Month: September 2017

Callie usually only visits her twin sister Tilda once a month, but Tilda has been inviting her over more often since she started getting serious with her new boyfriend Felix. Callie is thrilled to be included in her sister’s life. At first she finds Felix beguiling, but she begins to see signs that he’s abusive and controlling. Her once vibrant sister seems to be withering away, but Tilda refuses to entertain Callie’s concerns. Callie joins the ControllingMen.com forums for support, but the forum members are intense and she ends up getting in over her head. Her concerns about Felix are suddenly nullified when thirty-two-year-old Felix suddenly dies alone in his hotel room, just weeks after his and Tilda’s wedding. The cause of death is determined to be heart disease, but Callie thinks the circumstances of his death are suspicious. She’s convinced the police will be questioning her soon.

Tilda is a well-known actress, while Callie lives a quiet life and works at a bookstore. Tilda has always overshadowed Callie, even in childhood. It upsets Callie that people always assume that Tilda is her older sister. She’s been dominated by Tilda her entire life, but she wants to be seen as an equal. In the scenes from childhood, we see Tilda’s subtle cruelty to Callie. It’s obvious that she relishes in Callie’s unconditional adoration. Tilda has always been the stronger of the two girls, but seeing that Tilda could be in danger gives Callie the opportunity to be the rescuer. Callie’s idea of looking out for her sister is so creepy! She obsessively monitors her sister’s well-being and seems to want to literally consume Tilda’s essence. (You’ll see what I mean when you read it. Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it!)

As disturbed as I was by Callie’s behavior, I was also rooting for her! For all her odd quirks, she comes across as a sweet person. Callie has major self-confidence issues and is constantly comparing herself to Tilda. She berates herself for her social awkwardness and “vacant” life. She’s constantly admiring Tilda and Felix’s “fine bones, smooth, translucent skin, and shiny blond hair,” while belittling her own “round pinkish” body. From other characters’ statements, we see that Callie isn’t an objective observer. Callie is consumed by anxiety and has a tendency to catastrophize everything. She sees danger lurking in every corner. I didn’t know to what extent I could trust her perceptions, especially since she doesn’t even seem to trust herself.

What causes impotence in order generic levitra cute-n-tiny.com males? ED is common among men. It contains cialis overnight shipping a number of very simple exercises like the ones above that can help you develop new habits. The medical experts explain that there has been growth seen in the sexual problems in boys, such as premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, penis shrinkage and getting viagra online our page low sex desire. Wellbeing issues like circulatory strain, cardiovascular confusion purchasing viagra online and other sorts of wellbeing issues can offer ascent to the issue of impotency. The aspects I liked most about this book were the creepy atmosphere, the odd characters, and Callie’s codependent relationship with her sister. I enjoyed the first half, because I enjoyed getting to know the characters and the flashbacks to the twin’s childhood gave me breaks from Callie’s hand-wringing. First-person perspective + a character with a single fixation can be exhausting!  I enjoyed the overall quality and atmosphere of White Bodies, so I recommend giving it a shot if you don’t have the same issues with being trapped in an obsessive character’s head that I do. It’s a very quick read and I loved all the strange character quirks! I had an idea of where it was going to go from the beginning, but the winding path that followed led me with no idea of how it was going to get there.

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If you preferred the character-focused parts of this book, you might be interested in The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s a different story and has less popular appeal, but some of the character traits in White Bodies made me think back to it: twins where one outshines the other, the relief Callie feels when trying on new identities, and the meek twin’s psychological reasons for swimming.

Ten short stories by Iraqi writers envisioning Iraq 100 years after the US-led invasion. I love short speculative fiction, but I was mostly interested in this book because I have a huge blind spot in my knowledge about Iraq. Everything I’ve read about Iraq has been from the perspective of the American military or Western journalists! I had trouble nailing down the central message of some of the stories, but I recognize this book’s importance. These futuristic tales provide insight into Iraq’s present-day situation from a much-needed perspective.

The best science fiction, they say, tells us more about the context it’s written in than the future it’s trying to predict. The future may offer a blank canvas onto which writers can project their concerns, in new and abstract ways, but the concerns themselves are still very much ‘of their time’.

In the introduction, Hassan Blasim explains that it was a challenge to collect stories for this compilation because science-fiction isn’t usually written in Iraq. Religious extremism and constant conflict don’t exactly provide a fertile ground for imaginative expression. This unique assignment allowed the writers to look at Iraq through “the long lens of speculative fiction.” While these stories are set one hundred years in the future, the 2003 invasion is never far from the writers’ minds. In some of the stories, Iraq is still occupied by foreign forces or grappling with the effects of the neverending conflict. In other stories, the war is so far behind them that the younger generation can’t even comprehend it. Each short story is written by a different author, but common threads run through many of them: suspicion of religion and strongman leaders, the selling off of everything, and the loss of history by either governmental decree or as an act of survival. In many of the stories, the United States has succumbed to its own problems with extremism. Futuristic technology is featured, but what interested me most were the humanistic aspects.

My favorite stories are bolded. For the stories that were more opaque to me, I just noted the parts that struck me as most important.

• Kahramana by Anoud – Sixteen-year-old Kahramana bravely escapes an arranged marriage to the head of the Islamic Empire. She flees to the American occupiers for safety, only to be used as propaganda and carelessly tossed aside when she outlives her usefulness.

Violence sculpts you and in this case turns you into half a statue. Violence is the most brutal sculptor mankind has ever produced. A barbaric sculptor: no one wants to learn lessons from the works he has carved.

• The Gardens of Babylon by Hassan Blasim – The narrator designs smart-games based on old stories. He’d prefer to design original smart-games, because he doesn’t see how the past has any relevance to him. With the help of a hallucinogenic drug to cure his creative block, he sees he has an unexpected connection to the past. Through the narrator’s research, we see the constantly shifting alliances and senseless, escalating violence that tore the nation apart.

• The Corporal by Ali Bader – An Iraqi soldier who was optimistic about the U.S. invasion is killed by an American soldier. After one hundred years in limbo, he convinces God to let him return to Iraq in place of a prophet. The world the soldier returns to is a completely different place; the United States is gripped by religious extremism, while Iraq is a secular utopia. The reversal of circumstances puts the resurrected soldier in a dicey situation.

• The Worker by Diaa Jubaili – The religious strongman who now leads Iraq urges the citizens to remain calm and appreciate their circumstances because their suffering could be much worse. As a mysterious figure wanders through the streets collecting corpses, we witness the full extent of suffering.

• The Day by Day Mosque by Mortada Gzar- People have resorted to selling their own snot. This one went completely over my head! I think the important parts are the commodification of everything (including biological waste), the ridiculousness of the urban improvement projects, and the absurdity of George W. Bush’s statement that “day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom.”

You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Baghdad.

These help regulate buy levitra deeprootsmag.org immune function, organs and glands and mind/emotions. Still, tadalafil prices cheap most patients have to live with the same problems. In addition, keep in mind that tab viagra works only when you are sexually stimulated. These inventions have viagra online no prescriptions provided easier means to treat ED, PDE5 inhibitors score the best. • Baghdad Syndrome by Zhraa Alhaboby – Architect Sudra Sen Sumer is diagnosed with Baghdad Syndrome, a disease that renders its victims blind. The specter of blindness makes him passionate about his latest commission to design a city square, because it might be the last project he’s able to see. Haunted by a vivid dream of a woman’s desperate plea to find her lover, he sets out to find the statue of Scheherazade that was looted from the square many decades ago and return it to its rightful home. Just as the woman was forcibly separated from her lover and the statue removed from the square, Iraqis were forced to flee their homes and deny their family history to survive. I think the title is a play on Stockholm Syndrome. Despite the horrors the Iraqi people have endured, they can’t abandon their beloved homeland.

‘History is a hostage, but it will bite through the gag you tie around its mouth, bite through and still be heard.’

• Operation Daniel by Khalid Kaki – All audio recordings of forbidden languages are banned “to protect the state’s present from the threat of the past.” Anyone possessing forbidden material is ground down into diamonds to adorn the Venerable Benefactor’s accessories. But can the past truly be erased?

To compose himself, Ur reminded himself of how pathetically humans had failed to work out the basics of intergalactic space flight, driving back his momentary fascination with the book and restoring his old feelings of revulsion towards these creatures. It was only when this feeling of superiority had a physical manifestation—a shudder of revulsion—that balance to his psyche was restored.

• Kuszib by Hassan Abdulrazzak – The extraterrestrial occupiers of Iraq are farming humans. The alien invaders easily rationalize their cruelty to the “uncivilized” humans. Ona realizes that some of the criticisms of humans could apply to her own species, but her superiors assure her that the humans are much worse. Ona feels sympathy for the poor humans, but she determines her own desires supersede the humans’ autonomy. This story is really strange (tentacles!), but the message is clear. It shows an invader deciding they know what’s best for the occupied territories and how they exert their will over those they deem beneath them.

“We call it the world whether it is our own world or that which we no longer know, the way it was before the year 2021. As if nothing changed.”

• The Here and Now Prison by Jalal Hasan – Everything from the past, including the dead, is relegated to the Old City, a place that can only be accessed by scholars. A young man suffering from a disease sneaks into the area to visit his dead mother. His girlfriend follows him and discovers the past is more vibrant than their present “where everything you touched became obsolete because you touched it, everything you said became a lie because you said it.” This story deals with the limitations of language in describing the state of things and how that makes us grow accustomed to bad circumstances without even realizing it.

• Najufa by Ibrahim Al-Marashi – A man takes a pilgrimage to Iraq with his grandfather Isa. Isa has never visited his ancestral homeland because of his own father’s experiences, so his grandson hopes to convince him there’s more to Najufa than bad memories. As Isa shares his memories with his grandson, we learn of the sectarian conflicts that consumed people after the 2003 invasion and the unbreakable spiritual connection one has to their homeland. There’s a passing reference to the Christian Assembly of Kansas and Arkansas (CAKA), a domestic terrorist group in the futuristic U.S. that rivals ISIS.

‘We’ve changed so much,’ Samir mused, as if asking himself a question.
‘The world changes and all we can do is try to keep up,’ Helen offered.
‘But have we changed for the better?’ Samir asked. (The Here and Now Prison)

This was a challenging read for me, but it was well worth my time. What I saw most in these stories is a yearning for a peaceful future. I didn’t fully understand every story, but that might be because of lack of knowledge about the region. Many of the stories came into sharper focus as I read more nonfiction about modern-day Iraq. Some of the strange little details were born from reality, such as the invaders disorienting the natives by renaming all the streets in “Kuszib.” These fictional stories also made my nonfiction reading even more impactful. After the compilation of these stories, the future of Iraq grew even more uncertain. Blasim reminds us in the “Afterword” that many of the stories were written before June 2014 when Iraq’s second largest city Mosul fell to IS. The Iraqi army recaptured Mosul in July 2017, but there’s still a long road ahead. (Washington Post: ISIS is near defeat in Iraq. Now comes the hard part)

If you are looking for more books by authors from the region, you might be interested in Ayub Nuri’s memoir Being Kurdish in a Hostile World. A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War was also very educational. It’s written by a Canadian journalist and is set in Syria, but it focuses on Iraqi refugees and familiarized me with some of Iraq’s history.

What good could come of knowing you’d fallen out of time, your whole life seized away from you?

Toronto, Canada in the 1980s: Three days have passed since anyone has seen Lily. She has always been prone to wandering off, but she usually returns within a few hours. She has never been missing for this long. Her daughter Rita has always resented her eccentric behavior, but Rita would forgive everything if she could just get her mother back. The police say there’s no evidence of a crime, so the burden is on Rita to search for clues to her mother’s whereabouts. Lily has never been open about her past; in fact, she denies the worst parts ever happened. Rita digs deeper into her mother’s history and discovers there’s much more to Lily’s story—and consequently, her own.

Matanzas Internment Camp, California in the 1940s: Lily has a history of memory problems. She had to dissociate to make it through her horrific childhood. When Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were forced into internment camps during World War II, eighteen-year-old Lily was interred at Matanzas. She falls in love with the rebellious photographer Kaz and becomes close with his father, the camp doctor. She plays a role in the events leading up to the Matanzas Riot because of her desperate need to love and be loved. Torn between love and doing the right thing, her need to retreat into a fantasy world grows stronger. Is Lily even capable of knowing what the truth is?

Rita thought about the Japanese fairy tales Lily had once told her, all the stories of sudden disappearances and reversals of fortune. Girls who dropped iridescent eggs and accidentally killed their unborn children — their resplendent, palatial surroundings suddenly vanishing. Young men who opened boxes they’d been forbidden to look inside, only to be confronted by clouds of smoke and broken mirrors that revealed faces of old men. None of us are where we think we are. None of us are who we think we are. The present constantly disappears, time violently yanked away. That inevitable process of aging could be mysteriously — tragically — accelerated. So many of these tales were about lives evaporating, futures cancelled in a heartbeat.

This story was inspired by the author’s own family history. Leslie Shimotakahara is a fourth generation Japanese-Canadian whose grandparents were interned during World War II. Matanzas is a fictional place, but it’s loosely based on the actual Manzanar incarceration center. I was glad that I read George Omi’s memoir American Yellow right before this book, because it provided helpful context and vocabulary. After the Bloom book features an older character, so it gives more insight into the adult rivalries and resentments. The chapters alternate between Rita and Lily’s perspectives. Rita has never had a healthy relationship with her mother. When Lily acts helpless, Rita feels “this cruel, uncontrollable, animalistic urge to tear apart the little world her mother had fabricated out of tissue-paper lies and delusions.” Rita manages her time with Lily, because “too much chit-chat would only fill her with irritation or worse yet, that gnawing, empty feeling: they’d never see eye to eye on anything.” The differences between them seem unimportant now that Lily is missing. Rita is determined to find her mother. She’s also dealing with a recent divorce and insecurity over her six-year-old daughter spending time with her father and his new girlfriend. Lily’s chapters cover her time in the internment camp and the shaky rebuilding of her life afterward. Lily chapters are more focused and she’s the most interesting of the two characters, but she’s difficult to connect to because she’s so adrift. Her loose grip on reality and the way she is a supporting character in her own life makes her chapters feel fuzzy around the edges.

Nature on the verge of dying was often more beautiful than at the height of its bloom.

Secrets are kept to protect the secret-keeper and those around them, but sometimes knowing the truth can give people perspective and closure. Rita initially mocks the paranoia and conspiracies of her mother’s generation, but she realizes their fears are justified when she begins to dig deeper into her mother’s past. Men in dark suits were out to get them. Many of their family members were whisked away in the middle of the night to be interrogated, some of them never to be seen again. Family bonds were dissolved and generational wealth was lost. After they were released from the internment camps, they had to start from nothing in a hostile environment. Rita had experienced prejudice due to her Japanese descent, but she is shocked to hear about the level of discrimination suffered by Japanese-Canadians who are only a decade older than her. She was aware of the internment camps in the United States and Canada, but she had never considered the full extent of what her mother had been through. In context, Lily’s idiosyncratic behavior (the well-stocked wallet, extreme frugality) suddenly makes sense. Lily becomes more than just her mother, but also a young woman who came from nothing and raised two children alone. As a young mother and recent divorcée, Rita now realizes what incredible odds Lily faced. With a new understanding of Lily’s past, Rita may also come to understand how her family became so dysfunctional and why she and her brother had such different childhoods.

“Yeah? I’ve heard rumblin’ about that stuff. Sure, it was bad what happened, but we’ve all had to take the short end of the stick from time to time. That’s how history works — winners and losers. If all the losers wanted the government to write ’em a cheque, where’d the handouts stop?”
“Maybe if the government didn’t have its head up its ass so much, it wouldn’t have to keep writing cheques.”

Shame touches everyone in this story.
• As a child, Rita was sometimes ashamed of her heritage and her mother: “It was bad enough being Japanese. … The last thing she wanted was to be seen as both the Japanese girl and the girl with the crazy mother.” Now she is ashamed of her new status as a single mother and her drop in social class.
• Lily feels shame when she realizes how all of the men in her life have used her. It’s always been easier for her to tell people what they want to hear and she’s ashamed that she remained silent when it mattered the most.
• An entire generation is ashamed. In the internment camps, Lily watched “distinguished men reduced to beasts of burden.” When everyone was allowed to return to their lives, many were willing to do anything to assimilate, including hiding their culture:”Forget everything, turn the other cheek. Pull yourself up by your goddamn bootstraps.”  Some people were so ashamed of what happened to them that they withdrew from society completely.
It is estimated buy levitra without rx that around 30 million people in the United States suffer from erectile dysfunction and there could be no denying to this fact. http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/vampire-bats/ online viagra So, if anybody is suffering from the above mentioned any disease and if you stay anywhere, then you may contact Best Sexologist. By no means viagra 25mg online exceed the recommended dosage as it won’t expand your moxie consider. If no any pregnant sign in levitra free sample one year, check your sperm quality. • Governments are ashamed of their actions and gloss over shameful events in their history books. The euphemistic view of the internment camps and the government propaganda efforts give those whose rights were never in question a privileged view of what happened: “No one had been comfortable with all those Japs living off the fat of the land anyway while the rest of America had suffered wartime shortages.” Rita is frustrated with the concept of the “model minority” and how some community members are exalted as examples of how polite and strong one should be after their rights have been trampled. Anyone who doesn’t behave the “correct” way is seen as the problem, rather than the thing they were forced to endure.

Everyone, perhaps, had these faint, staticky shadow selves following them around, like degraded clones. Yourself, but not yourself. Things you’d done, but couldn’t believe you’d done, would never acknowledge. Parts of yourself you couldn’t bear to own.

The ghosts of the past linger, long after they were thought to have been left behind. Rita and her brother always knew there was something wrong, but they had to pretend not to see it. Because of all the secrets and shame, Rita has to deal with a gaping hole in her family history, as well as a distant relationship with her mother. Both Rita and Lily develop some type of split self to deal with demanding circumstances. In order to move forward, both women need to deal with their pasts. Rita needs to work through her difficult relationship with her mother. Lily needs to deal with her past trauma and guilt. After the Bloom is about the things we do to survive and the things we do to live with ourselves. Do lies for the greater good actually benefit anyone or does it just extend the pain? Many of the characters try to forget the past to protect themselves and those around them. Is it better to forget or does remembering make us whole? No matter how much we might want to forget, the past can never be truly buried. The effects of the past reverberate through generations, whether we recognize it or not.

LINKS
• Book Trailer
• Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment – Photographs play a key role in the story. Photos can show what actually happened, but they can also be used to show what we want to see. Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange’s photos of the internment camps were confiscated by the U.S. military and hidden away in the National Archives until 2006.
• Manazar Riot/Uprising – The Matanzas Riot is loosely based on the 1942 Manazar Riot.
• Driven Underground Years Ago, Japan’s ‘Hidden Christians’ Maintain Faith – History is filled with people deemed as undesirable by their fellow citizens. Rita notices how Lily seems to shield herself with bigotry. It’s a reminder that these are not just isolated instances in history and that it’s important to look inside ourselves.
• The Redress Movement- A campaign to obtain restitution and an apology for the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians during World War II.
• The theme of collective amnesia reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant:

“I know my god looks uneasily on our deeds of that day. Yet it’s long past and the bones lie sheltered beneath a pleasant green carpet. The young know nothing of them. … Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.”

“Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery? I see how devoutly you wish it, for your old horrors to crumble as dust. Yet they await in the soil as white bones for men to uncover.”