someone who was not important. I am so glad that this book was written so that the world can know of her heroism and courage, even though she was a teenager.

Power: Poetry by Martin Espada

“Power changes everything.” Says Libba Bray in her book, “The Sweet Far Thing.”  Martin Espada’s poems agree. In Espada’s works, “New Bathroom Policy at English High School,”  “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson,” and “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz California May 3, 1877,” power is a recurring theme. To the subjects of the poems, it is their security, their identity and their morality. As this theme threads though all of the poems, Espada is trying to communicate the effects of power on humans, their relationships with each other, and even with death.

Martin Espada speaks of power and authority in his poem, “New Bathroom Policy at English High School.” The poem first speaks of a group of boys talking openly in Spanish in their school bathroom while, unbeknownst to them, their principal sit in a toilet stall. Just Espada specifying the man’s rank over the students, making who has the authority clear, establishes a power dynamic. When the principal hears his name, he doesn’t understand the context of it, but it vexes him, as Espada says, “it constipates him.” The reason the principal feels so antagonized by this is that the boys have taken away his power over them. “The only word he recognizes/is his own name,” and therefore he has lost the power to understand what they are saying or what they think of him. He is afraid of this and the loss of power makes it so he feels repressed and insecure in his own authority. To “relax” he must regain his control and power by flexing the muscles of his authority, deciding to “ban Spanish/in the bathrooms.” Only now can he relax. Authority is a necessity in this poem.

            Power features heavily again in Martin Espada’s, “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson.” The poem describes the subject’s reaction to when someone mispronounces his name. He wants to “comb his beard to a point,” and “push his beret at an angle.” In other words look like the Spanish revolutionary icon from Cuba, Che Guevara. He wants to hijack a busload of Midwestern republican tourist and force them to chant in Spanish. Although some may see this as a gross overreaction, it is a power trip.  When people mispronounce your name, especially one evocative of your heritage and culture (as I believe the subject’s is because of the title of the poem, “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson.”) it is taking away the power you have over your identity and the power your culture holds. The subject in this poem wants to re-establish the authority he has over who he is and the power his culture holds in the world by forcing those stereotyped as most ignorant (Midwestern republicans) to acknowledge his culture and identity. He takes away their power.

            “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz California May 3, 1877” describes exactly what it is titled- a terrible slaughter set back when such atrocities were common. When even jail held no power over the self proclaimed vigilantes- a group of citizens who take the law into their own hands. In the 1800s, still a time of brutal racism, vigilantes had the ultimate power, as Espada shows. Each stanza starts with “more than,” leading the reader to understand that “more than” all of the horrible details of the deaths of the Mexicanos, was what happens in the last stanza (the only one that does not begin with “more than.”). The last stanza describes how what “remain”s are the murderers, who crowd “into the photograph” they have taken to commemorate the event. The vigilantes have clearly held the power throughout the poem, but now they take away even the power that death has. They refuse to acknowledge the atrocity by taking the photograph, making the deaths secondary to the camaraderie. Power is solely theirs in Martin Espada’s poem.

            Throughout Espada’s “New Bathroom Policy at English High School,”  “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson,” and “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz California May 3, 1877,” power is the necessity of life and all are susceptible to its lures. Through powerful verse, Espada shows us how most people crave power and go to ends such as killing to have it. But why do humans desire to feel powerful? To control? Maybe it is because we are afraid of what happens if do not have the power, if other people make decisions for us. This is probably why there are dictators or gangs, people like the principal at “New English High School,” willing to do whatever it takes to have power in their hands.

Is it Logical to Love?

I was listening to "Winter Song" by Sara Boreallis and Ingrid Michealson today. It was a lovely day and I had just finished a new book, House Rules by Jody Picoult. House Rules is a book about a 18 year old boy who is charged with the murder of his social skills teacher. Now, you may as well ask, why would an 18 year old boy need a social skills tutor? The answer is that Jacob (the boy) has been diagnosed with Asbergers syndrome. Aspergers is "an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests" according to Wikipedia. Aspergers, in terms of how it is presented in the book, makes Jacob take everything literally. For example, if you told Jacob that his story tore your heart up, he would respond by explaining to you that one cannot tear one's heart into pieces; because you would need a knife and you did not have one. In addition and due to this, Jacob cannot read social cues. For example, Jacob could talk for about 10 minutes about dinosaurs and if you said "oh look at the time!" in an attempt to escape the conversation, he would plough right on. He would not see that he is boring you. All of these factors add up to make him seem more than a bit odd to other people.

 Perhaps Jacob's most obvious symptoms of Asbergers, however, is the fact that he does not show any other emotion that anger when he does not get what he wants. When Jacob is informed that his tutor has died, Jacob says "Okay." Nothing more, nothing to show how if he missed her, the closest friend he had. When asked why he did not show any emotion, Jacob replies that his showing of emotions would not help anybody and that he knew he was sad so what was the point of showing it? Everyone in the book thinks that Jacob is a freak because he doesn't show emotion, however, I think that Jacob just has an overactive sense of logic. This means that he doesn't show emotion because the logic in his head tells us that there is no point. For most of us, our logic is nullified by grief and we cry and express our emotions. However, Jacob's body tells him this would be a waste of energy and would not benefit anybody. However, what his machine of a body has overlooked is that his showing of grief would have comforted his mother and brother. It would have showed them that he was a human being, something that they are always hoping for.

I compared this to Winter Song, the music I was listening to as I finished the book. In Winter Song a line says, "They say that things just cannot grow, beneath the winter snow. Or so I have been told." I took this to mean that in the coldness and hardness of winter, emotions such as love cannot thrive. I think that Jacob's Aspergers is like snow. I think that this is because he is so seemingly unfeeling- cold to love, and logical. His overactive sense of  logic, due to his Aspergers only cares about facts and measurements. Love does not play into logic, because it cannot be measured exactly and it seems he cannot feel it.  Most evidence points to the line being true, that love cannot exist under Jacob's disease, yet this is only how it seems on the outside. However, "beneath the winter snow," Jacob obviously cared about Jess, his tutor. He logically figured out that, due to his responses to Jess, he loved Jess. However, his logical body does not allow him to acknowledge this love, and therefor the grief that goes along with it. Pe

Logic vs. Love. Its such an interesting comparison. Much of the time it seems such opposites cannot be allowed to coexist in the spectrum of humanity. There are many books that deal with logic versus love, without the Aspergers element. However, in most of these books, the main character gets over his/her logical side and learns to love. What makes House Rules different is, the Aspergers element, the thing that makes it impossible for him to get over himself and love. I feel sorry for Jacob, love is a great thing. His snowy disease sounds like so much of a burden, and doesn't realize what he's missing. However, spring comes after winter. I hope that someday even though it is probably not possible, Jacob's snow will melt and spring will come.

Emma

            I have recently begun reading the book, "Emma" by the celebrated and renowned author Jane Austen. Austen has written many classic novels such as "Sense and Sensibility,""Persuasion" and "Mansfeild Park," to name those most widely known. Reading Jane Austen, or most authors from the time period of the 18th and 19th centuries is a unique experience, so different from the one when I read more recently written novels. Because the book comes from a completely different time period, the vocabulary and terms used in the book such as, "profligate" or "shew" as well as food such as gruel and dances like the quadrille that we are not normally familiar with today. Not only does this effect the reading experience because you have to extrapolate the true meaning from phrases you are unaccustomed to, it transports you into a different time where such words were used and truly absorbs you into the book. Another reason Austen's books are an experience is the rich descriptionary tactics that have been lost, in my opinion, in our modern literature. There are few books today in which you will find pages upon pages of description on a building or landscape or even a person's countenance. The same is true for the long paragraphs of dialogue between characters, our modern language and customs have conditioned us to speak in choppier, shorter turns without the flowery overtures found in Jane Austen's world, although in each there is found vehement expression and colorful languages and slangs of the time. This brings me to another point, how similar and different Jane Austen and our worlds are. Specifically in terms of women's place in society.
               Women as portrayed in Austen's works seem to have a great deal of power in terms of their own affairs and often the affairs of their superiors. Now, I have only read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" out of her books, but both depict father figures or elders of authority who bow to the will and respect the minds of their daughters, albeit sometimes condescendingly. This is evidenced in Mr. Woodhouse (Emma's father)'s description of his daughter, "Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others" and describes her intelligence and talents to anyone who will listen. He admonishes himself to a great degree and seems to put Emma on a pedestal, wiser and cleverer than himself and fit to run his estate and take care of herself all in one. This seemed not to fit with what we know of how past societies thought of women- beneath them and only useful in terms of marriage. This is because of the families' social standing. Richer women often had more say and power than poor women, particularly if the family in question did not have a son. Such is evidenced in the fact that Emma's father did not make her get married, even though she was extremely eligible at age 21, and pretty. Poorer families had to marry their daughters in order to gain better standing in society and often used their female offspring purely as a way to get richer, disregarding their feelings and wishes. In wealthier families the need to get married for money is not as great, and therefor women are given more power and leeway over choice. If Austen had written about less endowed families, then the powerlessness over marriage would have surfaced.
                The ideas of marriage in the teens and early twenties and such powerlessness seems silly today. After all, in this day and age we think women are  equal to men in all ways of the world- but are they? Women still get payed less than men at the same jobs and gender discrimination reigns world wide. I observe this kind of misogamy in school and on television. It seems as though women are "supposed" to be stay at home moms, and if they're not, they're criticized and characterized as being distant and cold towards their children. We have yet to elect a female president and it seems like the only position in the white house America will allow women to hold is the office of "first lady." Further proving my point is the term "slut." When guys have a lot of sex they are "players" and celebrated for their interactions. If a woman has a lot of sex she is labeled a "slut" or a "whore." It seems to me that although society has made some progress in terms of how women are thought of in society, we haven't matured as much from the times of "Emma." In fact, Emma seems to be respect and held in higher esteem than many women today.