I did it. I wasted exactly one hour of my life last night–an hour I can never retrieve. I wasted this precious hour by watching Britney Spears’s “reality” show Chaotic and it was exactly as horrible as you would imagine. I hadn’t intended to watch it but I flipped channels and there it was and being the pop culture junky that I am, I got sucked in. This review nails it:
If this hastily jammed-together excuse for a May sweeps entry even began to approach the truth, it might be more, um, dangerous. But there’s precious little chance of that. Madonna, in whose image-perfect steps Britney treads, offered up way more reality in her 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare.” To anyone who believes Britney is Madonna Lite, you’ve got more evidence right here.
I will say that the only interesting part of the show is when Britney sometimes turns the camera on herself sans makeup and the viewer is able to see how truly young she is.
This may verge on the line of TMI, but today is the day I go for my yearly mammogram. I have had one every year since I turned 30. Most women begin getting yearly mammograms when they turn 40 but since my mother (and two of her sisters) had breast cancer, my sisters and I must take this precaution.
So, for the sake of awareness, I mention this today. And I also would like to mention that many women cannot afford to get mammograms when they need them because they do not have health insurance, and so a test that could potentially save their lives is out of their reach. With that said, there is something you can do.
Every day I click on the button at www.thebreastcancersite.com (I click on all of the other buttons on the site as well–for hunger, literacy, rain forests, etc). I do this first thing in the morning before I do anything else on my computer. It takes a few seconds.
Can you believe that in just a few seconds you could do something as amazing as saving another person’s life?
Here’s wishing a very happy 50th anniversary to the ole bendy, green guy–Gumby:
Five decades after Gumby first captured the nation’s imagination, the little green guy and his chums are starring in a new art exhibit the first in a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the television icon’s creation and launch his comeback.
If you are like me, you probably have stuff in boxes in your basement, garage or attic that you never use (or have even forgotten you have). During our last move, we tried to get rid of much of our extraneous, but still useful, items by donating them to the Salvation Army. Now we have joined The Freecycle Network which is:
a grassroots movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Each local group is run by a local volunteer moderator.
Was out with a friend the other night and I let her order my wine for me because she is well-versed in wine and has great taste. Anyway, she chose a Viognier, which is a grape I had never heard of before, but now I’m glad I did because I fell in love with it.
NewPages.com has posted new reviews of such lit journals as: The Antigonish Review, Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cranky, Fine Madness, Florida Review, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, So to Speak, Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Terra Incognita, Third Coast, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Water-Stone Review.
When I read work by Michael Cunningham I think, “He really knows women.” And he does. He is right there in my head knowing how it feels to be a woman. All of that frustrated, crazy emotion. That desperate love. That anger. But then as I continue to read, I come to the conclusion that it is not just women he knows or homosexuals or troubled children or old men, instead he knows it all. He has a view into the soul of all humanity. And that is what I call vision in its truest sense.
Flesh and Blood is an astonishing, a moving, a painful and a beautiful book. Cunningham guides us through three generations of the Stassos family and all of the people who love them and hate them. Constantine, the patriarch, is a Greek immigrant who can’t help himself but live out the emotions his father beat into him. He wants everything, including inappropriate comfort from his teenage daughter, Susan. And yet, there is the tender boy within him still—that sad young self who is the opener of the novel. The boy who only wants his garden to grow and for people to be proud of him.
His wife, Mary, starts out filled with desire to go and do. She is covetous and believes her life will be grand until she finds she is stifled, and so gives up her desires and learns to live within:
She had switched to her tiny voice. When she spoke in that voice she seemed to be addressing someone who lived inside her, an invisible friend who shared her belief that the world was great and wide but finally too exhausting for anyone to live in it.
Susan is a replica of her mother except within her she contains a great ball of rage, which is not unleashed until her son Ben’s funeral, when she can finally let her father know just how much she hates him. Zoe, the youngest sister, is the one who always seems lost and yet as she loses her struggle with AIDs, we see how much of the true heart of the family existed within her. But it is Billy, or Will as he becomes, who is a the core of this narrative. He is the middle son, the one who eventually succeeds in putting his father’s negativity behind him and comes out of the closet and into the arms of his true love.
And in the end, it all comes down to Jamal, Zoe’s illegitimate son whom she raised along with her best friend/mother substitute/love the fabulous drag queen Cassandra. Jamal, the tender, complex and beautiful boy who finds the decaying wing of a bird and sees the beauty. Jamal, whom all of the others either love with fierce possessiveness or despise, because their desire is too much, is the life that leads us to the end.
For me, the most touching relationship in the book was that formed between Mary and Cassandra. An unlikely friendship blossoms under Cassandra’s pushing, born from a desire to drag Mary into the life of her grandson, Jamal. Cassandra becomes not only a woman whom Mary admires but also a man she loves—they are almost doppelgangers and yet Cassandra is the one who teaches Mary more about how to love her children than anyone else could.
With graphic and yet beautiful sex scenes, incest and disease, this book does not tread lightly but it does leave a lasting impression, one of exquisite language and unforgettable characters. Ultimately, it is an honest examination of the modern American family. As readers, we see ourselves in the lives of the Stassos family and if we claim not to, then, perhaps, we’re not telling the truth.
Allen gets cranky about the media hype over identity theft.
and
Katie Weekley reviews Terri Brown-Davidson’s brilliant novel Marie, Marie Hold on Tight.
myfanwy collins 