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This week, however, it was especially exciting to see a children’s author competing alongside the plumbers, architects, and others. Tui Sutherland swept away the competition for a few shows before sadly being just edged out last night (at least in my area–I hope I haven’t spoiled it for anyone else). Having checked out Ms. Sutherland’s blog, I think next I may be checking out some of her books as well. Her Pet Trouble series has some titles I can relate to–particularly Loudest Beagle On The
To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson asked, only partly tongue-in-cheek, for a new design–an alternative, if you will–for the rainbow flag. The design company Worldstudio was brought in with some ideas. You can see the designs here. My personal favorite was the Circle Flag (above). Even though some people think of the rainbow as kind of a tired cliche, and even though it’s been adopted by various other organizations, I think what it represents is what matters most. The circle represents both inclusiveness and openness, and letting the colors blend says that none of us is a single color. All of us–gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersexed, or straight–are part of and contain within us a spectrum. Celebrity judge Isaac Mizrahi chose one of the other designs, giving a very funny, very clever explanation for his decision. His explanation almost sold me on his choice, but not quite. I still like the rainbow.
I thought about all this the first time I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled. To say it was unlike any other Ishiguro novel is a bit of an understatement, although it’s true that it is very different from books like The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World. In fact The Unconsoled was unlike anything I’d ever read before, and it took me a long time to figure out what exactly was going on in it. I’m still not entirely sure, but I read it as a symphony in the form of a novel. It’s in four parts, just as most symphonies have four movements. The whole theme of the book is music, since it’s the story of a concert pianist named Ryder who visits a European city to perform a concert. He seems to have lost his memory (although this is never explicitly stated) since several people around him know him better than he knows himself. He meets a woman whose son is, she tells him, his own. He discovers an abandoned car in a field and remembers riding in it with his parents. While Ishiguro’s previous books were notable for their realism, The Unconsoled seems to take place in an alternative universe. Ryder goes to see the film 2001–a big weekly event in the town–but this version of the film stars Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. Time seems strangely compressed in this place as well, with long conversations taking place in short spaces, and a door in a cafe takes Ryder right to his hotel even though it’s miles away. People are angered by Ryder’s posing in front of a monument, and there are misunderstandings, such as when he listens to a young man practice a piece of music. The young man says he’s “just an amateur” and has asked Ryder for “a few tips” for a public performance. Convinced that the young man has the piece–La Roche’s Dahlia, a piece of music I’m pretty sure is as fictitious as its composer–down perfectly, Ryder walks away without saying anything. This leaves the young man convinced he’s a failure and incapable of playing. In one of the book’s most bizarre scenes a former conductor named Mr. Brodsky takes the stage again. The description makes me completely rethink the art of conducting, although, given the book’s alternative reality, I wonder if it’s anything close to what a real conductor could do.
Like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which D minor dominates until it’s finally supplanted by D major, The Unconsoled seems to be in a minor key but searching for a major one. Ryder is humble but unhappy. Like many of the people around him he’s lost and confused and wants an escape that ultimately music can’t provide. Or can it? Ishiguro’s art–writing–peels back reality and exposes “peculiar life-forms hiding just under the shell”. It’s strange, fascinating, and reveals, in a subtle way, just how far art can go. It’s almost like dancing about architecture.
It’s also used “loosely” to simply mean the sky overhead, but its third definition is, ” Highest point or state, culmination, climax, acme.” So acme is actually used to define zenith. Acme–the word, not the company that supplied Wile E. Coyote with an endless number of defective gadgets–means,
Etymologically both acme and zenith derive from Greek, although acme comes to English almost directly while zenith came via a much longer route through Latin and French. The nice thing is that in twenty-five weeks when I’m digging around for a word that starts with ‘z’ no one’s going to remember this and, with a few minor changes, I’ll be able to recycle the entire thing. I probably shouldn’t have said that, though, should I? Here’s a bonus word of the week: the word alphabet comes from the Greek alphabet which started with the letters alpha and beta. But why use the first two letters? Shouldn’t it have been the first and last letters to be truly inclusive? The last letter of the Greek alphabet, though, is omega, and alphomeg does sound clumsy. But the last letter of the Roman alphabet is z which comes from the Greek letter zeta, so instead of alphabet, why don’t we call it alphazet?
Because, you know, they might be a district attorney in disguise.
After the Utes left Nez did go down and find that the young man was dead. Unable to do anything, Nez put the body in the folds of a ridge and left him there. Intrigued, Bellson got a topographical map of the area and started searching for the young man’s This story made me think about two things. The first was how far off our romantic notions of Native Americans sometimes are. I’m guilty myself of thinking that Native Americans lived in a kind of paradisaical state, in harmony with nature and each other. In fact they could be just as territorial and aggressive as Europeans or, for that matter, people anywhere in the world. The fact that Utes chased and murdered Ruess, and the fact that a Navajo man watched, afraid and unable to interfere, underscore this. The other is that, as an explorer, Ruess was always seeking the unknown. He was interested in going places where there was no one else and, if possible, where no one had ever been. It would seem that there’s now very little left to discover. There are no big patches on the map marked terra incognita. And yet the mystery of Everett Ruess lasted for decades and was only recently solved. There are still mysteries and things that remain to be discovered–if you know where to look.
The story is straightforward enough: set in the 1970’s in California, it’s about a young man named Dirk. He meets and becomes friends with another boy named Pup. They become close friends, spending every day together and staying together long into the night. They play basketball in strangers’ driveways and sneak into peoples’ backyards to swim in their pools. There’s an illicitness about it that makes it exciting, but it’s harmless. Pup, whose mother is poor and whose father has left him, also goes in for some petty shoplifting, stealing a lemon cream pie and flowers from various yards to present to Dirk’s grandmother Fifi. Dirk’s parents were both killed and now he lives only with his doting and sweet grandmother. The friendship weaves a spell around them, and Dirk realizes he’s falling in love with Pup, but Pup pushes him away. Instead, following Pup’s lead, the boys have their first sexual experience–Pup with the prettiest girl in school and Dirk with her friend, all of them in a hot tub. It’s agonizing for Dirk, and the spell of their friendship has been broken. Rejected by Pup, Dirk dyes his hair black and shaves it into a mohawk. He immerses himself in the local punk scene, seeing himself reflected in the eyes of other boys who, in their own eyes, have desire mixed with hate. After a concert he’s followed and badly beaten by three skinheads. This is all part one. While elements of surrealism or even magic realism have crept into the book before this, flowing effortlessly out of Block’s lush prose style, now magic takes over almost entirely. A myserious woman named Gazelle appears to Dirk in his room and begins to tell him her story. He speaks to his father as well. Dirk is alone and afraid. He feels different. He’s an outsider. He’s found and lost the love of his life and he’s not even adult yet. But he’s reassured. At one point Gazelle says to him, “Any love that is love is right.” If this is obscenity, if saying love is right is a hate crime, then we live in a very sick world. Some, including the plaintiffs who want Baby Be-Bop withdrawn will say they worry about the message it sends. I worry more about the message that withdrawing and physically destroying the book will send. Dirk is gay, and, though it may be easier now for teenagers who are going through that to come to terms with it than it was in the 1970’s, it’s still difficult. But he also feels like an outsider. He feels rejected, unwanted, unloved and unlovable. Those are feelings children, teenagers, and even adults all share, regardless of whether we’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersexed, or straight. There are magical moments in Block’s book, but she doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities either. There’s nothing obscene about presenting the world as it is, although I suspect that what those who label Baby Be-Bop “obscene” are really worried about is that it promotes tolerance, understanding. Its message ultimately is, “You are not alone.” Banning it would be the greatest obscenity.
He also bought a hat with a feather in it, and, as gifts, the store gave him a belt and a gold-plated chain. It carried heavy cultural implications as well. Times have changed significantly, though, and, while the zoot suit may harken back to an earlier time, it can also be worn as a costume, or simply a personal statement of pride and joie de vivre. A store called El Pachuco in Fullerton, California has been selling zoot suits for more than thirty years. In a story for Studio 360, Associate Professor of Chicano Studies Susan Green explains that the suit has multiple possible meanings. There’s been a long conflict between the zoot suit wearers of the 1940’s, who felt they were advertising their success, and critics who thought they were “wartime wasters”. Even now she gets calls from parents whose sons or daughters aren’t allowed to wear zoot suits to the prom. Hey, clothes make the person, right? If the zoot suit is about pride, success, about joy, those are things to celebrate. And if it looks good, wear it!
Now, I’ll admit I’m skeptical. I heard Dr. Levine speak on the radio program The Splendid Table, and he spoke very straightforwardly, very clearly, and very logically about his research and human evolution. We have, he argues, evolved as mobile creatures. For most of human history and, for that matter, throughout nature, survival requires movement from one place to another. In the environment where human beings evolved food has to be searched for, which is why our bodies are designed to both crave and save fats and salt, two things which we need to stay alive but which, in excess, will kill us. All this is true, but I’ve heard this song before. It’s almost always sung by a snake-oil salesman whose next line is, “But I have the answer!” This is where Levine separates from the pack. For one thing I don’t believe any salesmen work for the Mayo Clinic, at least not in research. For another Levine doesn’t claim to have the answers. He does recommend some pretty radical changes, such as installing a treadmill in our offices and walking while we work, but most of his suggestions are simple. He’s not trying to sell a diet plan or claim that if all we do is pace while on the phone we’ll be able to eat buttered mashed-potatoes at every meal. He’s not selling anything but simply looking at biology and fifteen years of research to address an obesity epidemic. He’s not taking on Krispy Kreme or monounsaturated fats or saying that cashews are the wonder food of the future. He’s suggesting people take responsibility for their own health and weight, and simple ways they can do it. The title of his book may seem like a slight exaggeration, since someone who’s trying to lose a lot of weight will, inevitably, have to make some big changes, but Levine’s suggesting simple changes we can all make to maintain a healthy weight, and maintain or improve our health and our mood. Honestly, I haven’t read his book, and I’m not sure I need to because his basic idea–don’t spend so much of each day sitting on your butt–is pretty much common sense. Ultimately the fact that he’s not selling something could be Dr. Levine’s undoing. He’s also writes fiction, and his novel The Blue Notebook, about an Indian child prostitute, will be coming out in July. That’s good that he’s got something like writing to fall back on, just in case, you know, that whole being a doctor thing doesn’t pan out.
In the film Psycho we never actually see Mrs. Bates–not in the flesh, anyway, but this is how I always pictured her.
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