Atlantic Magazine has brought back the short story. A few years ago the magazine quit their tradition. But now readers are full of opinions. Should short stories stay or go again?
I AM SO HAPPY THAT ATLANTIC IS MAKING SPACE FOR SHORT STORES! I wish more magazines would do so!
It was in magazines that I was first exposed to short fiction, a genre a studied and wrote quite a bit for a time. Pre-Internet, I believed that people would read short fiction, collections of it, because they still wanted to read and did not have the time for reading full length books. I anticipated that this form would intrigue more readers.
Now the Internet has everyone reading blurbs and abbreviations. We quickly assess a site and decide if it will provide the information we're seeking. It's difficult to imagine life without at least an hour a day on the computer. So it's not THE TIME TO READ after all, but a significant change in our attention span that's changed, which SHOULD MAKE SHORT FICTION HOT AGAIN!
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
8/25/11
ANGELINA by ANDREW MORTON : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
ANGELINA (Unauthorized biography of Angelina Jolie)
by Andrew Morton C 2010
St Martin's Press
This review isn't so much about the CONTENT of Andrew Morton's biography of the famous actress and world traveler, who along with life partner Brad Pitt, has become the mother of 6 children, three who've been adopted from Africa and Asia, and who is now also an official Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, and perhaps one of the most powerful people in the world, the pair being philanthropists.
No, this review is of Andrew Morton as an outstanding writer in his genre, which is the celebrity focused biography. Morton has, through research and interviews of those surrounding the life story of a celebrity, made a great story of it, which meant making choices about what information mattered to make a book of it.
Morton's book held my interest, not because I'm a special fan of Angelina Jolie, since I'm merely curious about her. Morton's book held my interest because he presented a character so fascinating, that the story held even if she had not achieved the fame or infamy that she has. What's fascinating is the conflict within Angelina and in her life, which she seems to have succeeded because of or in spite of.
First, because motherhood has become her claim to fame if acting isn't, Morton begins with a scene of her infanthood, baby Angelina in an all white on white room, being tended to by an array of babysitters because her own mother is too depressed to deal with her.
Then he shows us, Angelina,as a young adult. She hardly seems to have overcome any psychological problems she might have developed because of this early deprivation, or growing up with divorced parents who never did agin become real friends, and a mother who never forgave a father for his cheating.
Morton shows Angelina as she was; a drug addicted person who used this that and heroin, bisexual and a dabbler in bondage, a wild child, so to speak, who without apology or a lot of explanation makes good anyway. She's unconventional and she seems to be doing a fine job of raising children with her life partner, Brad Pitt, so is it despite or because of her own childhood?
How does someone who collected knives from a young age and took to cutting herself (and then got all those tattoos - ouch!) become stable enough to raise happy children while globe trotting, granted there is "help?" Morton mentions the opinions of a couple psychologists, and mentions neither have ever met her, but their theories don't actually seem to make a lot of sense when life as lived now is evidence. She's a Method Actor, and she becomes her roles, but seems to relish the mom role that she made up on her own the best.
Angelina's father John Voight, the actor, attempted many interventions, and got not much gratitude for the bother. Angelina has a habit of freezing out those who she no longer likes. That means that she froze out two ex husbands, but went back and befriended one of them a while, at least until Brad. So I am left with this question: Is Brad Pitt actually the stability that made it all possible?
C 2011 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
by Andrew Morton C 2010
St Martin's Press
This review isn't so much about the CONTENT of Andrew Morton's biography of the famous actress and world traveler, who along with life partner Brad Pitt, has become the mother of 6 children, three who've been adopted from Africa and Asia, and who is now also an official Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, and perhaps one of the most powerful people in the world, the pair being philanthropists.
No, this review is of Andrew Morton as an outstanding writer in his genre, which is the celebrity focused biography. Morton has, through research and interviews of those surrounding the life story of a celebrity, made a great story of it, which meant making choices about what information mattered to make a book of it.
Morton's book held my interest, not because I'm a special fan of Angelina Jolie, since I'm merely curious about her. Morton's book held my interest because he presented a character so fascinating, that the story held even if she had not achieved the fame or infamy that she has. What's fascinating is the conflict within Angelina and in her life, which she seems to have succeeded because of or in spite of.
First, because motherhood has become her claim to fame if acting isn't, Morton begins with a scene of her infanthood, baby Angelina in an all white on white room, being tended to by an array of babysitters because her own mother is too depressed to deal with her.
Then he shows us, Angelina,as a young adult. She hardly seems to have overcome any psychological problems she might have developed because of this early deprivation, or growing up with divorced parents who never did agin become real friends, and a mother who never forgave a father for his cheating.
Morton shows Angelina as she was; a drug addicted person who used this that and heroin, bisexual and a dabbler in bondage, a wild child, so to speak, who without apology or a lot of explanation makes good anyway. She's unconventional and she seems to be doing a fine job of raising children with her life partner, Brad Pitt, so is it despite or because of her own childhood?
How does someone who collected knives from a young age and took to cutting herself (and then got all those tattoos - ouch!) become stable enough to raise happy children while globe trotting, granted there is "help?" Morton mentions the opinions of a couple psychologists, and mentions neither have ever met her, but their theories don't actually seem to make a lot of sense when life as lived now is evidence. She's a Method Actor, and she becomes her roles, but seems to relish the mom role that she made up on her own the best.
Angelina's father John Voight, the actor, attempted many interventions, and got not much gratitude for the bother. Angelina has a habit of freezing out those who she no longer likes. That means that she froze out two ex husbands, but went back and befriended one of them a while, at least until Brad. So I am left with this question: Is Brad Pitt actually the stability that made it all possible?
C 2011 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
8/18/11
EXCERPT : AND THE SHOW WENT ON : CULTURAL LIFE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED PARIS BY ALAN RIDING
Pages 239-241
"...the Nazi had...long since "cleansed" the publishers' back lists...some 20,000 books were seized.
"...After the Otto List, a far wider sweep followed, with German military police raiding seventy publishing houses, closing eleven of them, and confiscating over 700,000 books. But the Nazis were not yet satisfied. In July 1942, Propaganda Staffel issued an updated Otto List of 1,070 titles; some books on the first list were removed as mistakes, and others were added. Then in May 1943, a third list was issued, naming 1554 authors, including 739 "Jewish writers in the French language.'
... "In his memoir Heller said that a total of 2, 242 tons of books were burned. He noted, "I was able to visit the place where these books were stocked before their destruction. it was a vast garage on the avenue de la Grande-Armee. In the sad light coming through dusty windows, I saw piled up, torn dirty books, which for me were the objects of a veritable cult. A mountain of horror, a dreadful sight which reminded me of the autos-da-fe in front of Berlin University in May 1933.'
C 2010 Alan Riding
Borzoi Book
Alfred A. Knopf Publisher
"...the Nazi had...long since "cleansed" the publishers' back lists...some 20,000 books were seized.
"...After the Otto List, a far wider sweep followed, with German military police raiding seventy publishing houses, closing eleven of them, and confiscating over 700,000 books. But the Nazis were not yet satisfied. In July 1942, Propaganda Staffel issued an updated Otto List of 1,070 titles; some books on the first list were removed as mistakes, and others were added. Then in May 1943, a third list was issued, naming 1554 authors, including 739 "Jewish writers in the French language.'
... "In his memoir Heller said that a total of 2, 242 tons of books were burned. He noted, "I was able to visit the place where these books were stocked before their destruction. it was a vast garage on the avenue de la Grande-Armee. In the sad light coming through dusty windows, I saw piled up, torn dirty books, which for me were the objects of a veritable cult. A mountain of horror, a dreadful sight which reminded me of the autos-da-fe in front of Berlin University in May 1933.'
C 2010 Alan Riding
Borzoi Book
Alfred A. Knopf Publisher
8/6/11
MY HOLLYWOOD by MONA SIMPSON : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
MY HOLLYWOOD
C 2010 Mona Simpson
Borzoi Book Alfred A Knopf Publisher
Filipina nanny "Lola", the dominant voice and sensibility in this wonderfully rendered portrait of new century life in Santa Monica, California, comes to Los Angeles to work and send money home to her own Hallmark card artist husband and four good children. She, over several years, works long hours and seven days a week to send the family about half a million in USA dollars so that they can go to college and become professionals, raising their status and class in Manila. In the meantime, focused on her own real work of mothering the children of strangers, she slowly loosens her own marriage and roots in the Philippines.
To succeed at sending money home, Lola raises the infant children of two career couples and single mothers attached to television writing and the Hollywood business until they are pre-schoolers and then some. She falls in love with her charges, first Williamo, and then Laura, and becomes an important player in the local nanny network, helping to rescue one woman who is held as a slave, brokering marriages, and providing mentorship and referrals. She is there when the parents are too busy to have had (in my opinion) children in the first place. She is self sacrificing and these children of parents who are self-involved, but besides meeting her goals, where is the thanks?
IS THERE EVER THANKS IN MOTHERHOOD?
As dedicated as she is to raising Williamo, the only son of a mother who cannot handle raising a child and compose music at the same time named Claire, and a father who spends the vast majority of his life at the office where he writes situation comedy but is not even in his marriage, the boy will, a few years later, not even remember her.
The important woman's work of raising children - with help - has not been fully left behind by the birth mothers in this book, it's just that they have to hold onto their marriages at the same time, and childbirth and marriage turn out to be not so romantic after all.
The individual language and mentalities of Claire and Lola balance the overall view point of this book, which is to expose their individual and collective delimma as they raise and lower their class through hiring help or getting divorced. Upper class women, many accomplished and educated, slowly move their lives to leaving careers behind and dependence on husbands, and sometimes husbands have affairs to keep their marriages, but what is most important for them all is supposed to be the children, but that's not it either. They have left their goals behind for taking it one day at a time, making playdates, worrying if their child seems behind his peers or unpopular. Knit in a community like this, having your children get along with the children of your husband's work peers or boss is essential.
Laura, born slow but able to catch up with the ongoing attention Lola provides as a devoted babysitter rather than a professional special ed teacher, has a single mother who is mostly absent and self indulgent, and we get to know her so little we are, like Lola, not so sure where she goes or what she does. Despite Lola being in the traditional role of stay at home mother to the working woman who brings the income like a man in a traditional role, another relationship with a man who would be father, displaces Lola once again.
This then is the short short of the novel.
The clash of cultures and the mutual ambivalence about marriage and raising children that is cross-cultural, along with the broken English talk of Lola, which is more revealing than if she spoke English well, provides the nuances as well as a series of small informing shocks. This is no doubt a feminist novel, one that reveals intricacies between women who seem both striving and misguided, and who have things in common even when they are from different cultures and are kept from closeness by the employer - employee role they play out. It's one for my permanent bookshelf.
I've linked to Mona Simpson's site!
C Christine Trzyna 2011 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved
C 2010 Mona Simpson
Borzoi Book Alfred A Knopf Publisher
Filipina nanny "Lola", the dominant voice and sensibility in this wonderfully rendered portrait of new century life in Santa Monica, California, comes to Los Angeles to work and send money home to her own Hallmark card artist husband and four good children. She, over several years, works long hours and seven days a week to send the family about half a million in USA dollars so that they can go to college and become professionals, raising their status and class in Manila. In the meantime, focused on her own real work of mothering the children of strangers, she slowly loosens her own marriage and roots in the Philippines.
To succeed at sending money home, Lola raises the infant children of two career couples and single mothers attached to television writing and the Hollywood business until they are pre-schoolers and then some. She falls in love with her charges, first Williamo, and then Laura, and becomes an important player in the local nanny network, helping to rescue one woman who is held as a slave, brokering marriages, and providing mentorship and referrals. She is there when the parents are too busy to have had (in my opinion) children in the first place. She is self sacrificing and these children of parents who are self-involved, but besides meeting her goals, where is the thanks?
IS THERE EVER THANKS IN MOTHERHOOD?
As dedicated as she is to raising Williamo, the only son of a mother who cannot handle raising a child and compose music at the same time named Claire, and a father who spends the vast majority of his life at the office where he writes situation comedy but is not even in his marriage, the boy will, a few years later, not even remember her.
The important woman's work of raising children - with help - has not been fully left behind by the birth mothers in this book, it's just that they have to hold onto their marriages at the same time, and childbirth and marriage turn out to be not so romantic after all.
The individual language and mentalities of Claire and Lola balance the overall view point of this book, which is to expose their individual and collective delimma as they raise and lower their class through hiring help or getting divorced. Upper class women, many accomplished and educated, slowly move their lives to leaving careers behind and dependence on husbands, and sometimes husbands have affairs to keep their marriages, but what is most important for them all is supposed to be the children, but that's not it either. They have left their goals behind for taking it one day at a time, making playdates, worrying if their child seems behind his peers or unpopular. Knit in a community like this, having your children get along with the children of your husband's work peers or boss is essential.
Laura, born slow but able to catch up with the ongoing attention Lola provides as a devoted babysitter rather than a professional special ed teacher, has a single mother who is mostly absent and self indulgent, and we get to know her so little we are, like Lola, not so sure where she goes or what she does. Despite Lola being in the traditional role of stay at home mother to the working woman who brings the income like a man in a traditional role, another relationship with a man who would be father, displaces Lola once again.
This then is the short short of the novel.
The clash of cultures and the mutual ambivalence about marriage and raising children that is cross-cultural, along with the broken English talk of Lola, which is more revealing than if she spoke English well, provides the nuances as well as a series of small informing shocks. This is no doubt a feminist novel, one that reveals intricacies between women who seem both striving and misguided, and who have things in common even when they are from different cultures and are kept from closeness by the employer - employee role they play out. It's one for my permanent bookshelf.
I've linked to Mona Simpson's site!
C Christine Trzyna 2011 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved
8/1/11
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