Ms. Hen acquires an entourage

Ms. Hen acquires an entourage

The problem with Ms. Hen is that she is not a convenient purse. Even though she is cute, I don’t like to carry her around all the time because she’s not safe. So I went online to find a small bag that from which I could easily access my cell phone and hand sanitizer. I did a search for small purse and I found Milk Carton.

I thought the Milk Carton was so strange and unusual, I had to buy it. There was also chocolate milk and orange juice, but I decided I liked the Milk Carton because he’s blue and has cow print on him. I decided to look for Ms. Hen to see if she is still available, and she’s not! She’s been discontinued! I have to be very careful with both of them, because if they get wrecked or stolen, my career is in trouble.

When searching for Ms. Hen, I stumbled across the Little Rooster, or as I sometimes call him, Ms. Hen’s Petit Ami. I thought it was so adorable, I had to buy him, too. Now I have two new strange small bags. The rooster is my everyday bag, and the Milk Carton is my once in a while bag.

Ms. Hen and her entourage appreciate all the views that she’s been getting lately. She gets traffic from all over the world, and certain countries are always on the list, such as Germany and Ukraine, but the United States usually has the highest number. Ms. Hen would like to find out who the people are who are reading her blog.

If you’re willing, and you’re not shy, Ms. Hen invites you to leave a comment telling where you’re from, how you originally found Ms. Hen’s blog, and what you enjoy about it. Also, if you would like to make suggestions, such as books to read, or new formats, you could do that, too. Or you could write anything you want. And if you want to tell Ms. Hen that she sucks, and should stop what she’s doing right now, she will take your opinion into consideration.

Ms. Hen is curious about who her readers are! We are living in uncertain times, and Ms. Hen wants to know about the fans of her little piece of the Internet. She is a weird hen, and interested in the world around her. Write to her! She wants to know who you are.

Have a glorious day.

Ms. Hen,

her entourage,

& SO

Ms. Hen reviews The Sacrifice

The Sacrifice

Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Collins

2015

Ms. Hen decided to read this because she found it at a Little Free Library near where she lives that she discovered by accident when she was going for a walk. She decided to read this, because she read about it, and found out it is about racism, and was intrigued, because that is a topical subject right now.

This novel is about a black teenage girl named Sybilla Frye who she claims is attacked and raped by a group of white police officers who kidnap her on her way home from school. In the opening chapter, her mother runs around the neighborhood of Red Rock, Pascayne, New Jersey looking for her. A neighbor finds her in a run-down factory, and calls the police. Sybilla and her mother don’t want to cooperate with the authorities and Sybilla doesn’t want to be interviewed or tested because she and her mother are afraid. A lawyer and preacher twin brothers take Sybilla and her mother under their wings, and profess to want to help them, and bring the men to justice.

This novel is told through different point of views: the girl’s mother, Ednetta; the detective, Ines Iglesias; Ada, the woman who finds Sybilla in the abandoned building; Ednetta’s common law husband Anis, a murderous, angry man who beat his first wife to death; Jere Zahn, a white cop who is released from the force and commits suicide, and various other characters.

This novel was based on actual events that happened in upstate New York about thirty years ago, when a young black girl named Tawana Brawley claimed that she was raped by a group of white men who were mostly police officers, and was defended by Al Sharpton, but later the whole things turned out to be a hoax.

Ms. Hen didn’t know how she felt about this novel when she was reading it. She thinks that some people might get offended that a white woman is tackling a subject like this. She did some research, and read some reviews, and there has been a mixed response. She read a review in the New York Times by Roxanne Gay, about how people should not write about the other:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/books/review/the-sacrifice-by-joyce-carol-oates.html

Ms. Hen read another, glowing review by Rose Tremain, a white British author who loved the book:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/12/the-sacrifice-joyce-carol-oates-review

The ending of this book left Ms. Hen unsatisfied. She never gets to know what happens to the characters. And the last person’s point of view is not the most important in the book. Ms. Hen knows that such stories don’t end well, but she would like to have known what happened to Sybilla and her mother and everyone else.

  

Ms. Hen thinks that the characters in The Sacrifice are like others in novels about black people, and this book was possibly inspired by reading books and articles about black people rather than actually knowing what they go through from first hand experience. Ms. Hen thinks that Ms. Oates can get away with this because she is an established writer, and if an up and coming (white) writer tried to publish a novel like this today, that person would be squashed down like a bug under a person’s shoe, and the book would never see the light of day, and the person’s career would never happen.

Why does Joyce Carol Oates get to write about the African American experience and have authority to do so? Did she decide one day that she would write about racism because it’s a hot topic? Who gives the white writer power to write about whatever they want? Does anyone have the right to write about a culture that is not their own? And if they do, can they do it successfully, and be respected for their work?

Ms. Hen doesn’t know the answers to these questions. She is asking the universe and hopes that someone, somewhere will find the answer. 

Ms. Hen reviews The Crash of Flight 3804: A Lost Spy, A Daughter's Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil

The Crash of Flight 3804, A Lost Spy, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil

Charlotte Dennett

Chelsea Green Publishing

2020

Ms. Hen came to read this book because she met the author on a Zoom meeting for the National Writers Union, of which she is a member, and the author was looking for ways to publicize her book, and Ms. Hen told her she has a blog and she offered to review it. This is not what Ms. Hen usually reads, but she is an adventurous hen, and is open-minded and likes to learn things about the world.

Ms. Hen discovered that this is not light summer reading, but Ms. Hen does not read light books in the summer, because she is not a hen who follows convention.

This book is a memoir about the author’s father, Daniel Dennett, who was the top American spy in the Middle East in the 1940s. He died in a plane crash over Ethiopia in 1947, and the author and her family always wondered about the circumstances surrounding his death. The plane he was in was carrying sensitive transmission equipment, and everyone aboard died. Ms. Dennett believes that it was sabotage that killed him because her father knew things about the politics of oil in the Middle East. She was six weeks old when her father died.

Ms. Dennett worked as a correspondent in the Middle East when she was young, and had an experience that changed the way she looked at the world. She was almost hit by a sniper’s bullet in Beirut when the civil war started in that country. Ms. Hen thinks that those things happen to people often, that someone can have an experience, and the entire world changes for that person. The fact that she was almost killed drove Ms. Dennett to pursue the truth at all costs, not only about her father’s death, but about other issues of consequence.

This book focuses a lot on the history of pipeline politics in different countries in the Middle East: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Israel. The key players in the game for oil have been the Bush family, the Rockefellers, and the oil companies in the United States, Great Britain and other countries. The idea that the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan was fought for oil and not to fight terrorism is explained here, but there are citizens of the United States who believed and still believe that the country was fighting terrorism. We have to read between the lines and try to figure out where the truth lies. This book explains these situations in detail.

Ms. Hen thinks this book comes alive when the author talks about her own family. Ms. Dennett’s grandmother was a teacher in Istanbul/ Constantinople at the beginning of the last century. Ms. Hen thinks it’s fascinating that a woman in that day and age went to college and was educated, traveled and taught abroad. Ms. Hen also enjoyed reading about Ms. Dennett’s father and his adventures as a spy in the Middle East. Ms. Hen has never known anyone who knew a spy, and she thinks being a spy would be exciting. She imagines working as one now is not the same as it was back in the time of Daniel Dennett, because so much technology exists, it would be difficult to hide the way they did during his time.

This book shows evidence that the reason the United States has a good relationship with Israel is because of oil power and pipelines and not because of Anti-Semitism and the need for the Jewish people to have a homeland after the Holocaust and World War II. Ms. Hen believes this is true, contrary to popular belief, because not everything is what’s on the surface; there are always more layers to a situation, especially when it has to do with politics and international relations.

Ms. Hen enjoyed reading something that breaks her out of her shell. The world is full of complexities and nuance, and not everything is as simple as it seems. The Middle East is a turbulent area, and always has been, but hopefully sometime soon, humanity will rid the need for oil, and embrace greener energy sources. Perhaps because of Covid 19, people will try to reach for better ways of working to find energy that helps us, and does not drive us apart. Ms. Hen is a hen with ambition, and she dreams of a better future for all of us.

This book can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Crash-Flight-3804-Deadly-Politics/dp/1603588779/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2QK1YV9C2H23Y&dchild=1&keywords=the+crash+of+flight+3804&qid=1594682454&sprefix=the+crash+of+f%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-2

Also at Chelsea Green Publishers: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-crash-of-flight-3804/

Ms. Hen reviews The Plague

The Plague

Albert Camus

Vintage Books

1947,1948

Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert

Ms. Hen decided to read THE PLAGUE because it is a hot novel right now and everyone is reading it. She had read THE STRANGER by Camus when she was in graduate school, but after discussing it with a hen friend, she realized she didn’t quite get that it was supposed to be an existential novel. She was more focused on the tone of THE STRANGER, and didn’t know the background.

When Ms. Hen read about THE PLAGUE, she discovered that it is written to be an allegory about the Nazi invasion of France during World War II, but it was based on cholera epidemics that occurred in Algeria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ms. Hen thinks it’s interesting that readers can read this now, not thinking of an allegory, but thinking about the world today, and how the narrative informs current events.

This novel is about a doctor named Rieux who is in charge of helping the citizens of Oran, a town in Algeria, deal with the plague that strikes their town. The pestilence is first discovered because the rats in the town all start to suffer and die. Piles of rats are found in the streets and people are disgusted. Rieux thinks that the problem could be bubonic plague, but he does not tell anyone until the people in the town start to get sick. The government orders the citizens to stay home, and anyone who falls ill has to go to one of the hospitals, and almost all of them die.

The people in the town cannot leave and nothing and nobody can come into the town. Lovers and husbands and wives are separated, mail cannot come through, the same movies play at the theater, and the only way to get a message out of town is through the telegram. The people start to go stir crazy, and everyone has at least one member of their family who has died.

This novel is similar to one Ms. Hen read recently, YEAR OF WONDERS, in the way that the plague is contained within the town, and the inhabitants are quarantined within the borders. The priest in THE PLAGUE also gives a sermon about how the plague exists to teach them a lesson, similar to a scene in YEAR OF WONDERS.

Ms. Hen found some great quotes in this novel that she believes speak to our current pandemic. The narrator talks about how the town deals with the plague, “Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had killed off in all of us, the faculty not of love only but even of friendship.” Ms. Hen thinks this is a tragic quote, and she doesn’t think that our situation has gone this far yet, but she believes it could be coming. It’s an existential idea to live for the moment only, and to not have the capability for love or friendship. Rieux’s friend Tarrou dies, and he thinks, “So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps would have called that winning the match.” Tarrou liked soccer, and enjoyed playing it on the weekends, which he missed when the quarantine was enacted. Ms. Hen thinks that nobody wins the match when dealing with a plague or a pandemic, but we can always learn from our experiences and our as well as others’ mistakes.

Ms. Hen found a chicken in THE PLAGUE, and finding one in a novel always pleases her. The setting is a dry, dusty town on the coast of North Africa, and Ms. Hen can imagine what the air there is like, heavy and sandy, with an odorous sea breeze. Two of the characters go into a café, “On the table, including that at which Rambert was sitting, bird-droppings were drying, and he was puzzled whence they came until, after some wing flapping, a handsome cock came out of his retreat in a dark corner.”

This novel is beautifully written, and it’s pertinent right now, but Ms. Hen thought it was slow to read. Few women characters appear, which annoyed Ms. Hen because she knew that women in this situation would possess differing views than the men. Also, all the characters are Catholic, which confused Ms. Hen because it took place in North Africa, and she knew if it were realistic, Muslims would be present. Even though this novel has problems, Ms. Hen thinks it is excellent, and important, and people should read it as soon as they possibly can, because fiction can show us what can be possible, and it can also be a mirror that understands what we’re going through better than we can.