Paul Harris, 2009, 318 p.

In 2005/2006, while my Mother was in end-stage Alzheimer’s, Dad hired some home care workers to help with the day-to-day caregiving.  Most of Mom’s home health aides were originally from Africa, and one of them was from Sierra Leone.  J___ was such a kind-hearted person; the day after Mom died, she stopped by and sat in our kitchen and wept.  She was genuinely concerned about Dad’s well-being, and it was so touching and special to share our grief with this beautiful woman.  Now, in retrospect, I wonder if a few of those tears were for herself and her family.  J___ had always been close-mouthed about her experiences in Sierra Leone, but I know she was haunted by memories of the recent war that had destroyed so much of what was good about her country.  I also know that she was very concerned about the surviving members of her poverty-stricken family, and was working very hard to help some of them make it to the U. S.

I’m enormously pleased I was asked by TLC Book Tours to read and review a novel about Sierra Leone, because of J___ and also because The Secret Keeper is the type of novel that is right up my alley.  The book is chock-full of intrigue and action, it has a well-developed plot and characterizations, and it left me wanting to learn more about the place and its people.

Here’s a quick synopsis:  Danny Kellerman is a British journalist who is tormented by memories of his experiences as a correspondent in Sierra Leone during the civil war.  His ex-girlfriend is killed in a suspicious “roadside robbery,” and Danny travels back to the place that has haunted his dreams for so long to try solve the mystery of her death.  Things do not go well for him, and…  That’s all I’m going to say about the plot, because I don’t want to give it all away!

Paul Harris was a correspondent in Sierra Leone during the conflict, so I’m pretty sure he drew from some of his own experiences while writing The Secret Keeper.  I’m glad he wrote about a subject that must be near and dear to him because it shows.  It’s obvious that his knowledge of the subject added extra depth and moral complexity to this novel.   It’s obvious, too, that he has been a writer all his life.  This doesn’t even seem like a first novel.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think that The Secret Keeper is one of several or many great novels written by Paul Harris.

—————————————————————————————————-

Knowing J___ for the brief period that I did, and knowing that things are often not as good as they appear, I decided to try to find out a bit more about the current state of Sierra Leone.  SL is still struggling to pull itself out of the abyss.  Several human rights groups have recently reported that poverty is as bad as ever, and many children, some as young as 10, are still being used for slave labor in the diamond mines.  {Sigh}  They are often abused, they receive little to no medical care or schooling, and they usually work for over 12 hours a day.  Child soldiers may be gone, but the children still suffer.

It’s such a dilemma–if we boycott diamonds, then familes will starve even more.  If we don’t boycott, these terrible abuses will continue to occur.  We should make Sierra Leone a “do-over” –move everyone out, clean up the mess, and start over again from scratch.  We should do the same with Texas, too ( =  

——————————————————————————————————

Here are some photos of Sierra Leone, past and present:

I don’t know which are worse, the pictures of happy people or the sad photos.  They all make my heart hurt.

Lisa See, 2005, 253 p.

Word up, dawgs!  I’m in the reading spirit again (thank goodness).  For awhile there, I just couldn’t get motivated enough to read more than 15 or 20 minutes a day, but now I’m chugging right along.  I’ve finished four novels in a fairly short period of time, and the first one is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

Lisa (Books on the Brain) recommended it to me, and I’m very grateful to her because I never would have chosen it on my own.  It seemed too “girly” for my taste.  Reading a frou-frou novel such as this could easily spoil my good-ol’-gal reputation (like I have one, har)!  Snow Flower surprised me because it isn’t frou-frou at all.  It’s about women, that’s true, but the women in this novel represent all of us, and the story is a universal one of betrayal and redemption.

Snow Flower is set in 19th century China before, during and after the Taiping Rebellion.  The central characters are two girls who are bound by society’s repressive restrictions in many different ways, the most obvious restriction having to do with the binding of their feet.

This disgusting practice occurred off and on throughout early Chinese history.  I’ve always been quite puzzled by the appeal of these tiny little feet.  If a person can barely walk, then what good is she?  The two things that  bother me the most about foot binding are these:

1.  Mothers agreed to do this to their own daughters.  What if they had refused?  Would they have been beaten?  Humiliated?  That would’ve been a small price to pay for the preservation of their daughter’s physical well-being.  Instead of a Taiping Rebellion, there should’ve been a Mothering Rebellion!

2.  These deformities were considered to be erotic.  I’m pretty sure men would’ve been totally turned-off if they were allowed to see the unbound feet of their wives and concubines. 
——————————————————————————————————————-
There’s so much more to this novel than just icky foot binding.  Snow Flower is essentially about very dysfunctional relationships in a very dysfunctional misogynistic society.  Every relationship in the novel is abusive to one degree or another.  Mothers deny daughters the affection they so desperately need; fathers ignore and/or mistreat daughters because they are lowly females; husbands and mothers-in-law abuse wives; sisters and girlfriends lie and manipulate and hurt each other in order to to advance their positions in society.  Where did the love go?  How did this place and time in Chinese history become so dystopic?  This is just another example of man’s inhumanity, and it further validates my personal philosophy about the human animal:  “Life’s a bitch, and so are you.”
———————————————————————————————————————-
Now for a parting thought or two:

Foot binding isn’t the only stupid and ugly thing that women (and some men) have done in the name of “beauty.”  Here are a few more examples:

Jonathan Littell, 2009, 992 p.

I’ve finally given it up. The only reason I stuck with The Kindly Ones for over 500 pages is because there were a few moments of amazing philosophical brilliance in this novel which left me yearning for more.  So, I would slog through about 70 or 80 pages of Nazi officers (like Overcoatfuhrers and Underwearfuhrers–the Nazis were quite fashionable) discussing their opinions of which Jews to kill and how to kill them in order to get to the next section of brilliance.  I was like a drug addict jonesin’ for a fix, and then finding that the much-anticipated high only lasts for about 30 seconds.  What a let down!  I’m quitting this one cold turkey.

The Kindly Ones wasn’t a complete waste of time, though.  I learned quite a bit from it.  Most of the novel centers on Nazi dogma, especially their conviction that the “Aryan Race” was destined to rule the world.  The Nazis were Social Darwinists, and I decided to look up some information on it at work home during my free time.  The ideal Aryan was tall, fair, strong and athletic.  All other peoples were judged to be inferior, and those who were perceived to be genetically unfit  were disposable (and disposed of during the holocaust).  In case you’ve forgotten, in addition to the millions of Jews that were exterminated, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally/physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian oppositionists and many other “genetically unfit” people were also murdered.

I don’t want to make this into a huge history lesson, but I do want to clarify Social Darwinism a little bit.  Social Darwinists believe that:

1.  Biology governs every living thing, including humans.
2.  Uncontrolled population growth will eventually decimate our ecosystems and natural resources.
3.  Physical and mental traits are largely inherited, therefore humans should reproduce with the fittest mates they can find.
4.  Natural selection and genetics lead to the extinction of inferior species and the evolution of superior species.
5.  All of the above can be applied to society, thus our philosophies, religions, political systems and ethical values can also be attributed to natural selection.

When I finished reading these tenets, I became quite agitated because I believe in the first four of them (the last one is just dumb).  Does this make me a Social Darwinist?  Am I a racist, classist murderer like the monstrous members of the Nazi elite?  Am I some kind of evil skinhead type who should move to Couer d’Alene to help them prepare for their imagined war between Caucasions and African Americans?  Should I move to El Paso and patrol our borders with like-minded gun-totin’ redneck vigilante racists?  Should I become a (gasp) Republican?  I’m a terrible person!

Luckily, as I continued to read about Social Darwinism, I realized that I’m not one of them.  You have to believe in #5 to be a true Social Darwinist.  I really don’t believe in much of anything, especially if it has to do with organized religion or governmental/social constructs, so I’m off the hook.

After breathing a sigh of relief (especially about my close call with Republicanism), I continued on my e-journey, where I found one of the best academic websites I’ve ever run across.  It’s a site filled with Nazi propaganda, and you can find it here.  Some of the words and images are quite disturbing.  Here is an example:

This picture is one of many in a picture book entitled Trust No Fox on His Green Heath and No Jew on His Oath. German children actually read this in school.  Unbelievable!

Here is the text that accompanies the illustration:

But the Germans — they stand foursquare.
Look, children, and the two compare,
The German and the Jew.
Take a good look at the two
In the picture drawn for you.
A joke — you think it is only that?
Easy to guess which is which, I say:
The German stands up, the Jew gives way.
The German is a proud young man,
Able to work and able to fight.
Because he is a fine big chap,
For danger does not care a rap,
The Jew has always hated him!
Here is the Jew, as all can see,
Biggest ruffian in our country;
He thinks himself the greatest beau
And yet is the ugliest you know!

Here’s another picture from the website which further demonstrates the Nazi mindset:

The Jewish man in the picture is depicted as Satan.

That’s enough on this subject.  Next week, I’m going to focus on upbeat subjects, like flowers and butterflies!

William Martin, 2003, 576 p.

I’ve always been disappointed that I never had a chance to go to Harvard, and I don’t know why I feel this way.  I doubt that I would have fit in at all, since Harvard enrollees aren’t typically former high school losers who sit in the school parking lot and smoke and listen to “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” over and over again during lunch breaks.  Harvard students have 4.0 GPA’s.  Harvard students are driven and ambitious.  Harvard students are like Tracy Flick in Election (which is a great book, BTW).  I was the antithesis of a Harvard student, but still…

This may be the reason why I picked up a copy of Harvard Yard.  Perhaps somewhere deep in my subconscious I continue to yearn for that rarefied old-school Harvard atmosphere of tweediness and pipe-smoking and snobbish joviality.  Since I won’t be attending Harvard now or ever, the least I can do is read about the place now and then, and Harvard Yard seemed to be a good choice for some vicarious wish-fulfillment.

The novel is large; 576 pages, and it’s chock-full of history.  Harvard Yard traces the history of Harvard from its founding in the mid-1600’s to present-day.  The novel also has an interconnected modern storyline, in which the protagonist, Peter Fallon, is attempting to locate an unpublished Shakespearean play entitled “Love’s Labors Won.”  The manuscript was gifted to Robert Harvard by The Bard himself and brought to America by his son (and Harvard founder), John Harvard.  John gave it to a protegé before he died, and it was then hidden and lost and found and lost once again over the course of many years.

Harvard Yard is impeccably researched and written with an exactitude that I find to be quite laudable, but it was these very qualities that contributed to my increasing restlessness as I continued to read, and read, AND READ.  It felt like a never ending story.  There is just too much detail, and my interest began to wane as time progresssed.  I think Martin (and his editors) made a huge mistake when they decided to include the Peter Fallon bibliomystery, because it detracts from the voluminous historical fiction aspects of the novel.  Either make it one or the other, dagnabbit!

Overall, though, Harvard Yard was a good read, and I learned a great deal about Harvard and Puritans and The American Revolution and suffragism and civil rights and everything in between.  How long will I retain this knowledge–oops, it’s already gone!  That’s what I get for being a slacker and listening to devil music during my angsty adolescent years.  Now leave me alone–I need to get back to World of Warcraft.  There are a few demons that still need killin’… 

—————————————————————————————————————————-

For your viewing pleasure, here are some photos of Harvard, both old and new: 

                                                            ↑

                                                   Late 1600’s

—————————————————————————————————————————-

                                                           ↑

                                                       1726

————————————————————————————————————————–

                                                             ↑

                                                         1823

————————————————————————————————————————–

                                                     ↑

                                   Harper’s Weekly, 1885

————————————————————————————————————————

                                                         ↑

                                   Physics Faculty, ca 1900

———————————————————————————————————————-

                                                      ↑

                         Harvard College Observatory, 1900

——————————————————————————————————————

                                        Modern Harvard

                                                     ↓

————————————————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————————————–

——————————————————————————————————————

—————————————————————————————————————-

Here are a few other notable Harvard grads:

Lloyd Jones, 2007, 272 p.

I can see why Mister Pip won Australia’s Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2007 (and was shortlisted for the Booker).  This little novel is a beauty, and I was mesmerized from beginning to end.  One of the things I loved most about Mister Pip was its historical context.  Lloyd Jones wrote about an event I had never paid any attention to at all:  the blockade of Bougainville island by Papua New Guinea during the early 1990’s.  The story is about those who were left behind after Bougainville’s more prominent citizens fled to the safety of Australia and New Zealand.  While I was reading, my ignorance saddened me.  Many horrible and terrifying events have occurred all over this planet and I know almost nothing about them.  I think Americans are notoriously undereducated about the world, don’t you?  I don’t know how to fix this for everyone, but I do know how to fix it for myself:  I’ll read more novels like Mister Pip!

The novel is narrated by a young woman named Matilda, who recounts that awful time in the island’s history when almost everyone is gone and all that are left are native women and children and a few rebels fighting off in the distance.  Her village does have one white inhabitant–a bug-eyed gentleman named Mr. Watts.  Now that eveything has settled down a bit, Mr. Watts agrees to start up the school again, and, for want of any educational materials, he begins reading (and teaching) Great Expectations.

The students love the novel, even though they have no real understanding of the world inhabited by Dicken’s characters.  When the novel disappears, Mr. Watts asks them to recount Great Expectations in their own words, so they begin to retell it from their perspective.  The war eventually comes to their village and terrible tragedies occur, but Matilda never forgets Mr. Watts and how he made the world of Dickens become an essential part of village life.  Great Expectations instilled such a sense of wonder and curiousity in Matilda that she grew up to be a well-educated and successful adult. 

The marvelous thing about this novel is that it has so many layers, and as you peel them back, you begin to find more and more hidden meanings underneath.  I don’t think I’ve read a book with so much symbolism since my college days, when I wrote a paper on the underlying religiousity of The Old Man and the Sea.  On the surface, Mister Pip is a coming-of-age tale about a terrible time in a young girl’s life.  If you dig a little deeper, the novel is about jealousy, racism, isolation and ignorance.  If you get all the way down into the guts of the story, you find that Jones is also talking about the capability of storytelling to create and destroy, just as man does.  We procreate and we murder.  We build beautiful monuments, but we destroy nature in the process.  We build beautiful stories, but they in turn destroy the truth.  And what is truth anyway?  Every truth is a fiction, isn’t it?

This novel should be taught in schools.  It, along with other classics, like Lord of the Flies, should be taught to teens.  I think they’d really appreciate it.

———————————————————————————————————————

If I’m enthralled with a novel, I often feel the need to look up its setting or history.  For Mister Pip, I looked up some general information on Bougainville island.  Here are some pictures of the people and the place:

                                                              ↑

Do you notice the proximity to Guadalcanal?  The Japanese and the Americans fought on Bougainville’s soil during WWII as well.

—————————————————————————————————————

                                                         ↑

                   Bougainville Revolutionary Army Guerillas

———————————————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————————————-

Sandra Dallas, 2007, 320 p.

Wowie zowie, this novel is great!  It’s always such a treat to be pleasantly surprised by the unexpected excellence of a book written by a relatively unknown author.  For some inexplicable reason, I kept pushing Tallgrass aside for other reads over and over again.  It was on my sidebar forever.  I don’t know why I was feeling so hesitant about reading it, because it certainly didn’t deserve to be treated that way.  Tallgrass is one of the better novels I’ve read in the past couple of years, and it deserves some respect!

The novel’s characters are a thirteen year old girl named Rennie Stroud, her parents, the often horrible people of Ellis, Colorado, and some Japanese residents of a nearby (fictional) internment camp.  This is the second novel I’ve read about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II (the other was Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, which, by the way, I found to be tedious and trivial). 

Tallgrass is a mutifaceted novel, which is always appealing.  It’s part bildungsroman, part murder mystery, part historical novel, part family saga and part morality play all rolled into one well-written package.  Another appealing aspect of the novel is that it’s written about western people by a western writer (Sandra Dallas lives in Denver).  The townspeople of Ellis typify the western mindset to a tee.  Colorado people won’t give you the time of day until they decide you’re okay.  Colorado people are suspicious and closed-off until they aren’t.  Colorado people are the most frustratingly contradictory people in the world, but if you can win them over to your side, you’ve got the greatest allies in the world.  Ms. Dallas definitely understands Colorado and its people.

The only complaint I have about Tallgrass is that there were times when it seemed to be a bit too derivative of  To Kill a Mockingbird.  This isn’t much of a complaint, because I love TKAM, but there were a few instances when I thought Dallas cut it awfully close.  Other than this niggling little point, Tallgrass is a wonderful read.  

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Years ago, while driving back from Yellowstone, my parents and I stopped at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming to take a look around.  There wasn’t much left of the buildings, but it still gave me an eerie feeling to walk through the desolate site.  I imagined the lonely spirits of some of the people who had been incarcerated there following me and telling me not to forget about them.  I never have.  Germany wasn’t the only country during the Second World War to have concentration camps. 

Here are some pictures I found while surfing today.  Oh, the evil that men do!

                                                       ↑

Amache Internment Camp (Grenada, Colorado)

————————————————————————————————————————

————————————————————————————————————————–

                                                                  ↑

Dr. Seuss drew a bunch of these.  It changes my whole image of him.

————————————————————————————————————————-

“Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags were used to aid in keeping a family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township.” In 1942 Executive Order 9066 ordered the removal of 110,000 civilians of Japanese descent, including 71,000 American citizens, from the western United States, placing them in internment camps.
By Dorothea Lange, Hayward, California, May 8, 1942
National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the War Relocation Authority

—————————————————————————————————————————–

The Pine Deep Trilogy

Jonathan Maberry, 2006-2008, 1588 p.

Have you noticed that vampires seem to be “in” right at the moment?  Books and television and films are swarming with vampires and vampire knockoffs (like zombies, whom I’ve always thought of as vampires’ slow-witted hillbilly cousins).  There are (or were) Angel and Spike and Edward and probably a bunch of other pretty-boy vampires running around glistening from head to toe and causing beautiful women to swoon and fall at their feet.  Vampires are the teen idols of the past couple of decades, but it isn’t only teens that are gaga over these pointy-toothed Lotharios—older women love them too.  All a vampire has to do is stare all twirly-eyed at his chosen prey, and the woman is his, forever and ever and ever, world without end.

I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know why women are so enthralled by vampires.  There is a great deal of latent and overt sexuality in many vampire stories, (most especially Dracula), but does this entirely account for female fascination with these undead bloodsuckers?  Maybe they represent the “bad boy” some women seem to be drawn to time and time again:  the guy who smokes and drinks too much and rides a Harley and listens to hardcore thrash metal.  This guy only smacks his woman around a little bit, at least in the beginning… 

It seems like vampires have been romanticized to such an extent that they don’t even resemble themselves anymore.  What happened to the terrifying Klaus Kinski “Nosferatu” types of vampires from the good old days?  What happened to the slightly more palatable Christopher Lees and Gary Oldmans of yore?  When did these guys become the overly conscientious and nauseatingly remorseful Brad Pitts and Robert Pattinsons?

Vampires are supposed to be EVIL, not pretty.  They do not love; they do not care, they will not save your life—they’ll destroy it.  They are killing machines.  A little blood will not satisfy them; they must have it all, all night long.  Enough of this saccharine debasement of true vampire legends!  Vampires deserve to be reinstated to their former glory as the most ferocious monsters in monsterdom.  Vampires must rule the kingdom of the unholy once more!

So it is with great pleasure that I bring you the Pine Deep Trilogy by Jonathan Maberry.  Finally, vampires have been put back in their place at the top of the undead heap.  The first book starts with a bang:  three bad guys are speeding through Pine Deep and have an automobile accident.  The leader of the bad guys is badder than just about any character I’ve ever encountered in fiction.  His name is Karl Ruger, and once he gets going, there’s no stopping him, especially after he joins the ranks of the undead.  I hated Ruger–hated, hated, HATED him.  He scared me half to death a few times as well.

The novels are action-packed from beginning to end, and, speaking of the end, the ending is one of the finest I’ve ever read in the horror fiction genre.  I was on the edge of my seat during the entire climactic vampire/human battle scene.  It has been a long time since I’ve felt such anxiety while reading a book, and boy was I sweating this one!  

I learned a few things from these novels too:

1.  A werewolf that has been killed but not totally destroyed (i.e.      cremation) can be resurrected as a vampire.

2.     A Dhampyr is the child of a vampire father and a human mother.  

Dampyr’s can become efficient vampire slayers.

I’m not the only reader who was impressed by these novels:  Ghost Road Blues won the Bram Stoker award for “Best First Novel” in 2006.  It deserved the award, and Maberry deserves even more recognition.

Read these if you want to destroy your manicure!

2007, Kirk Curnutt, 329 p.

↑

Doesn’t he kind of look like Eminem in this picture?

“You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo”
~Eminem~
Lose Yourself

Years ago, when I was married and living in Maryland, a three year old girl disappeared from her fenced backyard one warm spring afternoon.  The home where the disappearance took place was a few miles away from mine.  It was not a divorce/kidnapping thing, since the parents were still married at the time.  There was no evidence of foul play, either, and, as so often happens with these types of cases, there was no trail for the police to follow.  The little girl was never found.  It was like she never existed except in her family’s memories. 

I absolutely cannot fathom what it must be like to be the parent of a missing or mudered child, but I certainly can’t think of anything worse.  The aftermath of such an event must be horrific–like a living nightmare.  How do you go on after something like this?  What’s the point?  Parents of missing or murdered children must experience existential crises practically every day for the rest of their lives.  The disconnect they feel must weigh them down to such an extent that they often find it hard to get out of bed in the morning.  I wonder how long it takes before they feel like real people again.  Do they ever feel real again?

This is what Breathing Out the Ghost is about.  The novel has three main characters (if you don’t count Dickie, the disgusting pedophile guy, and I REFUSE to count him).  All three characters have been brutally damaged by a child’s disappearance and/or murder, and all three of them will never totally recover from it.  Sis is the mother of a young girl who was raped and murdered; Colin is freaking out on speed and driving cross-country to try to locate his missing son; and Robert Heim is a disgraced private investigator who is obsessed with Colin’s case.  These characters are so wonderfully fleshed-out that I could relate to all of them at different times in the novel.  I was most fascinated with Heim, because he didn’t really need to be there, but he did need to be there.  He was both compelled and repelled, like any good protagonist in any good novel should be.  Mr. Curnutt did an excellent job with his characters.  I know this because I began casting the novel in my head while I was reading.  I would play Sis in the movie, although I’d rather be Heim.  Why do I always have to be such a girl?

I’m glad that Breathing Out the Ghost was set in the midwest, because there’s a kind of starkness and majesty about that part of the country that fits the novel very well.  The book itself is both stark and majestic, like the people of the midwest and the land they inhabit.

The subject matter of Breathing Out the Ghost is disturbing, but crimes against children (and adults) happen more often than we’d like to think about.  I once heard that practically every one of us has been investigated and contemplated by some kind of horrible person at some time during our lives.  Perhaps our children have had a pedophile or two look them over or even touch them.  Perhaps you or I have been the subject of a serial killer’s scrutiny.  Maybe we’ve just avoided being raped because the time or the place wasn’t right or we had a dog barking in the house.  Don’t think it can’t happen to you or yours because it can, and it sometimes does. 

Now on to the novel’s conclusion:  even though it was appropriate and unforgettable, I AM NOT HAPPY WITH IT.  Mr Curnutt, you absolutely must write a sequel to this novel in which a certain individual gets his comeuppance.  You must!  I was hoping to be “breathing out a sigh of relief” at the end of this novel, but I was “breathing out a stream of expletives” instead.  Please amend this injustice just as soon as you can!  (And why did you have to mention “spidering?”  Man, that gave me the creeps)!

Most highly recommended.

I decided to read Kick Me before tackling some of the novels that have been patiently waiting in my TBR stack(s) for many, many months.  I’m presently not in the mood to read about serious subjects, so the creeping piles of dramatic and tear-inducing books which are threatening to suffocate me as I sleep will just have to wait a little while longer, and no complaining allowed!  The other day, my pug jumped up on the couch, and one of the teetering stacks that I placed on top against the wall went tumbling down on his head.  He screamed bloody murder (pugs scream like little girls) and dashed under the kitchen table, where he remained in a state of cowering wimpiness for several hours.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence is Paul Feig’s memoir of his secondary school experiences, and it’s pretty amusing.  Feig was the creator of television’s Freaks and Geeks back in the ’80’s, and he’s also an actor, producer and director.  He’s kind of an incredible guy.  I had no idea! 

Feig hated organized sports and gym class. My favorite story is one in which he has to undress in the locker room for gym while wearing underwear that his mom adorned with a colorful butterfly.  His classmates go bonkers when they see the colorful appliqué, and start yelling “FEIG’S A FAG, FEIG’S A FAG,” over and over again.  He says, “They had come unhinged.  Apparently they’d never seen decorated underwear and the sight of it had turned them into the kids from Lord of the Flies.”

Feig may have suffered daily at the hands of his heartless peers, but they never broke his spirit.  He was a self-confident kid and he became a successful and self-assured man.  It’s refreshing to read a memoir in which the protagonist is able to take the awkwardness of his youth in stride and recreate his gawky teenaged experiences to his advantage as an adult.  Read this–it’s light and fun.      

Now for your continuing enjoyment, I’d like to present one of my worst middle-school experiences.  We’ve all had them; even the most popular kids have a hard time during early adolescence.  After reading quite a bit about this stage in a person’s life, I’ve come to the conclusion that both girls and boys suffer equally, but they suffer in different ways.  Boys have to deal with testosterone poisoning, so there’s all that aggressive crap that they have to dole out to each other every day.  Girls are mean and snotty, and there’s no meaner and snottier time than early adolescence.  During my early teen years, I suffered from an almost overwhelming sense of self-consciousness, mostly due to my height.  I was the 2nd tallest girl in school, so it was impossible for me to disappear the way I wanted to.  I was also the gangliest, most uncoordinated creature on the planet, and my klutziness haunted me until I finally figured out what to do with my mantis-like limbs after starting high school.  Here’s my story:

Chartroose’s Dance of Degredation and Despair

I fell in intense like with a boy when I was in the 7th grade, and this crush lasted until the end of my 8th grade year. The guy that I was crushing on was every girl’s dream.  He was one of the few boys who was taller than I was, and he had clear skin and knew how to use deodorant.  This was incredibly impressive to me, since many young adolescent boys are greasy, blackhead-riddled, stinky things who make their female classmates shudder in horror if they pass too close to them in the hallways.  For the purposes of this story, I’ll call my crush ”Bill,” because Bill is a good and wholesome boy’s name.

The dance of despair took place in 8th grade gym class, which, as we all know, is the worst class in middle school by far.  Gym is the place where you’re the most vulnerable and exposed.  Back in the day, we were forced to wear dreadful bluish-colored one-piece polyester gym uniforms with snaps on the shoulders.  They made us feel like we were gigantic infants wearing onesies.  Since they were 100% polyester, they’d make us perspire like crazy and begin to smell awful about two seconds after we poured ourselves into them.  We also had to wear knee high tube socks without stripes.  If we wore striped tube socks, our hatchet-faced pseudotransexual gym teacher would become angry, which really didn’t bother us all that much because she was perpetually angry anyway.

Most of the time, the girl’s gym classes and the boy’s gym classes were separated, but on the infamous day in question, the girls were to perform a special rhythmic dance for the boys.  We all knew this was the brainchild of the boy’s gym teacher since he liked to watch our breasts bounce up and down every chance he got.  (His perversion was one of the few gym related things I didn’t have to worry about, since my body closely resembled Olive Oyl’s).  Several days before the big performance, we were separated into random groups and told to choose our own music and choreograph our own dance.  Each member of the group was given a small bouncy playground ball  which was to be incorporated into our routines.  In my group, there were a couple of those perfect little squealy girly-girls that all moderately intelligent normal girls love to hate.  They took over the choreography, and the rest of us just went along with what they said because we simply didn’t care enough to argue about it.

I learned something very important about myself during this dreadful time:  I have absolutely no rhythm.  I was by far the worst participant in my group.  I can throw and catch a ball just fine, but not while trying to move my body in a graceful manner.  Even now, I’m about as graceful as a zombie, so you can imagine what I must’ve looked like back then.  I would throw the ball in the air and try to catch it while executing a split jump and end up losing my balance and taking a nose dive onto the hard wooden gym floor.  I’d try to pass my ball to another member of the group while twirling like a fool and accidentally bounce it off my knee, and it would then zoom across the gym and gleefully interrupt another group’s practice session.  I’d try to catch a ball that another member of my group tossed my way while attempting to pose in an arabesque-like manner and fall down with a crash, my gangly arms waving feebly like the appendages of a dying tarantula. 

My teammates, appalled at my lack of coordination, held a powwow and decided there was only one solution to the terrible situation I had created:  I was to do my own little routine while they did their big one.  I would dribble my red rubber ball in a big circle around them while they performed their beautiful dance on the inside.  It was all I could do, or so they thought.

The day of destiny arrived, and I was a nervous wreck.  The boys were going to be watching, and, to make matters worse, Bill was going to be there.  I could barely stand the anxiety, and I broke out in a sweat that dampened my polyester gym uniform more than it had ever been dampened before.  I and my glistening armpits took to the gym floor, anxiously awaiting the beginning of the dance.  The music started and I began my circle bounce walk.  I had dribbled perhaps three or four steps when the biggest catastrophe in the history of my little life happened.  The ball bounced off my foot and went flying into the bleachers, where  it clipped Bill on the side of the head and bounced off the wall behind him.  After a collective gasp from the audience, the entire group burst into raucous laughter.  It was the most embarassing moment I’ve ever experienced, and I rushed into the locker room and locked myself in one of the toilet stalls where I sat and wept silently and steadily for what seemed to be an eternity.  I could barely look at Bill after that, and my schoolgirl crush was completely and utterly dead.

The funny part of all this is that Bill actually tried to talk to me a couple of times after that dreadful day.  I couldn’t reciprocate, though.  The humiliation was way too overwhelming.  Now that I’m older and wiser, I believe I’ve finally figured out why he developed a sudden (and fleeting) interest in me.  It’s very simple:  guys like to be bonked on the head.  Also, they sometimes need to be bonked on the head in order to become aware of your existence.  Men are elemental like that.  If I had known then what I know now, I would’ve laughed with the crowd, retrieved my ball, and finished the routine.  Maybe Bill and I could’ve become friends, especially if I were to bonk him every once in awhile.

The End

After reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames (see my review here), I was in a Sedaris kind of mood, so I picked up my old copy of Holidays on Ice and reread it.  This is the third time I’ve read Holidays… and I enjoyed it as much this time as I have in the past.

I think just about all Holidays on Ice readers will tell you that their favorite story in the book is “SantaLand Diaries.”  In this rather lengthy vignette, Sedaris snarkily recounts his experiences as a Macy’s elf.  It’s convulsively funny; one of those stories that make you accidentally blow snot out of your nose because it causes you to snort with spontaneous nasal guffaws.  The story is even better when read by Sedaris.  His voice is whispery, high-pitched and odd, and during different parts of  the audio version, it either drips with honeyed sarcasm or seethes with soft-spoken disdain.  SantaLand Diaries is so popular that it has been adapted into a play.  I’d like to see it someday.

Every story in the book is funny, (with the possible exception of “Dinah, the Christmas Whore,” which I’ve never been interested in).  My personal favorite is “Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family,” which satirizes those hideous boastful holiday letters that we’ve all received at one time or another.  In this story, the letter writer is a frighteningly twee woman who slowly reveals her true colors as the letter progresses.  By the end, the reader has no doubt that the woman is totally bonkers.  I think ”Seasons Greetings…” is quite brilliant in both style and execution.  It’s one of Sedaris’ best.

If you’re one of the two or three people left in the world who haven’t yet read this, get yourself a copy and get started.  It’s easy and breezy and a whole lot of fun!

Here’s an audio youtube clip of Sedaris reading from SantaLand Diaries.  Do you hear what I mean about his voice?