Tag: books

A House of Favorite Things

camsterdam 1 Comment

“BOOK. FISH. SUIT. TIME. MOTHER. FATHER. LIFE.

Everything is part of Everything.

We Live, We Blunder

LOVE UNITES US.”

~Maira Kalman

This quote is one I have recently come across on the back of a most intriguing book found in the basement of Literati Bookstore. The book at first looks like it was handpainted and handwritten, and that’s just how it is meant to be. The book entitled “My Favorite Things” documents and explores the significance of objects that thread in and out of our lives and make our lives what they are. It’s the most unmaterialistic book about material items.

Image via mairakalman.com

It’s beautiful, it’s personal, it’s unique to Maira Kalman and yet it’s a book that speaks to every reader. Even though your eyes may scan over a watercolor illustration of Kalman’s living room and think, “That doesn’t look like my living room,” it nevertheless possesses armchairs, coffee tables, paintings, a window that looks out onto the street, perhaps a musical instrument, a stack of magazines, that reminds you of your own house – the advice given to you in that room, the stories told, the love shared, the tea spilled, the tears dried, the memories molded [some still enshrined in your brain while others you have forgotten].

Image via mairakalman.com

This book about objects is extremely important in my life of late because of a certain transition: that passing of old houses from one family to the next. Two years ago, we moved out of my childhood house in Jackson, Michigan and my family followed me to Ann Arbor (staying on their side, of course, so as not to encroach on my campus lifestyle!) We passed over the keys to new residents, yet for financial reasons, we still had a bit of ownership over it. Through those two years, I never went back to see it. 1) I never had a reason to but also 2) I wasn’t sure how my heart would feel seeing it again.

Because a house is not just a box of wood and paint. It houses human hearts – it’s a body for our bodies. It lives and breathes with us. It changes. It needs mending. It provides nourishment and shelter and escape and refuge and yes, even stress. It is a home for our memories – from its smell to its stains to its cozy nooks of comfort. And when it’s no longer yours, it’s like a piece of your family’s identity is left behind, too. But we move on. We grow together, we make new memories, we find new nooks. But we still remember our old friend. And I bet you – it remembers us.

In honor of last week’s final selling of the Jackson house (we are no longer the bank), I’m dusting off a poem I wrote in the aftermath of our move:

ode to a beloved yellow house

I had a little treasure box
nineteen years and counting
a shy pastel bursting 
with buttery flavor.
Nature had its way
with decorating – as it does:
promiscuous kisses watermarked
its walls, flecks of snow and dust
collected on its faded, well-worn cheeks.
The lilac lasted but a week –
a single blink of an observant eye. 

Winds would break its fragile walls,
crack its bones
against the test of time,
they said.

But my treasure trove was sturdy,
a bulwark never failing.
Its heart beat
stronger
than any thunderclap.
When opened
(very carefully now,
locks to the right,
defies expectations)
I found a jungle of memories,
vines of lives
well-traveled
and
well-
loved.

Couch seats [seams ripping,
fur-bedraggled, evaporated tints]
welcome you
to Home.
A musty odor
of damp
and old
and wisdom
brings the anticipation
of summer.
Fans flap
and clap
and applause
your busy day,
try their best
to cool you
down.
That spot there,
where
you spilled your toothpaste,
brush too big
for your five year old
mouth,
looks up without disdain.
“Don’t give up,”
it encouraged,
and provided
second
chances again
and
again.

My box loved its pairs:
(Vivaldi, pancakes)
(parents, child)
(kitten, family)
(sickness, health)
(laughter, tears)
(darkness, creaks in the night)

A two-way
love
permeated through its walls,
from our skin-
we kept its secrets,
as it kept ours.
Look! My whispers,
my thoughts,
my jam-covered crumbs
nestle snuggly
in the space
between
carpet
and wood.

I close my box with one tear-
sealing our bond
with the one everlasting gift.
The love of memories
wedged deep in
hearts,
in cube-shaped
cutouts.
Jump right in
and don’t ever let go.

For we don’t empty,
we retain,
build on
new layers.

Today,
I have moved my treasures
to the transparent future
where I
can look out
and always see
my
lovely
little
box
-as it always stood-
filling up with new
treasures that
aren’t mine
to find
anymore.

Bride and Prejudice and Adaptations

Jeannie Marie 1 Comment

As a senior English major, I didn’t know there was anything new I could be taught about reading critically. Since freshman year of high school I’ve been reading books – both popular and “literary” – critically. A lot of my friends (especially my mom) point out how I don’t ever “enjoy” movies anymore. I leave a theatre, talking about how the story line was messy or how one of the female characters was portrayed as weak. As an English major, writing has to be your strong suit, but thinking critically has to be ingrained into your psyche to survive.

Which is why, when a professor of mine presented a new way to think about reading critically, I was shocked (and yes, downright impressed). He told us that instead of thinking about themes, he liked to think about preoccupations – what is the text preoccupied with? What does it talk about over and over again? Where does it linger, and where does it skim? This method has been time and time again perfect for the type of analysis we do in this class. By reading popular (genre) fiction, we’re engaging with the type of material I’m not used to in a classroom – usually boring, pre-1900 texts, and we’re lucky if we get to read something in the 1920s. Modernism, Romanticism – these are familiar topics. Most English majors have a favorite Shakespeare play, just because they’ve read so much of it. So it makes sense that with a new type of text come a new type of strategy – though obviously for this professor, it isn’t new.

Tonight, instead of reading or watching a movie for my film class like I should have, I decided to surf Netflix and sprawl out on my couch. I had the TV to myself for a few hours and I wanted to take advantage of it. I didn’t want to watch the show I’m currently watching with my roommate (Jane The Virgin, by the way, and 10/10 would recommend – I’m obsessed) and not something I’d get too attached to – I wanted to relax, not pay attention and be completely absorbed until midnight.

I settled on Bride and Prejudice – a film masterpiece, if I do say so myself. I actually started it a long time ago, but I never actually finished it. It’s light, it’s fun, it’s Bollywood – what’s not to love? And I did love it.

But I also constantly compared it to my absolute, all time favorite adaptation, the Kiera Knightly Pride and Prejudice from 2005 (sorry Lizzy Bennet Diaries –  you’re a close second). And it wasn’t in a bad way – I kept trying to place each scene, since Bride is set in modern times, and seeing how each scene corresponded. I kept wondering how and why they made the choice to make Darcy American/white. It wasn’t a bad decision, and in a way it made sense – Darcy as the outsider to an Indian family and tradition – but it could have made sense if they insulated the story completely in India, substituting London with New Delhi or Mumbai.

But then I kept watching – wondering why the writers emphasized love story between Darcy and Lizzie (Lalita, in this adaptation – seeing the new names was particularly exciting to me), why Wickham didn’t end up with Lakhi, and why the ending felt so compressed. As I thought about these differences, I realized that Bride and Prejudice was preoccupied with different things than the Kiera Knightly adaptation was preoccupied with. Bride wanted fun, lighthearted happiness – focusing on song and dance numbers, and cutting too much drama that would have dragged down the script. It was preoccupied with showing two cultures coming together, an added layer to the socioeconomic issues Lizzy and Darcy usually deal with.

I will be the first to say that I generally love adaptations. Sure, will I criticize them? Of course. Do I hate some of them? You bet *cough* Percy Jackson *cough*. But do I give them a chance, and appreciate what they do? Always.

When engaging with Bride and Prejudice, I realized preoccupations were something that drove it to be what it is – why not for other adaptations? Immediately Baz Luhrmann’s fantastic The Great Gatsby comes to mind. The film was highly polarizing, but it was preoccupied with things some people didn’t agree with. It created a visual spectacle that hasn’t been seen on screen in a long time, if ever, and it located the story in 2013 even while keeping it a period piece, something I’d posit would be almost impossible if not for Luhrmann’s genius.

Adaptations hold an interesting place for someone like me, a book lover and a film nerd – and I’d always been torn on how to address them. But now, I think I get it. It’s not really anything special, but I realized that I look at the world differently because of one professor. And I think that’s really cool.

The Footsteps That Came Before Me

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

So this summer I had the amazing pleasure of leaving the country for the first time and going to England, where I got to study for five weeks at Oxford University, one of the oldest universities in the world. I haven’t gotten to talk much about my experiences there, since I made a blog but never kept up with it (oops), but I’d like to share something that I started thinking about when I came back to the University of Michigan.

It’s weird, because when I got to Oxford, I knew the history behind it, that there were thousands upon thousands of people that had walked the exact same pathways I did, that lived and breathed Oxford. It seemed like every day I learned something new; President Clinton once smoked weed at the Turf, Lewis Carroll taught here. There’s obviously something magical about walking in the footsteps of those who came before you (although, no, I didn’t smoke weed at the Turf – I just got a pint of cider, as per usual).

I’ve thought about this more, too, as the semester has gone on and I’ve been studying the works of James Joyce, who will forever be imprinted in Irish literary history. I had the chance to go to Dublin – there were some other people that wanted to go too – but I instead chose Paris. And even there, I found the quintessential tourist stop for an English major: Shakespeare and Company, the amazing bookstore that you just have to see to believe.

I found out in my Joyce class that Ulysses, his famous epic, was actually first published through Shakespeare and Company, and I had walked those halls, and I had taken a picture of the mural they have on the wall with James Joyce, proud on the wall. Joyce had gone to Paris and written in Paris a number of times – you could say I made that same pilgrimage.

But as I think about these things, about how these great writers have come before me, how I merely spent not even half my summer at this famed university whereas they devoted themselves to it – I don’t necessarily feel special. Sure, I loved it beyond all measure; this year marks the 100 year anniversary of the publishing of Alice in Wonderland. And it’s astounding that I even got accepted, much less had the money to go over there and spend five weeks essentially frolicking across Europe.

But I didn’t feel particularly magical. I know there are people who spend their time trekking across Dublin to find the spots Joyce mentions in Ulysses, or they go overseas to write because that’s what T.S. Eliot did. But nothing’s going to change if I write my novel here or if I write my novel in Paris, emulating some famous author. He’s not going to come back to life and help me revise those 300 pages, or give me inspiration for my next book.

I don’t mean to be too didactic, but I realized that following art isn’t what makes you any better – it’s doing your own art. By having my own experiences in Europe, I define who I am as me, not as someone else. Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t go back to Paris and perhaps write there (because I loved Paris. I loved it). But I’ll do it because it’s what I want to do – not because Joyce did it a century earlier.

And if there’s any true moral of the story it’s this: travel, get outside your box, go somewhere. It’s totally worth it.

Books of Curiosity: Why Humans Like Surprises

camsterdam Leave a comment

Publishing is hard. Especially when you distribute your magazine for free. There’s a difficult balance you have to find: include enough talent to make it full of substance and variety, but not to the extent that it is so thick that you can only print three copies. We’d like to think that the time and passion that goes into a literary magazine makes it into a valuable object – in other words, a kind of commodity. And with that comes the need for money. If you want more pages, more physical objects, you need more money.

As Editor-in-Chief of the RC Review, a literary and art annual publication that features Residential College students, I knew that we needed to collect more doubloons for our purse in order to print enough for all of the RC and faculty. Poetry should be free for all, but unfortunately, printing is not. Therefore, the fundraiser was born!

A close friend who had recently graduated from the RC was a vital part of the fundraiser’s idea. She was moving to Ypsilanti and had boxes on boxes of old, hoarded books – at least 50 of them! We gladly took them, without a specific purpose in mind, mostly because they were yellowed and powdered with the ripe smell of love and time – the complete Dawn Treader treatment. Many of the books we had never heard of before, many we judged quickly and added to our Never-Going-to-Read list. The fact that we judged the cover so much, with haste, churned in our heads. True, judging a book by a cover is a thing. It has to be – the colors, the words, the font, it all compounds the aesthetic pleasure of a book. The door that enchants you to step inside.

But, what if that door was covered? What if that book called “Loving Your Child Is Not Enough” was wrapped in a brown Trader Joe Bag, its handle beckoning you to loop your hand through it, an alternative quote taken from deep within its rabbit hole written in big letters across the front? What if we gave that book a second chance? Would someone come to knock on this novel adventure?

So that’s exactly what we did. We covered all of the books, some novels, some historical anthologies, some parenting books, one Spanish novella, with identical Trader Joe’s bags and added quotes or goofy one-line synopses to the cover. And Tuesday afternoon, we laid out our goods on a grassy knoll in front of East Quad, predicting that we would walk away with 49 of the books and about 2 dollars in our pocket.

But, to our surprise, we were a magnet to the curious. Most people walked by with their chins hinged toward us, mouth agape, not quite understanding. And then, the curiosity, the thrill, the NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON, set in and they approached us. Their eyes scanned the quotes, some smiling, others already pulling out their wallets, struggling to make a choice between buying one or ten of them.

We encouraged people to touch them, pick them up, feel their heft, smell them (one book’s cover quote quite literally said, “I smell pretty.”) It was as much of a social experiment as it was a fundraiser. People were so generous, too, often giving up to 5 dollars extra, just because.

Don’t call it deception. Our Blind Date with a Book was instead a meditation of curiosity. Think back to your birthday or a holiday where gifts are exchanged. There’s an inborn pleasure in being surprised, of not quite knowing what is in your hand. In a way, we also did a service to the books themselves. If donated somewhere where they weren’t wrapped, there is quite a good chance that many of those books would never make it off the shelf, spend a lifetime without being opened, perhaps even be thrown away. We’ve breathed life into them again, to show that they are something of value, they are a useful commodity. Even if the story themselves are less than exciting, they help to create a connection between the humans engaging with them. And for that, they are indeed priceless.

We Know What’s Going to Happen, You Don’t

Erika Bell 1 Comment

Do you ever watch your favorite show, read your favorite book, or start a great film and already know what is going to happen? The plot unfolds right at the beginning with you, the viewer/reader, as the initial confidant and the eye-witness to the madness. Then as the plot of the said show/book thickens, and the music starts racing in the background as the characters look at each other in worry, you sit back and realize that wait…you already know the big secret of the plot…the other characters don’t! This my friends is called dramatic irony, and I absolutely can’t stand it.

“Dramatic Irony – a literary device by which the audience’s or reader’s understanding of events or individuals in a work surpasses that of its characters.”

Yes it can be found in the classics like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and even modern works like ABC’s Revenge (cough, cough..hint, hint). Dramatic irony can be the best thing that could ever happen to a plot, and the absolute worst thing that can happen to an audience.

I came to the realization that I detest dramatic irony whilst watching my favorite drama/mystery TV shows. Yeah it’s great that we know that there’s a murder and some form of deception by this person, but do we as viewers really need to sit through 5 seasons of watching characters build up the courage/knowledge to confront the people or entity holding them back? Now that’s just ridiculous.

Dramatic irony sets up a storyline that we know will run its course. Did you think if we knew who the mother was before Ted met her, we’d even care after 9 seasons? What really pushes viewers and readers to stay passionate about these creative works, is the perfected art of surprise. Not many writers have it in them to continuously draw its audience in without giving much away, but to be honest, that is what makes for great drama. It’s the constant need to know on the audience’s end that will always make the pages worth flipping through or the shows worth watching.

In giving the very juicy goods away as soon as audience becomes acquainted with the text, it becomes a game of what character do I care enough about to stay invested in this? What character will I wait to know what I know, and will they react how I want them to? Even with this criteria in mind, I find that character-pull is becoming more and more weak. Do I even care about this character’s reaction enough? Eh..not really.

I urge creators of dramas to consider dramatic irony’s effects, and if it really brings forth what you want it to. Consider practicing the art of surprise, and how keeping the audience in the dark might bring forth amazing stories.

The Classic Mystery Storyline

Erika Bell Leave a comment

I don’t know about you, but I love mysteries. Maybe it’s my inner boxcar kid or my desire to be Sherlock Holmes/Nancy Drew, but ever since I was a little kid, reading mystery stories, watching suspenseful films, and using my wild imagination, have always been my favorite pastimes to get that chilling thrill. For me, it started off with the cheesy Scooby-Doo-esque reads you’d pick up in elementary school, with plotlines of kidnappings and killings, leading us through a web of adventures to only find out that there was no kidnapping or killing at all. Then it moved up a notch into horror territory. Off-the-wall, dramatized stories of monsters looking to wreak havoc on the innocent. Now, I’m a faithful crime-tv watcher. It has the same elements found in the mysteries of my previous years, but a toned-down nature that is both heart-wrenching and relatable.

Anyway, as I delved into some great Lifetime movies this weekend, mystery and drama-filled of course, I got to thinking about the classic mystery storyline that has been recycled year in and year out since the beginning of time. There’s always these elements that make a mystery a mystery, and even though we know what will probably happen (granted, there are some plot twists), we can’t stop watching them because they’re so enticing!

What makes up the classic mystery storyline? What are its potions that make it the perfect recipe for suspense and awe? Well, let’s try and figure this out.

Step 1: Make Life Seem as Perfect as Can Be

Do you ever notice that in mystery plots, its almost always a cookie-cutter, all-is-well ambiance to start it off? The main characters are going about their day-to-day activities in blind contentment. Skipping, jogging, cooking, laughing..basically life is great, and they’re about to get a rude awakening and everybody knows it.

Step 2: The “Dun Dun Duuuuun” Moment

It happens. The murder, kidnapping, missing-person, monster, stalker, killer, whoever and whatever it is, occurs. It makes us gasp. It makes our wheels get to turning in our heads. It is the moment whether you decide to commit to this plotline and invest your emotions or drop it and go do something happy with your life.  If it’s a good “dun dun duuuun” moment, you will commit.

Step 3: The Mess and Stress Stage

All the action a.k.a the mess goes down. The adventure of figuring out who did what, why they did it, and what’s going to happen next, becomes the main objective. And, of course, there’s tons of stress amongst the characters, which in turn, stresses the reader/viewer out (me).

Step 4: The Gasp…”I would’ve Gotten Away With It If It Weren’t For You Darn Kids…” Stage

We finally come to put all of the pieces of the mystery together and find out who did it and for what reason. By far the best stage, but if it is not done right, things could go very wrong and all of that hard work could be worthless.

Every mystery follows this pattern. Some worse and some better than others. Although, I love a good mystery with this classic storyline, I can’t help but desire a little change and a real shock factor within the genre. The repetition of this storyline sometimes makes the exciting genre…yawn-worthy. I urge those mystery-lovers and creators out there to break out of the box that has been established for so long. Surprise us, shock us, make us scream!