Diana's Blog: Quirky Words and Book Reviews

November 5, 2008
THE CANTERBURY TALES we read when I was in tenth grade. Each of us was assigned a character. I chose -- without hesitation -- the bawdy Wife of Bath. I was nearly flat-chested, body straight as an arrow, as unlike the buxom Wife of Bath as could be.
In this new unabridged translation of the Wife of Bath's Prologue by Burton Raffel of Geoffrey Chaucer's book, I read "In making love I never used discretion//But always followed after my appetite// Whether a short man, or tall, or black, or white// It made no difference, if I felt he wanted me // How poor he was, or how high in the world he might be//
Despite my supposed innocence, I hadn't been a virgin for a decade -- since I was nearly five years old, if you are doubting your math. The Wife of Bath's feelings and words rang true -- the violence she absorbed from men, and her fervent desire for them. I knew this to my core. I was trained to be this way.
Just moments ago, I re-read The Wife of Bath's Tale for the first time since tenth grade, and am delighted to see that her focus is virtue.
The Wife speaks of a knight who comes upon two dozen fairy women dancing -- and poof -- they vanish, leaving just an old woman. His question is still on his lips -- "what do women want the most." The hag -- as the Wife calls her -- says she will give the knight his answer if he will grant her wish, whatever it may be. His life is on the line -- and he gives the old hag's answer to survive, that what women want most is sovereign power in their hands over any husbands or lovers they take.
Spared his life, he grants the old hag her wish -- that he marries her and makes her his queen. Well, the knight is not too happy on his wedding night. A few days later, she challenges him to be a man of virtue. She says he can have her old and faithful -- or young and beautiful, but capitivating to any man who might want her. It is his choice. The knight turns the tables, giving her the power to choose.
Given that he has completely learned his lesson, she tells him to kiss her, and as he does, she becomes a beautiful woman -- and faithful. As The Wife of Bath says "...they rocked the bed//And this is how they lived, till life was ended//in perfect joy."
Virtue and Truth are transformational.
As bawdy as the Wife of Bath was, that was her message -- I only wish that when I was young, and a man eight times my age was having his way with me (when it began), that I could have found a way to tell the Truth directly then...or that my teacher would have seen through my incongruous choice of portraying the Wife of Bath, and asked me Why... and What did I know.

Labels: Burton Raffel, Geoffrey Chaucer, knight, THE CANTERBURY TALES, transcending the trauma, truth, virtue, Wife of Bath

October 31, 2008
Happy Halloween! I have THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA for you. Leslie Klinger, an expert on the fictitious but seemingly real Sherlock Holmes, has turned his attention to Dracula -- Holmes and Dracula were contemporaries in London just before the 1900's.
I've never been drawn to know more about Dracula -- mostly because I spent a very confused childhood not knowing what was true and what was imagined. Actually, I didn't know until opening this book that Dracula was as imagined as was Sherlock Holmes.
This is a lovely and captivating book -- well over six-hundred pages -- with photographs and ink drawings, and dominated by three and four pages of footnotes at a time. Bram Stoker -- who breathed life into the Dracula legend -- once crossed paths with Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Stoker's story -- through Jonathan Harker's Journal -- is utterly convincing, written in a voice that could sound like Sherlock Holmes, with proof offered in footnote and photo. The journal describes Count Dracula as very pale with rank breath and sharp white protruding teeth, but with excellent English and quoting the Bible.
It is possible to fall into this book and not find your way out for days.
THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA elicits thoughts of Elizabeth Kostova's THE HISTORIAN, for its intensity. Kostova told me in an interview that the book had taken about eight years to write. It was, she says, a result of her father taking her with him on his travels in Europe, and planting the story of Dracula in her young mind to grow into this deeply engaging novel. This was five years ago, and I am still grateful to have read it.
This being Halloween, I can tell you that Halloween was not the spookiest night as I grew up. I was not concerned about vampires visiting or of Dracula appearing. It was, frankly, spookiest any night, when a tall dark-haired man quietly pushed open my bedroom door long after midnight, and a sliver of hall-light split my room in half, while revealing nothing. Was it Dracula? Was it a vampire? It wasn't the Boogy-Man, I knew, because he wasn't as scary as this. This dark creature moved past my closet as if emerging from it, but I knew better. And, then, as he approached the bed, I would travel away, as I had been taught by the angels, leaving that poor girl's body behind, to return after the damage was done.
On Halloween, the scrim is thin between the other world and our own -- and many years I have seen the face of my grandmother and grandfather and others who had passed. Lights flicker of their own accord. Music stops, then starts again. I walk to my present bedroom and smell lavender as I enter -- a fragrance I do not own, but that my grandmother once wore.
There is, my friend, much more that we do not see that exists, than that which we can see.
So why not Dracula.

Labels: child sex abuse, dracula, Elizabeth Kostova, Leslie Klinger, t book review, THE HISTORIAN, THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA, transcending the trauma, truth, vampire

September 13, 2008
I figure I'm about a third of my way through life. Maybe one-fourth. But then, you never know. Using this math, when I was about one-fifth of the way through, a lumber truck barreled down a steep grade through twelve intersections in town, hitting the pickup I was riding in, just behind my passenger seat. I died. Came back.
Ages mystify me. As does destiny. Fate. Chance encounters that become the magnificent fork in the road. When Simon meets Garfunkel. And Elvis wants a bike for his eleventh birthday but that costs too much so he gets a guitar instead. And when Cassius Clays' bike is stolen, he takes boxing lessons. These are a few of the fascinating moments in A BOOK OF AGES from infancy to 100 years old. Seems the author Eric Hanson was taken by odd biographical details, charting them for years until they blossomed into the most amazing book.
Interviewing thousands of people over the years, the question I am passionately designed to ask -- and I find the appropriate words for each different subject -- what happened in your life to get you where you are now?
For me, I know the lack of truth and honesty in my family, and the elephant in that living room, propelled me to be a journalist -- to be a seeker of Truth, to be as close to the source as I could possibly be, and to be insatiably curious.
In my third year, as you may know by now if you've been following my book blog, my mother left my father, and moved with my stepfather, younger brother and me -- out of my grandparent's fabulous New York apartment -- whose rooms emanated with love and music and healing -- into the suburbs, close enough to visit NY, but far enough away that we were isolated, so that no one outside this new nuclear family could observe the violence, the suicide attempts, the rapes, and the alcoholism.
So I look up age Three in this book. At three, Elizabeth Taylor enrolls in ballet classes, 1935. Sigmund Freud sees his mother naked, 1859. Mozart learns to play the harpsichord, 1759.
At age four, Mick Jagger meets Keith Richards, 1947. James Thurber's family buys a dog that bits people, 1899. In 1906, Ray Kroc is taken to a phrenologist who says the boy is best suited for the food service industry. Formative stuff.
Age Six -- my favorite: Leonard Bernstein's Aunt Clara sends her piano to Leonard's house to be stored in 1928...and he asks to have lessons. When I was a kid, my grandmother would take me to see Leonard Bernstein in concert. He filled me with music. When I hear music, to this day, I see choreography in my head, thanks to him.
Our lives turn on these seemingly small details in life. It is all a blessing, no matter how cruel. Ray Charles, losing his sight at age six. Joni Mitchell, stricken with polio, and, while hospitalized, discovers that she loves singing, and loves that others love her singing. At age thirteen, Anne Frank receives a diary for her birthday, and later that year is forced, with her family, into hiding.
How rich our lives are because of tragedy! As horrific as my years from four until eighteen were, I would not now trade them for an easier life of trustworthy love. From the pain, comes a depth of compassion in interviews, the ability to see angels, the doggedness and resilience to chase down the actual Truth.
And for the writers among us, there is hope. George Bernard Shaw writes five novels over five years -- each rejected by publishers. He decides to write a play instead.
And for the artists at heart. At age 87, Pablo Picasso creates more than 800 new works in 1968 and 1969.
And for the musicians. At age 95 in 1978, Eubie Blake plays the piano at the White House.
For the dancers, at age 96, Martha Graham is choreographing a new dance for the Barcelona Olympics when she dies in 1991.
Be in motion, be flexible, and be open -- destiny is writ in the stars, and even a chance encounter can propel you onto your perfect path.

Labels: A BOOK OF AGES, destiny, Eric Hanson, fate, life journey, transcending the trauma, truth

August 26, 2008
I love Broadway musicals.
I believe in breaking into song and dance.
Call it corny, I don't care -- I love musicals because they raise my spirits.
My grandmother lived in NY all her life at 93rd and Central Park West in a rambling old apartment that she could afford on social security. Thank rent control, and the fact that she lived there for decades.
I thought it might be cool to live there -- the apartment unfortunately isn't with the family any more -- so a few months ago, I located the realtor for that apartment building and asked the price. I lived with my grandmother, my grandfather and my parents there until I was three and a half; I visited most weekends while going to school in the suburbs; and I lived with her the year after college graduation.
So I ask the guy how much.
"Nine million dollars," he says, "Would you like to see it?"
"Oh I know it quite well," I say and tell him the history.
Holy crap. I lived in a nine-million dollar apartment!
That's not what was valuable. It was my grandmother scrimping to buy tickets to Broadway shows so my little brother and I could escape into this rich, fabulous fantasy. To this day, strong emotions evoke songs that just pop into my mind. I may not know what I'm feeling, but if I analyze the lyrics to the song, I'll get it. Hey, "Don't Rain on My Parade."
So I receive with great delight the book HISTORIC PHOTOS OF BROADWAY: NEW YORK THEATRE, 1850-1970. Something strikes me right off about the book, but instead of puzzling over it, I pour through every page.
I find reference to LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, written by Eugene O'Neill, and I reflect on the paper I wrote on O'Neill in tenth grade. The teacher gave us the choice of any playwright, and when I asked a literary family friend for a suggestion, she recommended that I research O'Neill, noting that I would relate to him. Then I discovered the violence and alcoholism in O'Neill's family.
Back to the theatre. I remember seeing PETER PAN and THE SOUND OF MUSIC on Broadway, along with many other shows. I wander through the book, seeing black and white photos of a young Fred Astaire, Imogene Coca, Helen Hayes, Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Ethel Merman (who began life as Ethel Zimmerman), and Katharine Hepburn.
Way past page 200, I begin seeing some of the shows I grew up with.
Then it hits me. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. It's the next page in the book, and it's on the cover. I'd seen the musical on Broadway, and when I was in college and the show was on campus for a week, I went to every performance. I felt compelled. I wanted to immerse myself in the story. There was something in that story that connected so deeply with me, but I didn't know what.
Until a couple of years ago. That's when a family friend revealed a fact about my family that my secretive mother had never mentioned. I knew my mother's mother was born in Peru, and that my grandmother's hyphenated Latina name ended in -berg, but these pieces never connected until one day my family friend said to me, quite out of the blue. "Your grandmother's father was a Russian Jew."
He lived in Russia about the time the character Tevye did, and also had to emigrate.
We always know the truth.

Labels: books, Broadway musicals, Eugene O'Neill, grandmother, HISTORIC PHOTOS OF BROADWAY, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, NY, PETER PAN, SOUND OF MUSIC, Tevye, transcending the trauma, truth