Shameful Reading Secrets Revealed!

Once upon a time on the much-beloved (well, most of the time much-beloved) Fametracker Forums, there was a thread called "Shameful Reading Secrets Revealed!" -- and it was filled with folks who broke my heart talking smack about Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy.

Damn, those were some good times.

I thought about the thread last night while talking to my friend Steve. I was telling Steve how I'm currently in a fight with the Shakespeare Theatre Company because they want me to renew my subscription, and yet they also want to put on yet another production of both Hamlet and Richard III -- two plays that they've already done in the last five years. Done, and done really really poorly, if'n you ask me, mostly because they cast this David Hyde Pierce-looking guy, Wallace Acton, as both Hamlet and Richard III. Wallace Acton has two styles of acting: (1) Over; and (2) with his hair.

In the last five years, here are some plays the Shakespeare Theatre Company hasn't put on:

• Antony and Cleopatra
  
• Julius Caesar
  
• King Lear
  
• Timon of Athens
  
• King John

And a subscription to the theatre's expensive, y'all. And I don't know that I want to plop down that kinda cash for plays I won't see. "I can't imagine you seeing another Richard," Steve said. "But you'll probably see the Hamlet if it gets good reviews, right?"

Wrong.

I. Hate. Hamlet. And that's my shameful reading secret. Only not so much with the shame, really. I'm bewildered, maybe, by all the other mofos out there who think this play is the reason the English language was invented. And for a long time, I just thought it was me and my poor reading skills that kept me from reaching the sort of intellectual climaxes everyone out there with an English degree and a healthy dose of pretension seem to reach -- complete with toe-curling and surreptitious licks of fingers afterwards.

Look, guys: it's a long, boring play about some Danish fop who's still going to college and he's what? Thirty? At some point, Ham, you're going to have to tinkle or get off the potty with this education thing. You're going to have to get the degree or drop out and pay off those student loans with some crappy job as a barrista so you and all the other over-educated potheads can make me feel beneath you while you pour my coffee. Or, better yet, maybe you could get one of those coveted positions at Kramerbooks & Afterwards, and you and the other asshats who look down their noses at me for buying Dickens rather than some post-modern novel that doesn't use the letter "i" because it's proving a point can have yourself a gay old time. Stupid Kramerbooks & Afterwards. You know, you can be above-it-all-hip and helpful at the same time. Really. Try it.

Anyway. That's it. That's your main character in this play. "To be, or not to be"? Look: that comes 7 hours into the play, and I just don't have time for that kind of whiny vacillating. If he ever gets it figured out, let me know. Until then, I'll be over here, reading other Shakespeare plays that get the job done better.

It's not that I don't get that life's an existential crapshoot, and there's lots out there to get all prozac-ed up about. But hi, Hamlet? You're young. You're very young. You're still-in-college young. And if you'd not gone all mad at the end and murdered everyone and yourself, you might have reached, like, 35 or something and you would have looked back at your angsty Wonder Years with a little bit of a rueful headshake. "Killing my stepdad/uncle? What was I thinking? I could barely pass gym."

For my reading time, I think, there are any number of Shakespeare plays that are more psychologically and spiritually interesting than Hamlet. For instance, King Lear packs a more satisfying punch. There's a moment in the play when Lear, impotent, old, confused, and almost alone shakes his fist and rages, "I would do such things!" Only he, the other characters, and the audience know that there are no other things he can do. He's limited by his own life and his circumstances and his two evil daughters. And yet that rage-filled fist-shake at the sky: we've all been there.

I'm also pretty partial to Macbeth, and what happens when love turns toxic, and ambition o'er reaches itself. The trick to the play is that it's not the witches at all who have anything to do with Macbeth's downfall: it's Macbeth himself. And that's what makes the play so terrifying. If it were witches, then it's just a story of extenuating evil. But when it's just Macbeth, alone, watching a forest of death creep towards the castle: that's where the wallop is; that we each carry the ability to ruin our own lives deep inside of us.

Hamlet, though? What do we learn? That late 20-something super-seniors can't be trusted with revenge? That dresses don't serve as floatation devices? That Freud should not be allowed within a quarter mile of literature? Folks: these are things we already knew. And we don't need some long-assed boring play about some bipolarized dude in a page-boy to refresh our memories. One can try plumbing the depths of the play all one wants, but at the end of the play all you've got is a dead kid from a fucked up family who's hard on a girlfriend and should have been one of those bisexual theater majors. You know the type, always going on about how it's not the sex of the person that they're attracted to; it's the energy? Nevermind the fact that they keep going back to the same well of the drunkenly confused phys ed majors. What do I know from energy?

I don't doubt that there are people out there who get something out of the play. I'm just not one of them.

Not so much Plague

I have bronchitis. Acute bronchitis. I tried to make a joke about that with my doctor, how it's such a relief to have something cute for a change, and he said, "You really need to go home and rest now." Turns out "acute" means "short-term" rather than "severe." Severe bronchitis would be "chronic" -- and it's usually reserved for alcoholic smokers who live in smog-ridden L.A. Maybe next summer...

So I'm on some kind of antibiotic, Biaxin for you medical types in the audience. I know that antibiotics are theoretically evil and of the devil, and I am aiding and abetting the creation of super virii impervious to medications of any kind. But the differences in how I feel between today and yesterday are so markedly dramatic that I really don't care. When the Super Virii of the Future show up in 10 years to kick our collective asses, I'll stand in line rump first. For now: I don't feel like death.

Being gay and sick is different than being straight and sick. Once the nurse weighed me ("Really? Are you sure?" "That's a good scale there, Mr. Bevel." "Then I've lost some weight in the last 4 days." "If you say so." "Maybe the doctor doesn't have to treat this right away?") she asked for my symptoms, which fortunately I was able to display for her in person. "It only looks like I've just stepped out of the shower," I explained. She asked when the symptoms started and I said, "The day my partner and I were returning from Toronto." "Is this a homosexual partner or a heterosexual partner?" "We're gay." "Have you had an HIV test?"

Yeah.

And I mean, okay. I know. It's out there, it's a danger, and I'm in a risk group. But I'm not an active member of that risk group. Zach and I have been together almost 5 years; we're monogamous; and we've both been tested multiple times. It's a logical question to ask, I guess. I can't help wondering, though, if she'd have asked about an HIV test if Zach were my girlfriend rather than my boyfriend. Only, you know, with a different name.

A quick book wrap up:

I finished Wuthering Heights and I'm done. I don't need to read it ever again. It's just not that interesting of a book. We get it, it's bleak: can we go now? On the flight to Toronto (and more about that in a different entry; however, I will say: Canada? What the fuck did you do to Niagara Falls?) and back I read Albert Camus's The Plague, and I'll write an entry about that soon, too. I will say that it's not necessarily the best book choice when one is, you know, sick unto death the way I was. And I don't think I'll read any more Camus. I can't say that it's a bad book; I also don't know that it's good either.

And my current book? McTeague by Frank Norris. I'm cheating a bit, both in my "alphabetically we read" plan as well as my "Mike buys no new books." I found this for dirt cheap at a pretty groovy bookstore in Toronto called ABC Books on Yonge Street along with some other book, an early American writer (c. late-1700s), writing about a murderous sleepwalker.

A Poem

There's a
HOT CHICK
in the mirror

She knows the COOLEST MOVES.
She makes her arm warmers from sweat socks.
Her pelvic thrusts are THE STUFF OF LEGEND.
Even her earrings have attitude.
I can't believe
THAT HOT CHICK IS ME
But I give her a thumbs-up
And she gives me a thumbs-up.
She gives me a SEXY SMILE
and I'm flattered.
But hey, I HAVE A BOYFRIEND.

Just do it.

[Dear God, I love Teen Vogue]

Today's Adventure: Toronto

Zach and I leave for Toronto tomorrow because it's there and we have tickets and it's Passover and why not? ("Why not?" is one of the Four Questions.) There's a Niagara Falls trip on our itinerary, and some godawfully tall tower with a glass floor that will no doubt make me woozy and anxious. Other than that, I don't know what we'll do in Toronto; we've never been before. Hopefully it'll be better than our trip to Montreal.

Montreal was my fault. In fact, for the most part, you can be assured that anytime I mention a bad travel experience, it's my fault. It's not that Zach's blameless, it's just that I'm so much better at deconstructing a good time into a bad time.

Here's the thing: I don't travel well. It's all a delightful mélange of anxiety and nerves and irrational fears that I brew into a delightful cup of "Why the hell do you wait until now to get in some cuddle time with the cat?!?" I'm not good with renegotiating an itinerary; as soon as I have a plan in mind, by God, that's the plan that we're going to follow. Once on our way to the Metro -- the Metro, mind you; not even on the actual vacation itself -- I got entirely too worked up over a side-trip Zach wanted to make to a convenience store before we left to go to Amsterdam. I think through barely controlled tears of rage I shrieked something about Amsterdam not being a "goddamned Third World Country, you know, for your information, and if you needed to stop at 7-11 maybe you could have done that at any other point in the history of the entire world and not so much 5 minutes before the plane leaves."

What's helpful about these altercations is how I don't resort to hyperbole and sarcasm to get my point across. That's the sign of a healthy relationship.

The thing is, Zach has this sort of laissez-faire relationship with punctuality. I'm truly not trying to set up a I'm-better-than-he-is equation (though if you think I am, you've always been my favorite; just don't tell the others); I'm equally culpable in the opposite direction: to me, being on time means at least an hour early. So even before we leave to go on vacation, we're already at odds with each other. I want to be at the airport with enough time for bacteria to evolve limbs while Zach thinks that the airline somehow knows when we'll arrive and has adjusted its flight time accordingly. "No, Linda, we're not ready yet. Zach's only just now finished brushing Thor. We'll hold the plane another hour or two for them to get here."

Once we're at the airport, it's a new set of irritations. I feel that my presence at the correct gate is integral to our successful departure, flight, and landing. If I step away, even for a second, who knows what will happen? Like, what if they decide to change the gates on us and we're not there because now we're all Zach all of a sudden and we're going for a "walk" around the airport like it's a goddamned nature trail or something and we've got some bread crumbs to feed the squirrels. What happens then? Because there we are, waiting at the wrong gate like dumbasses, because we didn't hear the announcement that they've moved our gate to G11. And by "we" I mean an entirely fictional "me" and an entirely Zach "Zach" since I never leave the gate because of just such a scenario. I once rescued us from flying to Peoria, is all I'm saying.

I also have an oddly shaped suitcase that I really shouldn't use any more because I know it's oddly shaped and I'm always breaking FAA rules by storing it in the overhead compartment the wrong way because of on account of how oddly shaped it is. But that's not my fault. I like to be at the gate early and in line early so I can be sure that there's room for me to stow my oddly shaped luggage without drawing too much attention to myself and the bag, as well as leave enough time to sit down and pretend like I'm not the one thwarting other passengers. I can't do this if I'm trying to hunt down Zach, who's decided to go on walkabout.

And don't even get me started on the last-minute pee. Look: you don't drink anything at all before a flight. Like, 24-hours in advance you cut off all liquid so you're not a slave to your bladder and we're not there, last minute, waiting for you to remember that oh yeah: I have to pee. And I think you know who I mean by "you."

So anyway: hooray! Vacation! Which means that I'll be back online on Tuesday, April 18. Any thoughts on cool things to do in Toronto will be definitely appreciated.

In defense of cowardice

That's what I was going to write about. Over the weekend, Zach and I and some coworkers of Zach's saw Sophie Scholl: The Last Days. This is the second film we've seen with these folks, the first being the documentary Why We Fight and here's the new rule: from now on, the only films we can see with Barbara and Don are animated films with magical unicorns voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. where people -- and by "people" I mean multi-colored elves or fairies or shit like that -- learn the power of hugging and share a laugh or two when the cartoon skunk or badger or whatever upsets a cart of apples because enough already with the bleak films. God.

Here are films I can't see anymore because seriously, I'm done:

* Films about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Especially when they're set in 1943.

* Films about Palestinian suicide bombers.

* Documentaries about people dying and then they actually die on the actual screen.

* Films about female serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

* Films where a small English town learns to love again either through the ballet dancing of one little boy, stripping coal miners, brass-band-playing coal miners, naked English ladies, or kinky boot makers.

Sophie Scholl documents the last few days of Sophie, her brother, Hans, and their colleague Christoph Probst, memebers of The White Rose, as they are caught, tried, and convicted of crimes against Nazi Germany. Their crime? Publishing fliers that spoke out against the war, the tyranny of Germany, and against the systematic annihilation of the Jews.

They were all beheaded.

I was going to write about how I think that sometimes preserving the self is worth cowardice. That you can be much more effective alive than you can dead and martyred. I had a lot of reasons, and I thought they were all convincing and good, and I was going to share them all, and then I read this:

"The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves -— or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn." -- Sophie Scholl

Unreliably Yours

Let's try this again.

One of the claims of literary theorists concerning Wuthering Heights is that it has an unreliable narrator and that that's where all the fun is. Never mind Cathy goes kookoo and tears a pillow apart with her teeth. Never mind that her husband Edgar punches Heathcliff in the throat. Never mind that the book is incredibly exciting even to a modern audience -- no, the point of this crapfest of a book (for, friends and others, this book, while exciting, isn't really worth it. One of my favorite comments on the novel comes from Meredith: "I was rooting for the moor") is the unreliable narratorness of it.

I guess. But...no.

So, some background on the book: Wuthering Heights tells the story of Heathcliff and Cathy, their lives, their loves, their various DSM-IV diagnoses. However, the whole story is told by one narrator: a man named Lockwood, who is renting a house called Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood is gay and bitchy, and does things like forces the servants to stay up later than they want to to tell him stories. He can sleep his lazy ass in until whatever o'clock; the servants, though? Those pots aren't going to scrub themselves; and I don't think Lockwood has the hands for scouring.

Everything in the novel, then, comes from Lockwood. Lockwood is writing in his journal -- and he comes from the Mina Harker school of dictation, since he apparently can remember entire conversations that he's had and can write them down verbatim. The woman who's telling him the bulk of the story is Nelly Dean, she of the late-night girl-talk chat-fest with Lockwood. She also has an amazingly crystal clear memory, since most of the events she's relating to Lockwood occur about 20 years earlier.

So, here's the thing about Unreliable Narrators. The term is coined in a 1961 book by Wayne Booth called The Rhetoric of Fiction. Wikipedia has a list of novels that allegedly have unreliable narrators, and Wuthering Heights is listed among them. It also lists Henry James's The Turn of the Screw -- and that's another book that I don't think has an unreliable narrator. It's cooler, of course, to assume that the governess is mad; however, she's not. Those ghosts are real. And you're just going to have to deal with that.

Unreliable narrators make a lot of appearances in modern/contemporary fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro sort of specializes in unreliable narrators. That goddamned Life of Pi was all about the unreliable narrator. The authors, in these cases, give you reason to distrust the narrator. They'll give conflicting accounts, or there'll be a twist of some kind. A Pale View of Hills has a lovely and eerie and downright creepy moment of narrative shift. The author wants you to know that the narrator can't be relied on. That's part of the fun.

Wuthering Heights doesn't have an unreliable narrator. It has just the one narrator. And nothing appears out of line in what he's sharing. Except for the superhuman feats of memory and recall, that is. If you want to go the unreliable narrator route with Wuthering Heights, then how do you know when to stop? How do we know that Lockwood is giving us the correct version of what Nelly Dean said? How do we know that he hasn't editorialized? Even when Lockwood isn't directly related at all (e.g., the entire first 20 years of the story), he's still the only one writing it down. How does one decide when he's reliable and when he isn't? What I'm arguing here is that eventually you'll find yourself having to come to the conclusion that no part of Wuthering Heights happened at all, and that Lockwood, much like Nabakov's Kinbote made the whole thing up because he's a kookshow of epic proportions.

I was going to say that the Victorians had no truck with the unreliable narrator, but I'll have to back off that argument because I remembered Wilkie Collins and he pulls some unreliable narrator tricks with both The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But there, he lets us know he's doing it because he gives us honest, reliable narrators who counter what the dishonest or unreliable ones have to say.

What I will say is that one can have an unreliable narrator; however, one cannot have an unreliable author -- and a good author will let you know what the intent is.

And that's what I have to say about that.

Reading: Wuthering Heights (Unreliable Narrators)

First off, there's something like twenty different characters named Cathy in this novel. There are also Hindens and Harentons and Earnshaws -- all of which sound a little bit alike enough to require a handy cheat-sheet while reading. If those seventeen poor seventeen Aurelianos had only found a way to hide out in Wuthering Heights, they might have stood a better chance. Or maybe not. I don't know when the rage for Latino gardeners started, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the late 1700s.

Wuthering Heights is a very irritating book. That's not to say it isn't good, or that it isn't worth your time reading it. But if you read books because you like meeting people you've never met before, you should know up front that there isn't a single worthwhile character in this novel.

Everyone sucks.

This is my second go-through, and I'm near the midpoint. The first time I read it, it was because so many posters at my much-beloved, but sadly no-more, Fametracker message boards were really up in arms about it. Some loved it passionately; others wanted to burn all copies of the book and salt the ground where they lay.

I think part of the problem is teenaged girls. They're usually the problem. In this case, it's the way they've over-romanticized the primary relationship of the novel, that between Heathcliff and Cathy. (A propos of nothing except how awesome YouTube.com is, I'm watching the video for Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, where Bonnie Tyler is trapped in an evil sexy boys' school and she's trying to escape and I keep telling her to "Run, Bonnie! Run!" But the boys keep doing things like throwing doves at her or wearing swim goggles and then, out of nowhere -- NINJAS. And then there's some sort of kickboxing scene with barbarians? The hell? And then the Satan's Choir from that one Pat Benatar video shows up, the one where she's trapped in that room of shredded paper towels with her band, and there's that one guy who looks like the supposedly sexy younger brother from "Wings" but really, I never saw it, and then he did that awful TV version of The Shining and there was that ugly-assed kid, but in this video he's the drummer or something, only it really isn't that guy, it's just some guy who looks like him, and there aren't any drums in this shredded fabric filled room so he just sort of beats the air around him with his drum sticks and Pat Benatar claps along wearing the lime green gloves of a dead woman but then she ends up in a magic volcano with that creepy kids choir and by the way Pat Benatar? Gorgeous. But back to Bonnie Tyler. After they're unable to stop her with interpretive dance, the sexy evil boys' school boys try to attack Bonnie with their glowing bright eyes and then at the end, it turns out she's the sort-of lesbian school master of the boys' school, only when she's shaking everyone's hand, one of the glowing eyed boys is there, and this catches Bonnie by surprise. Verily I say unto you all, once upon a time there was the '80s. And they were fucking awesome.)

Heathcliff and Cathy have this unfair reputation of romantic love in the mushy, you're-my-soul-mate kinda way rather than in the true sense of romantic which is more along the lines of that frightened feeling one gets sometimes when listening to Beethoven, because the music is wild and unpredictable and a little scary sometimes in the way that Kate Bush makes me anxious. She's sing and it's beautiful, but you know that at any moment it's going to get kinda screachy.

If Heathcliff and Cathy aren't True Love Forever, what are they? I think that Emily Brontë's showing us what toxic, insular, incestuous love looks like. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange seem to be the only two households in existence, and people marry and intermarry with the frequency of breathing. I want to believe that if Emily Brontë could only see the way stupid 15 year-old boys and girls have elevated her monsters Heathcliff and Cathy she'd wanna smacka bitch or something.

Dude, I'd totally wear a t-shirt that said "15-year-olds make Emily Brontë wanna smack a bitch." It's urban street cred with just a hint of post-grad doctoral thesis.

(Okay, but just now I saw the video for Love is a Battlefield and guys! Guys! Have you seen it? Like, back when you were 12 and it was 1983? Because if you haven't, or if you've forgotten, you totally have to treat yourself right now. It opens with Pat Benatar as a hooker and then she's on a bus and you don't know if she's going to somewhere or coming back from somewhere, but what you do know is that Pat is tired. And then she's a hooker and then she's on the bus and then it's hooker and bus and hooker and bus until we find out that Pat totally ran away from home in a fit of teenaged rage and singing though she's really what? 30? And as her dad tells her she can never come back, she waves up to her brother who might be disabled or he has cancer because he's never downstairs with the family in any of his scenes; he either stares forlornly out the window or reads the letters Pat sends home on his bed before contemplating his own life as a high-priced call girl. So anyway, after being jostled by two gay men on an escalator, Pat winds up at this danceteria run by a skeevy Latino. But don't feel too bad for Pat because she's totally making friends and apparently being a hooker means all you have to do is dance. So sometimes she does, but then this one time she totally doesn't have time for that nonsense and she lounges in these Stevie Nicks cast-offs because she didn't have time to pack her good hooker clothes before leaving home. Poor Pat. Anyway, while she's lounging and playing with her frayed fringe, the skeevy Latino -- because, as you know, all pimps are skeevy Latino because if the '80s taught us nothing they at least taught us that stereotypes are only bad if you're a cripple -- has an altercation with this other dancewhore, only you know it's the skeevy Latino's fault because Pat jumps up, all in his grill, and then she and the other hookers form a ring around the skeevy Latino and they start the Hooker Shimmy of Empowerment and Social Justice for Sex Workers. And it totally works; she's like Norma Rae for the string-top and teased hair set. The hookers dance around him, and then once they've taught him an Important Lesson, they all dance out of the dance place and into the street, where they all hug and congratulate themselves for overcoming adversity and achieving never-before-seen heights with mousse. From here, I don't know where the other girls go. Probably to business school or community college. I don't know that I was able to get across the true awesomeness of this video in mere words; you'll probably just need to watch the video.)

(And that's the problem with this entry. I keep wanting to write about Wuthering Heights and the fallacy of the unreliable narrator -- I don't think they exist as much as post-modern students of literature want them to; I think you can have an unreliable narrator, but you can't have an unreliable writer or the novel just doesn't work -- but I keep getting sidetracked because YouTube.com is the shit and whaddaya know, there's a ton of Kate Bush videos out there to watch. I'll try writing again later.)

Reading: Shirley (finally)

Goddamn you Charlotte Brontë.

[For those not wanting to be spoiled at all about the last 200 or so stupidly plotted pages of this novel -- you'll want to find something else to read. You can always check out the archives, see if I've written something funny at all in, say, January of 2006.]

So I'll bring you up to speed. For a while, Caroline and Shirley were BFF, but both kind of worked up over the same guy, Robert Moore. Robert Moore owns a mill, is low on cash, and seems to be putting the smooth moves on Shirley (who, PS, is a wealthy heiress/landowner). Sure, when he runs into Caroline, he's all giving her the love-eye. But up to the point where Caroline gets sick (we'll get to that bit of plot mishigas in a minute), he's gunning real hard for Shirley.

In the span of a few pages, Caroline gets sick, Robert's long-lost brother shows up as the tutor of Shirley's uncle's family, and we find out the Shirley's governess is actually Caroline's mom.

Yeah.

I know.

It was at this point in the novel (around page 400 of a 600 page book) that I started getting a little worried about Charlotte and her novel. It had been really interesting up to that point. Brontë was writing clearly and frankly about the plight of women in the 19th century (which, frankly, weren't so great it turns out, what with the subjugation and the having no rights and the "why can't you just sit and knit a spell?" attitude of most of the men at that time). She was able to challenge and explore some of these assumptions through the character of Shirley, who was able to fluidly move between sexes without getting all silly like Virginia Woolf. But, for whatever reason, Brontë decided to shy away from the natural conclusion of where the story was going to take her and decided, last minute, to hire monkeys to throw wrenches at her novel. And while I'm as saddened by the plight of out of work monkeys as the next person -- I don't know that this is the kind of work we want them doing. Plus, when they're not stealing our jobs, they're stealing our women.

Stupid monkeys.

Let's take each plot element and examine it on its own. First, there's Caroline's illness. On it's own, I have no problem with it, and it makes sense. Caroline falls ill partly because of all the late night excitement she's been through (there's a scene where she and Shirley sneak through the woods with guns in the hope of being of service to Robert Moore as he protects his mill from a roving bad of hopped-up-on-anger Luddites); she also falls ill because her heart's broken. She sees the way Robert Moore and Shirley are togehter. She's also heard Robert Moore tell her that he has no interest in marrying her. I mean, Charlotte: We were there, too. We heard him say that to her. So it makes sense that she would take a little ill, and then that illness would be exacerbated by despondency.

Next, let's add the part where Shriley's governess (and now paid companion, since Shirley is of an age where she really doesn't need a governess any more) turns out to be Caroline's long-lost mom. Why? I don't know. Part of what happens is, when Caroline learns that Mrs. Pryor is her mother, she stops being ill and starts getting better. Then, she spends the rest of her scenes with Mrs. Pryor saying things like, "Read me a story, now." Or, "I hate the way you dress; you should change it. Now." Or, "Isn't it great we've found each other? Comb my hair: NOW." Prior to Caroline's illness, Caroline and Mrs. Pryor were on a walk and Mrs. Pryor told Caroline that she was planning on leaving Caroline a small income once Mrs. Pryor you know, died. Not that she was planning on dying any time soon; she was just saying, "When that time comes, I want you to have my fortune." I was really intrigued by this development; I also thought this was Charlotte's way of preparing us for the fact that yeah, Robert Moore is going to choose Shirley. And while my heart went out to Caroline, and I was sad for her, I was okay with that development.

Having Mrs. Pryor turn out to be Caroline's mom, though, weakens that plot piece for me. It's not one woman taking care of another woman simply because she's a woman. It's a mother taking care of her daughter which isn't as interesting. And part of my irritation is totally my own fault; that's not that novel Brontë wrote, so it's silly of me to get worked up about how I'd rather the novel were. My response to that, though, is that I feel like Brontë was heading in one direction with this -- and then the whole illness/"Look, my mom!" thing sort of rushed into the room wearing a lampshade on its head and we all had to pay attention to that.

The third part is Louis. Louis is Robert's brother. Up until around page 400, we hadn't really heard about Robert's brother. He wasn't that important. No one seemed to be pining away for him. In none of the preceding 399 pages had Brontë set up any reason for him to show up (and, now that I think of it, likewise for the Mrs. Pryor-as-Caroline's-mom business, either). Except, Brontë needs him to show up because she wants to have a happy ending for both of her female characters -- so she needs two brothers to do that. Shirley will end the novel married to Louis (who, apparently, has been pining for her ever since he was her tutor -- a fact that she keeps secret from both Caroline and the reader for too long. And Caroline tries to call her on that, only she does it sort of half-assedly since she's too busy bossing her new mom around and at several points throughout the novel after that, I wanted to offer Mrs. Pryor a safe house to get away from the abuses of out-of-control Caroline) and Caroline gets Robert. Even though Robert has already proposed to Shirley. (Brontë gets herself out of that jamb by having Shirley say no because she feels Robert's only asking her because she's loaded -- but that's something that Brontë never shows us as readers. Every time we've seen Robert and Shirley together, he wasn't all macking on her wallet; he truly seemed interested in and in love with Shirley.)

Anyway. I don't feel the novel earned its ending at all. And I think that Brontë sort of realized that she wasn't happy with the direction her novel was taking. But rather than redo everything, she just thought, "I'll do this," with no thought as to how it all fits together.

I'm glad to be done. And, that craptastic ending not withstanding, I'm glad to have read it. Brontë's insight into the position of women at the time is very enlightening and illuminating. It's heartening to realize that people did no better, even if they weren't able to affect any change. The novel still holds its place as #2 on my list of favorite Brontë novels. We'll see if The Professor knocks it down at all.

Reading: Shirley (the homestretch)

After 350+ pages, Charlotte Brontë decided to throw up her hands and go silly. Long lost mothers? (Who weren't really lost in the first place, or at least not missed.) Forgotten brothers? Mysterious illnesses? RABIES?!?

I have about 100 pages, and then I can bid a fond farewell to this particular bit of silliness. I don't know that this knocks the novel out of it's #2-on-Mike's-Brotë-list. I still think Shirley is a better book than Jane Eyre -- but that's because I don't cotton much to older, meek, oh-what-the-hell-why-not-St.-John Jane. I like young, sassy, I'll-escape-hell-by-not-dying Jane.

Up next on my list is another Charlotte Brontë, The Professor. Maybe. I really need to think long and hard about this alphabetically-we-read set-up I've got going on. I mean, guys, I have a lot of Dickens I haven't read yet. I may take a break and read a biography of George Eliot I picked up so my friend Steve and I can finish arguing about stupid George Lewes. I blame George Lewes for Romola, one of the worst books Eliot ever wrote, and one of the most unnecessary books you'll ever read about Savonarola. (Though I have to admit that I have the tiniest bit of a crush on Savonarola. I think it's his nose. Also, his monomania.)

Reluctantly Hallmark

My second or third week at [redacted] I got saddled with birthdays. "I don't want birthday cards that we all have to sign because those are lame," The Ballsy Career Gal said. "Maybe just send a company-wide email that says happy birthday or something. You'll figure it out; you're creative."

I didn't want to be birthday-creative. I didn't want to be the birthday guy. But I also didn't want to be the new guy who said "no" too often. So my plan was to write the email, have it be too creative, and then have The Ballsy Career Gal or someone else say, "You know, Hallmark's not bad."

Of course, they didn't. They loved the birthday emails. They're now this huge thing, and the meaner or more out there I am, the better they go over. Well, except for one. One birthday boy didn't like the fact that I compared his birth with the coming of the anti-Christ. However, I don't like that guy in the first place and if anyone deserves an Omen reference, it's him.

Anyway, here's my most recent birthday email I did, this time for the Aging Rockstar in the office:

_____________________
As a child, I watched Alice Cooper sing "Welcome to My Nightmare" on The Muppet Show and had nightmares of my own for weeks following. Being a rockstar never seemed like a viable career alternative after that. Rockstars were always biting the heads off of rats or sleeping with Joni Mitchell or drowning in pools of vomit or not kicking Tiny Tim's ass all the livelong day like I feel they really should have been. I mean, come on rockstars. There's harmless freakshow and then there's this. Anyway: rockstars scared me. Especially if you were Prince and I was 13 and you were crawling naked across the floor after slithering out of a bathtub and I wasn't sure what the camera man's intentions were but I was pretty sure that 60 Minutes did a special about what happened to kids in situations like this, and it always involved crying in court.

[redacted] is a different breed of rockstar. If [redacted] swung an electric guitar on stage, it would be an electric Nerf guitar, and it would bounce harmlessly off the drummer's head and then they'd smile some funny smile and make Isaac-from-the-Love-Boat fingers at each other. [redacted] would probably challenge you to a skip-off – and then let you win. [redacted] wouldn't trash a hotel room; he would carefully refold the towels and probably leave a little "Have a Great Day!" note for the housekeeping staff and even if they didn't speak English or couldn't read or were learning disabled and this is the only job they could get because the dyslexia wasn't caught in time only maybe that one teacher had an inkling but the wage we pay to educators in this country is measured in what? Pennies? Anyway, even people who don't take to reading would know that the note said "Have a Great Day!" because [redacted] would hang around and make sure that they got it and that they understood what it said because [redacted] is Very Careful.

[redacted] is what's going to make Rock 'n' Roll great again. And he'll do it not by dating an endless string of supermodels named Tawny or Lace or Chardonnay because they're trashy and besides those girls don't really date so much as they find themselves waking up in strange apartments wondering how they got there and who's going to do their hair that morning. Sometimes these supermodels are force-fed mind altering drugs and there they are, several years later married to Billy Joel and thinking it's a good idea when really he's just a drunk with a piano and the world's got enough of those that we don’t really need to encourage Billy Joel any more than we have to, right? "Shut it, Piano Man." And don't even get me started on Rick "Zombie King" Ocasek.

So today, on [redacted]'s birthday, don't bother singing him the Happy Birthday Song – and not just because I've told you again and again not to because that song is like nails on a chalkboard especially when it's sung at a Benihana because the thing I don't want to happen there is for one of those Japanese guys behind the hot metal grill to try and hit all the right notes instead of watching where that samauri sword of a chopping knife is going to end up because on my list of places to be stabbed, in the Benihana isn’t one of them. But back to [redacted] and the Birthday Song: don't sing it, because [redacted] should sing his own song for us. Because he's our rockstar. And the kid's all right.