I know its not part of the book club but...

I just read twilight by stephanie meyer.
It was absolutely horrible!
She's been touted as the next J.K Rowling. And I find that pathetic. And a travesty.
While I'm not going to say Rowling is the "best" literature in the world, but the story is catchy and sucks you in. While Meyer's story literally sucks.

I'll update more tomorrow when I'm not at work.

Next?

Just wonderin' what our next books gunna be.

middle aged white dude

I wanted to talk about the fact that the author of Middlesex is Jeffrey Eugenides, a white dude. He obviously did a lot of research for this book, or at least I gather that from the people he thanks (there seemed to be a myriad of authors of publications on intersexedness). However I always get this weird twing when I think about who wrote this book, a seemingly privileged middle aged white guy who went to Brown for his undergrad then Stanford and who now teaches at Princeton. AND of course I CAN judge this guy based on the schools he went to, he ethnicity, and what he looks like (he's bald).

Then I have to take into account that this is a story, a product of fiction. But I think that sometimes things are not that clear cut. Eugenides is himself Greek.

I am reminded of another really good book about personal experience that was written by someone far from who you would expect, Memoirs of a Geisha. And yeah... that's all.

I guess I'm just amazed and horrified and in awe, some how all at the same time.

Stupid book reviewers!

I just read a review of middlesex by the New York Review of books and this reviewer really ripped it apart. I found middlesex to be a thoroughly enjoyable book. This reviewer claimed that the story was rich in detail ("like all immigrant stories") in the beginning but that Cal himself was a weak plot line.
He states:
"rather than being more than usually nuanced insights into sex roles and gender behavior, as one would hope to have from a narrator who's so pointedly identified with Teiresias, the characterization of boys as inherently oversexed and violence-loving—traits that Callie, as she becomes a teenager, finds she shares, and that appear meant to justify her feeling that she is "really" a boy—are hardly nuanced. (They're the product of what you could safely call cultural monovision.) And to declare that "desire [for a girl] made me cross over to the other side"—i.e., to being a boy—seems awfully naive in this day and age, positing a kind of essentialism about sexuality and erotic affect that is equally unsubtle. (Why is it the case that Callie's attraction to girls "means" she's a boy? Couldn't she simply be gay?) We may not know much about Callie by the end of this book, but we certainly get a glimpse into how Eugenides thinks. "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level," the adult Cal boasts, a claim that will surely come as a surprise to Eugenides's (presumably testosterone-rich) gay male readership.

I suspect that Eugenides has fallen back on such unthinking clichés for the same reason that Callie and Cal remain so unformed: in the end, he hasn't figured out what might go on inside the head of someone who's had Callie's experiences. This vacuum at the center of his book accounts for a general sense of deflation toward the end, when some weighty climactic aperçus start racking up. But do you really read a 529-page novel that sets out to explore the most profound realm of human experience merely to find out, in its closing pages, that "normality wasn't normal" or that "what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death"?"

So what makes this reviewer so angry? That an intersexed person's experience with gender has to be a sideshow? That it has to be agony? That Eugenides has to dwell on Cal's experiences of being intersexed while the people around him are what shaped him is what I think matters.

Ok... this made more sense in my head. I think its the hang over stopping it from being good. More later.

Damnit.

I think this book is making me depressed. I may have to stagger it with trashy romance novels. I'm 3/4th of the way done. I cant put it down!

dude

Why is Chapter Eleven's name Chapter Eleven?  Is there some sort of reference that I'm not getting?

Middlesex.

As said creator for "SC Homo's for Prose" I find myself slightly worried that this book club will fail despite my efforts.

... maybe I should have choosen a more happy book.

Middlesex will be found at my local used bookstore Book Again and traded after I've purged all 40 trashy romance novels sitting in my room this weekend. I will probably re-read the giver.

...I dont want to sound like a middle school teacher, but should I post discussion questions.

Something I'd buy if I had an extra 400 dollars lying around.
A kindle.
You can even highlight and underline passages in the "book" to share with others, and e-mail said notes to someone's e-mail. Wow. I <3 technology.

the first time

Hello.

I'm breaking this blogs virginal page. I suppose it makes sense since I'm the only person who can post on this here thing at the moment.

For people who don't know our little "homo book club" is now reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I'm not going to give you a summery of the book, that's what wikipedia is for or even amazon if you're looking for an even shorter description.

Warning do not read on if you haven't already gotten to book three at least. I don't give much away but I will talk about subjects that you might not know about if you haven't read this far.

On incest. I actually don't like referring to the situation between Desdemona and Lefty as incest. It leaves a weird taste in my mouth. Sort of like describing myself as a lesbian instead of queer or a dyke. It fits sometimes but not quite. At first it sort of creeped me out that they were/are brother and sister. After a while though it seemed okay because they both loved each other. It reminded me of a conversation I had once. I'm not sure how we got on the subject by my friend eventually said, "If you think about it what is truly wrong with having a sexual relationship with a family member besides the fact that if you have babies they might have birth defects?" And I thought about it and I couldn't think of any logical reason (besides the baby thing) that it would be wrong. Except in the situation of adults having sexual relations with children (ex: father and daughter or mother and son). That is definitely someone in power taking advantage of a child. Look up The Children of God also known as the Family of Love. Creepy shit.

I think in general the subject of "incest" is quite taboo in our culture. I guess that's obvious, but it's almost like no one ever wants to talk about it. Not that I've tried exclusively to have conversations about it.


On words. I have a quote that I really like from page 217:
"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world, Not my America. But here we are, at last."

"Oversimplifies feeling," so true. Words, they're awful wonderful.

I think that's all I have to say for now.