The Fault In Our Stars

Saturday, while the menfolk of our urban family smoked and/or grilled lots of meat, us womenfolk went to the movies to watch The Fault in Our Stars.  We love John Green and his novels.  We love this particular novel very, very, very much.  So much so, it holds a rather sacred place in our hearts and bookshelves.  I was skeptical, as I always am when a book is made into a movie.  Rarely is the movie better than the book (except in the case of The English Patient and Legends of the Fall).  And although this movie was good, it was not as wonderful as the book.  The book is magical.  The book made me cry.  Ugly cry.  The movie only made my eyes a little sweaty.  And my nose may have burned some.  And there may have been a lump in my throat.

After the movie, we joined the menfolk and the kidfolk on the mountain and ate some of the meat that was smoked and/or grilled.  Children, slippery and pool-pruned, scampered about the backyard like woodland fairies.  Cafe lights illuminated our oasis...

Photo by Zoe.

A Tugging String by David T. Greenberg

A recent gift from my future mother & father-in-law was a signed copy of A Tugging String by David T. Greenberg, son of Jack Greenberg (former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund). A Tugging String is a nonfiction novel set during the Civil Right Movement, specifically during the 1960s and the years leading up to the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March of 1965. 

What a great resource this book would be in a classroom (late elementary into middle school) where the Civil Rights Movement was being studied!  Author David T. Greenberg's very accessible and autobiographical account of his childhood as the son of a leading attorney for prominent Civil Rights' leaders gives readers a riveting front row seat to history being made.  A Tugging String contains facts.  But A Tugging String also contains the raw storytelling that comes from someone who stood as witness to the events of that volatile time. 

Having a deep and abiding interest in the Civil Rights Movement, I found Greenberg's novel an important read, especially considering the recent Supreme Court case of Shelby County vs. Holder and the ruling where "the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was used to determine the states and political subdivisions subject to Section 5 preclearance, was unconstitutional."

We have a lot to think about as a nation right now.  Discrimination comes in many guises.  We have to be vigilant and, as Greenburg says in Tugging, we have to "do what's right."

Near the end of the novel, David's father shares with him the poem If by Rudyard Kipling.  Outside of rope skipping rhymes and Roberta Flack song lyrics, this particular poem is the first poem that I ever memorized as a youngster.  Sadly, I can no longer recite it on command.  But it is a beautiful poem, full of meaning.

If by Rudyard Kipling

(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

We Share the Same Sky by Elizabeth Mozley McGrady

We Share the Same Sky is the account of author Elizabeth Mozley McGrady’s 2007 pilgrimage to New York City; a pilgrimage that was of particular significance to her spirit, a journey to right a life that was no longer her own.

Interspersed with the history of both McGrady’s beloved home state of Alabama and her equally cherished yet temporarily adopted home of New York City, We Share the Same Sky would easily serve as a guide book to be carried in the worn backpack of a literary and gastronomic tourist of either place.  There is much in this book to marinate over, be it the detailed accounts of delectable meals in celebrated (and not so celebrated) New York restaurants or at her Grandmother Libby’s table, the descriptions of breathtaking architecture and scenery, the references to great literary works, or the reflections of the “inner consciousness” that cautions, “You are not at peace because you are not as you should be.”

Through McGrady’s journey, we recognize how our sense of place connects us to others, to our surroundings, and even to ourselves.   We are reminded that no matter where we travel, simple things connect us all, be they food, religion, family, history.

McGrady’s memoir is penned with intense introspection balanced by self-deprecating humor. It is an excellent read.  She will be at the GPL Local Author Day on May 17, 10AM-3PM.  I will be purchasing my own copy of her book then, as the copy I’ve been reading belongs to the library…

Author Elizabeth Mozley McGrady and I have crossed paths before.  We attended the same high school in Etowah County over twenty-six years ago, she being two grades ahead of me and friends with my older sister, making her a celestial being to us underclass mortals.  I knew her then as Beth Mozley.  She and I have, at times, figuratively and literally walked in each other’s footsteps since then.  We were recently brought together face-to-face for the first time in so many long years through my dear friend Dan Donaghy, who was visiting Gadsden from Connecticut again as our GPL writer in residence for a series of poetry writing workshops and speaking engagements.  Dan and I are chums from the days of Ithaca, NY.  Beth and her husband Travis, who currently live close to Gadsden, but not within spitting distance, drove in on a rather dreary night to hear Dan’s reading at the Back Forty Beer Co.  And there, the pieces fell into place.  At the end of the evening, I could not help but reflect on the rather serendipitous series of circumstances that brought everyone together at that place, at that particular time.  But I tend to do that sort of thing often.

A Piñata of Fahrenheit 451

Two amazing lectures in two days, both part of Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads Fahrenheit 451.  Friend Chris Harrison of Gadsden State’s English department delivered his blisteringly-hot The History Of Book Burning: From Cultural Annihilation To Symbolic Tantrum on Tuesday.  And Bradbury Center fellow Dr. Robert Woods’ passionate presentation on Fahrenheit 451 Wednesday, a presentation so moving that by its end, Amanda Jackson was wiping tears from her eyes and I was on the verge of shouting, “Hallelujah!”  Eric’s thoughts on Dr. Woods’ lecture the next morning after sleeping on it, “You know, it was like he hit a piñata of Fahrenheit 451 and scattered all these pieces of really amazing information all over the place…”  Yes, that is EXACTLY what Robert did.

Gadsden Times Article on Dr. Woods' presentation here.

Chris Harrison

Dr. Robert Woods

McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper & Blood Meridian

I don’t trust Cormac McCarthy with children, old people or animals.  If Mr. McCarthy introduces any of those three things as characters in a book, then you can almost bet that unseemly things are in store.  Take my word on this.  I’ve read enough of his books to know. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love the man’s work.  Any author who can write a lyrical and eloquent account of a violent necrophiliac (Child of God) in rural Appalachia is going to get points from me.

I have just finished McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965.  It was pure McCarthy:  sparse, poetic, violent, filled with the most amazing words strung together in the most amazing ways.   I am sometimes so caught up in his words that the realization of what he is saying makes me shudder.

“Then Sylder stood, still in that somnambulant slow motion as if time itself were running down, and watched the man turn, seeming to labor not under water but in some more viscous fluid, torturous slow, and the jack itself falling down on an angle over the dying forces of gravity, leaving Sylder’s own hand and bouncing slowly in the road while his leaden arm rose in a stiff arc and his fingers cocked like a cat’s claws unsheathing and buried themselves in the cheesy neckflesh of the man who fled from him without apparent headway as in a nightmare” (The Orchard Keeper, 1993 Vintage International Edition, pg. 38).

or

“A loosed box of kittens came tottering aimlessly over the floor, rocking on their stub legs and mewling.  Their eyes were closed and festered with mucus as if they might have been struck simultaneously with some biblical blight” (Vintage International Edition, pg. 180).

And then there are the single lines:

“The oaks stirred restlessly, low admonitions, shhh…” (Vintage International Edition, pg. 65).

“Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood” (Vintage International Edition, pg. 133).

Not long ago, I read Blood Meridian.  It, too, is pure McCarthy (he cannot be otherwise), and as much as that book made me uneasy, I loved every single word of it.  A fictional account of historical events from the mid-1800s, McCarthy takes readers on a horrifying journey with a fourteen-year-old boy named the Kid as he travels around the Texas-Mexico boarder.  There are other characters, unsavory and otherwise (worse), with whom the kid meets up and travels, but none as unforgettable and frightening as the Judge.  

Potential spoiler alert:  Clearly, McCarthy meant the Judge's character to be that of death, as any other character who has the great misfortune to meet the Judge ends up quite thoroughly deceased.  But never in my life have I read an ending written like the one this book has.  Where throughout the book, death is described in vivid detail, the death at the end of the book, arguably the most important death, is not well described at all.  We are not even given so much as a hint as to what happened, except that whatever happened was too horrifying to describe, as evidenced by the reaction of a character who stumbles upon the scene after the fact.  And that is the genius of McCarthy.  He uses our own minds against us, because he knows that we can do the most damage to ourselves.

A taste of Blood Meridian:

"How these things end.  In confusion and curses and blood.  They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back" (Vintage First International Edition, pg. 43).

"...a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world" (Vintage First International Edition, pg. 69).

"A man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.  Here there can be no special pleading.  Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised.  Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right.  In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural" (Vintage First International Edition, pg. 261).

So good, it hurts.

Relating

The weather is changing.  Leaves to be raked, plants to be brought in.  Drastic differences in daytime highs and nighttime lows.  Our northeastern states are bracing themselves for Hurricane Sandy, which the media has dubbed “Frankenstorm.”  The storm is due to hit Delaware on Monday evening.  It will move north from there, dropping rain and snow, knocking out electricity and causing a ruckus just in time for Halloween.  I know my northeastern friends, who are like family, have prepared themselves.  One cannot live in Maryland, New York, or Connecticut and not take a storm like this seriously.

Just finished reading Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain.  I’m fairly certain that I had read this book before, but it would have been a long time ago.  Its publication date is 1959.  The same year that William S. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch, Hunter S. Thompson published The Rum Diary, and Ian Fleming published both Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only.  My Side of the Mountain is the story of a young boy who runs away from New York City to live off the land in the Catskills.  I enjoyed the resourcefulness of young Sam Gribley, and could relate to his preparations for winter, but was frightened by the absence of a concerned parent (probably due to the horrific news stories recently about children gone missing and unhappy endings).  Sam’s story ends on an unbelievably upbeat note…

I’ve also been reading quite a bit by a New York blogger, 66 Square Feet.  Marie blogs eloquently (and so darned poetically) about gardening on her tiny terrace, cooking and eating the foods she grows there, and navigating, often on foot, her amazing city.  Her blog is a delightful love-letter about New York, her feline friend Estorbo, her spouse the Frenchman, and sometimes about her roots in South Africa.  Marie, Estorbo and the Frenchman are preparing for Sandy’s visit to the coast…carefully tended plants have been moved to safety, ingredients for simple yet elegant meals have been procured, beer and wine are to be purchased to soothe the soul.  I can relate.  If this storm were hitting Alabama, Eric and I would be doing approximately the same thing.

We are having NY strips, roasted rosemary potatoes and field greens for dinner.  Eric is under the weather, so this calls for blood...

Running & Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Never make promises while sitting in an emergency room because it is a guarantee that those promises will be made under the influence of some kind of duress AND may be difficult to keep.

Eric was propped on a gurney in the hallway of the ER on a Friday night in August (the 17th, to be exact).  We were there with what I can only describe as the most ill-behaved slice of humanity, for an accident that shouldn’t have happened.  Two hours earlier, Eric had wrecked his bike while training for cyclocross when he hit a foliage-concealed crater left in the park by Alagasco project workers.  His bike was toast (this after having rebuilt it from his earlier crash on May 24).  His body had not faired much better than the bike, what with his ripening black eye, broken nose, multiple facial scrapes, bruised back and wonky collar bone (the same collar bone that had just healed from being broken and surgically repaired in the May crash).  He was mad.  And he was done with cycling.  For good this time.  He thought out loud that perhaps he would focus again on running...

Maybe I wasn't thinking straight because of the stress, but I found myself telling Eric that if he did in fact decide to give up cycling and pick running back up, I would start running with him.

So, after about a month of healing, Eric and I went for a run together.  We ran a little over two miles.  I'm sorry, let me clarify that I did not run the ENTIRE two miles.  I ran one minute, walked one minute, ran one minute, walked one minute.  This seemed to work for me because although my legs kept telling me to go, go, go, my lungs kept telling me to just lay down on the pavement for a minute or two until someone I knew drove by and offered me a ride home.  It has gotten a bit easier since that first run, but I still have to bargain with myself to "just make it to the next fire hydrant."

How does Born to Run by Christopher McDougall play into all of this?  Well, Eric read McDougall's book recently while at the beach, and liked it well enough to share parts of it with me as he read.  I was intrigued, so once he was finished, I decided to read it too.

Born to Run, with its history of the birth of the grueling Leadville 100, its details of the deadly allure of the Copper Canyons of Mexico, and its fascinating scientific data which appear to shore up the idea that humans were indeed born to run, is a page-turner (and also a bestseller).  McDougall introduces us to the legendary Tarahumara, a tribe indigenous to the Copper Canyons region...a tribe known for their superhuman running abilities. He also introduces us to a motley and award-winning crew of American ultramarathoners:  the empathetic and kindhearted Scott Jurek, the intense Kerouac-spouting youngsters Jenn Shelton and Billy Barnett (aptly referred to as the Party Kids), runner/photographer Luis Escobar, the talkative Barefoot Ted (who, as you might guess, runs barefoot for the most part and yes, he talks a lot), and the admirable and unforgettable Caballo Blanco (Shaggy, Micah True, Michael Randall Hickman) whose dream to host an ultramarathon in the unforgiving Copper Canyons between the best Tarahumara runners and the best American ultrarunners becomes his magnum opus.  Even as a non-runner, I found this book engaging, what with its anthropological theories and its sometimes hilarious observations of the colorful real-life characters.

A sobering testament to the beguiling abilities of athletic shoe advertising may be seen when McDougall discusses the "Painful Truth" about feet and running shoes (pgs. 171-177 of the softcover Vintage Book edition):

"So if running shoes don't make you go faster and don't stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for?  What are the benefits of all those microchips, 'thrust enhancers,' air cushions, torsion devices, and roll bars?  Well, if you have a pair of Kinseis in your closet, brace yourself for some bad news.  And like all bad news, it comes in threes:
Painful Truth No. 1:  The Best Shoes Are the Worst
Painful Truth No. 2:  Feet Like a Good Beating
Final Painful Truth:  Even Alan Webb Says 'Human Beings Are Designed to Run Without Shoes'"

Of course, McDougall inserts compelling information to back up each "Painful Truth," but I'm going to leave that to you to find out what that compelling information is.  It did make me think back to the fourteen years of ballet I devoted myself to, many of the hours in those fourteen years spent practicing at the barre either barefoot or in soft ballet shoes with no support whatsoever.  If McDougall is correct, then my strong feet and ankles should thank me for all those years of unsupported pounding that I subjected them to.  I also think back on my favorite hiking boots that I wore in my early twenties while working as a contract archaeologist, suede hightop Payless work boots with soles so flexible and rubbery, I could actually feel my feet and toes gripping the rocks underneath them when I hiked rough terrain.  God, I loved those boots and still hold out hope of finding similar ones one day...

Another intriguing part of Born to Run was the research on persistence hunting (the running to death of an animal over a period of time) as one of the theoretical reasons for the evolution of the human body into such a perfect running mechanism.  Persistence hunting would be virtually untraceable through the archaeological record if it wasn't for certain bony characteristics in the human body that developed evolutionarily to position a persistence hunter in a place to be more successful.  It is a plausible theory, one that  McDougall fleshes out with Louis Liebenberg's study of one of the few living examples of persistence hunting left in the world, the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa (and not all of the Kalahari practice persistence hunting, only a "renegade band" of a few tribesmen).  Liebenberg lived and hunted with these Kalahari renegades long enough to completely change the way he ate and ran, becoming a better runner and a better hunter. And when Liebenberg left Africa, he wrote The Art of Tracking:  The Origin of Science, which is probably another good read.

Born to Run left me with a better understanding of what a proper running diet would be (less is more, and vegan seems to be choice), what shoes would best serve a long-distance runner (not the expensive kind that offer an overly supporting structure), and the best running form (run barefoot and you will figure out your best running form actually is). Born to Run also left me with a great respect for ultrarunners, most specifically those ultrarunners who were mentioned by the author.  These athletes love running.  Otherwise I don't believe they could do what they do.