MotherPie

Literature's Best Last Lines...

After my new book club in Santa Fe discussed the decline of literature and how 10,000 Suns was a good story, but not good literature, I decided to start my own personal litmus test for literature.

Here are some of my favorite last lines from classic literature:

"....After all, tomorrow is another day." ­-- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere. ­--J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. ­-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? ­--Ralph Ellison,Invisible Man (1952)

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. ­--Russell Banks, Continental Drift (1985)

...you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. ­Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Samuel Beckett)

In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel. ­--Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before. ­--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

`It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.' ­--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities(1859)

Are there any questions? ­--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. ­--Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

(For more, see Kottke.org's list of the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.)

Now I'm keeping track of the last lines from the books I'm reading. 

From Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, (2007) "He wrote: So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!"

Political endings?  If the Iraq War was Literature, Petraeus might have the best last line: "Tell me how this ends."

Reading, Reading & Reading...

The majority of adult Americans (56%) didn't buy a book last year.  How could this be?  While on vacation I read the hard copy of the NYTimes and came across things I wouldn't have otherwise.  Clark Hoyt, The NYTime's public editor, noted April 6 that the average Times reader spends 48 minutes with the daily newspaper and 72 minutes with the Sunday paper, far more time than the readers of most other newspapers. The online time is much less.

WashingtonPost won 6 Pulitzer Prizes, the largest number in the paper's history. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscsar Wao by Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer for Fiction.  I finished it last month and would recommend it.
Bob Dylan won a special citation Pulitzer for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

What does Dylan listen to on his radio?  50% of the songs he has played were recorded before 1960 and only 9% were recorded in the 80s or more recently.  Random Dylan quote: “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me…as opposed to when you grow up and you learn that…the pen is mightier than the sword. The world is fill of little contradictions like that.”  Once I wondered what happened to poetry in my lifetime, as it had been for previous generations, then I thought: Dylan.

Eric Alterman's Out of Print- The death and life of the American newspaper on the news business is one of the best articles I've come across, in a recent New Yorker. He takes the newsbusiness from the origins 300 years ago to a prescient review of the present.  Excellent article for those interested in the media shift from print news to online.

The HuffingtonPost has passed the Drudge Report in the latest comscore and Neielsen ratings which I think has something to do with the energized Democratic base.  The Gawker blog tops the list of the 25 most valuable blogs, at $150 million according to 24/7 Wall Street .

The 2008 State of the News Media, is out and notes that there is no finished news  product anymore.  News is continual, a service.  One year ago 3/24 major traditional news websites offered links to outside content. Now that figure is up to 11.  The news can't be offered in a "walled garden" anymore as readers don't just go to one place for daily news.

For Green Reading there are two books I'd be interested in from the list The Eco-Man's Library, Non-Fiction -- Vanity Fair's Green Guide: Desert Solitaire (1971)  by Edward Abbey; and  Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) by Roderick Nash.  I've already read, as most of us have, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but there are others on that list worth a perusal. 

So a final quote from Edward Abbey: "Wildness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.  A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

Cultural Indicator: Magazine Covers (& George Clooney??????)...

Reading culture from magazine covers is an art in itself. What is communicated through cover art, what do we read by design?  Men are in a messy confused state.  That's the message.

Cover art teases consumer interest by provoking curiosity to purchase in order to obtain what is inside.  This applies to book covers and (used to be) album-turned-CD covers.  The latter entered its heyday when albums were big and the tunes couldn't sell themselves as they buyer handled the product in the stores.  So, a little deconstruction of the art is in order in a comparative cover graphic post focused on one of today's leading cultural men.  What's the pull here?

What is the mess of March coverman George Clooney? Who is the target audience and why? What does this say? Do moms want to know?  Probably not.  Single women? Probably not for Esquire. (Men under 34 are the heaviest readers of magazines.)  Men, wanting to know what is the appeal behind the man?  Why he is such a leading man? Is there dirt here? Conflict of a mess, waiting to be told? International movie star George Clooney on the covers of Esquire for March and the NYTimes March 9 Sunday Style Magazine, is attention-getting for the fact that they both indicate messiness (click to enlarge the photo). The NYTimes has him pictured in an extreme close-up all grossly dirty and messy while Esquire features him all cleaned up casual with a messy teaser.  Media stats show that older men - 55 and up - are the heaviest readers of newspapers, but I bet the NYTimes Style mag appeals to younger guys (35 and under, the diamond bracket to appeal to for marketers --hence the edgy dirty face).

Equire's lead story highlights Coverman Clooney with a big headliner. The lead header above is his first name George (oh, his head is the O -- interesting graphic for the second most interesting leader nationally known by that name and so intimate - we are informal people and we know famous people by single names - Obama, Prince, Ringo, W). To the left of his photo is the rest of the lead story headline: Clooney Finally Talks About the Whole Mess That Is His Miserable Life.

Both media graphic cover illustrations communicate that there is more beneath the cover to the man.  Just the juxtaposition of these two covers is worth an examination itself for the iteration of the idea in two different national publications with broad audience (male) reach.

I like to ponder what the art of the medium says by design but don't have time or interest to read either of these stories. As a married mom raising a son, I just am curious: what appeal does the mess of this man have, and to whom, and why? Culturally?  For fun: If you put yourself on the cover, what would be the story? The title of the magazine? The graphic?  Digitally you can do this creative exercise.  Go mother yourself with creativity - play magazine cover editor/designer.

No, seriously, this isn't play. Our culture is undergoing a huge shift.  A recent study (pdf) for marketing to men showed that 50% of men in over 13 countries surveyed felt that their role in society is unclear and  80% don't identify with advertising geared to them.  So how do they understand themselves?  Cultural think tank scenarioDNA was part of the study.  Men don't drink beer in the lounge chair watching tv anymore.  Real men... (finish the sentence).

Ramble: New Book, Old Speech and Other Reads...

Like caramel on apples, thoughts and ideas make living sweet and they are absorbed through the process of thinking while reading. Rambling through reading lists, online and off, both of material read and lists of items to read, is a regular activity since living an art and reading a treat and life should be more than just swallowed as it goes by. So just to share a few:

A book blog, The Page 99 Test  takes one book each post and asks it's author to do the page 99 test, based on the quote by Ford Madox Ford, "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."  Nicholas Carr, former editor of The Harvard Business Review, pointed to the blog when it featured his newest book, The Big Switch, Rewiring the World from Edison to Google ("Riveting stuff" writes the NY Post").    I wonder if you could do this same test on blogs, taking the 99th post.

Raising sons today is a challenge - at least I find so by my own experience. Now that we know so much more about brains and development, should we seriously consider educating boys and girls separately? When I heard Shirley Franklin, Atlanta's great black mayor, speak of crediting her all-girls school education as one of the formative reasons she had confidence to reach high (she was speaking at a benefit for The Atlanta Girl's School), I first started to wonder about this.  Hillary Clinton is also a product of segregated education (Wellesley).  As we realize the differences, neurological and otherwise, between the sexes, educating with these differences in mind perhaps makes sense.  Read Teaching Boy and Girls Separately  and you might, as I did, think this might be a good thing.  On sex differences, could or would the media have attacked the character issue of a female candidate regarding sexual innuendos as they did with McCain?  No, it would be politically incorrect.

Narrative is an act of framing a story and the truth of matters is often buried. The big brou-haha over the NYTimes article on John McCain, questioning his ethics, had so much buzz. The issue is over the narrative, in politics, as played out in the media.  I think this is why nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, nearly half turn to internet for news.  For more, I'll point you to journalism professor Jay Rosen's article where he questions how vetting stories on the three leading candidates went awry Times and looks for a pattern... He writes, "Times stories were mis-conceived and mis-edited so as to incorporate and express the paper’s own image-shaping needs; and the “facts,” such as they were, were pushed about one way and another toward the end. The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate."  One comment he incorporates: “Candidates create narratives of themselves, which are almost necessarily not wholly accurate portrayals of themselves, ” says Christopher Colaninno, "I think the media gets tripped up when they can establish that candidates narratives are not accurate in someway.”  The narrative is such an important part of how candidate stories are framed - Vanity Fair's March feature on Obama says up front that it's story, Raising Obama, where the author says that Obama’s character has been under high magnification "is about the enduring character of a boy and a young man, and how that character has emerged in adulthood."   Journalists want to get the story, which involves conflict.  Conflict sells.   So it is the character. 

Five years ago this month we landed in Iraq.  I pulled up two reads to mark the occasion - one old, one new.  Just released yesterday (and already a bestseller on Amazon) is The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq War by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes (Vanity Fair has a brief synopsis). The cost of caring for our veterans was never considered. I read the first brief speech of note Obama gave (the second was before the '04 Democratic Convention) in October 2002.  His speech against going to war with Iraq was a very good read, since he has used this stance as his primary example for his good judgement.  Since moving to New Mexico I registered as an Independent and not supporting any candidate at the moment.  Morph, we can.

Book as Political Communication Tools: McCain is an Open Book & Prolific Author, Obama is a Top Seller (Right Now)

Books as a political communication strategy for candidates has become an important part of candidate branding and marketing in presidential elections.  This is one of the best ways for highly literate voters to gather information but it is also a tool, too.  (Think of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, "whose publication in the fall of 2006 effectively turned what was first billed as a book tour into a march toward the New Hampshire primary" as book as-campaign strategy for candidate narrative). It would be remiss to cover other aspects of media and overlook books as we look at our culture at the moment.

Looking at the top candidates, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on Amazon books, I queried by relevence, top sellers, and  publication date.  I didn't pay attention to the starred reviews because these can be manipulated and looked by writings authored by the candidates and also books authored about the candidates. 

Judged by authorship, John McCain is the open book and by far the most prolific author.*

Western Movies: Classic Americana (We're All Mestizo)...

Two top Oscar contenders this year are western in their core - There Will Be Blood (won) and  my favorite, No Country for Old Men. Used to be that you could see cowboy hats in Dallas.  I've yet to spot one on this trip to Texas... maybe as I head over to Fort Worth I'll see a few covered heads.   Our western heritage is such a confluence of myths and realities.  Has Bush's unpopularity helped diminish the hat? 

Does Obama's mixed heritage take us to a new mythological chapter of our self-definition?  Classic western, this stuff.  U.S News and World Report's cover story this week is US news.  Us, united in these states, rethinking who we are, who we will be.

Tommy Lee Jones is the quintessential Texan that you find in shadow form outside of the big cities of Houston and Dallas.  Maybe I'm drawn to him because he reminds me, in speech an mannerisms, of my cousin from Borger, Texas who goes by the name of Cortez.  My children would have been seventh generation Texans (Jones is eighth) had they been born south of the Red River.  They are 3/4 Texan anyway.  My father was born in Texas but his parents, who came west (oil, oil, oil) were Scots-Irish Mestizos.  Aren't we all, though, mullato, gumbo of this and that? DNA doesn't tell Texans apart, race doesn't matter (Obama's campaign is raising this issue and I think we are ripe for rewriting ourselves).  Is our national identity primed for revision? Americans have never quit trying to remake our image. The past is always gone with the wind, up for reinterpretation in context of the present.

We've always been becoming.  We've always been fluid. We're all malleable; we're all mixticius, mixed up and we storify and glorify ourselves based on conglomerating our past, present and future.  That is what I love about Westerns.  They are American to the core.  Myth, truth, character, setting, story, grit...

photo, top: Tommy Lee Jones makes his directorial debut with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Sony Picture Classics

Still...Reading!

Well, thumbs up friends - we are readers, we.  On my Still List in that quiet period before the New Year routines kicked in, I challenged my friends to do a Still Introspection.  What I found was still, with all the blogging, my friends are still reading.  The thumbs up is from a fabulous sculpture gate on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, a memento from college tours.  But with our media consumption, are we reading as deeply?  Media consumption habits are hard to change but we blogerati are a literate lot.

Santa Fe isn't one of America's most literate cities but I find a very very smart crowd here. Studies show that we're reading less and we're reading less well. On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Yet I find within the blogerati that reading is central. Also, know that literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.

Red Room is a new writers site.  Amy Tan writes her first blog post in which she ruminates about minutiae. But anyway, I found it interesting that I found so many mentioning reading on their Stills...

Claude-- still blogging in Paris after some three years, walking daily around Paris, still disorganized

Tamarika -- Still glad for getting all those degrees and enjoying the view (of a tall oak) outside her window; still trying to get it right (aren't we all????).

Ronni - still not joining social media sites, still blogging every day, still grateful for blog friends.  Has an unread book pile.  Doesn't do memes...

The Atavist... Still proud to be relatively intact, still can laugh at life's challenges, still enjoying a daily routine, still passionate about life...

tut-tut --  Still wondering what I'm really meant to be doing, still doing yoga

DaisyDay picked up the stills and is still wondering when she'll feel grown up (she, with the grandkids!).

Bellezza -- still wanting to be perfect, trying to be perfect, failing at perfection and still passionate about reading and still doing major posts about books.

Jill -- her post just prior had her top ten books of the year...  Still finishing her book and still blogging - going into her fourth year  Like me, loves her mac.

Lauri's stills....  Still wishing for a house to clean itself!

The Stills seemed to be better, full of more depth and wisdom, than resolutions...

I gave my youngest daughter Kahil Gibran for Christmas, hoping she'd love it as her great-grandmother did.  She then asked me for a list of the best books I could recommend.  I'm still working on it.  Any ideas?  A recommended list for a girl in her last teenage year yearning for good literature?  All I can say is: I'm glad she is still reading!!!  But I do know we are reading differently. 

A Great Date Night...

Going back to ourselves is what it is. Remembering and sharing what we once were when we were so influenced by music, before we grew up.  The beats and drums and notes of our blooming selves.  I've got it all captured for a repeat.  It was a great idea that... just ...happened.

So...

Holiday Fun & Entertainment...

Creative gingerbread houses from scratch -- this was part of our Christmas thanks to our two college kids. The idea of home seems special after months away burning brain cells on campus! They had been inspired by a huge display we had seen at The Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C. This is the first time we've had such an exhibit at the House of Pie.

We're out seeing movies these next few weeks -- Atonement and Juno earlier this week who knows what will be next. We're working off of a variety of movie lists: Roger Ebert's Top 10 films for 2007. No Country for Old Men is #2, filmed in New Mexico and I bet the director wins an Oscar as will the big bad Spaniard guy Javier Bardem, who will go down in our cultural history of villains.  Ebert has Juno as #1 and the 20 year-old star, Ellen Page, is full of talent).

USA Today's blog round-up of movies named No Country #1...  I missed the limited opening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the Santa Fe Film Festival and I don't think it will open again here as it goes into limited wide-release.  More movie lists are out that I'm checking.

Other fun reads for year-end: Best Compilation of 2007 Best of lists: by Miss C. on her own blog and she also has a best list post on Mental_Floss. 

With snow continuing this week, we might just watch tivo'd movies instead or Paul McCartney's Paris concert. Again.  These Days of Christmas are my favorites, right through the 12th day.

Friday Favorite: These Dreams...

In 1973, before MTV, Jim Croce died in a plane crash right after he had just had a couple of big song releases. After singing the song for 34 years, thanks to YouTube, I know what his peformances were like.
Jim Croce: These Dreams...

Update: I had to switch videos from Don't Spit Into the Wind which was made unavailable to this one.... thanks to readers for catching the broken link....