The View From the Studio Door: How Artists Find Their Way in An Uncertain World by Ted Orland, 2nd ed. 2007, Image Continuum Press, U.S.

This is my current bedside reading.  Its full of all the philosophical ponderings on artists and how they reconcile with the processes of art making, how they define art justaposed against the so-called “art world”, and on and on.  I’ve been highlighting passages because this is one I’m going to keep unlike the book he co-authored called Art & Fear which was okay but just didn’t speak to me personal.

I just completed the first chapter yesterday…it is a slow read for me because I can’t get past a page or two without becoming engaged in internal dialogue with the ideas presented….and if you know me, than you know this is what I want to experience with a book.  I’m digging that Orland recognizes the multipliticies that exist in human experiences, thus art-making also.   He isn’t presenting, so far, some “this is how you do it” approach but  seems to be writing to air out thoughts and engage readers open-endedly.

I’ll share some quotes in upcoming posts.  Peace.

Cion by Zakes Mda, 2007 paperback, Picador Press, NY

After a few nights of intending to start this book, it wasn’t until today that I split the cover.  The very first sentence sent me to dictionary.com.  The sciolist has delusions of Godness.  Sciolism (sahy-uh-liz-uh m) noun, superficial knowledge. Sciolist is one that possesses such a thing.  Digging the concept and the play with Godness as a condition, perhaps disorder.  I’m going to keep reading.  Check you later!

The Mermaid Chair

I’m fighting the instinct to abandon this book…it is a quaint read thus far but the I’m finding it a bit formulaic. I’m 1/3 through the book and not once have I been thrown off kilter or made to read a passage out loud to my family.

An adult daughter returns to her childhood home to tend to her elderly mother who has chopped off her on finger…not because she has dementia but due to some unknown reason that the daughter is there to find out and prevent further outbursts.

The title references an actual chair located at the abbey on the other side of her mother’s home. So far, other than memories of how the chair looks and sitting in and being mesmerized by it as a child, the true story or magic of the chair is still unfolding. Its one of the two curiosities that keep me reading. The other, being the mother’s story which if I had written it, she would have been the central character.

There are several points of tension in the story which helps to carry it along; between the mother and daughter, the daughter and her husband, the daughter and her haunting memories of how her father died, and the possibility of a little love interest between the daughter and a would-be-monk.

In a way I can champion the premise that the daughter will find her own voice with her mother and her husband but as a rite of passage the idea that this is coming when she is 40+ is a little annoying. The main character is an artist who paints in the upstairs attic of the home she shares with her husband who is a psychiatrist. My expectations where higher of the main character because she was an artist and she comes across as having a “mid-life” crisis and I’m finding it kinda “on the couch with oprah”.  For now, I’ll keep reading.

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd, Penguin Books, 2006 paperback edition

Grab your current read

Open to a random page

Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! 

Here is my teaser:

… she’d enlisted Shem to bury an upright bathtub halfway into the ground, and, being slow to grasp the point, he’d left the end of the tub with the faucets on it exposed.  Mother had gone ahead anyway and placed a concrete statue of Mary inside the porcelain arch.

 

From The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

Thanks Marie

The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, (hardcover), Knopf Publisher, first ed., 240 pages.

A book of short stories from a young Nigerian.  I don’t read many short stories…with J. California Cooper and ZZ Packer being the most memorable of the few I’ve read. 

In looking for patterns in the writing that unite all the stories, it seemed to me that the stories lean on themes of identity and personal values and expectations thread the stories.  The author juxtaposes contemporary life in Nigeria and life in America  to explore these themes.  The stories are situational narratives of individuals but with very little focus on character development and more on observation and experiences that unfold mostly through “a telling” than dialogue. 

The ending of the stories seemed abrupt but maybe that is the nature of the short stories.  It was if the characters just seem to suddenly get up and make their exit which left me uneasy.  Without much character development, I can’t say that I became drawn into  the stories and when I did it was in the stories where Adichie increased her use of dialogue between characters. 

Overall I found the stories a little formulaic and predictable.  My favorites from the collection of 12 were A Private Experience about 2 women in Nigeria from seperate ethnicities/religions/class who find themselves taking overnight shelter together during a violent uprising; Ghosts, about a retired university professor observing the downfallen state of his country compared the hope and vigor of his younger years and who finds comfort in the visitations by his deceased wife; The American Embassy, about a Nigerian woman seeking to apply for a visa through the Nigerian lottery system and the indifferences she experiences with the process.  The Shivering, about the becoming of friends between two Nigerian students at Princeton. 

The most intense stories where Ndichie used less diaglogue and more situational telling are Tomorrow is Too Far (about sibling rivalry and secrets kept) and The Headstrong Historian (about parental sacrifice and love, wayward children and how spirits will find their way back home).  Her use of narrative is the most intriguing and better developed.

Because nothing in this book compelled me to say “keep it”, I’m debating whether to bookcross it…something I haven’t done in a very long while.  Maybe I’ll donate it to a local senior citizen group or youth group.

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008

This has to be the shortest novel that Toni Morrison has ever published at 167 pages.  After just completing my first read of it, I’m wondering if the shortness of it had to do more with Morrison rushing it to print for contractual reasons.  Let me explain further.  Just short of reaching the middle, the writing read more like very well written and sophisticated character sketches.  I was feeling a sense of being let down.  The feelings of intensity and gripping edge anticipation of the story unfolding or the actions and thoughts of the characters just wasn’t there for me. 

A little past midway of the book I begin to see the characters in physical form, performing monologues on a stage.  The stage props minimum, their voices slow (except for Mistress) and resounding reaching into the heart of the audience.  Could Ms Morrison have experienced some afterglow from Beloved being performed as an opera and this was intended to be a stage performance of which she adpated into novel form?

By the end of the book, I thought what a straight-forward story…that is until the end, the last chapter when the mother (minha mae) of Sorrow speaks.  The preceding chapters minha mae only speaks through the remembrance of her daughter, the one who is called Sorrow.  Bringing the presence of Spirit as a guiding force, the mother speaks in her own voice and ties the knot with the opening chapter.

It was in the end chapter that I came across the line that made the reading the most integrated and encompassing for me:  To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.  Haunting, isn’t it?  At least it is for me.  The line that comes after, reads, Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.   

Memory.  No one uses it better as a literary device than Ms Morrison!   That always trying to recall and make sense of our world is where Toni Morrison reaches out to me and keeps me wanting to dig deeper and know what it is I don’t know…what it is she is trying to help me know and ponder further.  If only I could make this happen with my quilts?!

Another aspect of the book I really enjoyed is how she made the american landscape more real to me…the american landscape prior to america becoming America…when it was still territoriesand the dominion of overseas governments and the determined as much by the wilderness of what was untamed.  It was the first time I read a novel that made that historical period come alive as much as it did for me. 

I would recommend reading this book as a companion to the 2 previous books I wrote about in the posts below.

Reidiker’s Book will be another slow read

I finished the Intro and the first chapter Saturday…again, as with Hartman’s book, every page contains deep thought provoking information.  After each paragraph or two, my spirit enters the text and begins to create its own world…it takes a while to exit off of a slave ship, especially when the voyage sails into contemporary, modern times of today.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard “my family didn’t own slaves” or “we just need to get beyond all that old history” or “that was your generation hung up on all that”, I’d be drowning in dimes.  Reidiker is writing with such clarity that it is undeniable to show there is not a disconnect from history.  It is my stance that history is fluid and continuous…you don’t get to your tomorrows by cutting off your yesterdays.  With clarity he connects what we take for granted and “assume” what has been true all along or some “destiny” that the fruits of capitalism was built on and continues to be built on the expansion of slavery and subjugation and exploitation.   We’ve got to swallow the bitter with the sweet.

Notes: The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker

The author identifies four “dramas” played out repeatedly over the course of the 18th century aboard slavers…the first between the captains and the tough-scoundrel crew; the second, between the crew and the enslaved; the third, from conflict and cooperation among the diverse ethnic groups of the enslaved; and the fourth, among the abolitionists and the societies of America and Britain. 

His intent is to concentrate on the slave ships as the stage for all these dramas that drove commerce…he looks upon the slave ship as the key that drove Europe’s commercial revolution and economic globalization.  He claims (I’m still in the intro) that his research focuses on the actual deck of the slave ship. 

I can’t recall the title but I wrote about it here…a piece of fiction that opens with an enslaved African woman attacking the captain of the ship to defend herself against what she perceived as a beast…and I remember asking myself if I’ve ever been taken aboard the slave ship from a female view point?  I read Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage some years ago and alsmost suffocated by the voyage he took me on but it was a masculine experience…altough at the time of reading it I was too involved and overwhelmed by being transported into the experience that gender was of little relevance.

Ottobah Cugoano wrote Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, originally published in London, 1787; reprinted by Penguin in 1999.  Cugoana was an African who went through the Middle Passage and wrote about it later.  I’ve not heard of him and would like to check his life and writing out later.

The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker, Viking Press, 2007

I’m starting this one tonight.  Its been on my Amazon list for a while now.  This is a library book.

Tuesday Update:  I’m going to attempt to blog along as I read…often times while reading I come across a phrase, new info, etc. that spurs me off into another direction.  I’m going to attempt to use my post as notes to comeback to later.  So some posts might simply be a question or a phrase or even just an image that I may select to explore later. 

For example, in the introduction of this current book, Rediker references an author I’ve never heard.  Normally I would stop reading here and google to see what I can find, which leads to getting lost on line and taking time away from reading the book.   I’ll see how this works out for me.

Find out more about Ottobah Cugoano.

Lose Your Mother, cont….

This was a difficult book to read.  Every page held grief and sorrow mixed with the historical content.  If it was the sorrow of the author’s, it was mine, or a combined and collected sorrow, I cannot say for sure; more than likely it was all of the above. 

Throughout most of the book I wondered where the author was leading me…surely she would not open up this wound and just leave it to fester after I ended the last chapter, would she? could she?  Upon starting the 2nd to the last chapter I was silently pleading with her not to leave me there.  I just could not be abandoned in the hull of a slave ship emotionally when I expect so much of myself in the physical world.

The sole academic intent of the book was the examination and exploration of slave routes in Ghana.  It is mixed with the author’s exposure of her own vulnerabilties which I found endearing as it did not place “academia” outside of what transpires in our personal lives.  I found it very brave and courageous for her to lay herself out as much as she did.  At times in tears, anger, indifference…I believe much research from academic scholars would benefit from such open raw honesty. 

Hartman is searching for some solid structure and solid recognition of the descendants of  slaves on the African shores/rituals/psyche…something as identifiable as the slave forts that remain along the coast of Ghana.  During some encounters she comes across as out right accusatory of her host country as continuing to benefit from the proliferation of slavery as a tourist attraction.  Even though I would jump at the opportunity to visit the slave castles and the “door of no return”, she has expanded the discourse in my own head as to how and why I want to do so.   Even though she does not discover some solid historical piece to fill the emptiness and ambivalence that each African American has to reconcile…being descendants of enslaved people in a country founded on such promise…that warring of two souls that DuBois is so famous for speaking on in his book The Souls of Black Folk, Hartman does discover something even more valuable…something that speaks to the future of all common folk yearning to be free and grounded.  Hartman did  come in like a skilled surgeon in the last pages of the last chapter and did not leave my wound open oozing puss and for that I’m most grateful.

Something I’m considering doing as a result of this book is burying all my cowrie shell jewelry…a symbollic act that states I will not be buying anymore cowrie shell jewelry for adoration until I can process this all in my own time and mind.  I’ve known about the cowrie shells as currency for a few decades now, but she is the first scholar I’ve known to share how it translated to the slave trade itself.  176,000 cowries could purchase a healthy male sold in the 19th century.  176,000 cowries. 176,000 dead sea creatures.