Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Why Be Happy, When You Can Be Normal, by Jeanette Winterson

The writer presents her book in a video

Mercedes Cebrián interviews Jeanette Winterson (video)

Conversation with Bel Olid (video)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (film)

BIOGRAPHY

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and was adopted by a very religious family.

At 16, she discovered she was a lesbian and left home.

Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel, tells us her experiences of her childhood and adolescence in this family. (There’s an adaptation of this book for the television.)

She got a job as an assistant editor for a feminist publisher.

Besides writing and editing, she refurbished a house in Spitalfields, and there she opened an organic food shop.

Other books of hers are The Passion, set in the Napoleonic period, and The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 witch trials in Lancashire.

She had a relation with Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s wife, but it didn’t last, and Pat went back to her husband.

 

INTRODUCTION. The Wrong Crib.


This first chapter of Why Be Happy... is a sort of introduction to the book and presents some questions that are going to appear along the narrative: her adoption, religion, lesbianism, literature, feminism, parental and filial love. But sometimes you think it’s a kind of revenge against her foster parents, especially her foster mother, an authoritarian person obsessed with the biblical religion.

But all in all, the story is about the research of the protagonist’s biological parents and her own identity. And also trying to discover why she was an adopted girl: was she a desired child, was she given in adoption because her mother didn’t have any money? Because she was very young? Because was the fruit of a non-consented relation? But it seems there was another child to be adopted: why was she the chosen one?

She starts telling us she wrote Oranges and that when Mrs Winterson (her foster mother) finds out she got very angry. Jeanette now describes her appearance and personality: a tall, big woman with a paranoic obsession with religion and strict morality. But she has other peculiarities apart from going to church almost every day: she never sleeps with her husband, she keeps a pistol in a drawer, she believes in spirits…

And Jeanette herself is a very singular creature: she can be violent, she deceives her friends, she keeps a part from the rest of schoolmates, she likes reading…

 

And in the next chapters she is going to tell us how she learnt English Literature reading all the books of the library in alphabetical order, how she bought second hand books, and she had to hide them, how Mrs Winterson found them and burned them, and thus she decided to write her own, why she left her home at sixteen, how she earned some money working in a market, how she lived in a Mini, how she felt in love with a she-schoolmate, what were the working-class lives like under Margaret Thatcher, what were her opinions about her, how her Literature teacher took in her house, how she could go to Oxford to study Literature…

What kind of people were Mr and Mrs Winterson, what kind of relationship they had, why they didn’t sleep together, what kind of religion was the Pentecostal church, what kind of books she read…

There are also very interesting remarks about literature: i.e., people who read King James’s Bible could understand more easily Shakespeare because they were written in the same 17th century English.

But the big part of the story is the research and finally, after a long process and innumerable bureaucratic hurdles, finding out who her mother was, meeting her and tying to accommodate herself with her new relatives.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Do you think there’s always something missing in an adopted child?

-What would you say if a writer used your person as a character for a novel?

-What is for you to be “normal”?

-What can you tell about the story of Philomel?

-The narrator mention “stammering” when you have had a kind of trauma. What do you know about the causes of stammering?

-What can you tell us about these films: Secrets and Lies, by Mike Leigh, and Rosemarys Baby, by Roman Polanski?

 

 

VOCABULARY

crib, McCarthyism, flare, Pentecostal, bare-knuckle fighter, copperplate, be borne up on the shoulders, duffel-coat. Shift, cover story, flash-dash, terraced house, tick-box, catapult, misfit, forensically, shot, Philomel, blotted, vale, thug, seances, poodle, larder, cap-gun


Holly and Polly, by Graham Swift

Holly and Polly, by Begoña Devis

SUMMARY

Holly and Polly are two young girls who work in an assisted reproductive clinic. Holly is cheeky with men, she likes saying that they work in an introduction business and teasing them, making them guess what they do.

Holly is also irreverent, she likes making jokes, like creating Latin phrases to describe the sexual act, such as “penis in vagina intro-duxit”, and answering “et semen e-mi-sit”, as if it were a chorus of monks.

Polly is amazed at Holly’s nerve. She’s also shocked at his blasphemous behaviour, despite having been raised as a Catholic. But at the same time, Polly is attracted to her. It is the attraction of opposites, as Polly is shy and quiet, meek and mild.

One day, Holly asks Polly out, who realizes that she is also a lesbian, and that makes her very happy, because she has fallen in love with her.

Polly thinks about how unlikely it is that they ever met. It is as difficult as both, the sperm and the egg, meeting at the right time in a pot at the clinic, which they enter the next day as a couple. And she is also thinking about how ironic it is that the fact of playing God creating a new life is in the hands of two lesbians, who never mixed eggs with sperm in their private lives.

Nonetheless, they’ve found each other, and Polly thinks they don’t need to be ashamed of being a couple. How can they be ashamed of anything in a place where eggs and sperm pass through their hands all day? They have met in the right place. They are happy there, wearing green, like two peas in a pod.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

My personal opinion is that it is a difficult story to read, because it uses a large amount of colloquial language and expressions unknown to me.

As for the story itself, the author is ironic all the time about the fact that two lesbians have in their hands the ability to create new lives using spermatozoa and ovules.

Deep down, he is ironic about how things happen in life, how unlikely it is that the things that happen to us really happen to us, or that we meet the right person at the right time. Actually, everything is amazing in life.

It is also a reflection on the fact that everyone can lead the life they want, where they want, without being ashamed of it.

QUESTIONS

What can it be, the relation between the title and the story?

What do you think of artificial insemination? And what about being a mother without a father? Or about surrogate mothers? Would you prefer one of these methods, or adopting?

What are the two different meanings of the word “date”, or what is the pun between “dating agency” and “getting the date right” at the beginning of the story?

“How things come together in this world”: what do you think is best, design or random? (Think about deciding sex, eyes colour, skin colour…)

Why is it a joke to come from Kildare and have to wear green?

Why is their job similar to being God?

What can it be, the “touch of red in her black hair”?

Do you believe everyone has their “type”? Is there a different type for every different person?

Why does Polly mention Northern Ireland?

Do you trust in young people for important jobs?

For a couple in love, what is it better, to be opposites or to be similar?

Who can give a better piece of advice, a person that is “in” or a person that is “out”? For example, a catholic priest to a marriage, or an out looker to a player.

What do you know about Wilmslow?

Can you guess at a first sight if someone is in love, or if a pair of friends are “friends with a benefit” or lovers?

Are you able to know someone’s sexual preferences at first sight?

 

VOCABULARY

home in on, edge, give up, fellers, youse, turn-off, turn-on, mucky, comprehensive, B.Sc, scrubs, teasing, brashness, being up for it, plainsong, had me in stitches, shred, smoothie, buck passer, lark, detachment, gash, tilt, toss, scrub cap, pod, bumped, coy, canny