Spook by Mary Roach

This is the very last blog on Spook, but it's a good one. The grand finale. I'm finishing this book then I'm planning on starting The Time Traveler's Wife because I've kind of wanted to read that since 6th grade. My science teacher had a hardbound copy that sat on the shelf above her desk, and I must have stared at it a lot to still remember it so clearly. The Beaufort Wind Scale must have not totally captivated my attention....

What has been captivating my attention is Spook! It's excellent!! The newest installments (I just plowed right through and finished the last 80 odd pages) are all equally interesting, so I have to just do the highlights if I have any hopes of people reading this post and commenting. Actually, the whole commenting thing is freaking me out a little bit. I don't like it when people read my writing. Should I ever decide to write when I grow up, I will definitely use a pen name. Hmm, now I have to just think of one...

Anyhow, the first interesting tidbit is the theory that certain electromagnetic fields cause hallucinations. This makes me think of Lost, which makes me think of the whispers that they hallucinate on the island which is an electromagnetic anomaly which makes me think that I should consult Lostpedia to see if anyone else has this thought which just revealed to the entire world that I'm a flagrant, dorky Lost fan... These comments are going to kill me...

Wow, am I having trouble concentrating on my topic. This is incredible. Give Athena a couple days off from school and she freaks out. I'm one of those people who needs constant oppression or else I start referring to myself in the third person and chatting away madly about Lost. And don't even get me started on Mad Men, which is pretty much the best show ever.

The whole hallucination-in-electromagnetic-fields thing is interesting, because certain people are more susceptible to them. Meaning that some people sense a weirdness in the atmosphere better than others.... What if that's what a medium is? I've always wondered about extremely detailed scientific explanations. Does the fact that our universe started with the Big Bang signify that there is no God? Because we can explain the behavior of every entity by analyzing the tiniest part of its composition, does that not make its very existence a miracle? Does science explain things and take away the supernatural, or does it simply explain the supernatural? We should think of a new word for things that don't seem to be true. Supernatural is wrong, because what if talking to ghosts is natural...to some who can sense them in electromagnetic fields... Wow, where did Athena, the angry skeptic, go? You gotta love winter break.

My other favorite part of the last section of the book is the idea that the sensing of a ghost is due to infrasound. It's kind of similar to the electromagnetic abnormalities in a way (at least more closely related to that then ectoplasma for an example.) Infrasound is a real phenomenon. It's what whales and elephants use to communicate, and possibly tigers as well! Tigers use it for intimidation because it unsettles you. Ok, so here goes. First of all you have to hear the tiger growl and tell me if you feel something weird.

http://www.acoustics.org/press/145th/fig2.wav

I felt a little clench in my stomach (the infrasound comes after the initial audible roar) but that might have been the chemicals in Diet Coke burning through my stomach (I tried to quit it, I really did...) Then I played it for my brothers since one was incapacitated by a minor elective surgery and the other was incapacitated by Halo 3. The Halo player said he felt something, but he thought if might have been due to the game.

So yea, infrasound is a low frequency sound wave that can pool up in places with little ventilation and thick walls, such as [gasp] an old castle or crypt... Hmm, maybe we have an explanation for ghostly presences. Because infrasound causes you to feel unsettled, get it?

On another vein of thought, the idea sprouted to use high amounts of infrasound as a kind of weapon since:

“In strong doses, infrasound has been alleged to cause all manner of bodily unpleasantness: nausea, salivation, ‘extreme annoyance’, rapid pulse, vibrating visual field, ‘intolerable sensations in the chest’…”

And the list goes on. I have to include one of her jokes, because they're good.

“I used to have a neighbor who shoots high-decibel Eagles songs out his windows, causing nausea and extreme annoyance at a fraction of the cost. I’d have loved to get my hands on a retaliatory blaster.”

So, I HIGHLY recommend this book. It's good. Plain and simple. However, maybe it would be better for summer when you have time on your hands...

Spook by Mary Roach

Another week on the same topic... So sorry about that, but I've really been having trouble reading this book in my spare time. I'm in a state where if I have free time, I want to do something completely mind-numbing and effortless. I've read another chapter though entitled "Can You Hear Me Now?: Telecommunicating with the dead".



My favorite part concerned a Wilson Van Dusen who worked in an institution for the insane, senile, etc. Apparently through interviews with his patients who claimed to hear voices, he determined that these voices came from another world (as in heaven, hell or purgatory). However, through scans of brains during auditory hallucinations, it was determined that the speech part of the brain was activated, meaning these voices are a sort of inner-speech. It's kind of disappointing each time Roach puts forth another theory and then disproves it. They're all so crazy and exciting. The more I read this book, the more I think that nothing interesting ever really happens...

The rest of the chapter focuses on the time when things such as the telephone and telegraph were invented. Roach points out that the belief in mediums was of the same plausibility as the belief in these gadgets at the time. Out of the inventors, however, Edison, Tesla, and Bell all seemed to think that a human spirit would most likely leave the body and not fool around with mediums while the assistant of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Watson was convinced that the dead did communicate to the living. He also thought that he had a halo...Weird...Obviously, he never got anything proven.

It's incredibly interesting though, to think how skeptical people must have been about that new technology. At this day and age, I'm willing to believe basically anything that's invented. We're moving at such a rate of innovation that nothing really seems impossible to a certain degree. Obviously I wouldn't believe a teleportation machine could be made at this time, but in a couple of generations, who am I do say it can't happen? I wonder if our minds are more open nowadays. It seems kind of presumptuous to consider all people before our time incapable of thinking as clearly as us, but all of our strides in humanity must've somehow raised the average intelligence of people, right? Actually, apparently not with our sophomore class...I'm still hanging my head in shame...

Research Paper

Research Question:
What is more important, the development of critical drugs or animal welfare?

Wohlsen, Marcus. "Animal Rights Protesters Torment Scientists." Hanford Sentinel 7 Jul. 2008: n.p. SIRS Researcher. SIRS Knowledge Source. 7 Dec. 2008 <http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SMN0307-0-3726&artno=0000279901&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=&title=Animal%20Rights%20Protesters%20Torment%20Scientists&res=Y&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=N&ic=Y> .

Marcus Wohlsen is an Associated Press writer who attended UC Berkeley which is the institution this article is discussing. This article states that actions taken against professors who do animal experimentation are becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. A website has even been set up which gives names, addresses, and alleged cruelties to animals for the general public to see, but no serious injuries have yet been reported. This article is important to my research because it offers the negative side of protecting animals by systematically terrorizing scholars and attempting to stunt medical research. Many call these protestors terrorists and one professor claims that it is, "the greatest threat to academic freedom that I've seen in the history of this campus." Yet the animal-rights protectors maintain that they are only revealing these researchers for their moral bankruptcy as a duty to society because animals have a right to live.

Rucker, Philip. "Med School Is Asked to Stop Animal Use." Washington Post 2 July 2008: B.1. SIRS Researcher. SIRS Knowledge Source. 7 Dec. 2008 <http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SMN0307-0-3879&artno=0000284810&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=&title=Med%20School%20Is%20Asked%20to%20Stop%20Animal%20Use&res=Y&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=N&ic=Y>.

Philip Rucker is a staff writer at The Washington Post and was previously interned at The Washinton Post, at the Times-Picayune, in Corporate Communications at Humana, and in Economic Develpment at Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce as well as being a legal assistant at Russel M. Stookey, P.C. This article discusses the use of live animals for training at the Uniformed Services University. Apparently live ferrets and pigs are killed in a way that "inherently and unavoidably causes pain, distress, and suffering to those animals." This article repeatedly highlights that these actions are not neccessary and avoidable, but it is pointed out that they are not very frequent, only occuring at 8 of the all 154 of these schools in the nation. The dean of medicine points out that thousands of times more pigs are slaughtered on a daily basis in places such as Iowa for food, so the attention that they are getting is diproportianate to the actual cause and unneccessary. Altogether, this article contrasts from the piece in the Hanford Sentinel because it focuses more on the cruelty to animals and does not mention any irrational actions taken by opposers to these actions. It helps back up the pro-animal side of the argument.

Spook by Mary Roach

More interesting human behavior from this book. Apparently in an experiment people have interpreted white noise as being entire dialogues (which they in turn say is the undead speaking to them through telephones).

First of all, this reminds me of one day in physics class last year when we were listening to sounds of higher and higher frequencies. Eventually, it went so high that it was a faint buzzing in the back of our heads and the teacher asked if we could hear anything still and a couple kids said yes. It turns out it was off and she was just playing a joke on us. People seem to always be eager to hear or to see something because they think they should be able to. Strange...

People are so willing to believe things. What could cause that desire in us to take meaning out of everything we hear or see? I mean, think about it. White noise is interpreted into entire sentences and phrases! Is that too much curiosity or too much imagination inside us? I think it's the former because if we were all incredably imaginative there would be a lot more good books out there... So, is this curiosity a product of our basic animal instincts or a habit that has developed as we've grown into a distinct and strange race of animals?

I personally think a desire to take something meaningless and interpret as something incredibly important must have developed as we've become independant thinkers with a solid base of knowledge to work from. It's a new thing, and it's stupid. It's basically an illustration of how often people start running their mouths on whatever they believe to be true because they want to believe it. It's an annoying and egregious display of ignorance.

Maybe there are new and interesting sounds on tapes left in empty rooms because you aren't there filling the vacuum with your useless chatter? People who think something but aren't sure about it should probably stay quiet until they are sure.

Spook by Mary Roach

This week I'm writing more on Spook as I've spent my long weekend immersed in magazines and trashy teen novels (don't judge me). I did make some progress on the book and just finished a chapter on the author enrolling in a school for psychic readings.

Her verdict is that both the psychic and the reader only believe that what is being said is true. It's not that the supposed fortune-teller is trying to deceive people; they honestly believe that they have a gift. This belief in themselves, in turn, stems from the receivers willingness to accept that the broad fortune that they were told is true. It reminds me of that one picture where a hand is drawing itself on a piece of paper. Let's see if I can attach that with my blog post to liven it up a little bit.

The only problem with this idea is that it applies to pretty much everything. We believe things because other people tell it to us, and since we accept them, they keep pushing the idea. The separation between a belief in the supernatural and the laws of gravity is scientific evidence, but people can slap "scientific proof" on everything. Every other month studies come out either denouncing soy milk or saying it has the same effect as skim milk (not that this concerns me since soy milk just plain tastes bad...) but you get my point. There are some absolute truths in which I whole-heartedly accept the scientific proofs, like the way the earth turns and the way a seed turns into a tree, but how much does this help us in our everyday lives? Actually, a good bit... With the knowledge that comes from things that are indisputably proven we can grow food, make shelters, stay warm, in essence, we can live. It's those things that concern our vanity, our curiosity, our boredom, and our lust that can't be proven.

Ok, that was an unorganized paragraph since it was just a train of thought, but this blog is just a series of things that I think after reading something, so I'm leaving it that way.

To continue with my mishmash of semi-epiphanies...

Should the knowledge that our materialistic existences has no solid reason or basis according to the way the world works stop us from pursuing them or is this another reason to? Is wearing the ridiculous concoctions passed off to us by designers just plain stupid or is it in fact a brilliant escape from life? Do we need to escape from life? Is it all that bad? Since food, shelter, and warmth is all set for spoiled littler suburban girls like me, is it wrong of me to decide that it's absolutely necessary to buy gold eye-shadow or is that what adds imperative hunting and triumph to my life?

Ok, I think I've reached my conclusion: Humans have an animal instinct to seek something, they want to find something, but that something has become hollow and useless since we are have everything that we need. We are the product of people who have thought everything out for us before. Unless we are brilliant enough to rise to a new level of thought (a quality only geniuses have, the rest of us just memorize what's spoon-fed to us) our existences are basically hollow. I don't know yet if I like living a pleasent and useless existence. I'm still weighing its pros and cons, I guess...

Now, how in the world did I get to this from reading Spook.....

Spook by Mary Roach

I've started my next outside reading book. This is a 295 page nonfiction book about the afterlife, but it's not agendized or boring. Mary Roach is incredibly witty and her diligence in research is kind of incredible when you take a step back and look at it. She finds out exstensive details about strange "scientists" weighing dying people or animals to detect if a soul is leaving the body or researching "ectoplasma". She manages to make an interesting information-packed book feel like a guilty treat. Here is a perfect example of Roach's writing:

"The loss [of weight after death] was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce. Which is, yes, twenty-one grams. Hollywood metricized its reference to the event for the simple reason that 21 Grams sounds better. Who's going to see a movie called Point Seven Five Ounces?"

There isn't a terribly deep book, but it does provoke some thought. For an example, I've determined that I don't believe in an afterlife and I don't think that there are any people that can communicate with spirits. The idea does make for sometimes very good stories, but that's about it. I find it strange, the way people keep believing arbitrary supernatural concepts only because people before them believed it. I mean, what good did the belief in ghosts, spirits, and true love do to our predecessors? What are some things I actually do believe in? Well I'm not all cynical, I think hard work will prevail in the end, and I think the corny saying, "Stay true to yourself" is actually worth following. I'm still taking a leap of faith here, but at least I'm not waiting for messages from the other side.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The most disturbing thing about this book was when I read the introduction. The ending, contrary to what I expected, is happy. The last lines show that Esther has been cured, and she feels as if she's being reborn. However, when I read the introduction, I learned that the author, Sylvia Plath committed suicide shortly after this book was published. That really puts a damper on any hopeful spirit that may have been born with the ending. Although the book is not autobiographical, it is a novel, I assume a lot of it is based on her life. She too had a mental breakdown and was well enough to complete and publish a novel inspired by it. But the convenient and inspiring ending is false. It's the most fictional part of the whole book because the real woman who really had these thoughts and feelings didn't get better. She killed herself.

Otherwise, the story went in a traditional and understandable arc. She keeps getting crazier and crazier until she is taken to a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, who she loathes. He gives her a shock treatment which goes awry, causes pain, and traumatizes her. Her attempts and thoughts of suicide are constant, and her reason why she wants to end her life is the strangest part. She doesn't want people to know that she's lost her mind, that she can't read or write any more. Finally, she makes an almost successful attempt at killing herself by hiding in their cellar and taking a bunch of sleeping pills. When she's found, she's barely alive and admitted into a mental hospital which is not much to her liking. A wealthy sponsor sends her to another, better institution where she has a female psychiatrist who Esther actually likes. This femal doctor, Dr. Nolan, helps her recover and administers successful shock treatments. In fact, her first shock treatment with Dr. Nolan is one of my favorite parts of the book because it's such a relief. It goes:

"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air."

That passage is so refreshing after watching this girl stew in her destructive, incomprehensible, and disturbed thoughts for so long. She keeps getting worse and worse until she starts trying to kill herself and then finally the bell jar is lifted a bit! This isn't her first mention of that metaphor. The first time she said it, I was terribly relieved that Plath had deigned to explain to us the reason behind the title of the book. It's relatively annoying when authors choose a name that requires analyzing. I feel that it's a bit affected... Anyhow, the first mention that we have of the bell jar is when she's driving to her new, private mental institution and she can feel that her mother and brother are blocking the doors of the car so that she does not jump off the bridge that they are driving across. I wonder if they were actually doing that or she was just imagining it. Either way, it's pretty horrible.

"Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. Blue sky opened its dome above the river, and the river was dotted with sails. I readied myself, but immediately my mother and my brother each laid one hand on a door handle. The tires hummed briefly over the grill of the bridge. Water, sails, blue sky and suspended gulls flashed by like an improbable postcard, and we were across. I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir."

Her writing is so very good. The entire book is excellent. It's such an injustice that brilliant people suffer so much. It's so depressing that Sylvia Plath couldn't live a long and happy life when her writing was so incredible.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I hadn't had any time to read during the school-week, but I started it last weekend and basically could not put it down. It's only 229 pages long, but I don't think that is particularly easy literature. Plus, I'm planning on reading more books this quarter. This weekend I hope to finish it.

So basically I'm halfway through the book as of Saturday morning. It starts out with the heroine Esther Greenwood in New York as a summer guest-editor to Ladie's Day, a magazine. She starts out the book being a slightly cold and removed person. She's fascinated with one of the other winners, the sensual and cynical Doreen, but she is somehow disgusted with Doreen's amoral behavior at the same time. Flashbacks to her earlier college life also show how her adoration for a smart, good-looking, athletic boy Buddy Willard turns into revulsion for his hypocracy. It turns out that his good-boy image is only a mirage as he had an affair with a random waitress. Her disgust for the world isn't emphasized very much, but I picked up on every grain of it because it's certainly something that I feel these days.

Her behavior becomes stranger and stranger as the book progresses. She starts to refuse human company, and when she does go out with Doreen, her vision of the night is somehow feverished and unfocused. Her boss at the magazine tries to get her to appreciate the wonderful opportunity that she is getting, but she seems to be losing her vison of what she wants to do with her life. She tells us of all the years before that she labored at her work to get perfect grades, to get every scholarship, and to win every competition. She knows that those are her skills and strong points, but she fears she won't be able to do anything once she gets out of college.

By the time she returns home to Boston, she's completely lost. She has chronic insomnia. She refuses to wash because of its futility. She decides she will write a novel and spends a whole day sitting in her nightgown staring into nothingness. She can't read anything (as in, she's unable to piece together words out of letters) besides headlines, and becomes fascinated with morbid stories. She makes one feeble attempt at suicide, but ends up only cutting at her legs because she can't bring herself to slash her wrists. At the same time, I feel myself reading this book with the very same morbid fascination that the character has. Watching this girl self-destruct is painful, but I can't look away.

I finished reading Watchmen by Alan Moore. Let me preface this by saying, WOW. Then I need to restate myself, WOW!!

I loved it. It was incredible. I can't believe how many interesting themes were contained in about 100 pages about super-heroes. The plot, simply speaking, is about the US in 1985 at the height of the Cold War, but in this alternate course of events, super heroes actually existed. They were regular people who wanted to imitate the comic books and fight for justice in the streets. They banded together in the 50's and did so again in the 70's, but a law was passed to ban them after the populace became sick of them. The book opens with the murder of one of the first heroes, the Comedian, and a subsequent trend of retired superheroes dying or disappearing which leads the only still-active hero, Rorschach to believe that someone out there is killing the "masks".

The main conflict in the book is the struggle between saving people and saving the world. The characters all react in interesting psychological ways to the desperate impossibility of saving the wretched hordes of people. Some, like Dan Dreiberg, the second man to take the superhero name of Nite Owl, give up and fall into a depressed middle age where they view their vigilanteism as youthful naivete. Then there is my personal favorite character Rorschach. He's horribly traumatized from a childhood with a prostitute mother who genuinely dislikes him, and then he's further damaged by an "adventure" in which he tries to rescue a kidnapped little girl only to discover that the criminal already slaughtered her and fed her to his dogs. Needless to say, retribution is delivered. Now he doesn't really have emotions nor does he care for the scum of the earth people who populate the streets, and yet he lives his life to fight desperately for what is undebatably right. He is not willing to lie or to do what he thinks is wrong, but he so cold and able to kill anybody he thinks deserves it. Also, his mask is just a Rorschach blot test which has to be the coolest thing in the world.

Every single intricate element of the plot comes together so perfectly in the end, and the overall moral of the story is so unmistakable, understandable, and thought-provoking. It is no doubt one of the best books that I've read recently, and the best graphic novel that I've ever read... It's also the only graphic novel that I've ever read...

I've recently become obsessed with a couple of things, The Colbert Report, The Killers, and Diablo Cody's columns. I can only blog about one of them, but I'd be more than happy to talk about all the things I love about Diablo Cody's writing!

Here's the url to her most recent article:

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20233928,00.html

This time, she's talking about her new obsession with some show on the history channel called MonsterQuest. It's sappy and it appears to be 90% fictional from what she says, but she loves it. The topic itself isn't incredibly interesting to me. They usually aren't when she's writing; I mean the last few articles have been about how she loves retro PlayBoy stuff and Judy Blume. Her screenplay is about a pregnant teenager (a movie premise that wouldn't really interest anyone unless they're a fan of 7th Heaven or something). It's the way in which she writes things that keeps me coming for more.

Let's take this passage for an example:

"Television is essential to my overall wellness. It's my only distraction from the endless, unceasing California sunshine that refuses to get off my damn lawn."

Okay, let me list a couple reasons why I absolutely love those two sentences. Her sense of humor is actually... well... funny. I don't usually find women that funny. You've heard about my dislike of Tina Fey..... Diablo Cody is an exception to the rule. She's sharp, funny, and she does things like write that she needs a TV to distract her from the sun that won't leave her lawn.

Her amusing and earnest voice that screams through every word that she writes isn't the only reason I like her though. That she used to be a stripper and blogged about it is pretty much the coolest thing I've ever heard in my life. She's unapologetic about her sexuality (the title of the article I cited is "I Was a 'Monster' Virgin") and that's a breath of fresh air in an era where every pop-tart has to pretend that she's an untouched and pure girl to get famous (Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus) when everyone knows that they aren't. I can't stand dishonesty and I love cynicism. She writes about everyday life in a way that is entertaining and enjoyable and she'll make fun of anything stupid or fake if she feels like it.

That is why I like Diablo Cody. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to listen to The Killers' cover of Romeo and Juliet for the 1,000,000th time this weekend.

I'm still working through The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory. Yes, I just said "working through" which is never the ideal way to describe the reading of a book, but I must say that it is an excellent choice of words on my part. Despite it's similarities to The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory in outside appearences (note the name and the author), it does not have any of the appeal of her earlier book. I realize that in my last post, I was comparing the two books, but I feel that after finishing more than half of The Other Queen, I have to reiterate my opinion.

The Other Queen is told by three perspectives, and there are no subtleties about how the three characters view things differently. The wife is jealous that the husband is in love with Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Queen of Scots wants to be queen no matter what. The husband is in love with Mary but has to stay faithful to his wife and his real queen, Elizabeth. This could result in some interest if the characters were DYNAMIC, but these happen to be the three most STATIC characters I've ever encountered in my life, and I've read a fair amount of books.

If you take a look at The Other Boleyn Girl, the main character, Mary, Anne Boleyn's sister, narrates, THE ENTIRE TIME. She starts the book out as a young innocent girl who's in love with Henry VIII but after a while sees him as a spoiled and uncaring man and falls out of love with him. She watches from the sidelines as her sister takes her place as his mistress, then rises even higher only to be executed in the end.

So Ms. Gregory, you should really take notes from your previous book and make sure your characters develop.

Now, it's unfair to say that her multi-perspective books aren't any good. The Boleyn Inheritance does the same thing, but that involves some passion that it actually appealing to the reader (Catherine Howard and Thomas Culpepper!), a seriously messed up woman (wife of George Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's brother who was executed for allegedly sleeping with his sister, who testified against her husband), and perspective on the same events that are different without being too obvious (the way the strict and pious Anne of Cleves views things versus the way the ditzy, young Catherine Howard sees things). When you look back at the bland perspectives I listed in The Other Queen, I must say that perhaps this new book of hers isn't so much a bad version of The Other Boleyn Girl but more a bad version of The Boleyn Inheritance.

Or maybe I just don't like it because Boleyn isn't in the title...

Last week's blog was a bit lengthy, but this week I'm reading something much lighter. I picked up a brand, new hardbound copy of The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory because I'm shamefully obsessed with her historical fiction novels. I've read them all, so of course I had to go and blow $20 on a copy of her brand-new book. 

It's of course not nearly as good as The Other Boleyn girl (no, I never saw the movie), but that one had something extra to it. I'm convinced that any story about Anne Boleyn will turn out moderately good, and since Ms. Gregory is a pretty good writer, hers was really quite good. Something about the feverish rise and deadly fall of a character is monstrously appealing. 

This time around, the story is about Mary Stuart (also known as Mary Queen of Scots) and she's never really interested me very much. Some people find the idea of a queen of three countries yet without a throne fascinating, but I've always felt that it's pretty boring. This book alternates between the perspectives of Mary, and the couple who are keeping her in their house while she's exiled in England. Philippa Gregory is obviously going to spend the whole book building pathos for the young queen so that her death seems very tragic. A love story is slowly being constructed aswell between her and George. Bess is, meanwhile, aware of the beauty and vivaciousness of this royal and not too happy to see her husband slowly become taken with her. The problem right now in this story, is that there is no conflict. I really want a catastrophe to happen to spice things up a bit... That and the chapters narrated by Bess Talbot are terribly boring...

After finishing The Red Pony, I have no idea how to start talking about. There are so many ideas in it and complicated symbols that I can't begin to cover it all. I guess I'll start with my initial reactions.

The death of Jody's pony, Gabilan, at the end of the first of four chapters came as no real shock. It wasn't particularly foreshadowed, but the moment we learned that it was let out in the rain, I knew it wouldn't make it. Steinbeck isn't exactly the type of author that tells a warm-your-heart story about a pony that gets sick then all better and lives happily ever after. The child's reaction to the death was disturbing though. Killing a scavenger bird and ripping its head off seems so violent and dangerous and yet so natural. So, this being the ending of the first of four parts, I take it that the first step to Jody maturing is feeling so much grief and anger that his body and mind can't take it. I've felt that. I wonder if that was when I stopped being a little girl....

The part of the chapter that I can't say I understood was why Gabilan kept on running out of the barn in the middle of the night the second Jody fell asleep. If Gabilan represents his dreams and naivete, then the fact that it runs away multiple times until the final time when it drops dead, could make some sense symbolically... The only way I can understand it is by thinking it means that Jody's innocence and hopes are leaving him every time he closes his eyes. When the horse leaves and never comes back, Jody has his fit of despair, and that must be the moment that he loses his hope for a long period of time. Still, I don't feel like I totally understood that episode.

Then the next chapter is about the old Mexican guy who comes to their farm because the place he was born was just over the next mountain. In this chapter Jody mentions the nice mountains to one side of his house and then the evil sinister ones to the other side which he desperately wants to explore. This reminded me immediately of East of Eden, since the whole first chapter talks about those two contrasting mountain range. Steinbeck can't get enough of the contrasting east and west of Salinas Valley, could he? Symbollic of heaven and hell, good and evil, light and darkness, and he does love exploring those two extremes... In The Red Pony, however, I didn't feel like he was saying that those dangerous and empty mountains were hell, just death. The old Mexican ends up taking an old horse, himself, and a gun to those mountain ranges and never coming back. The reader is left to guess what happens up there (duh). So the combination of Jody's curiosity as to what is in those mountains, and the old man's journey there out of his own doing seems to mean that death is not frightening. It is a peaceful ending to a long story with its own mysterious allure. This contrasts with the violent and sad death at the end of the first chapter, but somehow starts making sense of the book as a whole. It's a narrative about death in every way, and what it means to the growing mind. I love it.

The third chapter is about the second horse that Jody gets, only Jody has to wait out a whole year patiently for the colt to be born from Nelly, the mare. The poor little kid does everything he can to help Nelly, but when the birth actually comes, something goes terribly wrong. The ranch help, Billy Buck, tells Jody to look the other way as he takes a hammer to Nelly's head and then cuts open her belly to bring the tiny black colt into the world. Jody can't move or think. He stands there shocked, and the chapter closes. Wow... Death again, as usual is the ending to the chapter, and this time it's sacrafice. The older horse has to die so that the young one can be born and Billy Buck feels he has to give Jody the colt because he was mostly responsible for Gabilan's death. Jody can't seem to justify the killing of Nelly in his own mind no matter how much he wanted another horse, and whether or not Jody does come to terms with this exchange is never mentioned again. I guess it can be assumed that he did, because as an adult you probably have to learn that things have to be destroyed to create new things. There can't be any happiness in the world without an equal amount of sadness. That's not the greatest thing to think of when you happen to be happy, but I'm a firm believer of that fact. If you have the ability to feel totally and completely happy, then you also have the unfortunate skill of completely losing all joy. Whoops, I've kind of strayed from the story there....

That's all I'd like to say about the book. I guess the last chapter didn't have a huge impact on me. It was pretty self-explanitory. It was a good read though. I still love Steinbeck.

I read an article from the New York Times on the Emmy's which can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/arts/television/22emmys.html?_r=1&ref=television&oref=slogin

It was a pretty interesting recap of the evening which I watched last night as well. I guess my interest in these awards was primarily due to my infatuation with the AMC show, "Mad Men". Something about that show just makes you love it... 

I've been bombarded with many other headlines while accessing my Yahoo e-mail which makes it obvious that the five hosts, the nominees for the category of Best Reality Host, were seen as a flop by everyone. In the New York Times article it even says: 

"If anything, the performance of the five reality-show hosts who together played masters of ceremony on the awards show might inspire the executives not to abandon scripted television."

I found that pretty funny being a huge fan of well-written cable shows (like Mad Men, Dexter, Weeds, The Sopranos, etc) and a proud abstainer from "reality" shows that are said to be so popular in my social category. I can't believe that girls my age actually watch The Hills and that one new show where Paris Hilton is trying to find a best friend...

The article spends a lot of time talking about the sweeps of both HBO (who came out with 10 emmys) and 30 Rock which got best comedy, best actor in a comedy, best actress in a comedy, and best writing in a comedy. I've never seen 30 Rock, but somehow I don't believe it deserved all of that. Honestly, I've never found anything that Tina Fey has done to be remotely funny... Why do people keep insisting that she's so very talented when SNL hasn't been funny since Will Ferrel and she was the writer behind all of those lame skits? I say it's 100% propaganda. People will say that Ms. Fey is hilarious without being able to name a single funny thing that she's ever done...

As usual, the Times give almost no opinions on any of the topics they report on. It's a remarkable newspaper, but whenever I catch not a single whiff of propaganda, I get nervous about how much there must be under the detectable layer. Of course this applies more to their political articles as I'm not too worried about them warping my opinions about award ceremonies...

I finally started reading The Red Pony by John Steinbeck today. I'd gotten it out of the library this summer along with some of his other novellas and didn't get around to it due to my lack of appreciation for Tortilla Flat. It was just a bit too John Steinbeck-ish for me. That of course means without very much in the line of a plot, but containing ample amounts of nostalgic accounts of ridiculous and unimportant adventures there just for the sake of telling them. Cannery Row had the same feel to it, but somehow I felt that I got more out of that book.

Anyhow, the exposition of The Red Pony brought up several thoughts in me. Basically, all that is written is a brief and complete account of how a family on a small California ranch spends their day. There's the helper, Billy Buck, the mother, the father and the protagonist, Jody, a ten-year-old boy. The list of events that transpire is tedious and monotonous, but I got a sense of rhythm out of it eventually. You kind of have to slow down your mind and understand the graceful gait for the writing. Once you capture that, you understand Steinbeck's tone in my eyes. And within this uneventful telling of  a regular late summer day, there can be little nuggets of writing that I find totally perfect in their own way. First, is this one-sentenced description of Jody:

"He was only a little boy, ten years old, with hair like dusty yellow grass and with shy polite gray eyes, and with a mouth that worked when he thought."

The whole thing about having Jody's mouth move when he thinks made so much sense out of the character. It's amazing how with that one description of one of his traits, we can already gain such and understanding of him. I've come to the conclusion that Jody is a quiet child, not smart, but thinks hard to come to his simple decisions. I wonder what is going to happen to Jody in the next 80 pages....

My other favorite quote from the passage I covered reads:

"He felt an uncertainty in the air, a feeling of change and of loss and of the gain of new and unfamiliar things."

I love how Steinbeck inserts this little gem amongst descriptions of buzzards and Jody crushing a muskmellon for no apparent reason. I gather from it that shy little Jody is going to grow up. I hope it's not too painful a coming of age, because I've already taking quite a liking to him.