Monday, September 26, 2016

Memory

Memory is an ephemeral thing. Recently I ran across a plain brown notebook. I had written across the front of it: Trip to Rome, March 2000. Seriously. Sixteen years ago. Of course I remember the trip. It was wonderful. Rome is one of my favorite cities in the world (not to name-drop, but it is). The first time I saw the Colosseum was through the smudged window of a bus many years before that 2000 trip. I put the notebook aside after glancing through it; I wanted to savor it later. I remembered the trip, the feelings, but not the details.

I tried to find that notebook to refer to while writing this blog. I couldn’t. It’s somewhere, and it will turn up, but what I did find were numerous other notebooks. Snippets of my life. Morning pages, poems, story ideas, other trips. Although many were not finished, were cast aside or interrupted, they each represent moments in time. My moments. Maybe when taken together they would represent a microcosm of who I am. I wonder if, a hundred years from now, if the notebooks survive, what some great-great-great would surmise about my life. Would it be of interest? Would these scribblings represent? Would they misunderstand? Understand?


What I know is, if we don’t write it down, and sometimes even if we do, so much is lost. There is a magic about life, about its colors, shapes, smells, sounds, emotions and experiences that defies words. Defies description. But when we read about it, sometimes, just sometimes, we live it again.


“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
                                         ― Eden Phillpotts, English author and playwright or
                                           -W.B. Yeats or 
                                           -Bertrand Russell

Sunday, September 11, 2016

SEPTEMBER 2016 BOOK SELECTIONS- PREP & GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld is an examination of the rarified atmosphere of the ultra-exclusive, private prep-schools that funnel the children of the very rich or very connected into Ivy League schools. Lee Fiora, the female protagonist is an exception, a scholarship student.

Lee’s observations form the core of the novel. She is revolted by and fascinated by her fellow students in equal measure. It is painful to watch her struggle to fit in and her obsession with the school’s golden boy. Ault, the fictional prep school she applies for and attends turns her former at-home personality of being easy, relaxed and out-going into one of being withdrawn, shy and agonizingly uncomfortable. It’s as if she moves through the world without skin.


Sittenfeld’s coming of age story has been compared to Catcher in the Rye. You cringe at her inability to see outside herself. You want her to be older, wiser. You want to sympathize, yell at, shake and protect her simultaneously as she tries to navigate her life. You remember adolescence.



Goldberg Variations by Susan Isaacs centers on three cousins who travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico to meet with their estranged, super-wealthy grandmother at her invitation. The name comes from Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations. Inarguably one of the most famous pieces of music ever written, it contains music that moves from soft and moody to intense and lively and everything in between. 

The title refers to the three cousins and Gloria, the grandmother. Extremely different and yet somehow meshing. Gloria is an extremely unsympathetic character. A hard and bitter woman, she brings the three there, after ignoring them their entire lives, to pick a successor to manage her vast fortune. She is in for a shock.