Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret: The 4 B's, Blood, Bibles, Bubbies and Boobs

My copy of this book is so old that I couldn't find a picture of it on Google Images. Anyway, I thought this one was more appropriate. I always saw Margaret as a brunette, not a blonde, anyway. I did think she had better taste than that Bill Cosby sweater, though. Euugh.

Let me amend that statement. My sister's copy of this book is that old. I never actually read it until now. Perhaps this is a testament to my ungirlish childhood. While other girls were dressing Barbie's and doing Princess Dress-Ups, I was building Lego pirate ships and cracking the passcode to Leisure Suit Larry 3 on my neighbors IBM computer.

Anyway, I never got around to reading the oft-banned preteen classic Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, and it has weighed on my soul for years. A testament to the unending chutzpah of Judy Blume--who went on to write freely about teenage sexuality, masturbation, divorce and racism--this book was one of the first to faithfully and unreservedly broach the subjects on every 12 year old girl's mind: 1) When will I get my period? 2) What will it feel like? and 3) Where are my boobs???

And if the menstrual extravaganza wasn't enough for you, Blume decides to pull out all the stops and talk about religion, too. Awesomely enough, Margaret has interfaith parents (Jewish dad and Christian mom). The downside of this, however, is that because the Mom's parents pretty much disowned her for marrying a Jew, Margaret is brought up without much religion in her life. Where her friends are either this or that, Margaret feels that she is "nothing," despite her parent's hope that she will "choose for herself when she's old enough."

This really hit home for me, and made me think about how my husband and I (he's the Christian one, and I'm Jewish) will handle this with our kids. What a great book, huh? So thought-provoking.

Anyhow, Margaret spends a lot of time experiencing different relgions; she goes to synagogue with her Jewish Bubbie, she attends church services with a friend, and even *almost* experiences confession in a Catholic church. At the end of it all, though, Margaret (who speaks to God on a daily basis, through her own inner conversation) asks Him: "I couldn't hear you in the temple, and I couldn't hear you in the church. Why do I only feel you when I'm alone?"

After being harassed by her grandparents (on both sides) to adopt one or the other religion, Margaret comes to the conclusion that she can't make a decision about her faith this way, and simply goes back to speaking to God herself, in her own way. This pervasive message, promoting a personal relationship with God over an involvement in organized religion, is probably part and parcel to why this book remains in the list of top 100 banned books. Conversely, it's also the reason that this book is now on my list of top awesome books, coz dang, Blume's got balls.

Meanwhile, I've gotta go and do my daily boob-expanding exercises...

We must, we must, we must increase our bust!

Tastiness: Italian Wedding or Matzo Ball? How about both?
Special Sauce: Serious Moxie. You go girl.
Recommend? For every girl (and boy!)

Timequake: It's All About Farting Around

When I was in middle school and high school, I simply adored Kurt Vonnegut. I read at least half a dozen of his works, probably multiple times. This list included Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night and others. I ate them up like apple sauce.

Now, at 26 years old, I think I was either a brilliant child or a deranged one.

Missing my old flame, I returned to Vonnegut's deliciously morose literary arms with his final novel length piece, Timequake. It's been so many years since I heard his voice, I really didn't know what to expect. Could we love now, as we loved then?

Now, at the end of the affair, I feel a deep sense of nostalgia, amongst other things. Timequake had to be the most nonsensical, bizarre, cynical, hilarious, beautiful and sad thing I have ever read. It's like ten thousand symphonies that, through an overabundance of dissonant insanity, achieve something more lovely than harmony. It is a million voices shouting and one person standing silent. It is impossible to describe.

Vonnegut himself is the voice of the tale, leading us through an amalgamated world of the real and the fictitious and and the sub-fictitious (who are the fictitious creations of fictitious characters) and the sorta both until we really don't know who's who or what's what or where we left our hat. Vonnegut, in his 70's at the time, tours his own life in moments, from paragraph to paragraph, some of them real, some not.

Which is which? Does it matter?

There is the little matter of a plotline where the universe decides to shrink and make everyone live the past 10 years over again (from 1991 to 2001) exactly as they did the first time, like programmed robots. The funny thing is, once free will kicks in, there's utter chaos. People have spent so long just going through their predetermined actions that they are clueless and frightened when confronted with freedom and choice.

Listen: Vonnegut's alter-ego/hero-figure Kilgore Trout (the long-out-of-print science fiction writer) says something to each person after the "timequake" ends, in order to break them out of their spell of fear.

This is it: "You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do."

This is a beautiful thing.

Vonnegut says something else later. He says to a pregnant woman who writes him a letter, asking if it's right to bring a child into such a terrible world as this. He says:

"What made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet. I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!"

Ting-a-ling, Mr. Vonnegut. I'll miss you terribly when you're gone.

ETA: You left us on April 11, 2007. How strange that it was so soon after I wrote this post, so soon after I rediscovered my love and respect for you. Now you're gone, and I was right, I miss you terribly. R.I.P, 1922-2007.

Tastiness: Bittersweet, like dark chocolate.
Special Sauce: Vonnegut is incomparable. Wit, satire, a high-level of raunch, the works.
Recommend? Like I recommend breathing.

Childhood's End: Out of the Mouths of Babes...World Annihilation. Aww!

Picture this: It's 1952, and you're Arthur C. Clarke, the Science Fiction writer. You're an f-ing genius. But you're also like, totally cool about it, which makes you even more awesome.

Pretty much everything's a mess at home. The US and Korea are bombing and killing the heck out of each other, people are getting nuke-happy with the newfangled hydrogen bomb, and worst of all, Guiding Light just began its harrowing journey to become the longest running waste of time ever to drain the collective intellect of American society. Sucks. Totally.

Now, if you were a normal 1950s lad, you'd probably be depressed about all this and drown your sorrows in a chocolate milkshake or a slice of Wonder Bread or something. But you're not normal, you're Arthur C. Clarke. Instead, you write a book called Childhood's End and scare the leftover bejezus out of everybody. Whatever. You don't care. They deserve it. You're an f-ing genius.

People found Childhood's End scary mostly because of how possible it seemed (and still does). We're shown a vision of the future not so different from our own, where just when we're on the verge on discovering something useful about outer space, a whole fleet of giant spaceships come gliding down on top of every major city on the planet (Clarke was the first one to do this, keep in mind...*ahem*IndependenceDay) and broadcasts a message in perfect English to every radio transmitter on Earth (*ahem*Hitchiker'sGuidetoTheGalaxy) to say "Be cool, my babies" and proceed to fix, throughout a generation, all the awful crap that humans have done to the world.

War? Gone.
Poverty? Fini.
Crime? Pretty much non-existent.
Cold toilet seats in the morning? Still around, but hey, you can't have it all.

Anyway, after a while things get really good and everyone's happy. 20 hour work weeks, self-driving cars, free higher education, the works. Naturally, people become boring. They watch an average of 3 hours a day watching television (unimaginable in 1952, but sadly the reality of today) and generally no one comes up with anything new and awesome to add to society (salad shooters have gone the way of the dodo).

But hey! No biggie right? Things are way cool. But somehow, there are those who get the feeling of forboding...like something bad is about to happen...

Could they be right?

If you want to know, keep reading.* If you want to find out for yourself, stop now.

Tastiness: Clever and surprising, like those peppers in Chinese take-out that make your mouth on fire.
Special Sauce: The master of SF shall not be questioned.
Recommend? The aliens told me to.


* All the children under 10 years old in the world suddenly become highly evolved, super-intelligent zombie beings that all get together and look all weird and freaky until all the older people die or kill themselves in a fit of laziness and then the super-intelligent zombie kids decide they're kinda hungry and eat the world before going off into the universe to join some god-mind thing and party. The end.

** Okay look, I don't understand it completely either. Read it for yourself.

Oliver Twist: The Nauseatingly Good, The Abominably Bad, and the Just Plain Ugly

Warranted or no, it was a subject of some embarrassment to me that I had never, not once in my life, read Dickens. Not in high school, not in college, not ever. The following was the summation of all of my knowledge of Charles Dickens' wide corpus:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
"Please Sir, I want some more."

That, sadly, was all. Both of which have probably appeared in dozens of credit card and/or soup commercials which really eradicates, in full, any possible modicum of respect I might derive from knowing those two lines. Now at least I can say that I've read one novel in its entirety, modest an accomplishment as that may be. Oliver Twist is much more than an overdone scene about an absence of slop, it's a surprisingly biting comment on British society in the 19th century. The characters sway from the cavity-inducing saintliness of Rose Maylie and Oliver himself, to the out-and-out vicious stylings of Sikes and Co., who all help to convince the reader that there was something seriously wrong in the city of London in the late 1830's. Perhaps this is obvious to all of you Dickensian experts, but hey, I thought it was going to be boring. 500 pages later, I see the error of my ways.

I think what I loved most about Dickensian style is his underwriting. He says one thing, but his cleverly crafted diction says another. It's that current of sarcasm, flowing just under the surface of his ever-polite and respectable voice, that really kept me in this novel. Without that, it merely would have been another Cinderella story.

So yes, I can finally understand all the references to the Artful Dodger; finally, I can offer up my own opinions of the queer Mr. Bumble and the dastardly murderer Bill Sikes. Thank goodness. However, I do have one point of contention with this hearty literary dish. As noted in an article by Norman Lebrecht, the villain Fagin is referred to as "the Jew" over 250 times in the first 38 chapters of the book. He is properly conniving, money-grubbing, and back-stabbing, as anti-Semitic characters are wont to be. This only bothered me on the surface as I was reading, like a bug crawling across my arm every hundred pages or so. Mostly, I ignored it. It wasn't until after I had finished that it began to bug me. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that some people do consider Dickens to have been an anti-Semite because of this novel, but most people just think that he was either commenting on religion in general or simply made a bad satirical decision. Apparently when confronted with the accusation of being a Jew-hater, Dickens said something like, "What? I thought all boy-thief gang leaders were Jewish." Huh. So, a jewess named Eliza Davies wrote to Dickens and scolded him for this affront. I mean, jeez. Kick a people while they're down why don't you. Dickens' response was this:

"I must take leave to say that if there be any general feeling on the part of the intelligent Jewish people that I have done to them what you describe as a great wrong, they are a far less sensible, a far less just and a far less good tempered people than I have always supposed them to be."

To which the Jewish people responded, "Um....thanks....I guess." Oh Dickens, what a smooth talker you are.

Tastiness: Hearty! Like a mug of ale and a shepherd's pie. Followed by a nap.
Special Sauce: A hint of sarcasm. Spicy.
Recommend? Indeed, my dear chap! Indeed!

Flowers for Algernon: Charly Talk Pretty One Day

last wek i ate a buk caled flowers for algernon and it was not hard too reed becus the man in the buk talked wit smal wurds lik i do. i red it reely fast and it was very intresting the tings they did to charly to make him smart. at furst charly was not even as smart as the mous algernon and the mous cud do tings fastr then charly cud lik run in a mayz to find the chees at the end. and charly had frends at the bakery who laffed and made joks with him. but aftr they did the operashun to charly to his brane he started to get smarter and smarter. furst they tauwt him to spel rite by looking at a dikshunary. pretty soon he started to write better and not misspell too many wurds. after that, he began to understand puncuation. Capitalizing words came quickly to him. He realized he was getting smarter. The sad thing was that he also began to realize that the people around him who he thought were his friends were actually just making fun of him and his retardation, and this hurt him. He started feeling emotions he couldn't understand. He began consuming books and information (like me!) and after only a short while, he went from being someone with average intelligence to a genius, and then a super-genius, with intellectual capabilities beyond any normal human being. Il a appris comment parler beaucoup de langues. Realmente, ha imparato parlare tutti. Er war ein ernsthaft intelligenter Mann. But as he surpassed all those around him, he was alone again, different, as he was before the operation. The only one who truly understood him was Algernon, the white mouse who endured the same brilliance as he. And suddenly, as he was contemplating the secrets of existence, he realized that there was a flaw in the science that had made him a genius. A serious flaw. Algernon died, so Charley buried him in his backyard. He wouldn't let the scientists keep him. And he knew that it was just a matter of time before his enlightenment would ebb, and pull away from him like the ocean from the shore. Leaving him with only remnants; scatterings of broken shells that once held cosmic perfection. And somehow he made peace with this, and all his past wounds that went unhealed for so long, and all he held on to were the books, the words that he wished would not leave him. But inevitably, understanding began to draw away, the words became muddled in his mind. He would walk down the streets of new york city and watch the people around him who paid him no attention and looked at the bright lights. he got lost once, but a kind policeman led him home. and sometimes he would forget about the opershun and wonder why things were so different now. but then he rememberd and thought how nice it was too be so smart and got his job at the bakery back and his frends were there and hapy to see him. so it was all OK and evry nite at home charly would lay sum flowers on algernons grave to remembur his frend the mous who was the smartist mous ther evr was. i reely likd the buk very much and i think evryboddy shud reed it too.

Tastiness: tastes lik beootifull
Special Sauce: An ever-changing voice, brilliant insight and character development.
Recommend? charly says yes.