Eleven Minutes

According to Maria, if you subtract all of the extra conversation, undressing and getting back dressed again, the actual amount of time it takes to have sex is only eleven minutes. And for that, she is perplexed as to why people revolve their worlds around the act and actively aspire to ever marry. Eleven Minutes is the story of one woman's slow journey to discovering the spiritual, sacred side of sex in spite of her hard knocks and cynicism.

A Brazilian woman working as a prostitute in Switzerland, Maria is determined to one day return to her motherland to settle down and buy a farm. One day while reading a book about raising cattle in a local café, a famous painter asks Maria if he can paint her portrait.

Schmaltzy? Yeah, I know it sounds that way. But I love Maria's self-reflection. Shortly after this encounter she writes in her diary:

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves withouth a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it--which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know." (pp. 119-120)

Coelho's Maria, like so many of the characters of his other tales, dives into the struggles of the human psyche in a way that I can relate.

A bit about Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson is one of my favorite adolescent novels. I first read it a couple of years ago; but as time progresses, I think it holds increasing relevance. It is set in the future when most Americans stay connected through a feed brain implant. As you can probably imagine, all one has to do is think about something and voila the thoughts are tagged with a plethora of related links and advertisements.

In one scene, the narrator, Titus is out mall shopping with his girlfriend, Violet. A rebel deep down, Violet talks about an experiment she has been conducting.

"Listen," she said. "What I'm doing, what I've been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that's so screwed, no one can market to it. I'm not going to let them catalog me. I'm going to become invisible."

I stared at her for a minute. She ran her finger along the edge of my collar, so her nail touched the skin of my throat. I waited for an explanation. She didn't tell me any more, but she said to come with her, and she grabbed one of the nodules on my shirt--it was one of those nodule shirts--and she led me toward Bebrekker & Karl.

We went into the store, and immediately our feeds were all completely Bebrekker & Kar. We were bannered all this crazy high-tech fun stuff they sold there. Then a guy walked up to us and said could he help us. I said I didn't know. But Violet was like, "Sure. Do you have those big searchlights? I mean, the really strong ones?"

"Yeah," he said. "We have . . . yeah. We have those." (p. 81)

Titus and Violet go from store to store asking about various "weird shit" (p. 83), but buying nothing. While looking at home endoscopy kits, she says,

"For the last two days, okay? I've been earmarking all this different stuff as if I want to buy it--you know, a pennywhistle, a barrel of institutional lard, some really cheesy boy-pop, a sarong, an industrial lawn mower, all of this information on male pattern baldness, business stationery, barrettes . . . And I've been looking up house painting for the Antartic homeowner, and the way people get married in Tonga, and genealogy home pages in the Czech Republic . . . I don't know, it's all out there waiting."

I picked up one box. "This one is the cheaptest. You swallow the pills and they take pictures as they go down."

She said, "Once you start looking at all this stuff, all of these sites, you realize this obscure stuff isn't obscure at all. Each thing is like a whole world. I can't tell you. (p. 84)

I will probably have more to say about Feed in future posts. In today's society, I cannot help but recall the biting social commentaries Anderson so deftly implies, and I especially love his use of language to seal his perspective.

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

Now that her father, the Beard, has returned to Morocco to find a new wife to bear him a son, Doria and her mother are left with little more than each other. Faïza Guène shares what it is like to grow up in the ghettos of Paris as the child of Maghrebian immigrants.

I just finished this debut, semi-autobiographical novel, and I love Doria's teenage voice. It is filled with a divine mix of adolescent sass, insecurity, astute observation, hope and resignation.

That Guène wrote this piece when she was only fifteen impresses the hell out of me.

Good Books

Outside of a dog,
a book is a man's best friend.

Inside a dog,
it's too dark to read

-- Groucho Marx

Don't forget that a book can be a girl's best friend too.