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Book Review: The Power (Naomi Alderman, 2016)
It’s interesting to note that writer Naomi Alderman was mentored by The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, and in that light The Power can be seen as something of a revenge fantasy with The Handmaid’s Tale as inspiration. It also leverages Atwood’s notion of the safe haven of a convent to nurture the development of an emerging power in women. What is this power? Teenage women start to discover an ability to generate electricity within their bodies which soon emerges as a weapon to free them from abusive men, and then find a way to connect older women to this power. At first, the power is an instrument of revenge…
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A Conversational Guide to … Rock ‘n’ Roll
There you are—stuck at a dinner party, or at an open house for your neighbor kid’s Bar Mitzvah, or dragging yourself to a professional “networking” event, or you’re sitting with your skis in Aspen’s Silver Queen Gondola for the 14 minute ride to the top of the mountain with a couple of German foreign exchange students. If an uneasy silence or retreating from live human interaction with your nose in your smartphone is not the considerate thing to do in these situations, you are faced with the challenge of talking with real human beings. Conversation was, and still is, a universally acceptable way for people to pass time. Get acquainted.…
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Story of Dan, Part Four
BORED, SUBURBAN WHITE KIDS IN THE CITY I can’t properly explain my college years without talking about TRASH. TRASH was like that cool, yeasty, and bittersweet smell that hits you when you walk into an old riverside bar. TRASH was a concept, an outrage, a figment of our imaginations. TRASH was that group of guys that you pass by on the street during a wild night and they’re laughing and shoving each other at their own private joke and you want to turn around and hang with them. “TRASH!” was what that tall, willowy black girl who worked behind the snacks and magazines shop in the IIT Student Union building…
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Book Reviews: What I Read Last Summer
Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, 1966. A long stretch of post-modern fiction with allegories to the Cold War and the liberal college curriculum trends of the 60s. There’s treatment of Western vs. Eastern philosophic approaches to human enlightenment as well. The Goat-Boy struggles with his own bestial origins vs. his aspirations to be a spiritual guide to the undergraduates of an Ivy-League patterned fictional college. A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945. Only around 900 pages of pungent, but surprisingly digestible, reading, and an excellent introduction to Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the German and English philosophers of the mid-Twentieth Century. Russell’s background in mathematics serves to make…
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Travelogue: Ireland (2013)
After the kids were out of their teens, we decided to start traveling on our own again to places we’d never seen. I originally wanted to plan a Scotland and Ireland trip, but decided to spend our time to focus on Ireland. The people there were as friendly as expected, the rolling hills as green as expected, the weather as unpredictable as expected. What we didn’t expect was the excellent food, after being raised to expect everyone there eating boiled corned beef, boiled cabbage, and boiled potatoes. Friday, Sept 13: Kilkenny Flew into London, then a took a flight to Dublin. We picked up the rental car at the airport…
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Story of Dan: Part Three
FAITH This little (half) Irish Catholic boy was struggling with the whole concept and purpose of God at age fifteen. I’d seen too many bad things happen to good people, and via my reading was becoming quickly aware of other cultures, perspectives, and modes of spirituality that seemed equally or more valid to mine. When I realized that the only reason why I was attending Sunday mass was to sit behind the girl I liked, I was through with it. In retrospect, this was a necessary part of growing up for me, and I’ve never looked back. SCHOOL School days in freshman year started with my clock radio going off…
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Waking Up From History: The Big Chill and Forrest Gump
*SPOILER ALERT**QUESTIONABLE ANALYSIS ALERT**CONTAINS INFORMATION BASED ON WIKIPEDIA* Plot summary, The Big Chill (1983): Seven alumni from the University of Michigan in their thirties, known for their political activism in the 60s, converge on the South Carolina vacation home of Harold and Sarah Cooper to attend the funeral of fellow classmate Alex, who committed suicide while living with the Coopers. After the burial, everyone stays for the weekend. Harold and Sarah are living a respectable middle-class life, with Harold about to sell his small business to a large corporation. Sam is a popular TV star on a “Magnum P.I. type detective show. Meg is a single real estate attorney in…
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Travelogue: New Orleans (2016)
Apr 21, Thursday: Just got back from a 24-hour place called Daisy Dukes on Chartres St. where I had an alligator po’ boy and it was everything that I thought it would be. Super tired from this morning’s travel, I vowed to stay away from the bars for now. Strolled back to my hotel, the French Market Inn, on Decatur St. near the steamboat dock through the drizzle and sidestepping the drunks sleeping in the doorways. That’s New Orleans for me—off the track, wet, stinking in a sweet spicy way and chunks of the sidewalk covered with plywood and scaffolding holding up facades and everything off kilter and kind of…
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The Story of Dan, Part Two
The NeighborhoodI grew up in a suburb bordering the City of Chicago. This meant rectangular blocks—a regular precision of eight per mile on the long side, and sixteen across, just like the big city. The East Chicago and Hammond refineries and steel mills were only 10 miles away, so things would get fragrant on a day with the breeze blowing in off the lake. There were taverns on the corners of the secondary streets, and long alleys behind the houses for garbage pickup and we thought, while growing up, that the rest of the world was arranged this way. This gridiron was the stage of the drama of my youth. …
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Review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Quitting: An admission of personal failure, anathema to the quintessentially American spirit of optimism and self-improvement. Fighting for the wrong side is held more admirable than running from the field of battle. Even anti-heroes are heroic to the extent that they strive in their opposition. A life without purpose is not worth living. Quitting is somehow a betrayal of our humanity. The narrator, a privileged, Art History graduate of Columbia University, is fired from her going-nowhere-fast job at an art gallery and she decides to quit—to spend an entire year holed up in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zonked on anti-anxiety and sleeping medications, funded by…
