"Never Let Me Go"

The song for which Never Let Me is named was written by a nonexistent singer who smoked cigarettes on a bar stool.  Well, I don't smoke and I fall off of bar stools even when I'm sober, but here's part of what I think that song might have sounded like:

Postcards and clippings,
Things I’ve kept and known,
Hopes and wishes spelled out on paper
Drop them, forget them;
Into the waste they go.

These are the things
I’ve hoarded all these years–
Kept hidden in my pockets,
Repeated in my ears.

Chorus:
Baby, baby, never let me go
Baby, baby, try to understand
This is for us, for you.
Don’t ask me to forget them;
Baby, baby, never let me go.

Medical Justice in Literature

Ask a man if he wants to live forever.  His initial answer is yes; who wants to die?  In the past several years, literature has begun to retell the lengths individuals may be willing to go in order to stay alive for as long as possible; it asks what the ethical boundaries are in a society that strives to prevent illness and preserve life.  Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go examine how ethical boundaries are crossed in  scientific attempts to preserve life and ask the reader to decide whether these crossed boundaries are justified or not.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the non-fiction account of an impoverished woman and how her cancerous cervix cells were used for medical research.  Never Let Me Go is the dystopian novel about young English clones whose purpose is to donate their organs to the sick, both works discuss the possible breaching of one’s rights.  Lacks was offered no consent form to sign, allowing her doctor to take her cells similarly, the clones have no say over their futures.  However, Lacks’ cells are taken to advance medical research; her cells help develop a polio vaccine and aid in the success of in-vitro fertilization.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, all clones, are created to put an end to cancer.  If Lacks’ and the clones’ bodies were used to promote the universal good, did the doctors and scientists do anything wrong?

Both works approach the theme of medical injustice differently.  In The Immortal Life, doctors are the antagonists, the ones who have stolen something from the Lacks family, and Lacks and her family are not quite protagonists, but are certainly victims.  In Never Let Me Go, we are never introduced to the doctors or scientists who created the clones and we are never asked to view Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy through the lens of pity.  Ishiguro makes clear that the characters, like Lacks, have been denied something crucial: control over their lives.  So although Henrietta Lacks is supposed to be pitied, the disservice done to her was monetary (her not receiving compensation for her cells), and Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are not supposed to be pitied, per se, but seen as real people, and their disservice was not having true free will; they could not escape having to die for someone else at some point in their short lives.

Jeremy Bentham, one of the fathers of Utilitarianism (Wikipedia), said, “It is the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people which is the measure of right and wrong” (BrainyQuote).  This would appear to be the premise of the doctors’ decisions to remove Lacks’ cells for research and to create clones for their organs.  To them, it was ethical—heroic, even—to save Lacks’ cells and to dictate the fate of Kathy and her friends because their actions help countless other people.  So they overlooked the pain their decision caused the Lacks clan and chose to view the clones as medical martyrs.  And while both authors shun this mindset, neither Skloot nor Ishiguro tell the reader what to believe in so many words….

Skloot chooses a quotation from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremburg Code by Elie Wiesel to preface The Immortal Life which immediately shows her point of view toward the doctors’ breeching of an ethical boundary.  “We must not see any person as an abstraction.  Instead we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (Skloot).  In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro establishes how differently the clones live compared to normal humans.  For the most part, he makes no comment as to whether their lives are superior or inferior to ours, except for a particular scene in Part Two of the novel.  Ruth is embarrassed by her collection of trinkets she has bought at the sale their school puts on now and then.  She puts all her keepsakes into a bag and gives it to the caretaker of the estate she and her friends are living at, asking him to give it to a consignment shop.  “‘Keffers rummaged in the bag a bit,’” Ruth narrates, “‘he didn’t know what any of it was—why should he?—and he did this laugh and said no shop he knew would want stuff like that’” (Ishiguro, 131).

Even with the authors’ opinions subtly revealed, the answer to the question—did the doctors act unethically—indistinct, and both sides of the issue have strong, valid arguments.  Ask a man if he wants to live forever.  Initially he says yes; who wants to die?  Ask what price he is willing to pay and he hesitates.  Rebecca Skloot’s debut book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go ask us to consider whether the ethical boundaries crossed are justified—if boundaries are crossed at all.  The answer is ultimately left up to the individual reader.

 Photos downloaded from foxsearclight.com.

Grapes of Ill

Portly.  Rotund.  Curvy.  Big-boned.  Voluminous.  Obese.  No matter what aphorisms we assign, sometimes only obese fits.  In Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Johnny Depp’s character Gilbert is strongly affected by his mother’s eating disorder.  He comes to resent her because of the responsibilities that her gluttony places on him.  Gilbert has to be the parent, financial supporter, handyman, and nanny for his family, especially for his younger, mentally retarded brother Arnie. Throughout the film, Gilbert experiences numerous emotions regarding his mother and their way of life, showing the chasm, as Susan Sontag describes it, between the kingdoms of the well and the ill—and the shame that accompanies the latter kingdom.  Hallström accomplishes these dynamics through several images and dialogues between characters.



What's Eating Gilber Grape DVD cover.
Photo from pricecanada.com



While we may not consider it this way, the living can be split into two categories, which Susan Sontag, the late essayist, novelist, and playwright, explains in her essay, “Illness as Metaphor”:  “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.  Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick” (Sontag, 3).   This “night-side of life” plays into the film almost immediately.  What’s Eating Gilbert Grape begins with Depp’s character Gilbert and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Arnie waiting at the side of the road for the annual parade of RVs to coast down the hill and through their little town on its way to more exciting places.  Immediately, Hallström establishes Gilbert as a resident of the kingdom of the well and establishes Arnie as a resident of the kingdom of the ill through their interaction.  Arnie asks Gilbert a series of questions, which are answered with weary, slightly patronizing answers on Gilbert’s part.



If the procession of RVs represents the multitude of possibilities for Gilbert, our introduction to his mother Bonnie makes those opportunities seem like pipe dreams.  During the film, Gilbert shows his love interest Becky the Grape house from a distance.  It is just a black geometrical bump on the horizon, but Gilbert comments that it is nothing compared to the humongous woman inside.  But this is not the only image Hallström uses to portray the disgust Gilbert feels for his mother.



The house in which the Grape family lives was built by the late Mr. Grape, who hanged himself in the basement, and it is now falling apart bit by bit.  Gilbert, the family handyman, fixes what he can, but he has to ask his friend Tucker for help when the first floor starts to sag because of Bonnie’s weight.  Tucker goes down to the basement alone while Gilbert keeps watch upstairs for Bonnie, presumably because he does not like to be in the place where his father died.  From Tucker’s perspective, we look up through the floorboards to see Bonnie Grape moving slowly on the first floor.  With each step, the floor creaks crankily.  Bonnie might be part of the land of living—although most likely not of the well—but sooner or later, she is bound to fall through the floor into the land of the dead, or at least into the kingdom of the ill.  In this scene, the floor and Gilbert’s refusal to go down to the basement symbolize the divide between the two kingdoms of Sontag’s essay.

While Gilbert may love his mother enough to not want her to find out she has weakened their floor, he does not respect her enough to keep her from being on display.  While Tucker is working on the basement, a few kids from town run up to the house, trying to get a view of the fat lady.  In jest, Gilbert lifts one of them up so he can see in the window.  He runs back to his friends, screaming, “I saw her!  I saw her!”



During a touching moment with Becky, Gilbert reveals how he really feels about his family:

BECKY:  Tell me what you want as fast as it comes to you.  OK?

GILBERT:  OK.



BECKY:  OK, what do you want?  Faster!

GILBERT:  OK, I want a new thing.  House, I want a new house for the family.  I want a—I want Momma to take aerobics classes.  I want Ellen to grow up.  I want a new brain for Arnie.  I want…

BECKY:  What do you want for you, just for you?

GILBERT:  I want to be a good person.



Only at the climax of the movie, when Arnie is arrested for climbing the water tower, does Gilbert finally come to accept and to sincerely love his mother.  Arnie is Bonnie’s “sunshine,” as she calls him, and when she finds out her son has been arrested, she leaves the house for the first time in seven years to bail him out of prison. When the family emerges from the police station, half the town appears to be watching them—to be watching Bonnie.  Children playing in the grass stare up at her girth; housewives stare in shock, probably hoping they never swell to her size.  The next day, at Arnie’s birthday party, Gilbert goes to his mother, who once again will not leave the house, and promises never to hurt her again.  He has always acted this way toward Arnie, promising to look after him and defend him, but this is the first time he has put her eating disorder aside and come to care about her.  In doing this, he bridges the gap between the two kingdoms from “Illness as Metaphor.”



Still, Gilbert does not give his mother the respect she is entitled to as a parent—however neglectful a parent she may be—until her death that evening.  Motivated by her meeting Becky, who neither stares nor laughs at her, Bonnie makes the journey up to her bedroom.  She presumably has not been to the second floor of the house in years, and the climb is difficult for her due to her weight, but she makes it to her bed and asks for Arnie, who finds she has passed away in her sleep.  “It’s going to take a crane to get her out,” Gilbert tells his sibling. 

“There’s going to be a crowd,” his younger sister Ellen realizes.  “I just know there’s going to be a crowd.”  So, to keep his family from being embarrassed, and to honor his mother, Gilbert has everyone help him empty the house, which he then sets on fire.  While this may seem disrespectful, it saves his mother’s name from being soiled any more by her size.



Hallström represents illness in this film as something of which to be ashamed.  Gilbert, who just wants “to be a good person,” is even ashamed of his mother.  It is only when she has passed that we see, in the final scene, that Gilbert can take hold of the possibilities waiting for him.  What’s Eating Gilbert Grape ends with Gilbert and Arnie joining Becky in her RV as it sails down the hill like a ship of hope.  As her RV comes, Gilbert delivers these lines:  “Amy got a job offer to manage a bakery in Des Moines….  Ellen can’t wait to switch schools.  Arnie asked if we were going to go, too.  I said, ‘Well, we can go anywhere, if we want….  We can go anywhere.’”



Through dialogue like this and through images such as the people staring at Bonnie, the small house on the horizon, and the divide of the basement and first floor, Hallström conveys illness as a inhibiting kingdom, something that holds others back.  Gilbert has to learn to love his mother, to respect her, and to fulfill the jobs required of him.



Works Cited

Depp, Johnny, Juliette Lewis, and Mary K. Schellhardt, perf. What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Dir. Lasse Hallström. 1993. Paramount. Web.

Sontag, Susan. "Illness as Metaphor" and "Its Metaphor". New York: Picador, 1989. 3. Print.

How Romantic Are the Blind!

Blind Man's Buff, painted by George Moreland in 1788, depicts several middle class adults and children playing the classic game, blind man's buff.  With one glance, this painting screams Romanticism.  Its dramatic lighting gives it away.  In art, this movement is especially characterized by seeing man as inferior to nature and by its dramatic lighting.  Below are several other Romantic pieces to give you a better idea:
  

Typical of Morland, a primarily eighteenth century, English painter, this scene takes place in a forest, showing the worship of nature.  We see one girl as the main focus of the painting, with almost a spotlight on her, highlighting the individual and the stereotypical lighting.  Everyone has a different, however vivid, emotion in not only their faces, but in their body language, showing the emotional side of Romanticism.  The children off to either side of the painting seem curious and eager; the blindfolded girl appears to be slightly frantic, and yet her hands look as if they’re about to clap in delight; the young man on the ground seems almost hesitant to touch her, almost asking, “Is this all right?”  In addition, we also see the middle class attire of these players, an aforementioned characteristic of Romanticism.

This piece reminds me of the scene in Blindness when the first man to go blind wakes up, hoping he can open his eyes and will have had his sight restored.  “…And if I were to open my eyes and see, he asked himself, gripped by anxious hope” (8).  Like the girl in Blind Man’s Buff, the character thinks he can just whip off his metaphorical blindfold and it will be someone else’s turn, as the car thief put it.  A few pages earlier, even, the blind man describes his former perception of blindness as a black veil (6).  However, this is no parlor game and he has to deal with the repercussions of, as a Romantic might phrase it, the powerful impact of mother nature.  Here, his blindness.

Referencing Susan Sontag's essay, "Illness as Metaphor," this article addresses the metaphors given to blindness.  Check it out!

Your Kingdom Come

Hello, all.  The underlining tool is not working--or it is working all too well.  I apologize for the inconvenience.

Sweet Briar Chaplain Adam White philosophy professor Kevin Honeycutt recently delivered a lecture on the religious and philosophic aspects of Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor.”  During the lecture I was particularly struck by the notion that the sick are treated differently from the well; they are avoided or even removed from society.  I began to wonder if we, as members of a society based on Judeo-Christian values, see the diseased as exhibiting physical evidence of the Biblical Fall and therefore individuals we wish to avoid.

We observe this ostracizing as far back as the Old Testament times, specifically in the book of Leviticus. 

Now the leper on whom the sore is, his clothes shall be torn and his head bare; and he shall cover his mustache and cry, ‘Unclean!  Unclean!’  He shall be unclean.  All the days he has the sore he shall be unclean.  He is unclean, and he shall dwell alone; his dwelling shall be outside camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46)

These orders are given by God Himself, perhaps in an effort to protect the healthy from this contagious disease. 

If we stop to think about it, the other diseases in history warranting isolation from society were all contagious.  Remember the plague, the scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and AIDS; even the common cold and chicken pox, although rarely deadly, are grounds for staying away from others.  However, cancer, the latest scare, is not something we can catch or contract from others.

But why do we still shy away from the ill, such as cancer patients—or even AIDS patients, which is not airborne?  Susan Sontag, in her essay “Illness as Metaphor,” claims, “With the advent of Christianity, which imposed more moralized notions of disease, as of everything else, a closer fit between disease and ‘victim’ gradually evolved.  The idea of disease as punishment yielded the idea that a disease could be particularly appropriate and just punishment” (Sontag, 43).  While this philosophy passé in the Reformed (Calvinistic) Church, man still views disease as blaring evidence of the Fall. 

Ernest Becker, a writer and teacher, expands on this in his book Escape from Evil.  “Man wants above all to endure and prosper, to achieve immortality in some way.  Because he knows he is mortal, and the thing he wants most to deny is his mortality” (Becker, 92).  Unfortunately, seeing others ill reminds man he is neither perfect nor immortal. Genesis 3 recounts mankind’s slipping from God’s grace.  Because of the devil, disguised as a serpent, Eve, the first woman, ate from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17a) and convinced her husband Adam, the first man, to eat of it also, even though God explicitly told them not to eat from it.  Consequently, God told Adam, “Cursed is the ground for your sake….  In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:17b, 19).  This not only brought suffering and disease into the world, but God’s words were also man’s death sentence.  Suddenly, man is not invincible; he is not immortal. 

Chaplain White says this shying away from illness comes from the Deuteronomistic teaching that says God will bless those who obey Him and curse those who do not obey Him (Deuteronomy 30:16-18).  In this mindset, only evil people get sick.  This skewed interpretation of Scripture is addressed later in the Bible when Jesus’ disciples, upon seeing a blind man, ask, “‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?’  Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him’” (John 9:2b-3).  By this, Christ does not deny sinful nature (the result of the Fall) itself, only God’s punishing man through disease.  He says the man is blind so God’s perfect will may be seen through him.  God works through man’s pitfalls and darkest thoughts, and even man’s illness, to further His kingdom. 

I think man isolates the sick because illness reminds him of his imperfection and mortality.  “All you have to do is to say your group is pure and good, eligible for a full life and for some kind of eternal meaning.  But others…are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness into your vitality” (Becker, 93).  Disease is physical evidence of the Fall, which man tries to forget, so he isolates the sick as an act of denial and desperation.

Works Cited

Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press, 1975. 92-93. Print.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 1977. 43. Print.

The MacArthur Student Bible: New King James Version. Nashville: World Publishing, 2000. Print.

Illness as Metaphor

This annotation is part of a group project in which we went through a specific section of the late Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor."

p. 73:  “In La Triviata, as soon as Alfredo wins Violetta’s love, the moves her from unhealthy wicked Paris to the wholesome countryside….”

“La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias (1852), a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title "La traviata" means literally The Woman Gone Astray, or perhaps more figuratively, The Fallen Woman. It was originally entitled Violetta, after the main character,” reports Wikipedia.



Frank Lloyd Wright
Photo from bolender.com



p. 73:  “In The Living City (1958), Frank Lloyd Wright compared the city of earlier times, a healthy organism….”

Frank Lloyd Wright, famous for the house, Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania was a well-known American architect.  The Living City is one of his later works, published the year before he died, according to Wikipedia.

p. 74:  “Bichat in 1800 defined life as ‘the ensemble of functions which resists death.’”

Marie François Xavier Bichat “(November 14, 1771 – July 22, 1802), French anatomist and physiologist, was born at Thoirette (Jura).  Bichat is best remembered as the father of modern histology and pathology. Despite the fact that he worked without a microscope he was able to advance greatly the understanding of the human body. He was the first to introduce the notion of tissue (tissues) as distinct entities. He maintained that diseases attacked tissues rather than whole organs” (Wikipedia).

p. 75:  “In 1916, in ‘Socialism and Culture,’ Gramsci denounced….”

Gramsci, an Italian politician and philosopher, according to Wikipedia, was involved with the Communist Party of Italy and was put in prison by a member of the Fascist movement, according to Wikipedia.

p. 75:  “In 1919, Mandelstam paid the following tribute to Pasternak: To read…”
Osip Mandelstam “was a Soviet poet and essayist,” according to Wikipedia.  Poetry of his was in Tenishevsky school’s almanac.
Boris Pasternak “was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one of the most influential collections of poetry published in the Russian language in the 20th century. In the West he is best known for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, a tragedy whose events span the last period of the Russian Empire and the early days of the Soviet Union. It was first translated and published in Italy in 1957. He helped give birth to the dissident movement with the publication of Doctor Zhivago,” reports Wikipedia.

p. 75:  “And Marinetti, denouncing Communism in 1920: Communism is the exasperation of the bureaucratic cancer that has always wasted humanity.”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian writer, fathered the Futurist faction, reports Wikipedia.

p. 76:  “…from Plato to, say, Hobbes…”
Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher and “a champion of absolutism for the sovereign,” maintains Wikipedia.

p. 78:  “In 1708, Lord Shaftesbury wrote:….”
Lord Shaftesbury (a.k.a. Earl of Shaftesbury) in context, is likely “Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury” (Wikipedia) who “was an English politician, philosopher and writer....  Shaftesbury's amiability of character seems to have been one of his principal characteristics. Like Locke he had a peculiar pleasure in bringing forward young men. Among these may be especially mentioned Michael Ainsworth, a native of Wimborne St Giles, the young man who was the recipient of the Letters addressed to a student at the university, and was maintained by Shaftesbury at University College, Oxford,” says Wikipedia.

Please Keep Your Cervix Cells inside the Car at All Times

I am riding Space Mountain.  Reading Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has the same effect as riding Disney’s indoor, pitch-black rollercoaster.  I go up, I go down, and I go side to side, but I can’t see my hand in front of my face.  Likewise, Skloot’s mash up of a memoir, a science report, and a narrative takes place over almost a century, and each chapter takes the reader in a different direction in time and perspective.

Space Mountain is its engineer’s first real ride.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is Skloot’s first book, but her other writing has been published in O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and others.  Her fame has led to her appearance on shows, from The Colbert Report to Fox Business News, and in magazines, from People to Science.  A journalist by profession, Skloot used her journalistic instincts to go after the information she needed for this book.

Anyone who’s ridden Space Mountain will agree the ride is an easy one: there are no helixes or corkscrews, loops or vertical drops.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does not demand the reader have his or her PhD in medicine or science (although some background can’t hurt).  In fact, most of the story has a poetic vibe.  In the first few pages of her book, Skloot asserts herself as a lyrical writer:  “There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.  She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red.”  If the reader goes through these lines and separates the clauses or fragments into lines of poetry, the passage morphs into a coherent poem.

Skloot takes the reader on her rollercoaster by introducing him or her to Henrietta Lacks and the woman’s personal story.  Interspersed are the birth of the HeLa cells—cells taken from Lacks during her bout with cervical cancer, which would later make the science and medical fields explode with the lust for possibilities and experiments—and Skloot’s own experience in snatching up information for her book.  The reader visits Lacks’ hometown of Clover, Virginia, meeting the woman’s relatives.   He or she then sojourns to Turner Station and Baltimore, where Lacks was treated and died.

“In 1999, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) issued a report saying that federal oversight of tissue research was ‘inadequate’ and ‘ambiguous’” Skloot writes.  The ambiguity, as Clinton called it, launches the reader up to the climax of Space Mountain.  Finally, I know where I am and I understand where I’m going.  The theme throughout The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks argues that taking someone’s body part, in this case Lacks’ cancerous cervix cells, without his or her consent is wrong.  Note, however, that there existed no laws during Lacks’ life prohibiting such an act as taking cells for medical research.

“A few minutes earlier she’d jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the ‘colored’ bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use.”  Using this passage and others, Skloot makes it abundantly clear that Lacks is an uneducated black.  She also implies the reason Lacks lived the way she did—in a shack with several other children with no higher education—and was treated at Johns Hopkins the way she was—with oversights and the taking of her cells—led back to her race. 

During Lacks’ lifetime (1920-1951) blacks underwent segregation, prejudice, and neglect from the government and medical establishments.  However, HeLa did not come to be based on Lacks’ race.  The doctors who took Lacks’ and others’ did not focus on black patients alone.  No one ethnic group had significantly more cells removed from them than another.  The doctors got away with taking people’s cells because patients didn’t know to question their doctors.  Ignorance and lack of education led to HeLa, not Lacks’ race.  The same thing could have happened to Latina you or Caucasian me.

Throughout most of the work, Skloot presents her opinion on what happened to Lacks and her family—Lacks’ cells were taken and ended up making millions of dollars her family would never see—by dishing out facts the opinions of others, not her own.  However, Skloot’s objective tone takes a plunge into the subjective making her tale less of an account and more of an editorial.  For example, Skloot entitles a chapter “Illegal, Immoral, Deplorable.”  Her assonance is noble, but I wanted to get off Space Mountain right then and go on something a little more consistent—like the Tower of Terror.

If The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks loses credibility from Skloot’s subjective faux pa, Space Mountain takes an emergency stop every several pages when Skloot neglects the rules of grammar most learn in fifth grade.  Looking through my notes, she forgets to use a simple comma in five places, ends countless sentences in a preposition, inserts one non sequitur, and does not honor the reader by italicizing independent works, and these are just the ones in the first 138 pages.  Personally, I might expect this from a high school student (who also knows better) but coming from a published author, it’s “Illegal” and “Deplorable.”   

The ride stops.  I get off and let the sunlight sting my eyes as I go outside into the hot, Florida day. 

“What should we do now?” my father—my amusement park buddy—asks. 

I look back; Space Mountain’s line fills up the futuristic dome and weaves out onto the tarmac.  Hundreds of people, critics, scientists, blacks, whites, students, doctors, want to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I sigh.  “Can we go to Cinderella’s castle?”

I am going back to my fiction, to literature’s world of pretty dresses and handsome men.  Science and those prone to cheering on the underdog may have Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot was published by Crown Publishing Group.  To order online, visit http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Immortal-Life-of-Henrietta-Lacks/Rebecca-Skloot/e/9781400052172/?itm=1&USRI=the+immortal+life+of+henrietta+lacks

Light

Let's be cliché for one moment and consider literature as a light, a beacon.  The written word opens eyes, opens minds, and educates.  It is literally a light to the people.  Why do you think the Middle Ages was also dubbed the Dark Ages?  Censor literature and you censor knowledge.  Literature's being a light to mankind is the reason I chose this background.  I had a few other ideas for pictures I could take and make into the background, but there are only so many hours in a day. 

Ta, Faith

I'm sitting in English, listening to JGB explain how to use Blogger.  I'm bored.  And it was dumb that there are no posts, so here we are.  Laura's hand is shaking.  Rachael's wearing my shirt.  Jerk!  I'm hungry.  The end.  Oh, wait, now there's empty space that I have to fill.  This picture explains my entire personality.  I'm a sadist.  Hahahahahahahaha!  I want a cat.  I mean, I have a cat, but I want one at college.  asdflkjjadfslkjksdflk.
This is making me angry.  I want to go see Easy A.  It's for psych.  I'm going to hell for all the stuff I've done for psych.  I wonder to which circle I'm headed....