Review and Blog for Wicked by Gregory Maguire
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
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Wicked by Gregory Maguire
We have all found our self perceptions at odds with the perceptions of others. At any time in my life you could have gathered a group of people from some portion of my life and they would have likely given you a different authoritatively delivered description of who I was and how I treated others. Perspective is shaped by a wide variety of factors and rarely at any given point are a majority of those factors actually related to the person being perceived.
In Wicked, Elphaba, who eventually grows up to be the woman known as the Wicked Witch of the West is often judged. What is interesting about the book is that Gregory Maguire lets the read pass judgement on Elphaba. We’re not really sure what her motives are, because we assume she’s going somewhere. Where she ends up going is, in the end, all too familiar.
Elphaba finds supporters, alienates them, brings them back. She’s different. She’s green. She’s an iconoclast. She is ripe for misinterpretation. She creates situations for herself. She lives through those situations. She finds herself, years later, trying to make sense of these situations.
I started reading this book in Sun River, Oregon and a few weeks later found myself near the end of this book in Portland, Oregon. A campground near Sun River was a location where a woman I was seeing deliberately staged a scene for me to misinterpret so that I would react in such a way as to release her from our relationship without her having to say to me that she had decided to end it herself. That weekend for years haunted me as much as any spell any witch could have put upon me. Even now, nearly a decade later, with the effects of time counteracting the effects of the spell, I made a side trip to the campground to exorcise the spell.
The fact that the spell, as it were, was old, by “getting over it” as we get over anything I had integrated it into my world view. I stayed there only briefly and went hiking to a waterfall in another area. But it led me to judge both the woman who brought about the situation and myself.
Later in the month I walked around parts of Portland I had been a regular in while I was a Portlandite. And as I was doing this, I was reading about Elphaba and her more intense relationship. How that sculpted who she became. Her reactions were certainly more intense than mine … but in the end it was all about her perceptions and other people’s perception of her for being there in the first place. Just as my perceptions of almost every resident of Portland are tainted by my experiences both personal and professional while I lived there. Believe me, it was quite an intense 14 months.
Oddly enough, these thoughts didn’t gel in my mind until Vivian and I were shopping in downtown Portland. We stopped by a shop which sold figurines of various types. There were thousands of them. Thousands of them. Star Wars figurines. Firefighter figurines. Baseball figurines. … Wizard of Oz figurines. And in those little plaster models was the
Wicked Witch of the West. And I had such a strange reaction.
My perceptions of who the Witch was, how she had become who she was, and so forth, had been changed through the reading of this book. I thought to myself that it wasn't fair to her that this popular vision of her (the Witch) should be so enduring. But I also mused while walking around downtown Portland, that a statement by Boq, a munchkin in the book was true for all people who had unresolved relationships floating in their minds.
He said, “Of course I remember her. How many green people are there?” We all remember the green people in our lives and we are all green people in other people's lives. If either are not true for a person, then that person has never truly lived.
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Read between 7 and 21 November, 2003
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While reading this book, as I said, I went to a conference in Sun River, Oregon. Later Vivian and I went to Karen Larson's and her new husband Dirk's wedding reception in Portland. While in Portland, I got to exorcise some ghosts and ride the Northwest streetcar. We also went to eat at a superb french restaurant in downtown Portland where we had Escargot, frog legs, pumpkin soup, steak with a nice fois gras butter and prawns in some sauce we've forgotten. It is called Brasserie Montmarte. It was outstanding.
While we were doing this and I was finishing the book, the Cubs and the Red Sox clung tightly to their respective curses and the Yankees (The George Bush Presidential Campaign of Baseball) and the Florida Marlins (The poster children for not counting your chickens) progressed into the world series.
I've finished Reading Wicked and have moved on to All my Life for Sale.
The review of Wicked should be up this weekend.
News of Gary Numan's Baby Take a look, they've been working on that release for a while....
Review and Blog for Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
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Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow
I am now a veteran of several Dawkins campaigns. I have learned more than a few things readings Dawkins books. He’s sort of the Darwinian William F. Buckley, he goes of on tangents, he rants when you least expect it, but he’s very firm in his convictions and has a passel of interesting arguments that are eloquently and entertainingly stated. So you keep reading even though at times you’re thinking “Where is this coming from?”
Chapter six of this book, for example, is nearly 100% rant. On page 20 of my version is also this undeniably rant-like statement “There are even a few vocal fifth columnists within science itself who hold exactly these views, and use them to waste the time of the rest of us.” This was describing modern day scientific skeptics whom, according to Dawkins, are so caught up in semantic arguments they seek to negate all of science itself.
So we’ve established that Dawkins is at-once tedious and a good read. He has a goodly collection of attention grabbing one-liners. The best of which is “it is overwhelmingly probably that you are dead.”
The entire point of this book is to help the reader separate good science from bad science or good science from mysticism or good science from base entertainment or good science from a bag of chips. In short, it’s his mission here to tell people to start paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
Unweaving the Rainbow – the concept itself – is quite simple. At one point Keats penned a poem that lamented science did “unweave a rainbow.” Which meant that previously it was unknown – a thing of distant and unknowable beauty. And that by identifying the components and systems at work to create the vision of a rainbow to the eye science had destroyed its unknowable beauty.
It is Dawkins’ contention that by understanding the incredible complexity of events that team up to create a rainbow (refraction, temperature, distance, angle, vision itself, etc) that this makes it even more astounding. Even more beautiful.
Dawkins doesn’t let many people get away here, we discuss postmodern theory, magicians, religious quackery, pseudo-science, and on and on. I wouldn’t recommend any Dawkins book over any other, really. But I do recommend that you get one.
Oh, I would be remiss in saying that this was a gift from my friend Karen Woodward in response to my hosting her web site www.woodwardstudio.com. Please, if you want, I’d be happy to host other web sites for small book gifts like this one.
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While reading this book I turned 38, went to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, went to Sun River Oregon for a conference, some Kirshner's Homebody / Kabul at the Intiman Theatre, and went to see Cirque du Soliel in Seattle as well.
