The Reader Travels

In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins poses the question about San Francisco, why, when mother nature keeps destroying your city do you insist on rebuilding it? I’ll tell you why. It’s because despite the earthquakes, San Francisco is prime real estate. It’s gorgeous, and prosperous.

But what about New Orleans? Mother nature sends the hurricanes. Cleanup and upkeep are a nightmare. It’s a swamp, but it’s still prime real estate, a port of entry, fecund with commerce.

With their Roman Catholic origins, these cities represent strength in suffering, power through martyrdom. It’s all about perseverence in the face of devastation.

Some of the most awesome stories are those of the Catholic saints, these wondrous people who suffer beheadings, crucifixion, burning at the stake, piercing by arrows. The saintly cities suffer earthquakes and floods, and like the saints, they are eternal.

San Francisco is a prime destination spot. In the 1800s, people came for the promise of gold, adventure, prosperity. In Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, Eliza travels to California in search of love and finds herself among people from all over the world, all in search of fortune. And in this bustling, changing place, she finds her self.

Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar brings us to places around the world, time tripping through South America, North Carolina, Georgia, England and Africa. But the end point is San Francisco, a place for the future, a place of rock stars, technology and knowledge. It’s a place where her characters can see themselves clearly, at the edge of the world.

So, even though Daughter of Fortune and The Temple of My Familiar show San Francisco at completely different times in the city’s history, the characters share the notion that this place is their final destination, their destiny.

I was talking to my teen-aged nephew Alex about how we both remember the answers to tests by visualizing the place where we read them in the book. I know a lot of people are like that, but I think there’s something genetic about the way we both do it. Alex’s father doesn’t really think that way, but his grandfather does. I’m thinking maybe it’s a recessive trait.

My sister and I were staring at the bloody head of John the Baptist at that Russian icon exhibit back in December. So, we’re both gawking at this gruesome image, nodding our heads, saying, “huh, huh, coool,” like we’re Beavis and Butthead, and she says to me, “It reminds me of that awesome picture we saw at that art exhibit a few years ago.”

My memory failed me, because I couldn’t bring up the image. But I remembered exactly where we were standing in the exhibit, and the path we took around the other paintings to get to this one in the corner that just floored us, and we stood gawking just like we did last month at John’s noggin. Just so you can get an idea of what we were seeing, the painting was Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Anyway, I was talking before about Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, a book which takes journeys from South America to San Francisco to North Carolina and Georgia, to Africa to England, back to South America and San Francisco. Because my spatial memories lend themselves to geography, I find that this book is inextricably linked in my mind to Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, which also takes an important trip from South America to San Francisco.

Ah, San Francisco. I think it’s time we went back there.

One of my dearest friends shared her copy of Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar with me a few years ago, knowing how I was consumed with thoughts of trees and memories of past lives.

Walker’s character Lissie takes us on a journey through history and pre-history. Her memory is long, for “Lissie means ‘the one who remembers everything.’” And she does.

Lissie remembers Africa, and many African countries have a history of tree cults, where trees are thought to bear some life-giving spirit or divinity. Lissie talks of “the chopping down of our hair,” as if our hair were mighty trees. She calls to me.

More recently, my friend shared another connecting link through the music of Jill Scott. The song, “Do You Remember,” on Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, also ties in this concept of remembering past lives. J-I-L-L remembers Africa, too, building “sand castles in the Serengeti.”

I don’t remember past lives, but I feel connected to all who have come before me and those who will come after, like the roots of trees are connected to the earth, their branches to the sky.

About fifteen years ago I was helping my mother chop down a magnolia tree in her back yard. The poor tree was crammed into this tiny space between the house and the concrete deck surrounding a swimming pool. It was a mercy killing as much as it was a defense of the pool and the house’s foundation.

That same day we received a phone call from my uncle. My grandmother had fallen ill and had to be hospitalized. She had been grief stricken following the death of her husband a few years earlier, and there were speculations about a suicide attempt. She would never come home again, though her body yet lives.

In my mind, the killing of the tree, and the demise of my grandmother were connected. My grandmother had always told me, “Ann Marie, you should write our family history.” But I had waited too long. I could no longer ask her about the stories. She could no longer tell me. And my mother had always been strangely bereft of a memory. She couldn’t tell me either.

I wasn’t going to give up, though. The “family history” would have to be a “family fiction,” and the magnolia tree would lend her vast memory where my family had none.

Once upon a time, when I thought I wanted to be an English literature teacher, I would wake up in the middle of the night with ideas about my lesson plans. Wouldn’t it be cool, for instance, to have the students compare a book with its screen adaptation?

High school students are notorious for watching the movie to avoid having to read the book. And people who read a lot are often disgusted with Hollywood’s version of their favorite novels. Why not bring these two worlds together, so everyone can be disappointed?

The more I watch movies based on books I’ve read, the more I can appreciate the choices made in the adaptation. Here are some things you might consider:

1) Distilling the essence - They say a picture paints a thousand words, but when you’re converting words to images, you have to make sure it’s the exact right image. These are artists at work. One conversation, one look, can speak volumes. Or not.

2) Working with animals - You may notice that scenes that involved animals in books may be removed completely or changed to something that captures the spirit of the scene in some other ways. It’s OK. Dealing with trained animals is no simple thing. For instance Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, replaced an elephant (camel?) ride with an airplane (balloon?) ride. It was about the relationship with the mother and the daughter, not about the elephant.

3) Budget - Some choices in adaptation come because of low budget limitations or high budget expectations. That’s just business. I might like to assign The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and challenge the student to watch the no-budget BBC Program and the high-budget Hollywood movie version to compare.

4) Editing - Good editing is something you take for granted, unless you watch the deleted scenes. But you can really tell when an adaptation fails because of bad editing. House of the Spirits, for instance, had whole chunks chopped out because the movie was getting too long for anyone to sit through. There’s no way somebody could follow that movie if they’d never read the book. Of course, if the writers had distilled the essence in the first place, they wouldn’t have needed to make such bad editorial decisions.

5) Target audience - Remember, a grown-up book can be cut to pieces to reach a wider audience. (And openly gay characters become ambiguously gay or not gay at all.) Several years ago, I tried to watch a made-for-TV movie adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It was in no way the same story when crammed into The Wonderful World of Disney, I’ll tell you that.

So I share this lesson with you. Enjoy the show.

I’m not one of those people who weighs her answers before she speaks. I know there are people like that, but I’m just not one of them. I could never be a lawyer, for instance.

I’m what you might call a blurter. You know that scene in Austin Powers where he’s thawing out and can’t help but speak every thought in his mind? He says something like, “How can I tell them that due to the unfreezing process, I have no inner monologue?” Anyway, that’s me, most of the time.

People will ask me a question, and instead of thinking about it for a while, I start talking around the answer until I find it. I mean, why do I feel the need to let people hear my entire thought process before I get to the answer they were looking for? It’s just plain confusing. I have to stop and say, “Okay, just ignore everything I said before. The answer is this….”

Not only can the blurting be confusing, it can also hurt people’s feelings. When my boss brought me my lovely 9th anniversary Fossil watch, I saw the box, and I said real ugly-like, “I know they didn’t get me a watch.” I mean, how was he to know that I consider a watch to be a symbol of enslavement, like wearing handcuffs or something? It’s silly, I know, because I’m bound to time whether I wear a watch or not. It’s only my delusion that makes me think I’m in any way free just because I’m not staring at my wrist every other minute. It’s not like it’s the normal thing. I’m supposed to want to own a nice watch, right?

In Anthony de Mello’s book Awareness, he spoke of being self aware, how if you could be aware of what you’re saying before you say it, then you won’t ever have a need to beg forgiveness. You will have said exactly what you meant to say, no apologies necessary. The problem is, Father de Mello told me what I should strive for, but he didn’t exactly tell me how to achieve it. I guess I’m on my own there.

Yeah, I know Christmas season is over. Oftentimes, when we think of the Baby Jesus, we think of peace on earth, with the hopefulness that such a thing could somehow be possible. Everyone looking up at the same star, this same beam of light in the sky, leading us to this pure gift from God.

Two things have made an impact on me this week: 1) I started taking a Raja Yoga meditation class at a meditation center down the street, wherein we ponder peace and the connectedness of all souls on earth and look toward God, the single point of light beyond the universe in our soul’s home; and 2) I watched Talladega Nights.

Now, Ricky Bobby, when he prayed, liked to pray to the Baby Jesus. His family would argue with him that Jesus wasn’t always a baby. He grew up to be a great man, a healer and bringer of peace. But, Ricky Bobby really liked the Baby Jesus. And why shouldn’t he? Babies are the purest creation, no thoughts or worries, nothing but pure baby-ness, before they grow up to learn about lust and greed and envy, or any of those horrible, deadly sins.

So, care of Ricky Bobby and our friends in Raja Yoga, I wish you the peace of a well-fed, sleeping baby. Alright?

Psychologists will tell you that eating disorders are more about control than anything else. It happens a lot to young women who have little to no control over their lives. The food they ingest is something they think they can control. They abuse themselves because they can.

You also see a lot of young women who get themselves knocked up with similar notions that maybe if they had a baby they’d have someone around who was even weaker and more helpless than they are.

Then you have the anorexics who want to have a little baby to love, but they can’t get pregnant because their hormones are all screwed up because they won’t eat right. But if they could only get pregnant, then maybe they could start eating again. It never ends.

Years ago, I was reading in Omni magazine about this saint from Portugal who wanted so bad to stay a virgin for Jesus that she prayed and prayed to become ugly so her daddy couldn’t marry her off to some prince. So one morning she woke up with a beard on her face, and her dreams came true. But her daddy was so pissed off, he had her strung up on a cross so she could die just like her Jesus.

Anyway, Omni magazine likes to make up crazy stuff in the name of science, but I really liked this one. They speculated that instead of a miracle from God, maybe this saint was just an anorexic. She screwed up her hormones and grew some facial hair. It coulda happened.

Poor Bigger Thomas in Native Son was so disconnected, no control over his own life, a poor black man living in a rich white man’s world. Since ancient times, people have been committing atrocities when it’s the only thing they can do to grasp some semblence of control over their own lives.

My favorite such story is that of Euripides’s Medea. It’s a supremely powerful tale of a woman so bitterly and irrevocably scorned by her man that she kills her own children to get back at him. Every time I hear about a story in the news where a woman has murdered her babies, I think of Medea and the utter desperation that would drive a person to do such a thing.

Contemporary writers like Amy Tan and Toni Morrison have also tackled the subject of women who would stoop to such desperate measures. There are tales of slave women in the US who murdered their own babies, whether out of mercy or rebellion over the men who controlled them.

Of course, then there’s people like the Boston Strangler, henpecked wimp of a man who murdered women all over town because the women at home so thoroughly controlled him.

Wow. I didn’t mean to get so heavy. That’s what Richard Wright does to me.