Dancing Shoes

This evening, in between bouts of working on our group thesis, I want to burden my few but dedicated readers (Hi mom!) with a book review.

On my birthday, my mom and I finally did something we've been longing to do forever: to relive that scene in You've Got Mail, when Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly, feeling bereft because her bookstore shut down, wanders into the competition's store, Fox Books. She sits in the children's section and watches the customers move around in this "homogenize-the-world mochaccino land"--this airconditioned monster of a bookstore--so different from her quaint little shop, which was "valuable, but small" (a metaphor for her life, really). She hears a customer ask a salesperson:

"Do you have the Shoe Books?"

She continues, "My friend told me my daughter has to read the Shoe Books."

The salesperson is obviously clueless, so Meg Ryan, half in tears, butts in: "Noel Streatfeild. [...] Noel Streatfeild wrote Skating Shoes, and Ballet Shoes, and Dancing Shoes... I'd start with Ballet Shoes first, it's my favorite. Though Skating Shoes is completely wonderful--" (and here her voice breaks) "--but it's out of print."

So my mom and I, with a sense of schoolgirl mischief not befitting our respective ages, wandered into Fully Booked and asked the girl in Customer's service: "Do you have the shoe books?"

Well, after a few faux pas (she bought us a collection of fashion books on SHOES. As my generation likes to say... FAIL!), she presented us with this book:

My mom and I were both a little stunned--we never expected the store to actually have any of the Shoe Books--and so, after the fuss we'd both made and the salesperson's repeated trips to the shelves, we both felt a little forced into buying the book. Not that we weren't excited. Kathleen Kelly, we knew, had "excellent taste--she's famous for it"--so we had pretty high expectations.

They weren't disappointed. This is hard to believe about a children's book, but I never knew what to expect next. In the story, two girls--Rachel and her adopted sister Hilary--are sent to live with their Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom after the death of their mother. Aunt Cora is the famous Mrs Wintle, who runs a dancing school and produces row upon row of Wintle's Wonders, little girls who find jobs as dancers for shows, musicals, troupes, you name it. It ought to be the perfect fit for Hilary, who's a dancer who was being groomed to go to the Royal Academy of Ballet, but Rachel (who isn't a dancer herself--not at all!) knows that what Mrs Wintle teaches is the wrong kind of dancing! How will she ever arrange for Hilary to get to go to the Royal Academy, and how will she avoid becoming a Wintle's Wonder herself?

Children's books, we all know, tend to be a bit one-dimensional on the character front. Usually rather plain characters are dressed up with capabilities or super powers and thrust into a wonderful plot. (The first Harry Potter book comes to mind. Harry himself, if we're to trust the narrator, has the personality of a paper bag--it's his situation that gains our sympathy; Dumbledore is all good, and Petunia and Vernon are all bad.) Noel Streatfeild reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' better books, because each character has a set of flaws and perfections. Rachel and Hilary are not all goodness and sweetness, though you love them because they are really a figure of sympathy; Rachel can be headstrong and stubborn and self-centered, while Hilary can be spectacularly lazy and self-centered too.

The adults--Cora Wintle, Uncle Tom, Pursey who is like a matron figure, Mrs Storm who runs the classroom and gives the lessons--are written solidly and beautifully; Cora Wintle whose devotion to her daughter Dulcie makes her pretty awful, but at the same time sympathetic; Uncle Tom, who may be praised for the way he handles Rachel and Hilary with affection and genuine respect, but who may be faulted for the poor way that he's bringing up his spoiled daughter, queen of Mrs Wintle's school, Dulcie; Pursey, who listens to Rachel and Hilary and who loves them, but who never really takes a firm stand on anything; and Mrs Storm, who loves Rachel but who doesn't understand dancing well enough to know why her ambition is what it is. You just want so much for Rachel and Hilary to be loved and for their dreams to be supported, and sometimes you don't get that consolation because the adults can be sympathetic in this aspect and completely obtuse the next, but these little disappointments are what make the book realistic and substantial. You know, like real life.

I would love to read the other Shoe Books. Including Skating Shoes though, as Kathleen Kelly says with a catch in her throat, "It's out of print!"

O you, who came upon me once: Today, in three acts

ACT I.
Detachment. How hard it is! Oh, to be fastened by nothing but three nails and to have no more feeling in my flesh than the Cross!
151, The Way

ACT II.
You give me the impression that you are carrying your heart in your hands, as if you were offering goods for sale. Who wants it? If it takes no creature's fancy, you will come and give it to God.

Do you think that is how the saints acted?
146, The Way

ACT III.
The heart! From time to time, without your being able to help it, your all too human memory casts a crude, unhappy, “uncouth” shadow on your mind.

Go to the tabernacle immediately, at least in spirit, and you will return to light, happiness and Life.
817, Furrow

So in the end, mea culpa, but that's no reason to walk about with a long face. I'm sorry, and next time, when you catch me unawares, I will behave better and with more genuine charity.

Slowly

(I always feign an indifference to poetry, because the truth is that it was my first love. I wanted to be a modern-day Sylvia Plath without the philandering husband and the oven. I wanted to be Amy Lowell. Dorothy Parker was my idol. I fell asleep at night chanting Matthew Arnold to myself. I fought with anyone who might listen that it's not "e. e. cummings" but, also legitimately, "E. E. Cummings." Too bad I don't have any talent. All I can do is admire poetry like this--honest and sharp--from afar.)


Slowly
Donna Masini

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake—I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren’t we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn’t look, but looking, weren’t we
held there, weren’t we
imagining—what were we imaging?)

Mrs. Paterson urged us to move on girls,
but we couldn’t move. It was like
watching a fern unfurl, a minute

hand move across a clock. I didn’t know why
that snake didn’t choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening

wider, sucking it down, just so
I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:

this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back.

The Best Slow Dancer

by David Wagoner


Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn't there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets yet never
Where you could be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren't the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else's partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

A10 Nerve Clips.

My brain is fried. I shouldn't do this again. One of my favorite, favorite things to do is to hunt down memories from childhood media--songs, TV shows, cartoons. Earlier this week I tracked down the shows that used to be on ABS-CBN in the mornings and in the afternoons after school; apparently most of them were from World Masterpiece Theatre (世界名作劇場, Sekai Meisaku Gekijō) like "Little Prince Cedie" (here called "Cedie: Ang Munting Prinsipe"), Remi: Nobody's Girl, and so forth. (And was I the only one who thought Remi was a guy?) I also made the interesting discovery that "Julio at Julia", one of the earlier cartoons, was not in fact Japanese but of French/Belgian origin. It was called "Les jumeaux du bout du monde" (or "Twins of Destiny" in English-speaking countries). I'd feel jologs about it all, before reminding myself that nearly all of the kids in my generation watched this stuff since it was on free TV, and it was some of the best entertainment that could be had back then. (Though you have to wonder what enterprising minds thought it was appropriate to put "Neon Genesis Evangelion" on ABS-CBN in the afternoons. I'm twenty-two and I still feel too young for it. It was hardly to be grouped with "Adventures of Peter Pan" and "Swiss Family Robinson.")

Interestingly, here's a Wiki list of the shows aired by ABS-CBN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shows_previously_aired_by_ABS-CBN#Anime_and_Tokusatsu) and the anime aired by AXN-Asia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXN_Asia). I feel obliged to mention that I am not now, nor have I ever been, what is called an "otaku"; this was all mainstream back then, and like as not, your seatmate in Grade 1 probably knew the mangled lyrics to the Grander Musashi ending theme as well as you. As anime seemed to me to get more stupid and shallow, and less wholesome, I gravitated away from it. But it doesn't make those memories any less sweet. Oh to come home in the afternoon and be greeted by Tenchi Muyo on AXN, and to watch it while eating merienda and while refusing to remove your white ankle-high socks!

To add to this, for the whole weekend I've been remembering a song that I was certain was from an AXN-Asia show. It went "dararum, daramum, ready, oooh-oooh." Then "DUAL!" That was my big clue, and from there I tracked down the show. It's called "Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure" and is about an awkward high school boy, Kazuki, who ends up in a parallel world. I always identified with one of the other characters, a certain Mitsuki, who (Asuka Langley-style) cared deeply about Kazuki but hid it by treating him abrasively. I found where the episodes can be downloaded (Veoh, in case you're interested) and even found the ending and opening themes. All right, I downloaded the entire OST here) just because I was curious! And the curious thing is, I still really remember the opening and closing themes really well. When I played them, I could sing along with the lyrics, despite hardly understanding any of it. My favorite is the song called "Real", Dual's ending theme.

And there's no one I can talk to this about, because even if I could find someone who watched this show, a) they probably wouldn't remember or b) they wouldn't want to talk about it or c) they'd be my brother. So I post here out of a desire to send this cosmic message "out into the void" (Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail).

Now the last memory I'm hunting down, before I promise I'll give up this habit entirely, is this: I'm sure it was on AXN and I'm sure it was dubbed. It was also a mecha series (you know, the kind that was so popular back then, with the protagonists operating fighting robots) and in one of the episodes, the lead character, a young girl, had taken an anti-heroine with her to have pancakes at home. This anti-heroine was the cold, unwanted-as-a-little-child type, and the whole memory is tinged with the anti-heroine's bitterness at the protagonist taking for granted the warmth of a home, the experience of making pancakes with her mother, and the ease of self-confidence--in short, everything she herself lacked. I was a melancholic little kid so I never forgot the emotional impact of that moment; however, in retrospect, I also blame it for the fact that I never took pancakes for granted either, and the reason they're my favorite carb.

Oh unnamed show that I can't find on the above lists, where are you? I just want to find you then I'll rest easy.

Home from my seminar

"In the world of emoticons, I was colon capital D."

:D

(from my favorite show, The Big Bang Theory.)

Introducing Gilbert Keith

I can't stop thinking about GK Chesterton these days. Some friends of mine were studying a book of his on St Thomas Aquinas, and while I also plan to read that, I skimmed over some of GKC's other books that I already had on my hard drive, among them the Father Brown stories and some essays of his. These essays discussed the hard-hitting issues of his time, and while some people may consider them obsolete (he wrote about the dangers to be faced by a society which entertained abortion and contraception, for example. And guess what! All of the things he predicted/reasoned would happen have now come true!), but his arguments will always, always be valid. I'm planning to post a lot of blogs about his work, so I suppose I'd better start with a good introduction.

There is a short, and sufficiently juicy, introduction of him at the American Chesterton Society's website: http://www.chesterton.org/discover/who.html. My favorite part is when you scroll down a bit and read what follows. I've pasted it here: (I don't think the Society would mind me posting this, since they're just as rabid as I am to make GKC known to the general populace.)

Why haven’t you heard of him?

There are three answers to this question:

I don’t know.
You’ve been cheated.
Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be left to educators and that publishing is too important to be left to publishers, but there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer taught in our schools and why his writing is not more widely reprinted and especially included in college anthologies. Well, there is an excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to pigeonhole, and if a writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word description, he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three hundred pounds.
But there is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators and critics have found it much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather than to engage him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.

Chesterton argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism and capitalism and showed why they have both been the enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.

And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith. These don’t play well in the classroom, in the media, or in the public arena. And that is probably why he is neglected. The modern world prefers writers who are snobs, who have exotic and bizarre ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at Christianity, who deny the dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no responsibility.

But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in schools, you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read Chesterton. And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete education in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.