Bossypants

Book type: Autobiographical Comedy

Summary: Tina Fey of SNL and 30 Rock fame, combines memoir/autobiography with ludicrous humor in Bossypants. She describes her childhood, growing up white, but not quite white; exotic, but not quiet exotic (her father being German/Scottish and her mother being Greek) and recounts how she got into theater with a children’s theater group and later joined The Second City, which launched her into improv, and then SNL, and then to being the vice presidential candidate for the US-of-A. No wait, she just played Sarah Palin on TV. You coulda fooled me! (And it did confuse some French journalists who thought her fake interview with “Katie Couric” (aka Amy Poehler) was the real thing. Now you might not expect a book like Bossypants, written by a comedy writer to contain very many valuable lessons for the rest of us. And you’re probably right, but I found a few.

Lessons:

1. Remember the “Rule of Agreement.” This rule is a tenet of improvisation, namely that if someone preposes a scenario, you don’t just automatically shoot it down. As Fey explains, “Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to ‘respect what your partner has created’ and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you” (65). Clearly it won’t always apply. Like if your roommate suggests that you two go as any of the top say, twenty results for “worst Halloween costumes ever” that pop up in a Google search. You should immediately say no.
   

   Thought I was kidding? I don’t know how you’d pick which one takes the prize for worst costume. They’re all so…unsettling.

   The point in all of this is to never go to a Halloween party–or worse, Trick-or-Treating with your kids–while wearing a vagina costume (or like my mom did one year when she wrapped herself in toilet paper, smeared peanut butter around her mouth and gleefully told anyone who asked what she was, “Well can’t you tell? I’m an asshole!” Way to go, Mom). The second point though, is to be open-minded and be willing to maybe say yes unless the situation requires a firm and immediate “NO” like any of these costumes would.

2. Make statements. This is a big one I need to work on too, so maybe you and I can get together sometime and practice? Great, thanks. The point in this one is to “Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says ‘I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?’ Make statements, with your actions and your voice” (66). Making statements is all about confidence. In my opinion though, for what it’s worth, sometimes you should lay it all out there and sometimes, like when you’re talking to your boss about a delicate concern, you should tone it down a bit. It’s all a balancing act, and learning which situations require which mode of behavior can be difficult, which is why every workplace has at least one complete pushover and one who gets in trouble for being far too blunt. Or for wearing a mini skirt and a plunging neckline top to a quarterly meeting with the entire staff and the District Manager. Stay classy, former manager of mine.
3. “Stick to simple pieces that flatter your body type” (85). Gentlemen: before you decide to skip this one because it’s clearly for the chicks, take your finger off the scrolly part of the mouse! This applies equally for men and for women, though admittedly men’s fashion doesn’t generally include as many options as women’s does. But still, do what you can. If you’re a woman and you’re 45 and you’ve got a lot of what Tracy Morgan would call “front meat,” maybe don’t wear that plunging neckline to the company meeting. Maybe don’t wear it at all. No one’s saying you have to wear only turtlenecks, but you can be fashionable and highlight your curves and trim legs without showing all of them to everyone. And for the guys: get clothes that fit you. Don’t run around in XL hoodies when you’re a Medium, and don’t wear the super skinny jeans if you’re not Italian, Spanish, or under 200 lbs. Sorry, that’s the limit people. Don’t blame me, blame your jeans. I mean, genes. And something we can all agree on for both men and women of all sizes: no one should ever wear these pants, if they can even be called pants.
   

   Unless you want to be compared to a 93 year-old with a lumpy diaper or a Cabbage Patch doll. Then by all means…

4. Never ask people about their reproductive plans. Tina’s Mom is right about this one, you really don’t know another person’s situation unless you’re really close to them (and even then maybe you should just hush). The main reason for this is that generally it’s none of your business. And I’d like to take this a step further: don’t lecture someone about what they should or should not do with their life, especially regarding having children. If someone brings up that they can’t wait to have kids, don’t be the ballbuster who says “Can’t wait?! HA! Having kids just ruins everything!” (and then starts listing all the things kids ruin). The only exception is if the person saying she can’t wait to have kids is a 14 year-old who’s dating a college kid who is about to take her to a frat party. Then please, for all our sakes, railroad that girl with your list. But back to my original point: this goes for people who tell you they don’t want to have kids as well. Don’t go into a speech on how children are the only things that truly give our lives meaning and blah blah blah. Smile and nod and go on thinking your life has meaning and the other person’s doesn’t. Just don’t say anything. Think about it: maybe Billy Ray Cyrus and his wife had hesitations before someone word vomited all over them about the miracle of having a child and they decided to go for it…and we all got stuck with Miley Cyrus. Maybe that person should’ve kept their mouth shut.

A final review/recommendation:

Bossypants is definitely funny and it reads very quickly, so if you like comedy or you like Tina Fey you should probably read it. If you read my first post ever on Mindy Kaling’s book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and decided to go out and read that book (and you liked it), you’ll most likely appreciate this one as well. I enjoyed the fact that Tina did have some real lessons or stories of difficulty she’s faced being a woman in comedy and being a working mom. She also had some good points about how other people don’t always just exist for our amusement, especially people we call our friends. She makes her statements without bashing the reader over the head with them, so if you’re leery about reading some feminist left-wing Sarah Palin basher’s book, you can calm down and still read it, it’s not that bad. Finally, while I read the book, my brother and sister-in-law have reportedly listened to the audiobook version four times or more and love it every time, so maybe you should check out that medium first.

Photo credits:
Book cover: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/files/2011/07/Bossypants-Tina-Fey.jpg
Halloween costumes: my screenshot of Google search “worst Halloween costumes ever”
Justin “the Diaper” Bieber: http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01681/Justin-Bieber-620a_1681601a.jpg

Night

Book type: Autobiography

Preface: My first introduction to Elie Wiesel was his book Five Biblical Portraits, from a course on the Old Testament with one of my favorite professors in college, an old, gentle yet impassioned, former pastor and biblical scholar, and a German who had lived through World War II. Originally, I bought Night not knowing much of anything about Wiesel except that I’d liked his other book and this book was his first, and arguably, his most famous. Admittedly, I decided to read it this week mainly because it’s a mere 115 pages long. These were among the most emotionally charged hundred pages I’ve ever read and prompted me, once I’d finished the book, to go back and listen to a recording of my German religion professor telling his life story from the last day of one of his classes, a tradition for each class he taught–I heard this story around a half a dozen times and it affected me deeply every time, and this time was no different. Wiesel was an adolescent, torn from his home in Romania and forced into a concentration camp because he was Jewish; my professor had been a five year-old boy, forced to evacuate his home in Poland with his mother, grandmother, and siblings due to their German heritage (their family had lived in Poland for centuries before the outbreak of war in 1939). Their stories are very different, but they share similar threads: violence, discrimination, death, suffering, and survival. The lessons this week will be few; what can I say that could convey more than the stories from their own lips? My only purpose here is to hope that their stories reach a few more people who might otherwise never hear them or read them. In the introduction to Night, Wiesel says

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time (xv).

It’s not only a survivor who has no right to deprive future generations of the history of tortured Jews, refugees, gays, of the handicapped, of POWS, and everywhere, of children; no one has the right to be ignorant of this collective history, or to be silent about past horrors or present ones.

If there is a word that could encapsulate our time, now, it would be connection. We are able to connect, to share our experiences, and thereby to break the boundaries that separate us from one another with greater speed and ease than ever before. Given this reality, we have no excuse: we are required to pass along the histories of those who have suffered, in the hopes that our knowledge and understanding will help to prevent us from carrying out or being complacent to future violence.

Summary: Night is a succinct history of Elie Wiesel’s life in concentration camps, mostly still with his father, yet separated from his mother and sisters. (He would later be reunited with two of his sisters, but sadly, his mother and youngest sister Tzipora and his father all died at the hands of the Nazi guards and crematoria.) It is a story of great despair, of lost faith, and of humiliation, and yet, after having run for many kilometers near the end of the war, when they were not much more than skin and bones, Wiesel affirms their strength and ability to survive:

We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything–death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth (87).

Lessons:

1. “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere” (from Wiesel’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech printed at the end of the book, 119). I think we tend sometimes to think of violence in other countries as out of our reach because of cultural divides in addition to the obvious matter of physical distance. Undoubtedly this was the feeling of previous generations that did not speak out or act against the atrocities being committed all across the world during World War II (and every other war in history). And yet, we judge those who did not act to save the lives of their neighbors, of those transported to internment camps, concentration camps, extermination camps. We judge them for their inaction, their apathy, in the face of obvious inhumanity. History will judge us the same way. And in our age of technology and connection, we will have no excuses to give for why we did nothing, said nothing, when people were suffering near to us and far away.
2. Be wary of simplified history and what it can do to your humanity. When we simplify the horrors of World War II, though it might seem like we’re empathizing with the victims, what we’re also doing is lessening the humanity of those who caused such suffering. When we make those people “monsters,” we tell ourselves that we could never become them, but surely that’s what so many people also thought before their neighbors were stripped of their jobs, then their homes, and finally their lives. We can never dismiss the possibility of our becoming apathetic to the suffering of others; we must, rather, stay vigilant to ensure we do not lose our concern for those around us. When we make an entire people out to be evil, we do the same thing to them that some of them had done to others. In the case of my professor, his family was German ethnically and Polish politically, and they were caught between advancing Russian and German armies and had lost many family members already and were frequently plagued by roaming bands of drunk, hungry, and ravenous soldiers who would rob them, assault them, and threaten their lives. And thus it was that outside, at his family’s barn, “a five year-old boy knelt and prayed for the peace of the world.” We must remember as many stories as we can, we must remember the inhumanity and the humanity alike. We can start with stories like Wiesel’s as a way of remembering, and by sharing them we break the silence that puts our humanity at risk.

A final review/recommendation:

There is no reason not to read Night. It’s brief, it’s powerful, and it’s a good first step in remembering the lives of those who were persecuted during World War II, whether they died in the cattle cars, in the work camps and the crematoria, or whether they survived as Wiesel did. People like Wiesel have undertaken the traumatic and burdensome task of putting their living nightmares into words. The least we can do is read them. Night is a good place to start.

Wiesel is pictured in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, near the upright pole at the back of the frame.

 

Photo credits:
Book cover: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780374534752.jpg
Buchenwald Photo: http://www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/photo/lc/image/74/74607.jpg

 

 

 

Barrel Fever

Book type: Humor/Fiction/Autobiography

Summary: Barrel Fever is a collection of short stories about impossible people (not as in “these people couldn’t possibly exist!” but as in extremely obnoxious or nutty people) who are caricatures of people you and I and everyone else would know. There’s a story about Sedaris’ male protagonist dating Mike Tyson and getting punched in the face for saying something negative to Mike’s dog while in the car (I can relate to this as my brother once threatened to stab me in the face with his dinner fork on Thanksgiving Day for calling his cat fat). There’s a story about a young man finding his father and aunt having sex in the basement unit his family rents to a creepy Greek guy who keeps dead squirrels in his freezer for next week’s stew, and there’s also a story about another young man who gets fed up with his brother-in-law and so, saws off the handlebars to his fancy motorcycle and ends up being stuck sleeping in the garage as the lookout for the handlebar culprit. There are a lot of nutters in this book and even though I don’t think this is where Sedaris was coming from at all, I think this book is about a barrel full of monkeys with some kind of fever that makes them crazy in their interactions with the other monkeys (obviously, monkeys being a metaphor for people in this case, in case that wasn’t readily apparent).

Lessons:

1. Every now and then, stop and think about the themes you’ve talked about that day or that week and ask yourself, “Do I talk about ___ too much? Is it possible that I make it seem like I’m fixated on ___ because I talk about it a lot?” I know that a lot of literary criticism says it’s not fair to judge an author’s personal ambitions, fixations, or interests based on what they write (otherwise someone like John Fowles, author of The Collector, a book about a man who kidnaps a girl and locks her in his basement for years–and might I add, the only book that’s ever unsettled me to read–would have been locked up long ago for the creepiness of his writing). That being said, in the real world, what you talk about (a lot, at least) is what people will identify you with. So, for example, in Sedaris’ book there are numerous references to violence against animals: running over someone’s pet dog, throwing animals out windows, I can’t even remember all of it because I tried so hard to put it out of my mind. The point is, per the advice you may remember from Mr. Foster of How to Read Literature Like a Professor a couple weeks ago, if something pops up three times or more, it’s not a coincidence, it’s a theme within the work, which means it’s there to be noticed. I’m not saying Sedaris hates animals and wants to dropkick every adorable furry creature he may come across, but I am saying that if you remember having talked about wanting to kick your neighbor’s dog a couple times this week to a coworker who doesn’t know you all that well, they might start to think you’re an animal hater and a jerk. Or, if you’ve talked multiple times today about how you’re really hungry but can’t eat because you’re trying to lose weight so you can wear a bathing suit you bought for this summer, just keep in mind that at some point somebody’s going to think you’re obsessed with your weight and they’ll want to shove a donut in your mouth both to shut you up and to sabotage your diet. So take a hint from Epictetus and pay attention to what you say, it’s often the only thing other people have to go on when they think about who you are.
   
2. When you’re on vacation, you don’t always have to buy a kitschy souvenir to remember your trip by; buy something you actually like or will really use. I say this lesson because the copy I have of Barrel Fever is one my aunt bought for me from Shakespeare and Company, a famous bookstore in Paris that we got to visit together, and one that’s entertained the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. And it’s my favorite souvenir from the time I spent in Paris with my aunt because reading, David Sedaris, bookstores, and travel are some of my favorite things in this world, so I have something to commemorate that trip with my aunt, and it’s something I’ll actually use.
   
   

   I took this picture inside Shakespeare & Co. I could’ve used this as it’s own lesson…

    

3. Sometimes it pays to do something that at the time doesn’t really pay. The final story in Barrel Fever is an autobiographical tale of the time when Sedaris worked as an elf for one holiday season at Macy’s. Now, at the time it was undoubtedly grueling work, it couldn’t have paid very well, and he must’ve gotten barfed or sneezed on by more kids than I would personally care to know even exist in this world. But there was a silver lining: Sedaris turned his experience as an elf into the story “SantaLand Diaries” and it made him famous. The embarrassing, un-lauded, and sanity-testing seasonal job as an elf for Macy’s turned out to be Sedaris’ entry point to the world of literary fame. And the quote on the cover above from the Observer compares Sedaris with Woody Allen and my personal favorite, Oscar Wilde. Being an elf probably didn’t pay off for the author at the time, but it’s definitely paid off for him in the long run. So don’t always focus on what you’re getting out of something right now, think about what you might be able to turn the experience into down the line.

 

A final review/recommendation:

In general I’ve found I’m a bigger fan of the autobiographical essays by David Sedaris than of his fictional short stories, which is why Me Talk Pretty One Day and some of his other books are ones I will probably read dozens of times in my life, while I may only read this one another time or two. But if you like humorous short stories as a break from the tedium of work while on your lunch break, or as fun bathroom reading, or while waiting for the jerk in front of you to complete his 23-minute ATM transaction in the drive-thru at the bank, Barrel Fever is an excellent book to have by your side. You may not be able to get a copy from Shakespeare & Company, but you can get it for around $12 on Amazon, so try that if you can’t make it to Paris this Memorial Day for some new reading material.

 

Photo credits:
Book cover: http://www.hachette.com.au/cover/large/9780349119762.jpg
Shakespeare & Co.:http://europeantrips.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Shakespeare-and-Co.-Paris-Bookstore.jpg