It Belongs To Someone

On May 17th, 2011, my grandmother died.

My mother called me multiple times in the hours before with updates on her condition. I don’t remember any of those messages, just that there were a lot of them and that I checked them right after she left them but didn’t call back. She sounded frantic, too frantic to be scared just that panic that overtakes everything else. I didn't want to be overtaken. I was at work. And my day was already 2,000 miles away and two hours ahead of hers.

Finally, she left the final message. All the panic had evaporated from her voice, just the cold clarity of voice that comes with the shock of devastation. She told me to call her. I knew my grandmother had to be dead, so I called my mother back.

She told me, “You need to call your brother and tell him.” I called Patrick, there was no answer. I didn’t leave a message. Then, I called my father. My father said to tell my mother that he was sorry, which is the only thing he has ever asked me to tell my mother since they’ve been divorced.

Three days later, as I was walking home from the “El”, Patrick called me. Dad had told him. Patrick said, “I’m sorry, Marlena.”.As if the death belonged to me. Like our grandmother was my husband.

I should have hit him back. And said, “I’m sorry for you too, Patrick.” But instead I hung up.

Patrick was born in August in Sacramento and my mother’s room wasn’t air conditioned well. When my grandmother arrived, the first thing she did was balance my dark and squirming brother on her arm, and with just her forefinger and her thumb she peeled each sock off. But somehow the death belonged to me.

The Same Old Song

 First, I read these books wrong. I read Freedom in the waning days of Chicago winter and Anna Karenina in days so humid that I forgot it could ever snow again. People told me, mostly the internet, that this was incorrect. Everyone knew that Karenina was winter reading and Freedom was summer. They were just that different. But the whole time I was reading Karenina, I thought of Freedom. Mostly, I thought of the cliché, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” For those who hope that we learn from the past, in both books, the authors signify that the mental anguish we put ourselves through is never out-dated. Prosperity, in both books, allows the main characters ample time to unravel themselves. Both Tolstoy and Franzen allow the mental anguish that the characters weave themselves into to be also dependent on the subtle influence that economic and political climates have on our thought processes. And our thought processes are not displayed epically; both authors are also able to illustrate their revolving characters insanity by making their works archetypes of realist fiction: it all exists in the details.

In Anna Karenina and Freedom, both Anna Karenina and Patty Berglund, respectfully, have too much free-time. While the characters are 230 years apart, one has the drawing room to write notes and knit and the other has the 21^st century equivalent: internet and gym shoes. Both characters are possessed with jealousy and a nagging sense of declining worth to their husbands and their societies. While Anna is ostracized from those she finds her purpose in being a part of, her high-society set and son, because of her decision to follow her passionate love affair with Vronsky, Patti is ostracized by her husband, Walter, and her son, Joey, because of her lack of passion about Walter’s environmental vision and her son because of his resentment of her obvious obsessive need of him. These isolations allow them both to act erratically. Anna convinces herself that Vronsky no longer loves her and pushes him away with her passive-aggressive behavior while Patti turns her affections towards her husband’s lifelong best friend. But while Anna kills herself in the end; Patti goes back to her husband. Both Patti and Anna are not in love with their husbands, but Patti matures and can accept the love that Walter has for her as enough. Anna can’t accept her husband, although it ruins her relationship with her son and society, Anna allows her need for passion destroy her. 

Anna Karenina and Freedom both take place on the brink of a new world order that impact the characters' internal conflicts. Karenina is set about 30 years before the Bolshevik Revolution, while the main action in Freedom takes place at the dawn of post-9/11 America. In Karenina, the character Levin and his relationship with his peasants and his dealings with Russian government through his relationship with his brother-in-law, Oblonsky, makes him obsessed with figuring out a way to get the Russian peasant to derive more self-interest in their work, especially since serfdom has recently been abolished. However, Levin isn’t a budding communism, he is all about self-interest, but Tolstoy definitely recognizes the broken, redundant Russian bureaucracy through Levin’s eyes and slips in jabs about the current sad state of bureaucracy by having Oblonsky chasing a post entitled the “Joint Head of the Committee of the Joint Agency of the Mutual Credit Balance of the Southern Railways”. Tolstoy signifies that Russian government has significant issues and foreshadows, through the presence of Levin and his intellectual sparing, that something big will have to change for it to work properly.

In Freedom, 9/11 occurs with the Berglund’s son, Joey, watching the coverage from his dorm room, mourning the fact his gilded Clinton-era childhood just exploded. In the face of neo-con George Bush America, Joey joins in hoping to ride high on a Halliburton type auto-parts exchange in Iraq meanwhile his liberal father zealously pursues the opposite with a huge, flawed federal conservation effort. Father and son, never BFF in the novel, now despise each other, not merely for politics but what for their politics say about the other and themselves. Joey sees his father as a passive romantic not driven by reality but the beauty in his mind which also conveys his father’s love for his disinterested mother, while Walter sees his son as a self-serving, handsome WASP, which makes Walter both jealous and disgusted. Neither needs the other as an enemy; both their endeavors are destroyed by their own passion to see them succeed. A 21-year old Joey gets in over his head trying to close an illegal contact worth millions in South America, while Walter’s anger towards West Virginian rednecks that won’t move to save an “almost endangered” bird results in a television misstep that gets him fired and, later, his assistant killed. However, Freedom ends with the father and son actually close coinciding with the impending Obama administration and the less black and white morality of the Bush administration.  

Both books succeed in showcasing the flaws of their characters by being masterpieces of realist fiction. The authors setting their characters mental states in relatable activities not in grand arches but in the play-by-play of routine reinforcing our mental neurosis live in the details. While insanity is evident in Anna’s suicide, the gearing up towards her suicide, all of her irrational thoughts while going about her everyday activities is in her misconstruing Vronsky’s lateness as a sign he no longer loves her and letting her mind loose to crash with this falsity. The mental anguish resides in the details in Freedom too. No one in Freedom kills themselves but Patti’s depression and Joey’s hubris take place in the banal. Joey battling with himself over committing to his girlfriend is a chapter of manic cell phone calls overlaid with a stream of consciousness that is battling three ideas of how to manipulate, fess up, or detonate the situation.

Although both over 500 pages and sprawled over the years, both books aren’t epics in the way you expect. They are character studies about the same kind of characters. The ones that are filled with self-doubt and with an ear towards neurotic behavior, just like one’s you would find at your dinner table or lunchroom. It’s comforting, in cold weather and in humid weather, to know that the mental anguish you go through is not a sign of the times but a truth of the ages.

Hipster Takeover

This summer I spent three days in NYC with one of my college roommates. By my account, and I say this with love and no malice because despite my artsy leanings I am one too, she is a yuppie. She’s a fashionable yuppie though, while I am a Gap of two seasons past yuppie. Anyways, when we arrive in New York, she’s wearing skinny jeans. I am jokingly flabbergasted by her jean choice. When we were interns together in Washington D.C., she was of the bootleg jean set, with me. We both would have rolled our eyes at someone in our program thinking they were hipper than their suburban Californian roots. However, I said what I felt, “I’m beginning to feel like my boot-cut jeans are mom-jeans.” She agreed, “That’s really why I switched to skinny jeans. I was beginning to feel like my wardrobe was outdated.” Chris has yet to sport grungy Converse sneakers but her acceptance of skinny jeans reinforces the acceptance of hipster trends in the mainstream consciousness. Besides skinny jeans, there are the jokes of TV It Girls and a certain contending A-List Hollywood hunk, that are signifying that the way Millennials defined itself when they fled from the suburbs to the cities is making its way back to define the suburbs too.

Turning on the fall TV schedule, Zooey Deschanel headlines the new FOX show “New Girl”. On the show, she sports geek-chic black rimmed glasses, a penchant for tweein’ out by singing all the time, and that youth staying in a hostel/working at Intelligentsia shaggy haircut. Before, Deschanel was already the poster girl of hipster culture to mainstream America, with her Cotton commercials and (500) Days of Summer fame, but she wasn’t famous, famous. She was always a little too odd for that, a little too artsy, vintage, with those doe blue eyes that seemed to glare from a 1930’s postcard. Now that network TV has not only cast her but built a show around her, when in the past, as NY Mag noted, she would be the kooky friend of the show runner, Deschanel is top-billing.

The proliferation of hipsterdom in TV doesn’t end there, it’s used as a punch line on two other networks. Flip onto CBS, there’s Kat Dennings on “2 Broke Girls” lamenting in a Williamsburg restaurant of the yarn hat wearing, out-of-control beard growing, 20-something dudes that lounge around while suckling off of their rich parents teat. Click onto ABC, where “Happy Endings” had an episode last season where Casey Wilson’s character accidentally dates a hipster which results in her needing a whole hipster makeover. When Wilson is found out, by not dressing ironically to an 80’s theme prom party, she is shunned by her pretentious date and his friends. Mocking hipsters for being pretentious, lazy snobs is an extra-curricular for their Millennial peers but bringing this new joke to a wider audience allows older generations in on the joke too and gives them a label for what they might have perceived as just the youth wanting to look homeless.

If there is a Jude Law of 2011, who was in every third movie that came out in 2004, but in hipster form, it’s Ryan Gosling. Gosling brings his ever-earnest, he has tattoos of hearts being smashed into cactuses or something and acts as a peacemaker in a NYC street fight, from indie drams like Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl into the wide releases of Stupid, Crazy, Love, Drive, and The Ides of March. While he can be red carpet polished, he walks around NYC with a real troubadour, ratty sneakers, and Goodwill tank tops. And sure celebrities be wacky, but Gosling has that pat hipster seriousness about all his nonsense. There is no playing this up for paparazzi when it comes to Gosling. In the past, Gosling wouldn’t have made it out of Parker Posey territory, he would be an indie movie actor where his handsome yet apathetic screen presence would register. However, with all his current releases he is poised to be something big, which wouldn’t have happened had Gosling tried to make it into wide release say in early aughts.

It’s interesting to see a trend come into wider acceptance. I haven’t been old enough to see this happen before. I remember loving N’SYNC and Britney in their Disney concert days, long before the puka shell necklaces, highlighted spiky hair of young men, and pastel eyeshadows became synonymous with the late 90’s, but I didn’t stand on the sidelines for that one. And I am not purposefully avoiding joining in on the big hipster breakthrough (hipster breakthrough would be a phrase quite loathed among some people) with its 21st century movie star, TV heroine, and style. But it’s interesting to see how my generation is presenting itself to the world. I have yet to join in....I'm still rocking my bootcuts. However, it's worth noting, when I went home to California this summer, my mother played croquet in a pair of skinny leggings.