"summer recap"

I've been trying to read books that are kind of like classics, not like actual classics but the ones that are assigned at school so most everyone has read them. I've read to kill a mockingbird and one flew over the cuckoos nest. I really liked to kill a mockingbird and read it really quickly. It took a while for me to get into one flew over the cuckoos nest. I got through the last chunk pretty fast, the ending was depressing. While I read one flew over... I reminisced on high school reading. I kept wondering if this was one of the books that mainly the boys like. Like I remember in school that most of the girls hated beowolf and most of the boys loved it.

I've been reading almost entirely fiction for the past few months which is highly unusual for me. I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Ok, I already love dystopian fiction but I looooooved this. One of the elements that I intially hated but then I loved was the refrences to durrent technology, like blogging and texted and social networking sites, fast food and such... The internet plays a pretty big part in the storyline. Most of the dystopian fictions I read are kind of old, so to read a story that has teenagers texting in it... it made it feel more current therefore actually possible, interesting because Atwood has stated that she doesn't write science fiction but speculative fiction. I also read a Handmaids tale by her. It was good, doubly depressing because it's mainly about the governments oppression of women (first their bank accounts are frozen, then they are sent home from work, and so on worse and worse). Oryx and Crake was far more gnarly. I liked it a little better. I also just read that Atwood will be making it into a trilogy.

Somehow all this fiction reading makes me feel dumb (I don't know why), I need to get back into a non-fiction loop. I've been thinking a lot about collective unconciousness. suggestions?

The Corner

Before David Simon and Ed Burns made The Wire-- they wrote The Corner. Its brilliant, of course. And it shares many themes with The Wire. But its also more focused then The Wire. The 600 pages of The Corner focus on a year in the life of a handful of real people who lived near the corners of Fayette and Monroe in East Baltimore in the early 1990s.

A consequence of this focus is that the physical, cultural and allegorical world of the corner that Simon and Burns depict- in their words "an existential crisis rooted not only in race-- which the corner has slowly transcended-- but in the unresolved disaster of the American Rust-belt" where "an increasingly draconian legal system's inability to mitigate against human frailty and despair, against economic neglect and institutional racism, against a failed educational system and the marginalization of America's urban populations "- is personalized.

The people caught in this world are humanized. You identify with them. You hope for them. You cry for them. You live in awe of them. Coupled with Simon and Burns extended and brilliant discussions of how the corner has developed, how its economy functions, its culture, the failure of the war on drugs, wellfare and the institutional abandonment of the underclass, you are given an intimate connection to people forced to live under conditions where

"To see it in retrospect, to look backward across thirty years on the Fayette streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology....cursed as we are with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, as the millennium to have found a limit."

Yet, in the people who make it out, who make something where all others fall tragically to the corner- in the unbelievable example of Ella Thompson- who following the murder of her 12 year daughter against all realism holds runs the local community centre- or Fran Boyd or Tyreeka Freamon, you gain some hope. For, on The Corner "no ending is certain and hope itself endures.' Even as "The Corner is, itself, immutable." That is until we "acknowledge[ing] honestly the depth and complexity of the problem." In other words, we face what has created the corner in its own image- capitalism- and transcending it before it is too late.