One from the Archives: Moroccan Taxi
May 6th, 2008
Mr. Pencil, me, Morocco.
Book Review: “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt
May 6th, 2008I wasn’t completely swept off my feet by this much-loved Irish autobiography, but I had an enjoyable engagement with it. McCourt’s grim take on his childhood poverty in Depression- and WWII-era Limerick is simultaneously depressing and bemusing.
Characters are fairly allegorical, though not without surprising complexity. Priests are inflexible, laughable and contradictory–though not all of them. Extended family members are condescending, bigoted and hypocritical–but not all of them, and not all of the time.
A few gems stand out: the janitor at the hospital where McCourt endures typhoid; a shut-in who has been shattered by his experiences in the English army in India; a forgiving and patient Franciscan priest.
The constant hard knocks. Repetitive, rhythmic sorrows of death and poverty and alcoholism. You see them coming up on the story’s horizon and you’re powerless to defuse them. It’s hard at times, to read. His father’s drinking is especially hard to tolerate because it’s such a helpless situation.
Everything is painted so grey: the lane, the dingy, flooded house, the River Shannon. So when something happens driven from love, the color it shoots into the story is blinding. Guilt and perseverance bind families and neighborhoods together. It is a nice frame of reference through which to grasp a basic understanding of the era.
I went in prepared for something that was aimed at the heartstrings. Perhaps as a result of this steely preparation, my tears were not jerked. But I was touched, if not moved. ( 
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Book #21 of 2008 for me!
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What’s your Least-Favorite American State?
May 5th, 2008Preface: I’ve been to all 48 contiguous states. I have been to nearly all multiple times. I plan on going to Alaska next year. Hawaii might be harder.
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For me, I’m going to have to say it’s a toss-up between Kansas and Oklahoma. The landscapes are long in the face and don’t seem loved by the inhabitants, particularly. The High Plains in general are a tough thing to love easily, but the Dakotas seem to have more blasted serenity than their southern neighbors.
Kansas, the last time I was there, last April, was smattered along its entire freeway length with anti-abortion billboards, all struggling to best each other in terms of shock value. Kansas also has toll freeways, which seem entirely inappropriate.
Oklahoma seems like Kansas, only greyer and even more stubbly, though I haven’t been there for some time. I’ll grant you that the panhandle is fascinating if not lovely. First the strip of land was eschewed from Texas because it was above the latitude boundary for having slaves. It was never loved, a no man’s land. Then it was finally, slowly homesteaded, but then blown to scoured bits in the Dust Bowl.
I would love for someone to show me the joy and the beauty in either of these places. I know there is something to be found–this country, despite its political-social shortcomings and bursts of insanity, is a staggering quilt of landscape–I just need to be shown. Kansas tried to show me, a little bit. It was late dusk and I was gunning for KC. And suddenly fire. Snaking, low lines of fire only a foot or two high: the prairie burning. It was surreal and unforgettable, but sadly in an area with no exits from the freeway (hence no photos).
6 Responses to “What’s your Least-Favorite American State?”
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El Gray Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pmI believe there’s a decent state park, just across the TX border at the bottom of OK, but I can’t remember the details right now. Lake Texoma straddles the states, I suppose, and is not a bad place to get stranded for an afternoon in a jury-rigged speedboat with a half-dozen friends and some beer.
They charge about $75/hour to tow a boat back to the shore of Lake Texoma, btw.
I hear Tulsa has its charms, but I can’t confirm from personal experience.
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tODD Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 1:13 pmI’ll bet that we have very different impressions of many states, since most of my adult travels have involved flying into a city, rather than driving between them.
That said, my trip last year to Wichita, Kansas was about as dull as I imagined it would be (I mean, as far as an example of a Kansas city goes; my trip was actually quite enjoyable). Look at a map of the place! When the map looks like a big grid, you just know it won’t be that exciting of a place. There’s almost no natural obstacles to your geometric perfection!
The best thing I can say about Kansas was that, due to its proximity to the more interesting Midwestern states, it had frozen custard.
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Aileen Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 1:48 pmI’ve had really good pie in Oklahoma but as far as I can tell, Kansas offers very little to the interstate traveler. Aside from all the dead-fetus billboards, the tolls are ridiculous - how costly can it be to pave something as flat and featureless as Kansas? New Jersey was similarly expensive to drive through but at least it was short and had something worth visiting at the end, New York.
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shlomo Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 3:11 pmOklahoma and Kansas are easy targets.
My least favorite state is Washington. It’s just too close. Zillions of Vantuckians drive over here every day and pollute our air, giving me allergies. And now they want us to build them a new bridge, so even more can drive over, pollute, etc. -
tODD Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 3:40 pmLyza, my question is: what about Delaware? Where does it rank in all of this?
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Alan I. Says:
May 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pmFlorida did not live up to the warm spring selling as my travel agent had pitched. The week I was there in 1995, it was below freezing, which sent me into various gift shops buying sweatshirts and blankets. Next Florida attempt will be Key West in Year 2009.
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Book Review: “Sarah’s Key” by Tatiana de Rosnay
May 3rd, 2008I received another Early Reviewer book this month from LibraryThing. The paperback edition of Sarah’s Key will come out this fall. It is currently available in hardback from Amazon and other sources.
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In 1942, thousands of Jewish children, women, and men were herded into a stadium in Paris–the Vel’d'Hiv’–and summarily shipped off to concentration camps, mostly to their immediate deaths. That this roundup was executed by the French police (not the Nazis) and that it was mostly expurgated from the mainstream of French history darkens an already dark chapter. “Sarah’s Key” follows the fictional story of one young victim, a 10-year-old girl, and a modern woman whose life whose life intersects with hers in mysterious ways.
The story is part mass market thriller, part didactic history lesson, and part novel, a well-crafted but poorly-written page-turner more akin to an action movie than a work of literary subtlety.
It was about a third of the way into “Sarah’s Key” that I started wondering if it had been originally written in English (t was). I scoured the title pages for translator credits; I surfed the Web for data. The author, Tatiana de Rosnay, is French, so it would be feasible that that language is where this began. I did this research because I was hoping that there was a reason that the language was as dreadful as it was. I wanted to be able to blame someone other than the author for the stock, jarring phrases like “eyes white with fear” and “speechless with terror.” At one point, speaking of a matter of life and death amongst the characters, de Rosnay has the young girl worry franctically if, by locking her very young brother in a hidden cabinet when the police come to round up her family, she has “let him down.”
Let him down? “I let him down” is a reasonable thing to say when you miss your kid get a home run in his tee-ball game because you’re working late at the office. It seems a wildly inappropriate (not to mention anachronistic) way to describe a child’s potential death. Perhaps this was on purpose. But it smacked of a carelessness with words that I found difficult to ignore.
The effort the book makes at bringing an obfuscated, shameful piece of history to the fore is noble. de Rosnay is right, most people have not heard of this tragedy. But what’s missing, except for brief mention, is the broader context of the French Occupation and the Vichy regime. France’s political paroxysms during WWII are complex, and I’m not going to pretend I understand them (yet). I would have appreciated a lesson in how the Vel d’Hiv’ tragedy plugged in to what was going on in a broader sense. de Rosnay condemns the French policemen for carrying out the grim task, and though she does have a character that breaks out his jackboot role, the rest of the force is portrayed as thugs blindly following orders. One has to question what the motivation was, what was really driving it.
What I can credit the work with is its inventiveness of plot. I hesitate to pigeonhole something about the Holocaust as a “beach read” but it has that tempo, a Dan Brown-ish Byzantine intrigue, that seems to suggest the genre. At an early point in the story, I paused and made specific predictions about the resolution of the story arcs. I was wrong about nearly all of them, which was redeeming.
During my brief Web research about the book, I came across the publisher’s page, trumpeting that movie rights have been sold. Good, I thought. Perfect. Because this is an isolated case in which I think the movie might be better than the book. ( 
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B’Owl!
May 3rd, 2008Last night after another wretched episode of Battlestar Galactica, Mike and Chris Higgins and I stayed up watching TiVo bits. Chris showed us the “Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Much of the time it’s baffling and lightly amusing, but then this gem came on and I think my entire life might be different now.
One Response to “B’Owl!”
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autumn Says:
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:33 pmwhen i saw this headline i thought we might be in for another crohn’s related post. glad it was waaaaay more amusing than that would have been….
May 6th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Glad you identified yourself. At first, I thought it was Brad and Angelina.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
man you guys are beautiful.