Personal: January 2008 Archives

As I dipped into Life Studies last week, looking for words to share in this space, I realized that Vreeland's collection does not lend itself to excerpting. (though the phrase, "how Mimi's fingers, like little white minnows, grasped its handle," seems to have stayed with me.) However, it was her exploration ("Uncommon Clay") of a daughter and a mother navigating the tangled prions and negative spaces of memory loss for which I am the most grateful.

It is unabashedly emotional, to be sure, of both Vreeland and of myself. The subject taps a reserve of longing and misunderstanding as I watch my own mother dart in and out of her mother's life--a life clouded by time, her desires blunted to absorb only the daily presence, really, of my grandfather and the sweets that preface each meal.
I wonder how these two women, such pillars of my life, maneuver through the silences, through the words that now gape, unspoken, in my mother's mind and that no longer find tread in the spongy recesses of my grandmother's skull. What landscapes have they found to transverse across together? Or, more likely, does my mother still search for some safe pathway?
I wonder if, as Vreeland supposes, my grandmother feels that "the world may be spinning around her, mountains, people whirling in and out of rooms, but she is at center, knowing those are her hands at the end of those arms, that that is her breath moving in and out of the dark centers of her being." And I wonder, if that is the peace which exists, how three people, two generations removed, come to find that peace together.

Last night, under the influence of champagne and chocolate, it occurred to those of us at abrooklynlife's New Year's party that 2008 rhymes with ... great ... yeah, so some would consider that a rough night. Others, perhaps, would consider that an indicator of New Year's Eve success. Regardless, in the spirit of eminent future greatness, Subway Reads emerges from the glitter and spangle to greet the cold light of the new year with spectacles and keyboard in hand.
Less ambitiously this year, instead of chronicling the ins and outs of the F train, I'll be exploring the much more modest confines of my bookshelf, though hopefully a few observations from underground will make its way onto the screen as well.

Today, we begin with the one book I received for Christmas:

Women in the Material World

by Faith D'Allusio and Peter Menzel

Arranged alphabetically, Women in the Material World explores the lives of women in countries from Albania, Brazil, and Cuba to Russia, Thailand, the United States, and fourteen other countries all over the globe. This book follows on the heels of the authors' previous project, which documented thirty statistically average families around the world. You can check out their portraits here.

But D'Allusio and Menzel discovered that the stories they had told were predominately male stories, and so revisited many of the profiled families to take a look from the female point of view. This new book is full of life--through conversations, observation, statistics, and of course, photography.

I'll include excerpts from these women's stories here each day of the week.

As Naomi Wolf writes in the foreword, "the beauty on the page is a tribute to the inherent beauty of the subject: the female love, passion, and toil that invisibly undergird human societies everywhere."