i send my SOS to the world- this is my message in a bottle. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Middlesex I just finished an AMAZING book. I was actually starting to get sad as each page brought me closer to the end of the book. It's Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, who also wrote the Virgin Suicides. This book is one of the best books I've read in a long time. I know that me describing it won't really come close to how it is, but there were two parts in the book that really stood out for me. You know when you read something and each word sort of...elongates, the passage knocks you off your feet, and you have to reread it three more times, before saying underneath your breath.."wow"? That would be these passages for me. "Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age". I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar". I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meoisis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theatres, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last." And then... "Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It beings far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the long practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theatres, over the Panhandle dope dens and flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the ranbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can't see it anymore; it movies in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is...it lent the city the shifting, anonymous feeling of the sea, and in such anonymity personal change was that much easier." Go. Read it. You won't be disappointed. I couldn't put it down, knocked off the 500+ pages in 4 days. Mm... I love the feeling of finishing a good book, I swear it's nearly post coital. It's..an intimate feeling, like being wrapped up with a lover for marathon Sundays, and the feeling at the end of that, happy, but kinda disappointed that you're not in the moment anymore. 10:23 p.m. - Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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