The Raw Power of Knowlege

    You might wonder as you read Crimson Petal and the White after a disorienting gritty and real reading experience, how such a wickedly earnest, beautiful and harsh book ended up in your hands in the first place. Deep in the underbelly of London we find the raw un-glorified population of church lane in a poor area of London. Our character Caroline is witty and child-like when she hasn't slipped into the almost mechanical persona she uses to struggle through life.

    You see, to get around church lane, you need your wits a sharp blade and a way to merge with the pulsating activity of the street, to blend in and most of all to slip away into the shadows.

    Prostitution.

    I won't tiptoe around it,  I'll put it blatantly.

    Generally we don't associate prostitutes with being powerful creatures. Many prostitutes are brutally forced into the trade and sold as sex slaves all across the world. The less extreme is of course the choice of the profession and life itself.  But Caroline (we all know now that she is in fact a prostitute) has a dainty, graceful lady-like charm and slovenly appeal to her. Not only does she use this to reel in her prospective customers but she dances daintily across their lives, planting ideas influencing the old, the rich and the powerful men without even realizing the power she is wielding.

    The tables turn almost every time Caroline is with a man, the degrading filthy work gives way to conversation and jokes. A lot of the time she sees more into their lives, past present and feelings than their wives and children do in a lifetime.

    The most surprising aspect of the power is not her potential to wield it but what comes from knowing someone wholly, some of their most intimate details only heard by someone looking for them. Her job was to please the men, to know them, Caroline held the key to her customers lives and their secrets and their emotions even when she was too naive to know how tightly she could reign them in.

Calamity Topics in Special Physics

Where do we begin with Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. When I first opened the book I quickly became confused and discouraged it was a trainwreck of literary devices, overworked with quirky details, description and references to both Nabokov and pop-culture. It was slightly aggravating trying to get through the first two hundred pages limping along with a some what self-obsessed, intellectual main character and an almost dead plot-line.

Later on in the book I got used to Pessl's writing style. I eased along post-iting descriptions and meaningful sentences i liked. And from then on my reading was gentle and sloped.

Blue Van Meer our nomad narrator moves from town to town around the country after her mother dies, with her academic political-science genius father, finally settling at a prestigious private school. Blue is accepted into an exclusive group of friends, where everyone else is simply exoteric. A fixture of the group is Hannah, the beautiful, mysterious and bland film teacher who brings the group home on weekeneds.

She is very mysterious and would rather discuss pop culture and third world economies than her only life. I was incredibly intrigued, why were the kids so enchanted by Hannah if she couldn't even hold my attention. She averts questions and basic details about her own life and when she isn't teaching at the school she hides away in her patchwork home.

Her selective students slowly put together theories and ideas about Hannah's identity or if he has one at all. What else I can say about Hannah, Blue or our eccentric Marisha Pessl's writing; only time will tell

The Great Perhaps

            In a world of scandal, revenge and media crazes, there are fewer and fewer things we can do as humans to make ourselves stand out. We accept most news even the genocide in Darfur or the hundreds killed every month in Afghanistan. These events have the mundane impact of scrubbing a counter. The world is shrouded in a veil of media that glorifies violence, death and sex to a point where we not only accept it but we barely see it. We are so caught up in our own self interest, that rarely now can we tell the difference between what should cause genuine shock and cheap thrills.

            One book broke through the veil for me. I have now finished Looking for Alaska by John Greene. A book that not only turns our plain, existentialistic lives on their heads but parades around with such bold, brilliant philosophy and meaning that you can't help but ask such deep poignant questions as why are we alive, what is there to live for and most importantly "how do we get out of this labyrinth."

            Its not often that a book makes such a mockery of society but can be so incredibly thought-provoking at the same time. We experience life at the rural Alabama boarding school through Pudge, our awkward, resilient main character with a passion for last words. Along with group of quirky, extraneous friends he sets out to experience humanity and seek "The Great Perhaps".

            An ornate fixture of the novel is the character, Alaska. She is gorgeous, brilliant, passionate, temperamental and incredibly philosophical. Alaska leads the group with boldness and brings out love in those lucky enough to cross her path, yet an air of mystery surrounds Alaska that continues into the compelling ending of the book and even the interpretive reader struggles to understand.
**Spoiler Alert**
           After an eventful evening of pranks and romance Alaska suddenly makes an entrance full of anger, despair and guilt. She then takes her car and drives of campus over eighty miles an hour crashing into a jack knifed truck and dies instantly, when she had more than enough time to swerve off the road safely. Both the reader and Alaska's friends struggle onward in an eternity of bewildered, hair-pulling, head-crushing angst.  We are left with an almost selfish parting gift from Alaska. Pondering and unwrapping her death was a morbid treat and in the end we arrive with desperate, self-indulgent suicide or an accidental attempt to barrel her way out of the labyrinth.


            While living with media, cheap thrills and a mundane blur of a world. You can only ask yourself, who wouldn't want to create your own identity, to stand apart, or make your short-lived existence mean something even in the most deep, morbid and passionate, confusing way you can. And so I commend you Alaska Young

Chaos at the Counter

Segregated Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's is a long way from modern-day Brooklyn. When I started the book "The Help" by Katheryn Stockett. It was nearly impossible to picture a town with such resilience and cataclysmic change. The Help is a story narrated by three completely different women, two african american maids and a white farmers daughter living in an disheveled Jackson, Mississippi at the height of its social chaos. 


One of the more striking scenes was where three of the colored maids are describing the famous lunch counter sit ins all across the south in horror. On the local news they show six young african-american men sitting at the counter while white teenagers and grown white men smearing ketchup and salt and french fries in their hair and dumping food all over their heads. They sat there in peaceful protest for hours, ignored by the staff and picked apart by the media until closing.


So where are the lines drawn. When you sit there and don't turn around don't talk only sit showing immense courage, while the people behind you the bullies and tormentors are the real cowards. Cowering behind the old southern standards afraid of the change and those who are open to change are too afraid to speak out or voice their opinions because of everyone else around them. 


We usually associate bravery and courage with boldness and blind valiance. But is is often the bravest people who are silent, who take the abuse and refrain from fighting back out of a combination of strength and wit. The peaceful but self restrained ones should be commended and not beaten down. The lines are drawn.