In Othello, Shakespeare created a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with an attraction between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona, with their elopement and with strong mutual devotion that ends hastily with jealous rage and violent deaths.  Shakespeare sets this story in the romantic world of the Mediterranean, moving the action from Venice to the island of Cyprus and giving it an even more exotic coloring with the stories of Othello’s African past.  Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine  - the differences of race, color, age and of cultural background - that you should not be surprised that the marriage ends in disaster.  Most people who read or see this play will feel the love represented between Othello and Desdemona is so strong that they could have overcome all these differences were it not for the words and actions of Iago who hates Othello and sets out to destroy him by destroying his love for Desdemona.

            As Othello starts believing Iago’s insinuations that Desdemona is unfaithful, his fascination with her turns to horror.  The reader is confronted by a generous and trusting Othello in the grip of Iago’s schemes and of a trusting Desdemona who has given herself up entirely to her love for Othello only to be subjected to his horrifying verbal and physical assaults.

            The reader will feel that the play’s fascination and its horror may be greater than ever before because we have been made so very sensitive to the issues if race, class, and gender.  Desdemona is white and Othello is black and because of this, their interracial marriage is a source of slurs from Iago that runs throughout the play.  The issue of gender is especially noticeable in the final scenes of the play, which are vivid reminders of how terrible the power traditionally exerted by men over women can be.

My friend just got her own blog on today and you all should check it out. Why you may ask, do I recommend her? Well because she asked me to. I’m kidding of course; she didn’t ask me to help get the word out about her… yet.  But seriously, she’s a really fun person to be around (most of the time) and has a lot of great opinions (and some odd ones, not to mention she’ll be really sad if she doesn’t get any hits (unless she’s “on the rag”, then she becomes violent). So check her out (please that time of month is coming soon) you may like it (and really if you don’t, you just don’t have to go back.)  http://welcome2myworld.today.com/

During Summer break, Hudson Jones has come to Monterey, California, in search of answers to an unanswerable question. Claiming to be working on a senior dissertation, the ambitious graduate student believes he’s found a lost John Steinbeck novel called Changing Tides that seems to hint at the author’s love for his best friend, Ed “Doc” Ricketts.

Also during this summer, divorced dad Ben Ransome, a marine biologist who hasn’t parented for 7 years, must learn what it means to be a father to his 16-year-old daughter Caddie after her mother can’t take her anymore.

While both struggle in their unique situations and after an accidental meeting, they find in each other a shoulder to lean on. However, after Caddie announces that Ben is  falling for Hudson, All three must take a long look at who they are.

Poe is awesome. No matter how many times I read him, I get shivers. But more than being creepy, he makes you think. The “inner life” seems to be a recurring topic in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Despite how different or similar his characters are there always seems to be something going on inside of them, below the surface. Some great examples of this are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”. In the “Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is obviously suffering from some sort of psychological disorder or distress, though it isn’t clearly stated, nor can I say for sure what disorder or disorders it might be. Most of the action takes place in his head, or is caused by his own thoughts. To explain further, he watches the old man sleep for eight nights before deciding the time is right to kill him. The fact that he does this rather than kill the old man on the first night exhibits to me that there is something going on inside his mind, which the reader can’t understand. Once the murder takes place and he chops up and hides the old man’s remains, there is very little actual action, yes the police come but they appear, at least according to the narration, not to suspect him of any crime. By contrast the narrator slowly but surely begins to slip deeper and deeper into hysteria, hearing what he believes to be the beating of the dead man’s heart and then confessing the entire story of the murder to the police, begging them to rip up the floor boards because he believes that the beating is coming from under them. Another character that has an “inner life” is Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado”, whom I believe has an internal need to control everything around him, perhaps because he also suffers from a psychological disorder. In the very beginning of the story he states that he seeks revenge-which ends up being murder- against Fortunato for insulting him, however he still considers Fortunato his friend. This is an odd conflict of the mind on Montresor’s part. After luring Fortunato to his home under the misconception that he has a bottle of light Spanish sherry that he’d like to share with him, the men descend into the home’s vaults and down into the crypts. There Montresor chains a very inebriated Fortunato to a stone and then walls him in as Fortunato pleads for his freedom. After being completely walled in Fortunato becomes silent which annoys Montressor. The degree to which Montresor got his revenge proves that he had strategically planned it out well in advance, mastering every detail and thus controlling the situation. He had to get rid of all potential witnesses to the crime, as well as plot a way to get his “friend” to come over and go into the cellar. Also, the annoyance he encounters when Fortunato no longer begs for his freedom, exhibits Montresor’s need to be in control and have everything go according to his plan. He had obviously envisioned Fortunato pleading until he no longer could speak and when this doesn’t happen his vision becomes wrong and he looses control to some degree. Lastly, there is some “inner life” taking place in the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” for both the narrator and Roderick Usher. There is some reason, which the reader is unable to understand, why the narrator stays at the house when there are such strange things going on, such as Usher’s sick sister and the house falling apart. I feel that it is some psychological reason causing this, not a disorder but something in his psyche. Also the narrator doesn’t see Usher’s sister on his own, it is only after convincing by Usher that he even sees her and even then it’s only brief. As for Roderick Usher, I believe that he is also experiencing some sort of psychological issues. These might be caused at least partially by the continued incest in his family tree, since for generations the family tree hasn’t branched out. Because of this, he is having difficulty dealing with the death and dying of his sister because the family line will either have to die with him or he will have to marry someone outside of the Usher family. There is also the possibility that his sister may indeed not exist at all, and that she is simply a figment of his askew mental state. I say this because of the fact that it takes his urging for the narrator to sense Madeline’s presents or see her.

To sum it up, the characters of these stories indeed have some interior force or forces that make their lives and actions very different from other people and definitely different from the lives that we, the readers have.

With all the talk of Heath Ledger winning an Oscar (possibly) for his role in the new BATMAN, I decided to his original Oscar bid, and his great/tragic character: ENJOY

Anxiety the state of apprehension, physic tension or mental uneasiness caused by fear, as of danger. (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary) 

            Many characters of the “contemporary” period are consumed by anxiety, which often results in a psychological division for the individual.  One such character whose life is plagued by this type of ambivalence is Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain.

When Ennis met Jack Twist in the summer of 1963, there was a clear connection between the two men that defied any boundaries that society set forth.  Even before their first sexual encounter, Ennis had come up behind Jack and held him against his chest, humming quietly and swaying in front of the fire, and after there first awkward, yet intensely passionate night together, it was evident that the men would never be able to quit each other.

They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and jack jumped in with “Me neither.  A one shot thing.  Nobody’s business but ours.”

Indeed it isn’t anybody’s business but theirs and, alone with only each other and the animals, they were free to love without fear, but in the real world-the world they return to the end of the summer- people tend to pay attention to other people’s business and that’s what concerns Ennis.  Ennis’ fear of “being queer”, or having his sexuality being found out about, goes back to his childhood when there was a couple of men, Earl and Rich, who lived together not far from Ennis until tragedy struck.  One day Earl was found dead in an irrigation ditch; whoever had done it had taken a tire iron to him, tied him up, and dragged him around by his genitalia until his penis was pulled off.   Not only had Ennis heard about this hideous act, but his father had also taken him and his brother to see it and laughed about it, might’ve even done it according to Ennis.  Which is why, when Jack brings up the idea of getting a ranch together Ennis declines, saying that all they can do is sneak off together a few times a year because anything more would lead to their deaths.

Not that his fears are at all irrational.  When Jack went back to Joe Aguirre for a job the following summer, there was clearly homophobia at the root of why he won’t hire him again, saying that Jack and Ennis weren’t paid to leave the sheep with the dogs “while you stemmed the rose.”  Furthermore, by the end of the story Jack suffers the same fate as Earl, proving Ennis’ fears were indeed accurate.

Being that Ennis finds maintaining a gay relationship with Jack so hard and believes that they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t, one would think that Ennis should forget about Jack and live out his life with his wife, Alma, and their two daughters, Alma Jr. and Francine.  He had seemed perfectly content, even if he was not completely successful, with his life for the first four years after his summer on Brokeback Mountain, but once he heard from Jack all of the feelings that he had came rushing back. Still he contented that he was straight.  “You know, I was sitting up here all that time trying to figure out of I was-?  I know I ain’t .   I mean here we both got wives and kids, right?  I like doing it with woman, … but ain’t nothing like this.  I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hundred times thinking about you,”

And adding, “That summer when we split up after we got paid out I had gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke, thought I ate something bad at that place in Dubois.  Took me about a year a figure out it was that I shouldn’t let you out a my sights.  Too late then by a long while.”
            It’s not that he doesn’t love his family, he does love his daughters and he wants to be happy with Alma but there just isn’t anything that comes close to what he feels for Jack, he even wonders if this happens to other people and how do they overcome it. Since he was unable to overcome true emotions, Ennis’ marriage falls apart. Alma had seen the kiss between Jack and her husband, and he never would do anything with her and the girls, but he would always find the time to go fishing with Jack, so she divorced Ennis and remarried.  Ennis understood and didn’t have any hard feelings toward her until she accused him of having something more than friendship with “Jack Nasty.”

            Faced with the accusation of having a homosexual affair, true though it was, Ennis grabs Alma by the arm and begins hurting her and yelling at her. This is the woman that he had, at one time, planned to share his life with and he can’t even manage to tell her of the love that he has for, and with Jack.

            No matter how much inner anguish Ennis has, he still manages to go up to the mountains with Jack for years, though he does seem to try to avoid it sometimes. On what turns out to be their last week together, in May 1983, the two men have an argument because Ennis says he won’t be able to get together for a week in August as they had planned and blames it on work. This might be indeed the case but Jack reasons “you used to come away easy. It’s like seein the pope now,” and though Ennis isn’t young and can’t just keep quitting jobs when he can’t get off to see Jack the way he had in the past, that coupled with Ennis inner conflict makes me think that he might’ve been trying to stay away from Jack in order to try and salvage a “normal” existence and trick his mind into believing he’s “not queer”. However if that is indeed the case, Ennis can’t mask his feelings, even during the argument; soon the conversation turns to Ennis wanting to know weather or not Jack goes to Mexico to have sex with hustlers. When Jack says yes Ennis ranges on, with a mixture of jealousy and fear, “I got a say this to you one time, Jack…all them things I don’t know could get you killed if I should come to know them.” When Jack fires back that they could’ve had a wonderful life together but Ennis kept that from happening, “then you ask me about Mexico and tell me you’ll kill me for needing it and not hardly never getting it.” And finishes up by saying that he wishes that he could get over him, Ennis falls down to his knees heartbroken.

            The love he feels for Jack lives on beyond Jack’s death, he even goes to Jack’s parents house and offers to take the ashes up to Brokeback Mountain. However I feel it is only after that meeting, and subsequently finding Jacks shirt hung over his own shirt, that Ennis finally begins to feel comfortable with their relationship. He buys a postcard with a picture of Brokeback Mountain and hangs it over the shirts in his trailer. Though he still doesn’t talk about what existed between them, he has openly acknowledged it with this display. At this time, Jack begins to appear in Ennis’ dreams because Ennis has finally allowed himself to think freely about Jack.

Did you ever feel like nobody in the world can keep a secret? It seems like the common denominator. It doesn’t matter what race, religion, sexual orientation, occupation, or fiscal status a person falls into- we all gossip. But maybe it’s not our fault.

Author Robin Dunbar equates the human need to gossip to an animalistic instinct. She explains that our evolutionary ancestors, like monkeys and apes, spend their lives in close physical contact, endless grooming each other.

“They think nothing of spending hours leafing through each other’s fur, combing, picking, parting the hairs….We are social beings, and our world- no less than that of the monkeys and apes- is cocooned in the interests and minutiae of everyday social life. They fascinate us beyond measure.” [1]

            She goes on to explain that if the reader were to listen to the conversations of others, whether it be at a bar or restaurant, or a university common room or the lounge at a multinational company; no more than a quarter of the conversation would deal with any intellectual weight. The rest, she explains, will be the socially important, “who is doing what with whom. And whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing; who is in and who is out, and why; how to deal with a difficult social situation involving a lover, child or colleague.”[2]

[1] Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, ( United States of America 1996) 4           

[2] Dunbar, 5

Becoming Visible          

  Does anything last? It’s a question that plagues Nick Dunhill, the 19 year old protagonist of Timothy James Beck’s most recent novel, When You Don’t See Me.  When the book opens Dunhill, who had been introduced to Beck’s readers in his third novel, I’m Your Man, as Advertising whiz Blaine Dunhill’s outspoken nephew whom he took in after his parents couldn’t take him anymore, is now attempting to carve his own path in life.         

     Formerly a minor character, who I believe was given some of the greatest one-liners in the history of one-liners, the younger Dunhill has always been someone who wanted to be different than his Stepford-appearing Wisconsin family, but he is hardly a bad kid.  When he gets suspended from class and Uncle Blain asks why he says, “the teacher asked what Britain’s greatest import was and I said ‘George Michael’s ass.”  Now making the jump to main attraction, Beck manages to keep Dunhill true to that nature, delighting fans, while still keeping the story informative and with enough background information for new readers to pick up the story without having read the last three novels.     

        Nick’s situation is not unlike that of many young adults in this day and age. He makes the unpopular decision to leave college, upsetting those he feels closest to, hearing the ever popular saying of millennium parents, that by dropping out of college he is dooming himself to an unfulfilling future.  He also has a feeling of entitlement that generation Y has so often been accused of having.  He moves out, not because his uncle wants him out, but because Blaine didn’t immediately hook him up with a cushy job at his advertising firm.  He quickly moved into an apartment in Harlem, complete with three roommates, and gets a temporary job cleaning apartments with an agency called “I Dream of Cleanie.”  It isn’t long before he faces the jolting reality that comes from leaving a two-story loft in Hell’s Kitchen with a housekeeper and  all the comforts of home and replacing it with roommates who can’t make rent, no health insurance, roaches on the counter top, and clients who try to take advantage of him.      

       On top of this, Dunhill has lost his daring nature. Once the young teen who fearlessly told his parents and brothers that he was gay and that he wanted to go live with his uncle in New York because they couldn’t handle him the way he was, he is now afraid to go in an elevator, take the subway, and all but refuses to go into any building that is more than 15 floors.   Nick Dunhill has experienced a change that, though it varies in degree, a lot of his real world contemporaries- and I count myself among them- experience as well.     

       In the fall of 2002, the University of Rochester released its findings in a study about teens and stress.  The study was originally conducted in the summer of 2001, and found that 21 percent of preteens and teens across the continental United States had acute to moderate fears of stressful situations and occurrences that were out of their control.  When the surveys were re-conducted in the winter following the September 11 attacks, the percentages had spiked up to 39 percent and the fears were considered significant as the teens reported having this feeling on a range between often and nearly always.  Those surveyed, now almost seven years older, are the young people venturing out into the world as the new breed of adults and the worries are just as prominent.           

   As American children, the idea of this kind of disaster was a farfetched thought.  Depending on the exact age, this is a group who was born toward the end of, or after, the Cold War.  The idea of foreigners threatening our world seemed something out of a History book, we were taught that wars were something fought on far away soil and that, while other children in far away countries might have to worry about that sort of thing, America was strong and that we would be protected.  Then, out of nowhere and at ages where we still, for the most part, believed in the strength and invincibility of our country, we experience a greater disaster than anyone three times our age could have imagined.  That’s not something that never goes away, it changes something inside of you and you never see the world the same way again.          

    Nick hasn’t only been changed by it, however, he’s been paralyzed by it.  Too scared of the past, he tries to run away from it, but ends up running from everything and everyone who cared about him and is still haunted by all that has been left unfinished.  Through out the book, Nick must learn how to reenter the world of the living after so many years of trying to blend into the background.     

         It’s an interesting, and more importantly, realistic portrayal of the journeys we take when we’ve veered off life’s path. Watching Nick Dunhill reengage in his own life-trying and failing, rebounding and reconnecting, and learning to deal with both love and loss- is not only enjoyable, but also allows the reader to feel that if he can make it through so can I.

I am hoping that this blog can be a phantasmagorical mix of all different topics, which should explain the name”thisNthatwithatewist,” because quite frankly my interests aren’t just limited to one thing. I figure to start it off; I’ll post a review of one of my favorite books: Families: A Memoir and a Celebration

      Wyatt Cooper might well have been one of the most talented writers of the second half of the 20^th century. His vivid imagery is reminiscent of Tennessee Williams or Mark Twain and his eloquent voice is, in my opinion, comparable to that of the Bronte sisters or even William Shakespeare.  Yet, most people have never read his only book, Families: A Memoir and a Celebration. This is because only three years after Families was released, Cooper died suddenly from a heart condition at the age of 50, and the book has never been republished.

            The 1974 book is dedicated, “To my two families, the one that made me and the one I made;” two families that couldn’t have been more different. Cooper was raised in rural Mississippi on a farm during the depression. They had very little, but they had love. In the 1960’s Cooper, by that time an actor and screenwriter, became the fourth Mr. Gloria Vanderbilt, who at the time was worth over $4 million. The two met at a party and, “saw in each other a spark of recognition, a desire for family and need to belong.” He became father to her two youngest sons Carter and Anderson Cooper.  Although I admire his talent throughout the book, it is the way he describes his wife, that I find the most beautiful.

“She moves on strange planes, that girl; she is a creature of some mystery, not altogether of this world, part wood nymph, part Earth Mother, and part American Beauty Rose. She has the freshness of Snow White and the glamour of the Wicked Queen. She is as exotic as a unicorn and as subtle as an Egyptian temple cat. She is as crisp as gingham, as sensuous as satin, and as inscrutable as velvet. She is also as tentative as a doe in the forest, as delicate as a spider’s web, as glittering as frost on a windowpane, and as plain as a willow. She is as gay as a meadowlark, as clean as a day in the country, as cool as strawberries, and as healthy as a pitcher of milk.”  It might just be the hopeless romantic in me, but I’d give anything for a man to speak of me that way. Thought the two families described in the book couldn’t have been more different, the theme of the book is universal; we are shaped by who and where we come from.

            Cooper depicts how society has led the family to lose closeness, something that he tried to counteract in his own life.  He warns against being too busy to cherish the now, saying, “I cherish each day with my children, for never again will that little boy be the same little boy he is today.  Tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after that, he will be a grave young man, solemnly shaking hands, keeping his secrets to himself, and expressing his love for me only with a quick and laughing eye. In the meantime one treasures each moment, preserves it, locks it away in memory, and knows that what exists between us tomorrow will be based on the joy, the respect, the truth, and the love that are ours today.” 

            He also discusses the different kinds of relationships and dynamics that exist within a family. He goes into the detail of his own personal losses, his father when he was 17, his sister’s death when she was in her thirties, all from heart troubles and foreshadows the future doom that would befall his children and wife.

            “When Carter was three years old, he asked me, ‘When I get to be as old as you are now, will you be very old and ready to die,’” Cooper recounts.  “Something turned over in my stomach; my eyes burned; and I felt constriction on my throat.”  Not only did Wyatt Cooper never live to see Carter Cooper into his forties, but Carter himself died just eleven years after his father.

            I’ve read this book several times, and every time I am inspired by his love of his family. As someone from a big family, he really speaks to me.  Anderson Cooper has said that he reads the book as a guild on how to live. Perhaps the world would be a better place if he wasn’t the only one.

            The final paragraph of the book reads, “We must, whenever possible, reach out to each other, tentatively to touch, with our hands with our eyes, and with our hearts. We must wish for each other love and laughter, smiles and sunshine, good thought and happy days. We must go rejoicing in the blessings of this world, chief of which is the mystery, the magic, the majesty, and the miracle that is life.”