Joan's Grief

I'm freshly into the book - Didion is an excellent writer - and I'm already starting to think about how the mind processes traumatic events and how the mind grieves. The mind is almost like an animal that runs around hurt, confused, bewildered ... when something of traumatic magnatude happens, it really can't cope. Even the most intelligent people, like Didion, can't help but envelope themselves in grief and not know what they will do until grief is experienced "the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

Step into My Office: Zinga over Mowen?

OK how did that happen? Did Zinga have more visibility? If I can put it out there first, can I say please don't play the health card... we all know that Mr. Evans disease has its challenges, but let's stick to the topics for the betterment of the region as a whole: jobs, economy, education and healthcare.

Gillilands bid in the primary may have had a slight impact on Mowen's loss, and that is unfortunate, however Zinga has a lot of ground to make up from the last election, and I hope she runs her campaign better.

New Read: The Year of Magical Thinking

Guido picked the new read for this round: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking by American writer, renowned as a journalist, playwright, essayist, and novelist Joan Didion.

The Year of Magical Thinking was published October 4, 2005, and chronicles the year following her husband's death (2003), during which their daughter, Quintana, was also gravely ill. Although during the period of the book their daughter recovered, she died in August of 2005 due to complications from acute pancreatitis.

In November 2005, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Here's a review by the New York Times.

Successful Rendezvous - Guido on a Roll

Well our rendezvous last night at Bombgasm's eclectic abode was a success (we missed you ROXY!). Guido provided most of the entertainment for the evening: breaking stemware, throwing cheese, dropping lemon bars, spilling juice (sidebar: next time bring a tarp for easy cleanup)... AND performed a stunning interpretive dance to the "Girl from Ipanema." Words cannot begin to describe his some of his other renditions - and we'll leave that alone for the time being but can say this much: we were in tears for more than an hour.

Back to the book:
Berendt's sophmore effort The City of Falling Angels can't equally be compared to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As entertaining as the characters and expatriates of Venice were, there didn't seem to be any concrete plot, or point to many stories within the story (other than there are many entertaining personalities in Venice). The crime, which was supposed to be a cornerstone of the book, took a back seat to the characters, some of whom did not have anything to do with the burning of the Fenice.

We appreciated some side points such as reading and learning more about Ezra (and printed out a few of his poems for further discussion) and Seguso the glassblower's artwork.

The book is not poorly written and Berendt has a gift for observing and describing people. The plot did suffer however, and I don't think we got the point of the title. It could be inferred that falling angels describes the state of the city in decay, hoping for a revival, or in a biblical sense a fall from grace waiting for redemption.

The villains gave the book three machine guns (out of six total).

one of my favorite Venetian Villains

God love that De Luigi - defacing the construction mural with flames coming out of the window's is a perfect compliment to the ongoing construction bid catastrophe. It is ironic that when the ruling came down, the architect who got second place in the bidding process, suddenly dies in a car crash.

Berendt did fall into one heck of a story to write about (rather conveniently... he was coming off of the success of Midnight and looking for a new book) and happened to be in town (again, conveniently) at the time of the fire... hmmmm....