Monday readings...or the rest of Sunday's papers

I'm still reading the Sunday papers from yesterday and saw this article on text-bubble anxiety in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/fashion/texting-anxiety-caused-by-little-bubbles.html


Catching up with the Guardian today, I read this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/jennifer-aniston-childess-women-judged-unfairly

I find it interesting in a more general than personal sense since I've never been asked why I don't have children or why I'm not married (well, except by my mom!) but I imagine it's true to a lot of women's experiences.

I think that there are also women who wanted children very very much at one time in their lives, but made peace with not having them once it became clear motherhood just wasn't going to happen. Maybe biology played a part or they wanted to raise a family with someone else and never met that special person...

Some people (usually people who should just mind their own business)make assumptions that should only ever remain inside their own heads and never be spoken aloud. None of us ever really knows why someone else does or doesn't do something and it's not for us to judge them. I've always believed true feminism is having self-autonomy as a woman, whether you decide to have children or not.

 

The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke is the kind of book you need a few days to think about before you understand if you truly like it or not. I guess that sounds a bit bizarre or indecisive, but the truth is Elizabeth Ridley's period piece, while extremely well-written, deeply touching and downright beautiful at times, leaves me a bit uneasy.

Tranby and Lysette, surely two of the most unlikely women to ever fall in love with each other, are each so severely messed up emotionally (in their own unique ways) that I'm not sure either should be seeking any relationship, much less one with each other. They are both also wonderful and caring, but it is 1909, after all, and so much is already on their plate that time and circumstance threaten to crack it beyond repair.

Maybe I'm reading way too much into everything that happens, but I also question what is real and what is not and if our narrator Miss Tranby can even be trusted. Things are so wispy and fragile by the end, the reader cannot help but feel sad rather than hopeful. The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke is definitely a solid read...whether it's a solid romance is an entirely different matter.

 

There are some sweet passages within the novel that I just had to highlight in Kindle. The first section is a scene where Miss Tranby is bound and determined to deconstruct her feelings for Lysette and make them go away. As you can see, she's not doing too well with that:

 

If only you could see the sadness, the loneliness, the lies and the compromises…myself, and attempted to reduce to ordered terms this unsettling development.

 

DIAGNOSIS: Love. No. Not possible.

 

SYMPTOMS: Giddiness, shortness of breath. Urge to gather flowers. No. Lips that long to kiss. No. No. Tremors in hands and knees. Flightiness and his twin pain, optimism. General soreness in thorax. Rash on neck. No. Soft tissue breaks out in hives, in the pattern of the rose bush raising thorns. NO. My heart hurts. Poked and nibbled by plush, carnation-flavored lips. NO!

 

PROGNOSIS: Poor. ANTIDOTE: Lysette. A last desperate bid to live: Lysette. CURE: Unknown to man. Lysette McDonald. Yes. Only Lysette. Lysette Lysette Lysette.

The second is more of a general observation that most any gay woman would probably tell you is all too familiar. At this point, Miss Tranby is thinking of how nice it would be to have someone to talk to who knows exactly what she has gone thrown as an "invert" (a term often used well into the 20th century to describe gays and lesbians):

 

 

We would have spoken honestly about the beauty of women, and the wild emotions they sometimes engendered, and what it was like, as an invert, to feel so odd, so stricken by strangeness, and yet so deeply wonderful, both at the same time. She would have known and understood all those feelings, and neither one of us need have felt lonely.

 

This is a second cover for the novel...and much more in keeping with how Miss Tranby is described within its pages. The inner turmoil she experiences, though, is better captured in the gestures of the woman on the first cover. It kind of bugs me when a cover goes for a more "traditionally" attractive woman instead of how she actually looks. Sometimes you'll read a book only to discover the artist most likely either didn't bother to read it at all...or just didn't care.

 

 

Be authentic about who you are, how you feel and what's going on.-Peter Gabriel
 

There's a scratched beauty to Peter Gabriel's voice that pulls me in every time one of his songs plays. "The Book Of Love" is my absolute favorite, but "Here Comes The Flood" is equally gorgeous in its own way and much more sad and Sunday night quiet.

Peter himself thought the song over-produced the first time around (on his 1977 self-titled album), as he originally intended it to be recorded with just piano and guitar. The 1990 version on Shake The Tree is sparser, closer to his original vision and definitely more haunting.

 

Sunday readings...here and there

 

 

From the July issue of Wired: 

 

 

 

 

 

Given today's technology... a surprisingly interesting article on 'Knuckle Busters' in this weekend's Wall Street Journal:

 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/will-credit-card-breaches-give-knuckle-busters-a-second-crack-1409365854

 

 

 

 

And also standing out in this weekend's Wall Street Journal (if you're a David Bowie fan):

 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/david-bowie-and-quantum-mechanics-1409066727

 

Speaking of Bowie, there's also this article (much older) on what he was thinking when he made his highly successful and commercially friendly Let's Dance:

 

"I wanted to come in touch with the common factor and not seem to be some sort of alien freak," David Bowie told writer Lisa Robinson shortly after the release of Let's Dance, his most accessible — and commercially successful — album. "I don't want to seem detached and cold, because I'm not."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-best-albums-of-the-eighties-20110418/david-bowie-lets-dance-20110330#ixzz3C1iPNhsf

 

 

This book is coming out next week and got a good review in WSJ and is also discussed here:

 

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/christine-okeefe-aptowicz/dr-mutters-marvels/

 

 

Three day weekend reading...

Well, last week's attempt to read Fanny Hill was a complete bust.

 

Granted, I'm not quite sure I could follow, much less understand, all the physics behind the 18th century bawdy frolicking going on throughout so much of the novel, but I am pretty sure a lot of it was wishful thinking on the part of a man (John Cleland) with a very wild imagination. I'm not well-versed in erotica from any century, but I'm also quite sure love scenes ("love" being used loosely) should not sound like something from Gray's Anatomy (the medical text, not the tv show.)

 

 

 

 

I don't know why I pick up much older books when I can't sleep, but tonight I'm going for War and Peace (which it probably goes without saying is much cleaner and far better reading.) What surprises me is how funny the beginning is, though that could be the slap happy sleepiness inside me right now and the 21st century insight that "forty years" is hardly old age.

 

I think before I get into reading it any more, though, I need a good history refresher on Napoleon and his invasion of Russia.

 

Also helpful is this:

 

 

 

 Another great source is this link from Amazon where someone breaks down which translations to read and why:

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/R1IK42CKUHYV9V

 

I'm reading the Ann Dunnigan version, but I also downloaded (for free from Google Books) the Nathan Haskell Dole one.

 

War and Peace (Signet classics) -- (UNABRIDGED) Ann Dunnigan was born in Hollywood and here she has presented us with a very nice contemporary (1968) "American English" version of Tolstoy's Magnum opus. I call this one the "doctor's office version" because, even though it is 1,456 pages long (Signet paperback/Penguin), a busy errand-runner can still reasonably carry it around without backache. I found the translation itself to be quite competently rendered and most of the text reads straight through with no footnotes to deal with for the French language parts. If you're an American, and plan to read "War and Peace" only one time, and you're a really busy person who likes to read during windows of time, then this is likely your top choice.