vocabulary

henry is starting to articulate a handful of recognizable words. they are, in no particular order,

clock, teeth, cheese, jesus, shut, show, daddy, hi, this

a useful list. it wouldn’t exactly get him out of trouble in a foreign country, but at least he wouldn’t starve (spiritually or otherwise). i still don’t understand, however, why he doesn’t learn a few really useful words like drink or snack or take me outside and i’ll stop screaming.

lucky us, we’re bagging up that big lexicon tomorrow and taking to the skies. yes, it’s true, i get to spend weeks sitting in the belly of the big western sky, seeing mountains and other tall things. i hope the humidity won’t miss me while i’m gone.

imagination

i am a lucky girl. not only has my posture improved over the past week, but i also got to spin out a week of my life at cleveland state’s imagination workshop. for those of you who are turning up your noses and thinking–writing in cleveland, it’s not possible–think again. neal chandler, director, is a genius. and meeting josip novakovich was beyond delightful: the man is hilarious in a sort of deadpan eastern european way. my list of books developed a sort of bunnies-mating quality. and i’m even more determined to get a few essays out as soon as reading periods open again in september. it’s a pleasant little time-warp to feel like a student and a writer again after so many days of playing at the park and reading sandra boynton. so, all of you with dreams, give yourself at least a week to dabble in them. you’ll walk a little taller.

lemon lime

limes were on sale. eight for a dollar. eight. what could i do? i bought eight limes. i wrapped them up tightly in a plastic bag and stuck them in my refrigerator drawer. i can’t decide if i’m waiting for some special occasion, some moment when only limes will do, some cloudburst of fortune when i must have lime after lime after lime after lime. or if i will leave them there until i’ve forgotten my tiny round perfectly greenish yellow limes. until i’ve utterly forgotten that limes were practically free, practically begging me to take them home.

it seems like i’m changing the subject, but we had an ultrasound the other day. i say “we” even though i’m not sure who “we” are. is “we” me and joe? or is “we” me and the baby? or do i say “we” just to make it sound less like i had an ultrasound for appendicitis and more like i’m full and ripe and gestating?

however you add it up, we had the ultrasound. and i saw the baby. my tiny lime-sized wonder, twelve weeks brewed. wiggly arms. wiggly legs. ears, all indistinct and adorable. perhaps a nose, but it was hard to tell. and that long thick cord of a tube that connects me to my tiny lime person.

maybe that’s what makes it hard to eat the limes (all eight of them, snuggled together next to the celery and the granny smiths). i’m feeding my own lime. it seems a strange sort of cannibalism to slice my limes for guacamole or curd. and a strange sort of mothering to keep the limes there in the refrigerator. waiting.

at last

at last. the bubble that’s been hovering around me like a second skin the past few months keeping me from penetrating life: my life, an imaginary life — finally burst. i picked up alice sebold’s the lovely bones, a book i’ve been avoiding. i don’t do hype. i don’t do murder. but i read that first chapter and i felt absolutely smacked. hurled across the room and smacked. i hunkered down and read that entire book in a day and a half. if a book that tackles something so grotesque and repulsive can be beautiful, it is. sebold is poetry itself. somehow getting inside those characters helped me open something inside myself. i looked up from the last page and saw my husband and my son and i thought, this is good. what i have, here, right now, is good. at last.

the brothers karamazov

here it is. the end of june. have you finished the brothers karamazov? neither have i. but i’m still there. i’m still reading. and gosh darn it, i’m going to finish if it kills me. (which it just might.) here’s our guest host’s review: don’t worry, no spoilers or loosening of important plot points follows. feel free to read and comment no matter how far you got into the heavy thing.

 

I figured we should start our discussion with the introduction because many people may have read this far before the enormity of the task overcame their best intentions to read the entire book. If that is not the case, at least you know where to look for the introduction in the book.

 

I love the introduction to this book because of the many different roles it plays in the story. On the one hand, it gives us a taste of the voice of the narrator unencumbered by the plot and characters. This is particularly valuable in this novel because Dostoevsky often highlights the narrator’s voice in the foreground of his novel. Is the narrator a participant in the story? How does the narrator’s extreme proximity to the events of the story shape the narrative that s/he relates? Is s/he trustworthy? Is s/he one of the named characters in the story? I don’t have good answers to any of these questions, but they make the novel fun to read and reread.

 

On the other hand, the introduction draws particular attention to Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov (Alyosha) as the ‘hero’ of the novel. If we take this comment at face value, the novel becomes a standard bildungsroman with Alyosha as the central character who passes through moments of spiritual crisis on his way to greater understanding.

 

What sets Brothers apart in my mind is the masterful way in which Dostoevsky engages the big questions from a variety of viewpoints. Dostoevsky’s writing is often noted for its polyphonic nature (a multiplicity of independent voices within a single work), but many times when you pin somebody down and try to get them to tell you exactly what that means, the waffling begins. As I read Brothers this time, I was struck by the variety of themes and voices in the novel. I really felt the richness of his characters as they struggled with the fundamental issues treated in the book (guilt, responsibility, suffering of innocents, family, loyalty, greed, buffoonery, faith). Dostoevsky allows each of his characters to experience and express these themes and allows each to move from the background to the foreground in the words and actions of each of his characters. The best comparison I hav eheard likens Dostoevsky’s style to a symphony―themes emerge in one voice, and are later picked up and developed by another voice in the orchestra. When we encounter the same theme in a different voices, we take something new away from the experience. So it is with reading Dostoevsky.

 

The themes of suffering and responsibility/guilt stood out to me in my reading this time. (Perhaps this is because of the circumstances in which I read the book.) These themes are inextricably linked by the the contradictory phrases that Dostoevsky associates with them in the book . . . On the one hand, “All are guilty (often translated as responsible) for all and for everything.” (все виновны перед всеми и за все) but at the same time, “All is permissible.” These statements seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum in the first sections of the book, representing the wide range of philosophies embraced by the members of the Karamazov family. Throughout the course of the novel, these ideologies charge towards each other, finally colliding in the climactic episode of the story (though we do not see them collide until long after the ‘climactic’ event has taken place). Again, Dostoevsky’s narrator leaves it to his ‘hero’ Alyosha to sort things out after the conflict passes.

 

There is so much more to write about this book, but I have a widget installed that uses an algorithm built on the length of a post, the number of multi-syllabic words and the frequency of semi-obscure literary references to warn the would be blogger if readers will make it through a given post. Said widget informs me that my time is up

 

I am curious to hear your responses. I would love to discuss the points that you find interesting. I would love to hear that anybody else read this book.

our guest host, spencer is (almost) ABD for his PhD in arabic language and literature and lives in jordan (the country) where he enjoys the best chocolate milk in the universe.