How have people mispronounced your name? How is it supposed to sound?
Submitted by Lorie.
You would think that Amy isn't a name to be mispronounced, but it most definitely is. For the first few years of his life, my brother callled me "Ah-me". And working with international students, I still get that pronunciation along with "Emy" all the time. I don't think I really notice it anymore.
At least I don't go by my middle name. That would most definitely be butchered to pieces. When I used to try to use it online in the early days of the internet, everyone just ended up calling me "Ned".
As for my last name, I only have to worry about that being mispronounced for another 4 months. My last name certainly isn't Spray, or Spermy, or Spy, or Berry, or Perry. My new last name is highly pronounceable even if it is common.
Amazon.com sent me an email recommending it because I simply rated the movie Videodrome. I'm not sure they hit their niche market with that email. Instead, they should have been recommending it to people who had given high ratings to Amelie. The central story is of two girls who are born in different countries but lead a very similar life. They feel a connection to each other even though they've never met. Veronique in France learns from Veronika's mistakes in Poland without knowing why she's avoiding making those mistakes. The main characters are high spirited and world-curious like Amelie. And, like in Amelie, there is the mysterious person that Veronique follows small clues to find. These clues, however, are mailed to her in packages without a return address.
I would love to find the soundtrack to this movie because the music is gorgeous. The story features the unique operatic voice of Veronique and delicate marionettes performing ballet. However, the story, the cinematography, and the whole idea of the movie itself is beautiful. It's a movie with very few words so you barely notice that you have to read subtitles from time to time when the actors speak in French or Polish. I would have to say that this is one of the best movies I've watched all year. It's best to watch when you're in the mood for a slow and beautiful foreign film.
"According to graphology, if you take your index finger and trace someone's handwriting ... you can feel exactly how the writer felt at the time he wrote." Most diaries are written in 1st person except for the ones whose entries begin "Dear Diary". Misty's diary, however, is written in 2nd person to her coma-bound husband. It's not as if she expects him to ever read the diary, but she blames him for being in this miserable life that she dreamed of throughout her childhood. Is this really her destiny? Why did he bring her to this island? She pricks his body numerous times with the sharp pin point of the gaudy broach that's been passed down in his family for years. But neither the words in her diary nor the prickles of pain from the broach illicit any sort of response from her dearly wedded vegetable.
The artist is often a person willing to endure or inflict ill-fortune upon themself in order to produce great works of art. Their art comes at a price. For example, many poets and musicians die young from mental disorders and suicide. And many great writers and artists began writing or drawing or become great during an illness:
"You [have] Nietzshe and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. ... Great artists are great invalids."
Perhaps everyone has the potential to be a great artist or writer but are just unable to tap into the raw emotions and connectivity needed for great art. The truth is that most people
"live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It's only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone's injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration."
In contrast, many people who have accumulated a great fortune have been willing to inflict ill-fortune upon others in order to amass their wealth."Child labor in mines or mills. ... Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes from something unpleasant." The difference between the average person and the evil person is just how much ill-fortune they are willing to inflict upon others to reap a fortune for themselves.
"These useless details ... they're only useless until you connect them all together. ... Everything is nothing by itself." Over the years, the families of Waytansea Island have realized that they could enhance their fortunes by capitalizing on these seemingly "useless details" by connecting them together. The result is a sort of horror story that Misty finds herself caught in the middle of ... over and over again.
From the moment I heard the interview with Gary Shteyngart and an excerpt from his new book on NPR, I knew that Absurdistan would be a book worthy of reading. In my opinion, the greatest fiction novelists are those who can plump up a sentence so thick with precisely chosen words that you have no problem feeling as if you are a part of the very fabric of the story itself. Largely, these authors also know the secret of creating great characters. Without great characters, a story is only a place and a time and feels as desolate and empty as a world ravaged by nuclear war. But with juicy sentences like engorged ticks and characters brimming with life, an ordinary time and place becomes extraordinary. This is the experience one has when reading Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart.
Absurdistan is not a comedy. However, one cannot help but laugh often while reading it. Perhaps it is the candid view of exposed scenes of base humanity that causes the laughter. We tend to laugh the most at things we can identify with the most. For example, while I don't have a khui and have, thus obviously, never been circumcised, I do understand pain and can certainly identify with the horror it must be for a 17-year old male to have to undergo such a procedure involuntarily upon entry into a foreign country as Misha does.
Shteyngart is a master of words. Considering that Shteyngart and his main character are both Russian, it's no surprise that the author chooses to flavor the story with Russian words here and there. However, he does it in such a way that one needs no dictionary to immediately know what kottedzhes are or what a khui is. The author is also very talented at coming up with the perfect tongue-in-cheek figures of speech that bring the story gloriously to life. When Misha reaches the USA, his cab stops "in front of an old but grand house whose bulk [is] noticeably sinking into its front columns the way an elderly fellow sinks into his walker."
The character that tells his story to us in Absurdistan is "Misha Borisovich Vainberg, age thirty, a grossly overweight man with small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the most distinguished breed of parrot, and lips so delicate you would want to wipe them with the naked back of your hand". Since he is quite wealthy, Misha has a "manservant" named Timofey who dutifully accompanies him through thick and thin (but mostly "thick" considering Misha's size). Misha tells of a particularly hot day in which "Timofey had to accompany me around town putting icecubes between my tits in a desparate effort to refrigerate me." In the first chapter, we find our hero in Russia talking to his father about travelling to study abroad in the USA at Accidental College (somewhere in the midwest). "I nervously squeezed at my left thick left breast," Misha tells us, "funneling it into a new oblong shape. I noticed a stray piece of salami peel on the table and wondered if he could eat it without Papa noticing." It seems as if he is always focusing on a stray piece of food somewhere instead of what is going on around him.
Everything in his Misha's life tends to happen to him accidentally. He inherits
a fortune, beautiful women seduce him, he can't get back to his beloved
USA because of the wrongdoing of his father, he ends up with a Belgian
passport in the middle of Absurdistan, and he's appointed as Absurdistan's Minister for Sevo-Israeli Affairs Ministry of Mulitculti despite neither being a practicing Jew nor a Sevo. Misha is tremendously ordinary yet tremendously intriguing at the same time.
Misha says of himself, "how can one be angry at a man of such few qualities?" Yet, people are always imbuing him with qualities he doesn't have. His to-do list for his job as "Ministry of Mulitculti" includes such ambitious items as "get Internet installed in office" and "encourage multiculturalism in everything I do". Upon finding a man shooting missles from roof of the Hyatt hotel, Misha exclaims with shock, "Oh, God. Don't tell me you're shelling Gorbigrad because I told you your war wasn't exciting enough."
Perhaps he's just misunderstood. Even his love of food causes misunderstandings: During a meal with his future father-in-law, he says "I started to rock back and forth, as I always do when confronted by food of this caliber. Mr. Nanabragov took this for a sign of Hasidity and started to make a toast to Israel."
Misha doesn't want all these things that are thrust upon him. He simply wants to get back to New York, eat 3 to 5 fine meals a day, drink lots of vodka, and get Rouenna to fall in love him again. "My problems, however, rest with the U.S. State Department and the demented personnel at their St. Petersburg consulate," Misha laments. The U.S. embassy in Russia sports its "Rules of Humiliation for Russian visa applicants ... spelled out in English officialese: U.S. law places on each nonimmigrant visa applicant a presumption of immigrant intent. The burden of proof is on the applicant to overcome this presumption. In other words: You're all whores and bandits, so why bother applying?" Misha is neither a whore nor a bandit. Yet, he says that "[s]ince I returned to Russia some two years ago, they've denied my visa application nine times, on all occasions citing my father's recent murder of their precious Oklahoma businessman."
Will Misha ever find a way back to the USA through his accidental stumblings through life or will the choices of others send him spiraling to Absurdistan and beyond for the rest of his life?
Pearl uses a ficticious character, Quentin Clark, to try to find the basis for Poe's famous fictional detective, Dupin. Clark travels to France in search of the real Dupin (at peril to his engagement and career) so that he can solve Poe's mysterious death. Pearl's research of the known facts surrounding Poe's death is used for his characters to form hypotheses about what happened in Poe's last days and who might have been responsible (if anyone) for his untimely death. In the end, there's really only one hypothesis that seems to stand out to me with more merit than the others. Even after much research, the final verdict of what happened to Poe still seems like a huge guess. I was intrigued, however, by the hypothesis that the reason for Poe being found unconscious and dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothing shortly before his death is that a clothier snagged him out of the soaking rain and offered him shabby dry clothes in exchange for his nice wet ones. This seems plausible since dry clothes are more valuable than wet ones if you don't have another change of clothing on hand.
There was but one quotable quote from the entire book that made me stop and think for a moment:
While this isn't universally true 100% of the time, it is true in many cases and became a basis for Dupin's final complete hypothesis about who might have been considered to be an enemy of Poe if indeed his death was the result of an enemy rather than accidental. Unfortunately, by the time I got to that point in the book, I didn't care why Poe died and couldn't remember why I ever cared."Our own past perversity, not that of others, sets us against someone for life."
If anyone has The Poe Shadow on their reading list, I think I'd recommend it with reservations. It's obvious that the writer went to great pains to do a lot of research for the book. However, it's also obvious that much of the episodes in the book come from him trying to find a way to insert things from his research. It's got the quality of a BBC detective movie and would honestly be better in that format. While the idea behind the book is rather intriguing, the follow-through leaves much to be desired. I couldn't finish the last hundred pages of the book fast enough because, by that point, I frankly didn't care about the characters and didn't care to hear one more hypothesis of Poe's death trumped by another one.
I think the ending to the story should have been more or less like that of "The Cask of Amontillado":
At the end of Pearl's research, there was still no answer to the mystery of Poe's death. All he can ever make is a guess as to what happened to him. But, perhaps, with the final word of this novel -- the final "stone" in place -- Pearl can feel free to leave Poe to rest in peace and re-erect the former position the world has had that the reason for Poe's untimely death is, in fact, unknowable."No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!"
Show us some shades of blue.
What is your earliest memory?
Submitted by Megan.
I don't think that anyone ever believes me when I tell them that my earliest memory was of my very first day . How can you remember something when you don't have words yet to describe what you're feeling and seeing? Animals have memories without words, Helen Keller had a rich inner world without words, so why can't a newborn baby?
I'm sure my memory of my first day was fueled by my dad talking about it constantly. He talked about how he held me with his palm under my belly and propelled me face-first into the world so that I could see everything. He talked about how the nurses all gasped lest he drop me. He wasn't going to drop me.
My memory is of the world I saw that first day and how disappointed I was that it wasn't more colorful. Everything in the hospital was shades of drab and more drab. Where were all the colors?
What's puzzling to me is why I expected colors in the first place. Had I dreamed in color? Was I promised colors? Had I come from another life with colors? Had I come from a world filled with more variety and depth of color than the human eye can see? My entire life, I've continued to look for more more colors than there are on the color wheel. It's as if I have a faded memory of some other colors that I've seen somewhere else. Perhaps I remember ultraviolet or more depth and dimension beyond 3D. Or maybe a devoloping baby dreams with more imagination than it finds in the limitations imposed on this world.
Tell us about your first kiss. Who was it with? How old were you?
It's funny how you don't notice how disgusting those festering pimples are that are coming at you when your face is covered with them as well. What innocence. He smelled good and he was kissing me in the dark, so that's all that mattered.
It's also funny how unprepared you are for the first moment you experience being turned on. I thought I'd peed in my pants.
But with first kisses come first broken hearts -- especially when your best friend has very large breasts and your boyfriend is filled with red-blooded curiosity. Oh well. On to stealing a sweaty bench-warming math geek ...
