Forging an Art

Forget Cliff’s Notes and SparkNotes - breeze through the classics with Sarah Schmelling’s Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float.  This looked amusing as a title, but the book in hand is hilarious.  The treatment of the traditional school reading list torture, including Moby Dick and Little Women, is instructive, with valuable insight regarding characterization in particular, while maintaining snort-inducing humor.  Yes, snort-inducing.  The connections, which are key to the Facebook mindset, make real people out of some pretty cardboard characters, as Schmelling imagines interactions that never could or would happen between a variety of characters and authors.  Where else can you find references to Henry James, Jerry Seinfeld, and Mr. Roper - of Three’s Company fame/infamy - in one volume?  Actually, I don’t think I have ever seen Mr. Roper referenced before, except in TV Guide, and I don’t think that counts.

The Adventures of Amir Hamza.  This was required reading, and a long tale to boot, as are most epics.  It is rather repetitive, again, as some epics, with the usual battle, triumph, marriage/feast.  There is a particularly strange line/translation that I just can’t make sense of - “her eyebrows shot out the arrows of her eyelashes and deeply pierced his heart” and one phrase that I really like - “the crocodile of their swords.”  What a great image, and one I have not yet encountered.  I like the dust clouds that, while contrived, magically appear before or during a battle to offer an intermission, if you will, for discussion and consideration between armies and enemies.

How to Take Over Teh Wurld - this is an absolute scream.  Beyond snorting, in fact.  I can’t get enough of these great cat pictures, tagged with brilliantly hysterical captions in LOL-speak.  For someone like me, who responds to my son’s “ROFL” with “MAO” - not via email, but in everyday passing conversation, as if such an exchange could be considered conversation - this is like manna from the sky.  This sort of business keeps me sane, or insane, take your pick.  I need to get my hands on its predecessor, I Can Has Cheezburger? in order to make my life complete.

I made the mistake of re-reading Rebecca West’s Henry James. I really can’t stand Rebecca West, but I know I need to - and want to - know what others think of my man Henry.  As my coworker Miss Terri says, it’s best to know your enemy.  What an obnoxious, self-centered person this one was, too.

More required reading in the form of Efuru, the very concise tale of an African woman that leaves so much unsaid.  Nwapa’s no-nonsense prose is reminiscent of Hemingway and the iceberg; so much under the surface.  This book could be ten times as long as it is, but there is no reason for an expansion.  Efuru’s experience is understood, and the lack of bemoaning her plight or celebrating her triumph - if it is a triumph, and isn’t it pretty to think so - only adds to that which the reader can imagine.

Just finished Jacqueline Kolosov’s A Sweet Disorder, which was, well, sweet, but not as good as The Red Queen’s Daughter.  It was a bit slow to start but I knew that Kolosov would make the time investment worthwhile, and she did.  The focus on needlework made this romance particularly interesting to me, along with the relationship between embroidery and healing, both of which require strong observation and creative skills: “a man must study life if he is to master even a fraction of its complexity,” one of Miranda’s suitors notes, and in this case, it is attention to detail that allows her and other strong female characters to greater agency in their fates. 

Who else can accuse a character of “excessive barbering” but Scott Donaldson?  Just in love with his collection of essays, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days.