the month of June

I finished reading Water for Elephants (or, as I call it in my head, Like Water for Elephants — its namesake clearly being Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate). I’ve mentioned that it was an odd reading experience for me because I felt like I was reading a draft of a piece of fiction written for an advanced creative writing class/workshop. The writing was inconsistent — at times a beautiful sentence peeks out, and I would get all excited by it, but that was always surrounded by a series of overly simplistic sentences. The characterization was odd. The character who was most believable to me was Walter/Kinko the midget with the Jack Russell Terrier, Daisy; however, even he seemed to be a caricature of a small person traveling with a circus. The protagonist was flat in his almost-too-good-to-be-true personality. When the book opens he is ninety or ninety-three (he’s never sure of his exact age), and the dialogue is trite. I found myself asking, is this really how an old man speaks, or is it just how we (and Gruen) think an old man is supposed tospeak? He just wasn’t believable. All my complaints about spotty writing and flat characterization aside, I loved the story and found myself excited to get back to reading it each night. I’m not sure if this is simply because I was so craving a story filled with the details of circus life, and this one gave me the nitty-gritty I was looking for, or it is because Gruen does manage to keep enough happening that an otherwise done-before romance becomes a page-turner. There were moments when I found myself wondering how or why the story was compelling. After all, it is mostly the story of two people in love who can’t be together because one of them is already taken. Nothing new here. Still, there are enough of the circus-driven antics and incidents to keep the story exciting. And the animals. It seems as though Gruen understands animals better than humans, because she was able to bring them to life in ways she just couldn’t with the human characters. Perhaps this is because animals don’t talk and Gruen struggles with dialogue, but whatever the case, the depictions of the animals add an element to the romance that I’ve certainly never encountered in other books I’ve read.

but the folks on the outside don’t know”

A couple of weeks ago, D and I along with a couple of friends, went to see Cirque du Soleil in Hartford. None of us had ever seen a live Cirque performance, and for the first time in my life I could actually afford to go (though barely, the ticket prices are outrageous), so why not? While watching the performers, I was in awe. I began thinking about how I know very little about the circus, because, after all, that is how it is intended to be — all illusion, all facade, all of the time. We’re not intended to think during the circus. What little I do/did know related to tales of freakshows and those not accepted by/into mainstream society escaping, running away, finding some realm of protection (although potentially not much); accusations of animal mistreatment; and Depression era escapism. Cirque de Soleil doesn’t use live animals, so I began wondering more about treatment of humans/workers than animals and assumed there must have been at one point clear hierarchies in circus life and maybe that still continues. I also wondered if the human body is intended to do some of the things these performers were doing. I was particularly struck by the girls with gymnasts-sized bodies who could twist and contort in ways that made them look as if a few ribs and/or vertebrae had been removed. Ultimately I decided I wanted to find out a lot more about all of this…and this realization struck just in time for summer reading! So, I have begun to compile a summer reading list with a circus/carnival/freakshow them. So far I have:

Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Under the Big top by Bruce Feiler

Josser: Secret Life of a Circus Girl by Nell Stroud

The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top by Janet Davis

Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination by Rachel Adams

I’ve considered reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn but am a little wary of it after reading the reviews. I can’t tell whether I’m intrigued enough to read or if I’ll end up just plan horrified.

I’ve started reading and have almost completed Water for Elephants and will follow up with a review of that, as I’m pretty surprised by my intense interest in a book that is so poorly written.

I’m looking for more suggestions/ideas. The list so far is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, academic and popular, and I’m open to any and all of these genres/perspectives. I’d also love recommendations for documentaries on this topic, as I haven’t explored that angle so much yet.

All of this, of course, has nothing to do with the diss and is, what a friend of mine calls, “productive procrastination.” I just thought I’d become a circus expert while productively procrastinating.

Additions to the list/reader recommendations:

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes by Christopher Bram