Love Thy Enemy

Recently, I found myself in a very uncomfortable situation, about which I will not go into detail.  When I reached out for help, the advice that I was given was that I should "love my enemy."  I was very hurt by this suggestion, and I wondered about it, and my response to it, for a while.  After some weeks of meditation on this phrase, here is what I have realized:

First, I needed to identify my “enemy.”  Perhaps the “enemy” is not the person who wronged me at all.  There are painful memories of those wrongs, yes, but is that person still holding me back, or is the experience?  Are the memories actually the enemy?  So what does “loving” my enemy really mean in that case?  If I can make those painful memories useful, and learn from them, and gain a new perspective on life, is that “loving” them?  I think so.  When I use the painful memories of past wrongs as learning tools, I am “loving my enemy” because these memories are the real enemy holding me back. 

For instance, on bad days I can I feel lost or caught in them.  Sometimes I suffer bitterness and anger when they come up for me, while others I feel regret, sadness and loss.  So I accept the painful past.  I take the memories on.  I say, “I have been wronged, but who hasn’t?  It is not my fault that I was wronged, but it is my responsibility now to move on from it.”  This is “loving the enemy:” loving the memories of a painful past experience.   And now when they resurface, I feel instead grateful that things are different, or proud that I overcame them, or blessed to have loved ones who support me no matter what.  The painful experience is actually something I have made useful, because it has given me a brand new perspective on life and how full and joyful it can be in comparison.

“Love thy enemy” is a cornerstone of forgiveness.  Forgiveness is accepting what has happened to you and allowing yourself to heal.  This is the important next step of my thought process:  Forgiveness does not make what happened to you “OK.”  Also, it does not mean that the person who hurt you is welcome back into your life.  You can bless them on their way, but it is also important to stand your ground.  Standing your ground means making your boundaries clear and respecting yourself.  Neither forgiveness nor “loving your enemy” means that you have to be a doormat for them to cause you even further discomfort, let alone more pain.  I needed help that night standing my ground, not help with “loving my enemy.”  I continue to explore and work on both.

Everyone has a story, and everyone has been hurt in a major way by someone, in regards to their own experience.  The people who hurt us are and should be inconsequential.  Let them go.  As I said, bless them on their way and stand your ground.  This is the best “loving” that you can give.  Love the memories that have become enemies by using them and growing.  Love yourself, also.  Be easy.

Thank you for reading.

Love, 

Clellan

Sister Savannah (Savannah, GA)

Reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt was like coming home.  Well, maybe more like coming home to a step sister who gives you a warm hug and then sits in the corner mumbling wickedly about you.  The book takes place mostly in Savannah, and this Charleston girl did not appreciate the many unfavorable comparisons the author claims Savannahians make between the sister cities.  The wry southern lady's voice in my head kept speaking, "Well, us Charlestonians don't even think about Savannah...let them make all the comparisons they like.  And the Spoleto USA festival is a damn good time..."  The book mentioned more than once how Savannah got the offer to host Spoleto USA first, and, because of their rejection, Charleston got the honor as a runner up.

 Those brief references aside, the book really was delightful.  I felt gratitude towards the New Yorker who moved to Savannah and took his time to right this piece of nonfiction (that's right, nonfiction).  This novel is like a window into old southern culture, and the author had to go into the house in order to unlock and open it for the rest of the world to peer inside.  The author crafts this story with such love and appreciation that a true Southerner will begin to have visceral sense memories of moments in their life that match the tale, and an outsider will marvel at the wonder and begin to love it too.  And if there is something a Southerner likes more than telling a tale, it's having others listen and become desirous of the same experience.

The fact that the book was an extremely popular non-fiction book and reads like a novel is just perfect. In the deep south, what is fact and what is sensational are so hand in hand that no one thinks of "facts" as being mostly boring.  We see the world through eyes that believe in magic, in the witching hour, in the concepts of legends, true love and honorable deeds.  And dishonorable deeds, too, of course, are a large part of that mysticism.

I will not reveal any more than that.  I cannot recap the story or outline the plot since the story, like all good stories, must be told the way it was meant to be and in its entirety.  But you must read the book.  Get yourself some southern culture.

Love,
Clellan

Plays Apart

I forget that in my original manifesto for the book review blog I had a list that included plays.  I have read A LOT of plays in my search for showcase material and monologues.  Here are my thoughts on two of them:

Keely and Du by Jane Martin

With the abortion debate still a hot button issue among many, this play should be done everywhere.  This 1993 winner of an American Theatre Critics Association Award for Best New Play is deeply fascinating, weird, visceral, touching, and smart.  Keely is on her way to the abortion clinic when she is kidnapped by some unspecified extremist group.  She wakes up chained to a bed and in the care of Du, an old retired nurse who belongs to the group and in whose care Keely is entrusted.  They are going to force her to have the baby.  The underlying complexities of both of the characters' lives are explored through their conversations and negotiations.  The climax is thrilling and in the end there is a twist.  The play raises a lot of questions, and as a reader I found myself closing the play with nothing but thoughtfulness concerning the issue.  If you do this play, call me up.  I want to play Keely.  I will audition the shit out of this role for you.

Dying City by Christopher Shinn

Apparently I chose plays that touched on all the hot button issues.  This play was well received after it's 2007 premiere (Ben Brantley called Mr. Shinn "the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today" and if you know Ben Brantley, you know that the praise is meaningful) and I wonder when more theater companies will begin to pick up this gem.  The play goes back and forth between the events that occurred on two nights a year a part from one another; the night before Kelly's husband Craig leaves for Iraq, and a year later when his twin brother (played by the same actor) has come to visit.  I think this one deserves a read for yourself.  Side note:  the original production at Lincoln Center included a stage that rotated slowly over the course of the entire show and wasn't noticeable until some time had passed.


All for now.  More later!

Love,
Clellan

Oyster Point Walking Tours

If any of my faithful readers (if only I updated as faithfully...) will be visiting Charleston in the near future, I advise that you take a tour with the Oyster Point Walking Tour group.

Their website is here:

http://oysterpointtours.com/

The team is made up of a young, vibrant crowd who all love living in the Holy City and want you to love it as much as they do.  As a native of Charleston, I would not endorse any other group.  I'm a local, my family has been residing in Charleston county since before the Revolutionary War, and I'd walk with them.  So should you!

New Adult Fiction: At It's Best (Or...New Adult Fiction: Theater Nerd Edition)

New Adult Fiction has been sweeping away readers who span from preteen girls hungry for an expression of the sexual desires they are beginning to feel to middle aged women hungry to re-experience the time in their lives when sex was new and exciting, to us: the twenty-somethings about whom this fiction is written.

We are a very critical audience, for the most part.

Especially us theater girls.  Who will devour anything worth carrying in our beach bag (Twilight or it's near predecessor Fifty Shades of Grey), but are quick to denounce either as being as meaningless as fluff/porn to as harmful as retrograde anti-feminism.  And while those Hunger Games books certainly had their fierce female warrior, half of us were unhappy with the ending and the other half of us wondered why we had to invest in another love triangle in the first place.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series also features a kick-ass, dysfunctional heroine, but wasn't really written to fit into this genre, even though it does, and is also an import from Sweden so of course it's more liberal in its thinking.  The series even bears the original title Men Who Hate Women, but that title wouldn't fly with US publishers. 

If you are looking for something fun, something that makes you smile the whole way through, that fits perfectly within the new "New Adult Fiction" genre but also takes time to wink at you and drops it down for something real:  then you need to run to the Kindle store to pick up Cora Carmack's LOSING IT.

The heroine, Bliss Edwards (a THEATER MAJOR in a liberal arts program) doesn't bear the "Mary Sue" quality that, say, Anastasia Steele of Fifty Shades bears.  No, she knows that she is attractive, but has never really taken the opportunity to have sex.  She feels weird for still being a virgin at twenty-two.  She doesn't want to jump into bed with someone random, but she would like to get down with someone.  And so, sometimes she gets in over her head, sometimes her emotions get blurry, sometimes her plans go awry and she can't control everything.

A jet-setting billionaire doesn't come to her rescue.  Neither does a vampire, werewolf, fellow warrior, infamous journalist, or anyone else for that matter.  Bliss does meet a guy, since this burgeoning genre means including some form of romance, and it is the kind of guy she's been looking for:  the kind of guy she'd be more than happy to do the deed with, among other things.  Things get messy, because if she just met the guy and things worked out wonderfully the first time (no pun intended) then we wouldn't have our book, or our genre either.  She makes a decision or two along the way, and we get our (SPOILER ALERT) happy ending.

This is the thing I like the best about the book:  Bliss is making decisions.  She's not helpless, she's not clueless, and she doesn't play wilting flower.  She's not invulnerable, either.  This is a perfectly written, human character.  She has goals beyond landing the man of her dreams, and she attains some of them too.  In the end, the book is a romance, so let's not get too critical about the overall importance of her paramour(s).

And, okay, there is also still a love triangle.  But, come on guys, even Shakespeare used those.

Oh, yeah.  Theater majors will love the jokes and winks that we get.  As you're reading, if you find that all of this shit stuff didn't happen to someone in your undergrad liberal arts department, then I want to know where the hell heck you went.

You Deserve Nothing...right?

Alexander Maksik's You Deserve Nothing was just the read that I needed during the week of dread that was the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.  Hannah, my roommate, recommended it to me and mentioned that it was like Dead Poets Society mixed with some international intrigue.  The book certainly peeked my curiosity because I love Robin Williams, used to date artistic/troubled school boys exclusively (you know who you are), and think that bilingualism is hot.  However, the book turned out to be a little different than all of that...

The book was told from three different perspectives: the three main characters.  However, each character in the novel was so fleshed out that I almost remember it as having several more point of view narrations than there actually were.  The names are almost unimportant.  I remember them as their archetypes.  The "sexy professor," the "awkward teenage boy," and the "teenage girl too sexy to know what to do with herself."  Each is on their own personal journey and must make the kinds of life choices we all make, and are all pushed around by the waves of reality that make our desires more difficult to obtain and our choices harder to make. 

There's definitely lots of existentialist influence and underlying tones.  The French setting helps this along, and of course, all of the existential discussions that occur in "Mr. S's" (that's the sexy teacher) advanced English class for high school seniors at the International School where he is employed.  Eventually he has the affair with Marie (the sexpot high school senior), and has a really meaningful experience with Gilad (awkard teenage boy, aptly named), which, consequently, has made me nervous every time I'm on a subway or train platform. 

So, overall, I give it four stars out of five for being a great read that's also really smartly done.  It may be a little too smart for it's own good, and maybe let's Mr. S off a little too easy in the end.  But then again, life is never fair and we all must do the best we can with the hand we've been dealt.

Run, Don't Walk

Every twenty something that I know should pick Dr. Meg Jay's new book The Defining Decade:  Why your Twenties matter- and how to make the most of them now.  I read the book in a 12 hour stint, purchasing the book late Saturday night and finishing it, after a morning of Father's Day breakfast and attending church, on Sunday afternoon.  And when I mean every twenty something, I mean every twenty something.  Twenty somethings who are nannies, yoga instructors, and baristas should read this book.  Twenty somethings who are grunt workers or entry levels at any kind of businesses, corporation or company should read this book.  Twenty somethings who are in graduate school, law school, or med school should read this book.  Twenty somethings should read this book, regardless of what they are currently pursuing in their lives.  Can I say this again?  Read this book!

The book is divided into three parts: "work," "love," and "the brain and the body."  Each contains anecdotes from the author's own life as well as from patients from her practice and experience as a clinical psychologist.  The book doesn't contain a guide about how to make choices that will make your life better.  The book informs you about the ways in which the choices you make in your twenties could impact your life, and how to make the best, most active choices for you.  This book does what a lot of self help books cannot do: it gives you a tailor made approach to fit your own needs and desires.

I recognized a lot of the passages in the book from articles by Dr. Jay that I had read in the NY Times.  Although they were tremendously insightful and interesting as stand alone articles, they were much more helpful in the context of the overall book.  Instead of feeling guilty about where I am in life, and guilty about the way I feel (lost, excited, anxious, ready, nervous, hopeful, terrified, confused), I left the book feeling reassured.  My feelings at this stage of life are normal, but I don't have to stop there.  There are positive things that I can do in my life that both allow me to enjoy my twenties and also begin building my future.

As I said, I feel as though each reader will gain a different insight into his or her life by picking up and reading this book!  Five stars.

If a man don't treat you good...

The experience of reading Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea was like that of going into a time machine.  First, I had heard of the book years ago from my dear friend Emily Childress-Campbell way back when she was just just Emily Childress and we lived in a cramped dorm where she kept illegal hamsters (or something like that...maybe they were gerbils? Anyway...), so memories of our Jane Eyre-esque conversations and the first time I ever watched the film, with her, came flooding back.  Second, the book has not been released on Kindle yet, so I had to order it from Amazon, and I found myself reading a real paper book again.  Although I love my kindle, I do find a few things frustrating: like having to click a million buttons to flip back to a passage that was half the book ago, or not being able to see all of the cover art.  Well, none of those technology fueled frustrations with which my grandchildren won't sympathize!  I was able to flip back to reread certain passages to clarify something in the book as I read with ease, and the cover art was exotic and saturated, just like the world of the book into which I entered.

Wide Sargasso Sea was certainly the "tour de force" that the quote on the cover promises it will be.  A neat 171 pages, including the introduction by Francis Wyndham, I read it in an evening.  Being a Harry Potter generation-er who takes it seriously, I think that I have been indoctrinated into that kind of 3rd person narrative where we experience the events as if from over the shoulder of the main character, only sometimes going outside of the world of Harry's experience to get an outside perspective.  My ride through Wide Sargasso Sea was therefore, at times, a difficult journey because the first person prose could catch me off guard or make me feel a little lost.  But never, I believe, was this without purpose, as I will later describe.  Rhys takes us on a first person journey first from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole girl who has been in raised in the Caribbean and is, at the beginning of the novella, under the care of her widowed mother, Annette, and her nurse maid, Christophine, just after the Emancipation Act has been passed on her island.  The family, now being the descendants of former planters and slave owners, is shunned by the village they are near as well as isolated from other whites on the island due to the political climate and Antoinette's mother, who has a less than reputable history and soon is interred as a "madwoman."  Later we see the story through the eyes of Mr. Rochester, who is never named but whom we recognize from Charlotte Bronte's famous Jane Eyre.  He is there to marry our heroine and gain her wealthy dowry.  Finally we are returned to the story as it is in the hands of Antoinette during her final days locked away in an English manor under the same accusations as we saw befall her mother.

Through the first person narrative I was admitted into the world of the book not through detail of place and action, but through thought and emotion.  The place descriptions were lurid and lush, giving me also the hazy feel of the heat, the saturated quality of the island.  Much was often left unsaid until a character chanced to mention it, giving the storytelling a mysterious edge, which mirrored the mystery of the culture on the island.  Sometimes I caught myself feeling frustrated by the inaction of the characters to defend themselves, only finding that this was probably how Rhys expected the reader to feel; as in the end I found that this kind of lethargic prose helped to illustrate the inability of some of the characters to express their desires or, once they had, the inability of the other character to comprehend.  They were stuck in their own dreamlike perceptions of the world, captured in the dream like quality of the passages the write had given to us.

The book certainly makes me frown on the handsome and romantic figure of Mr. Rochester as he in cut in Jane Eyre's cloth.  The Bronte novel makes a sympathetic case for him, in which he is not without sin but repents and is worthy of the honorable Jane's love.  However, seeing the sad case of his "Bertha," the nickname he gives Antoinette, one cannot help but feel sorry for the madwoman from Jane Eyre, because the books gives us such a compelling glimpse into the world of a lost and confused little girl who lived in between worlds and only hoped for happiness.

It is not that I like Antoinette better than I like Jane.  I find both to be compelling heroines and that each book, both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, gives us interesting insights into how society thinks that women should behave in regards to love and relationships.  Both Antoinette and Jane overcome their fair share of obstacles.  Jane is mistreated by her foster family, whereas Antoinette is cutoff emotionally from her mother and witnesses a mob burn down her own home.  Jane is sent away to a horrid boarding school where she is starved and abused both mentally and physically, whereas Antoinette is sent to a nunnery where the people there confuse her and she is tormented on her walks through town.  Jane, described as plan once reaching adulthood, persists through her circumstances and becomes both educated and independent, although guarded and unsure, whereas Antoinette, described by all as being beautiful, attempts to further please her step family by marrying a stranger, whom she readily begins to love.  Whatever her abilities, Jane makes choices that are good and not wholly selfish but not too simperingly selfless either.  She is a woman of dignity.  Antoinette is just the opposite, a woman of fire and passion and full of love to give.

When Rochester does them wrong they each react in their own distinct ways.  Jane runs, runs, runs.  Meanwhile, Antoinette runs, but only to her nurse maid Christophine, to whom she begs to make Rochester fall back in love with her.  Antoinette screams and cries for Rochester's love, and is never rational.  The triumph of the novella comes only from Christophine's speech to Rochester at the book's climax.  In the most champion moment of the book, Christophine berates Rochester for his ill treatment of Antoinette and says, "I tell her so.  I warn her.  I say this is not a man who will help you when he sees you break up.  Only the best can do that."  By "break up" she means become heartbroken.  Rochester could have been as patient as Jane, as forgiving as Jane will be to him in later years when the next part of the story unfolds for him, but rather we see him become the cruel Mr. Rochester that we recognize from the beginning of Jane Eyre.  Antoinette is lost to him, becoming his mad little "Bertha," a wife to be hidden away.

So here is the moral of the story as I take it from Wide Sargasso Sea, especially as it relates to Jane Eyre:

We should all be free to love as passionately and as unrestrainedly as Antoinette, but we all have to try to be like Jane, lest we be labeled madwomen.

Or we could all be more like Christophine, who holds my favorite quote in the whole book:

"A man don't treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out."

Amen, sister.

Stranger than [fan]Fiction

I entered the reading experience of Fifty Shades of Grey like that of a seasoned fanfiction connoisseur.*  My canon (the original published work, in this case Twilight by Stephanie Meyer) knowledge was brushed up on, I had read the appropriate “warnings,” and was ready to discern for myself whether or not this new thing by E L James was a good read.  When beginning a fanfiction, I notice a couple of things in the first few paragraphs that determine whether or not I keep reading: one, is the narrative crisp, clear and descriptive, and two, am I reading this author’s perspectives on a character, or are the characters merely caricatures of canon characters?  Right off the bat, Fifty Shades of Grey reminded me of those well done fanfictions that I choose to “favorite;” that is, the author was threading together a story with grace while building anticipation for what comes next, and so I was excited to keep reading.  There were also lemons* promised, and every fanfiction reader knows that sometimes a good fanfiction can be brought to the next level by a good old-fashioned lemon or two.

I was impressed with the character work.  In the beginning, it seemed a bit bumpy.  I could see “Bella” and “Edward” isms throughout, and had to stop myself from guessing which of the other characters matched up with which (i.e. “Jose” for Jacob…good one, E L James, good one).  By the end of the book, however, Anastasia, this book’s Bella, had surpassed the heroine from which she was derived by… well…by actually being something of a heroine for herself.  I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that in this case, Anastasia fights for what she wants out of the relationship, and that doesn’t include begging to be turned into a Vampire so that she can spend all of her eternity in soppy awe of Christian Grey (the books older, cooler and more disturbed version of Edward Cullen).  Sadly (I will spoil this for you), Mr. Grey never does reveal himself to be a Vampire, and we are left with the impression that his fucked-upped-ness actually stems from real human trauma.  This I appreciated in multitudes.

By the end of the book, I declared to myself that the grasshopper had truly exceeded the master (although...how hard was it?).  Fifty Shades of Grey author E L James took a difficult subject matter for a mass audience, a BDSM* romance, and related it easily to the masses.  As the main character Anastasia puts it herself, “The BDSM is a distraction from the real issue.”  The real issue is compromise, and what two people from seemingly opposite worlds must do in order to share a meaningful relationship with one another.  I found myself personally moved by the trials that our main duo struggle through:  not just what each individual wants out of a relationship, but what they are willing to give.  The BDSM component actually forced me to see this more clearly; I was jolted, out of my comfort zone, and therefore able to look at the text with a more critical eye (a distancing affect Bertolt Brecht would be proud of…maybe). 

Of course, the book is not without faults.  It is no work of literary genius, and often the prose becomes repetitive and a mere means to move the story along.  If I saw one more character say “Jeez” one more time, I might’ve flipped a table.  However, faults aside, if you want to read this for pleasure and maybe also to learn a little bit more about yourself, go for it.

Oh, and the sex is smokin’.

Treat yourself.

*see one post prior for an explanation of how Fifty Shades of Grey came to stand as a novel on its own after originally being posted as a work of fanfiction, or go here

*smutty scenes, often described as lemons on fanfiction sites

*I'll let you look that one up

The (Working) Hit List

Welcome to my summer of reading women authors and playwrights.  This happened (mostly) by chance.

Novels/Novellas/Essays
The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)
A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
The Robber Bridegroom, The Optimist's Daughter (Eudora Welty)
Beautiful Creatures (Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
Fifty Shades of Grey (E. L. James)*
The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Nonfiction
Let's Pretend This Never Happened (Jenny Lawson)

Plays
The Verge (Susan Glaspell)
Demon Baby (Erin Courtney)
Stoning Mary (Debbie Tucker Green)
The Maids (Jean Genet)
Far Away (Caryl Churchill)
Execution of Justice (Emily Mann)
Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (Osonye Tess Onwueme)
The Well of Horniness (Holly Hughes)


*This book was recommended by a friend, and upon further research I discovered that this book series began as Twilight fan fiction.  Because of articles like these, and my own first hand experience with it, I am a public supporter of both the fan fiction universe and of all interactive reader experiences (like my BFF Pottermore).  This book may mark just another step in legitimizing the controversial genre.  We'll see how the series holds up; I am simultaneously tantalized and made anxious by the reviews and summaries available.

A BRIEF UPDATE

Dear All:

I have decided this summer that I am going to officially have this blog up and running as a book review site. I'd like to go with a theme, and I think I want that theme to be reader-driven (like, you guys pick the next book I read out of three choices every week). Since that pool is very limited (hi, friends!), I'll try and expand it over the next two months.

Until May hits us, however, please be satiated with a short list of must reads as I have found them over the past year and a half:

Series:
The Stieg Larsson Trilogy (Girl with the Drago Tattoo, etc)
A Song of Ice and Fire (favorite book in series: Storm of Swords)

Classic Literature:
Jane Eyre (finally. love.)
Wuthering Heights (finally. love.)

Plays:
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Two Trains Running by August Wilson
Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl (I have a newfound devotion to Sarah Ruhl)

Nonfiction Award:
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Vampire Novels Worth Reading:
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

I'm about to start The Hunger Games. Would have read them this week but left my Kindle at home :( and I hate computer screen glare.

That being said,

Happy Reading!
Clellan

An Adults-Only PS:
The Risque Reader might enjoy "The Taking of Sleeping Beauty" by Anne Rice. A classic among Anne Rice followers, it is artfully done and perfectly scandalous and I enjoyed every minute.

Fun with the Undead.

I just finished the dazzling 2005 novel by Elizabeth Kostova entitled "The Historian." A true gem of a Vampire novel, in the sea of fairy tale worthy vampire hunks. This novel will reintroduce you to the dark side of the lore and legend of the Vampire. It draws heavily from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and also several actual (and some fictional) historical documents chronicling the history of the folklore of Vampires.

The book is also sexy. It's sexy, not only because it takes you back in time a little, spanning from the 1930s-1970s, but into these particular scholars worlds, who have not yet felt the wild impulses of the sexual revolution. The girl who dates herself as having been a teenager in the 70s even lets us know how particular odd this was for her, even if it isn't so odd for the older characters. The desire is palpable but the intellectual respect and outright innocence of assumption is startling. There is one passage where Paul, a main character, is staying at a monastery with his female traveling companion and fellow scholar, Helen, and he has just proposed to her the night before. He hesitates before entering her cell, but then says that he suddenly remembered that she was his fiancee, and he felt that it was right to go in and kiss her good morning. For God's sake, how sexy is that? The innocent hesitation at one's own fiancee? His love for her surpassed a sexual habit. He knew her enough to ask her to be his wife; he did not need to sleep with her to know that.

And there's a lot of good old fashioned eerie tomb digging, ancient artifact finding, bloodsucking/ demon creating, silver stake in the heart driving, Vampire fun.

A fun question for those who have read or plan to read the book: Who exactly do you think Kostova is referring to in the title? Or is she referring to anyone particularly at all? I have my thoughts, tell me yours!

A Quick Note

I just found out that I am going to be listed as the co-author of a text book. I figured that Facebook was too immature of a place to go shouting about it, so I'd just write about it here. I was hired for the summer to help Dr. Susan Kattwinkel edit and prepare her textbook that is basically an "Introduction to College" textbook for freshman in First Year programs at the College of Charleston. For 3-ish months I sent out e-mails to various CofC representatives to ensure that we could use certain material, searched the Kendall-Hunt website for non-offensive Health sections (I will tangent on this in a second), and, most importantly, wrote small sections and created exercises/ worksheets. These exercises included scavenger hunts, money management, time management, and my favorite, how to write a paper for college. I assumed that I would be listed as an editing assistant or intern, but an e-mail from Susan a couple of days ago informed me that I would be listed as the co-author and that she would send me the information for my resume. I thought that this was pretty swell, and wanted to share. Huzzah!

*Health Sections that generally screamed NO SEX EVER multiple times. They argued that having sex could add stress to your college workload. I think that healthy relationships lend themselves to healthy, stress relieving sex. Maybe they should have told the kids about building healthy relationships, and then having as much sex as possible.

Gone with the Wind

I didn't like Pride and Prejudice one bit. I know, I know, heads are turning. It was...charming. And also boring. Lizzy Bennet is not unlike many girls. A good person, a loving daughter and sister, albeit a bit quirky and a little too argumentative. She generally follows the rules of society, at least, as I see it. I think that the time period in which it was written may affect my perception of the novel itself. Austen assumes that her audience understands the strict societal constraints placed upon Lizzy, and therefore that Lizzy is particular and special...whereas I just see her as a women who won't be considered an object of trade. But if she has the support of her family in that aspect (for the most part), what's so special about it? The novel didn't capture me, in any case. And I apologize to my Austen fanatic friends. Maybe you can explain what I'm missing.

You know what book did capture me, completely? The book I read directly after, Gone with the Wind. When they call this a "sweeping novel" they mean it...that's the only two word phrase that I could think of that actually describes the book. Scarlett O'Hara may have been a selfish bitch and Melly may have been a little too simpering, but they were both revolutionary women. They weren't revolutionary because they were attention whores or particularly hated the restrictions that society placed upon them. They were revolutionary because they had to be, because a war broke out around them and the men that they so often deferred to were gone and they were left to forge new paths for themselves...to survive fire and theft, disease and hunger, the assault of their person and their land. They were survivors. The novel is about two women who are essentially preservationists (upholding the Survival of the Fittest theory) and come out of their topsy-turvy world on top again. Scarlett not only fights her position in society, she uses it to gain status and ensure the health and survival of not only herself, but of her family. It's very human, and quite captivating. I highly recommend it.

It also made me feel closer to my late Granny, who kept a copy of Gone with the Wind and the Bible in her living room at all times, it seems like. Funny enough, Pat Conroy, in his introduction the the paperback version I read, cites this as one of the tenants of our grandparent's generation (well, mine, they were a bit older. Grandfather born 1917, Granny born 1921)...that is, a generation almost forgotten now, a generation gone with the wind.

A Wedding Weekend Awaits!

And I can't wait to have tales to tell!

This week was my training week at Bocci's and tonight is my last training shift. Let's not talk about the bar training or how I actually tried every single wine that the establishment offered; without spitting. Needless to say, I got a little more than tipsy in the three and a half hours that I was working. Graciously, the bar tender fed me afterwards.

So now I have to clean out my car for the trip. Four twenty somethings in a tiny Honda Civic doesn't seem like it would be that fun, but I'm sure we'll have a blast. I just have to check the air in the tires and my oil. Not sure how to do either. I'll bet that Meredith will help me in the morning, though.

And then its a fun filled weekend that I'm sure will include lots of giggling, champagne and hairspray. And Hollywood tape, perhaps. I'm looking forward to getting away for the weekend and escaping the limbo that I've been in in Charleston for the past couple of weeks. I'll be able to clear my head and set things straight. At the moment I'm feeling antsy and just want to go to work and get the weekend started! At least I'm not pining for New Jersey anymore. Such a roller coaster of emotions that one goes through before one makes a big life changing move!

Ah, wanderlust.

Love,
Clellan

No Pride, but some Juice.

I was sick this morning. No, I'm not pregnant. I had a crazy, feverish, alcohol induced beach weekend and silly me though that I could continue living my life and go out for a few drinks, as if I were a pro. The contents of my stomach staring back at me this morning prove that to be unwaveringly untrue. If you tear up your stomach one weekend, you don't keep aggravating it later. That's what causes ulcers.

So, since I spent three or four days acting like a crazy rockstar (minus the cocaine, it was really the only thing missing), I didn't actually do any reading on the beach like I thought I might have. So my endeavor will start today. With Pride and Prejudice. Come on, its a shame that I haven't read it before.

In other news, my roommate got a "real" job working as a secretary of sorts from 8am-5pm M-F, while I got a job waiting tables at an Italian place. I'm taking care of her tiny poodle/mixed with something else dog, who is adorable, while I sit around as if I were still a college student, typing away and waiting to drive to singing lessons.

I should be scoring my sheet music...

Off I go.

Love, Clellan

Job Interviews and Rumi

My new books to read endeavor has already left me the wiser. Examining the list, I noticed the author of "Mathnawi" was the Rumi that someone had quoted to me once. I researched him and read some of his love poems. Beautiful stuff. Here is a quote I randomly came across and loved:

"Don't be one of those merchants who won't risk the ocean."

Life today is full of challenges, but my commencement speaker said three days ago, at my graduation, that for the confident, hard times are present as challenged to make things better. I feel as if going to graduate school is this kind of confidant leap; after all, I certainly feel like I am setting sail to a treacherous ocean, bound for shores I can't even see yet, millions of miles away. I am confident, and can be courageous, and I want to make things in this world better. So here I go. It doesn't feel real yet, actually, with Rutgers being quite a distance away geographically. I'm sure it will feel real enough when the course enrollment e-mails really start rolling in around June/July, when they told me to expect them.

For the summer, however...I need money, and money to save. Thanks be to God for these two interviews on Thursday; I actually hope that I get them both. I also am lined up to House Manage if I can assure them by next Wednesday that I have time in my schedule, and I also have some interest from a Children's theatre company in town to be a Stage Manager...we'll see about both of them. If I get BOTH of these jobs on Thursday, which I am actually hoping for, then I won't need anything sporadic like that. Maybe I'll get neither and I'll be scrambling and glad for two little temp jobs in the theatre.

I am working a *little* right now, helping Susan Kattwinkel, my former theatre professor, edit and put together a text book. This book will be geared towards First Year Students in our First Year Experience program, an area I worked in as a Peer Facilitator for three years. I'm getting paid for about 40 hrs total for a time span of about a month. It's not a bad paycheck, and it will probably cover my utilities for the summer (maybe, depending on the heat) and that's not bad, but I need something to cover rent and then some.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be this concerned about money and jobs. I was probably delusional. I also never thought that I would be completely and totally excited about moving to New Jersey! Can't wait until August!

More on books

I wanted to check off some of the books on my list:

Wuthering Heights
Medea
Oedipus
Faust
Iliad/Odyssey
Recognition of Sakuntala
1984
Hamlet/ King Lear/ Othello
Pippi Longstocking
The Aeneid
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

All of these were great reads.

I tried to read Moby Dick a while back, but it was a no-go. Maybe I'll try again at a later date. For now, I'll probably stick to something shorter.

Love,
Clellan

This Has Absolutely Nothing to Do with Wal-Mart

This summer I am faced with quite a few fears:
1. I have no money
2. I have no job
3. I am about to be accumulating a very large sum of debt for graduate school

I have a job interview on Thursday, and put in a dozen applications yesterday. But it would be nice to have a steady source of income already!

Instead of completely despairing, I decided to give myself a nice, COST-FREE challenge this summer. I searched the good ole 'net for lists of 100 books that "you must read before you die." Most of them were crap. I found one that the Guardian in the UK put out, and the admissions were made/ voted on by reputable authors around the world. This one is the list that I chose. I liked it especially because it includes Eastern authors, not just the white guy who wrote "Memoirs of a Geisha." It was the smartest list out there, and I highly recommend it.

My challenge is to read as many books as I can from this list throughout the next three months. I put in bold each of the book titles so its not so confusing:

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

A Long Time

So I haven't shopped at Wal-Mart yet. BUT I did enter one. It was traumatizing.

I was meeting my mother so that she could give me my graduation present, and she had to run in to "get a few things" and insisted that I go with her. I told her that it was like dragging a recently clean druggie out of rehab and back into a crack-den. She thought that this was hilarious. I just wanted to inhale all of the dirt cheap merchandise.

But I'm glad I went in. It only reaffirmed how very wrong I think Wal-Mart really is.
"I've got my shampoo, now I need some cleaning products. Oh, and here is a lovely display of cookies. I'll get those too. And dog food. And I also want to look at the DVDs..." And all at ridiculously low prices so that you KNOW that a five year old in an underdeveloped country (or China) made it especially for you.

So that is my story.

I also got into Grad School; I'm going to Rutgers University! Hooray!

Love,
Clellan