MAR - Traveling With Pomegranates

March review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009. [Travel category]

This month was Travel month in the great world of Caty Reading-dom, and I've had this book on my shelf for a while. It had all the hallmarks of things that strike my fancy: female solidarity, travel narratives, pomegranates, imagery and mythos, a clever cover...anyway. Sue Monk Kidd has been a name I've toyed with for years; I'm pretty sure I own both her novels, but I had never read them before this. I bought them in high school, when they came out, book guzzler that I am, but it took me until now, until this book, to sink my teeth into her. (And Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which she talks a lot about in this book, is already ordered and on my desk expectantly.) Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France is the story of Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, taking a number of trips in the formative stages of a new epoch in their respective lives, attempting to find their ways back to themselves and each other, each battling through different feelings of loss and uncertainty.

I could tell from the first pages that I was going to like the book, I could feel the way each woman's sentences mirrored those thoughts that I kept in my own mind, but rarely gave voice to. They thought so deeply about everything, which is clearly the point of a memoir, especially a travel memoir--to go back over the things that have happened and lay on top of them a film of greater meaning--but I still liked to think about these women in the moment, accessing such deep parts of themselves and putting them down on paper. I liked to read passages where one woman wrote about another who had separated herself to go and write, and the book would then revisit the separate woman and I would get to go inside.

This dual nature of the book was intensely poetic to me, the two halves that make up the whole. There is one point where the women go to Eleusis and visit the well where the goddess Demeter is said to have wept for her daughter Persephone when she was swallowed into the underworld by Hades. At different points in the narrative, we get to hear both women, young and old, at this well, as well as watching from the other's external perspective. As a young woman, I identified with Ann, having recently graduated college and felt at a sort of loss for my next step. This was a clear parallel that I sort of expected to take away from their story. What I did not expect, however, was the sort of eye-opening I got reading the Sue chapters. Each time I finished one, I would take a moment and sift over the memories I have of my own mother in the past years and I was startled to see the different shape of those memories after reading. I am planning on passing my copy along to her soon, and I am interested to see what she identifies with, or to what extent, rather.

A striking moment early on comes in the pair's first trip, where Sue buys the two of them small pomegranate charms at a shop in Greece. The pomegranate comes to symbolize so much for these two women: the stories of Demeter and Persephone, the female mysteries of womb and woe, the first experience and the re-experience. I too have a connection to the pomegranate, but mine comes from a different realm. I bought my charm (seen in the above photo) at a hole-in-the-wall jewelry stand in Israel when I was 16. The charm reminds me of the first time I visited the country, the first time I started to connect to my Judaism on my own terms, rather than those meted out by whatever religious program I had been a part of, synagogue or Young Judea or what have you. Pomegranates play a big part in Judaism as well as Greek culture, steeped in theology from the Old Testament as "God's Fruit," the fruit some scholars believe to be the forbidden fruit of Eden. The seeds are said to number some 613, coincidentally the number of mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah, and are meant to represent a sort of righteousness, as well as learning. I knew a little of Demeter and her pomegranates, but it was interesting to see a different side of the symbol I have come to love over the years.

I haven't really even touched on the feminine aspect of this book, and I don't know if I have the words for it right now. Plus I wouldn't feel right pasting it onto the end of a post like this, just for the sake of having it. Suffice it to say that Ann's struggle to find and keep herself throughout her impending marriage, her Yellow Wallpaper dream, and her rewriting the ceremony with her mother all resonated with me on a level that I am looking forward to exploring more. I will flesh that out better another night. For now, adieu.

FEB - American Supernatural Tales

February review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi, Penguin Horror Series 2013. [Anthology category]

what better to read on Valentine's Day while waiting for my date?

This month was anthology month, and what better choice than the collection of horror stories that I got from my secret santa? It felt quite perfect, actually. Guillermo del Toro is curating a horror series that I have been obsessed with from afar since my boyfriend told me about it late last year. I am a sucker for good designs (half my beer choices are based on the name and the label, I'll be honest), and I've always sort of had a thing about covers. So when my secret santa bought me the anthology, it seemed a perfect confluence of events, begging to be taken advantage of. And I did, because who am I to say no to The Fates?

It's been a while since I've read an anthology cover to cover. For school, it was generally a few select stories, although the overachiever in me always tried to read as much as I could to get a sense of the whole collection. As such, I wasn't quite sure what to pay attention to in my reading. Obviously the stories all have a common supernatural thread, as well as being authors from the States--those are the two qualifications for the anthology set forward in the title--but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. In the end, I simply relished all the different interpretations of the word "supernatural," as well as all the different writing styles, letting them wash over me one after the other. Joshi organized the book chronologically, in addition making a note when authors played off of or influenced each other. As a result, I was treated to a sort of whirlwind tour of supernatural writing through the ages, and I really quite enjoyed it. I enjoyed finally reading some stories that have been on my list for a long time ("The Fall of the House of Usher" by Nathaniel Hawthorne), being exposed to the beginning of a mythos that I've become familiar with through countless televised cultural appropriations ("The Call of Cthulu" by H.P. Lovecraft), and falling in love with new weirdness ("The Late Shift" by Dennis Etchison).

In my last Eclectic Reader entry, I talked about what the genre of horror means to me, what my immersion in this subject has taught me. I talked about it as a way to answer questions that do not or cannot have concrete answers, a way for humans to rationalize the unrationalizable, in a way similar to religion. Guillermo del Toro, ever the artist and mastermind, brilliantly hits upon what I was trying to evoke in his series introduction, talking about the beneficial qualities of horror, of being scared, "for to learn what we fear is to learn who we are." Gah, this man has consistently found a way to make my heart tighten in that singular realization that someone else feels exactly the way that you do.

In another instance of the universe and my reading list aligning, I just started watching HBO's True Detective, which happens to feature the story "The Yellow Sign," part of The Yellow King by Robert W. Chambers, which happens to be collected in this volume. It was, in fact, one of my favorite stories, largely due to the intricacies of the characters and the ambiguity of the horror described and the conclusion, things that I'm looking forward to seeing portrayed on screen.

I would be hard-pressed if asked to try to choose my favorite story within the multitudes, as many of them touched me in ways that only they could. I guess I'll list some of them with a little bit of reasoning:

• "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes" by Fritz Leiber (1949): I am a sucker for vamp reimaginings, and this one is one of the most eloquent and high-flown that I have ever experienced that still had the added bonus of not making me want to punch whoever came up with it in the face. The idea of a sort of consumerist vampirism with photography as the lure is so incredibly innovative that I can't help but be drawn in as the protagonist was.
• "The Hollow Man" by Norman Partridge (1991): I love me a good wendigo myth. Ever since episode 2 of Supernatural, I've been fascinated by this creature that I can never quite place in a monster category. I really enjoyed the perspective shift in the tale, being told by the monster himself; it's a rare horror story that focuses on the one who causes the horror. I used to write dorky stories like this when I was a kid, but never with as much pathos as Partridge pulls off.
• "In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan: I really enjoyed this story and its position at the end of the anthology because I feel like it lends itself to the idea that I and del Toro have examined, the idea that some things cannot be explained, try as we might, and even if that is the case, we should not forget about them. We should remember, and let that fear inform our lives, though we should not let it overtake our lives.

I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings on American Supernatural Tales. It's been a fun time. I haven't read an anthology in a while, as I mentioned before, and I think I wanted to keep my post as open-ended as I could in order to address everything I wanted to. Stay tuned!