Learning. “The Devil can enter the seemingly impenetrable compound freely because the outside is really in. In other words, the compound is a metaphor for the fortress of the human psyche.... This monster sounds a lot like the demon that assaults Rosemary while she’s sleeping. Could it be that Rosemary, a good girl, doesn’t want to admit to having—let alone liking—rough sex with Guy? Is “demon” a name we give to otherwise “normal” husbands who occasionally like to rape their wives?  Jong argues that “Devil” is how we absolve the hubris and shame of our desires.”   Excerpted from" Masha Tupitsyn  A Mashup of Devils. July 3rd, 2009  The Rumpus.net return

Learning again. I can't help but compare Cormac McCarthy’s work of fiction, The Road, to Mary Rakow's The Memory Room.  McCarthy's such a fine read.  With his incredibly well written illumination we peak through closed fingers in horror of our apocalyptic damage, press our noses against the destruction of the earth and of course our own.  We root so for that man and his son, and the writer does give us a sliver of sunshine at the very end so we can hope, somehow against all the evidence, that the son will survive. This is McCarthy's begrudging offer after his seductive portrayal of the devastated landscape.  As if it were against his code to offer hope. We get what we deserve.  Whereas with Rakow, hers is an equally devastated landscape, but internal (of course, she's a woman!) and it's just as much a page turner, a fascinating and incredible weaving of the internal languages of the multivoiced self.  And yet hers, at end, is much more of an open handed offering.  We feel a pride and awe in her protagonist woman's strength to endure, like McCarthy's post heroism hero, and yet....she gives us more than a sliver of hope.  We know not only that we have the strength to survive, but also the intuition, the smarts, the way to find or make the  tools we’ll need and help to figure it all out.  And that we can tolerate the truth of what is revealed, even when we suffer for things not our doing and those that are.  And that we can change in response.  We survive knowing more for having traveled through the impossible.  A net gain of heart.

Michael Chabon hints at all this in his interesting discussion in his review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in “After the Apocalypse” The New York Review of Books.  Feb 15, 2007.  return