Assignment 2

First, "James Kandy" is a character I made up, but have never written about. And I liked the way it sounded so I've used it as an email, and other things, but then never wrote about him. So we'll see how that works out. Maybe I'll change the name of a character in one of my essays to James Kandy, or something.

Next, you asked (perhaps rhetorically, in which case oops) what might have made me read "Merced" on my own. Well, I really like the title. It sounds like an interesting travel-piece. I think I would have been interested in the story up until the narrator realizes that Mercedes is going to die. Because then I guessed the narrator would have some sort of mental breakdown, and as interesting as I find breakdowns and failures of that nature to be, for some reason I glazed over then. It's not a bad-looking essay at all, it's just not my "type" I guess! :)

And third, I'm having a really tough time writing. I've got something I'm working on, and it's coming along fine. I just don't think it's as interesting as anything else I've written, or anything I've read. I don't know if this is good, or what, but I'm finding it very hard to write about my life. Writing is usually easy for me but this is hard.

"You Should Feel Lucky"

This chapter from Lerner's book is at once both hilarious ("for now she is this skinny thing and I hate her", 2) and quite sad ("By the time I reached sixth grade, I couldn't stand most of my closest friends", 3). The humor is contained and balanced carefully within the text, as if it were teetering on the edge of a bucket of tears, about to fall in. I mean that none of the jokes are quite jokes, but rather the humor comes from the fact that the internal monologue of the narrator is so real, so warm and down-to-earth about her size and mental state that we laugh along with her at the pathetic state the world -- even as we know that we are included in it. This made it much funnier, but it was a kind of self-aware, smart humor rather than something pitiful. I don't know how she did it.

The prose is excellent, spaced-out, making full use of every image, using only a few words or sentences. One of the first themes that I started to notice was on page 2, when Lerner points out that Wanda, the tall fat girl, is a "safety net"--even as her "cheeks flush quickly and are often either firing up or fading out." Wanda is not stable, not "normal". I love how Lerner shows us this with a simple physical description of Wanda's cheeks. It's fabulous. Thus Lerner's world is established as being "scrambled" or chaotic. It is topsy-turvey: she finds solace in knowing that someone else is hurting.

Lerner tries to control the chaos of her world by controlling who her friends are. This is both smart and potentially violating -- she risks becoming even more alienated from herself by doing this, although it does prepare her for the real world. Her size becomes a metaphor for life, and the more her weight is out of control, the more she attempts to control smaller things around her. She sees things in terms of food (a "dollop" of misanthropy", 3), viscerally connected or repulsed by the physicality of what people look like (for example, the "frosted, hot pink" shades of her friend's mother) and cannot escape her skin ("...gymn shorts cling to my skin", 3).

By putting this story in the present tense, Lerner creates that sense of immediacy that both connects and repels the reader to and from her story. When she asks herself: "Do I or do I not want another donut?" we are reminded (perhaps) of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. Both Lerner and Hamlet are asking "Do I, or do I not, want to live"? When Lerner gets to the point that she wants to "kill" her friend's mother, we start to cheer for her, because we see that she has forgotten her own self-hatred for a moment. Lerner wants to protect her friend! She's mad for her friend! And then we sink back into the internal, conflicted thoughts of Lerner's narrative.

from Style, w/ "Merced" pp. 3-28:

The first 2 chapters are great because, in them, Williams talks about how silly "turgid" writing can make someone feel they are not smart, and why would you want to do that, when people already worry about whether they are smart enough? However, I wonder what this is saying about the science of linguistics/grammar/etc. in our age. Must we ALL write like this now, because it is the vogue in writing to be clean, clear, spare, and reporter-ish? I find all kinds of writing fascinating, and I hope that Williams is not breaking his own "rules" about what kind of writing is GOOD when he bashes all the elaborate, unecessarily complex writing (and perhaps mindset or philosophy) of past stylists. In my view, most fiction writers are clean and spare, while it's the dissertation and article writers who try to be annoyingly complex. And I know this because I am doing my Ford project and reading all sorts of literary and historical articles that are pretty much that way.

Reading this book in respect to "Merced", the interesting thing is that, in Williams, "no one learns to write well by rule, especially those who can't feel or think or see" (10). This relates to the essay because, in it, the narrator thinks that she can get away with laziness and even profit by it, by following the rules (or at least not breaking them). However, she soon starts to see that illness and health do not follow their alloted pathways. I may not be making sense in relating the "theme" of a style book to that of an essay, but they are both nonfiction, so what the heck. The important thing, I would then gather, is to see what literal style tactics are suggested in Williams that resurface in "Merced", which is clearly written so that anyone can understand it, and does not attempt to confuse the reader, except when the author is showing how "complex" (and i.e. arrogant) she is when dealing with Mercedes' illness.

The very end of Chapter 2 ("Correctness") sums up by saying that it is important to have choices. Linguistically, Williams seems to think that it is not what SHOULD get written that gets written, but what IS written that matters. Language, he feels, develops without regard to our beliefs about it--and yet, he says, what's important is that "we have a choice"(27). So, we can choose what to write, even if it doesn't matter ultimately what we think SHOULD get written. Because our subconscious or whatever will just make use slip up and write what IS. And with regards to "Merced", I think that ties in quite neatly with the theme of death and how we are to deal with the future.

pp. 31-50, w/ "You Should Feel Lucky":

Analyzing Lerner by looking at the (hippie) principles, not (emperor-imposed) rules, I see that she follows all of them quite well. No abstract, complex writing here: "IT IS 1972. I AM twelve years old." Subject verb object. Subject verb object. Present tense makes it immediate. The problem with both this story, and the style book, is one that is probably not very viewable but that kind of bothers me. Sure, you can make all of your subjects into characters, and your verbs into actions, like you learned in elementary school (I didn't, by the way. I was homeschooled until middle school and I have no idea how I learned to write. By osmosis or by guessing. That's why I both enjoy and resist this style book). Anyway. The point is that, by doing that, you reduce writing to the computer-like inscribing of details. Williams even notes this: "we need a way to look at our own writing in a way that is almost mechanical . . ." (43). Everyone's writing starts to look alike. Actually a lot of "good" writing does look alike at this point in time. But what are we headed towards--the perfection of writing style? No, didn't think so. We are headed towards individual perfection of writing style. Or just, individual writing that, for whatever mysterious reason, turns out to be labeled as "good" by a lot of people? What exactly constitutes good style, or good writing? Williams suggests that some of the answers lie in future chapters.

I like that Williams writes this book clearly, as he suggests works better, and yet he is not "writing down", which is kind of how the Shadowboxing book feels, BUT at the same time, I have read lots of "writing" books and not many "style" books (besides Strunk & White). The difference is this: say you have a proplem. You go to two people: one is a writing person, and another is a style person. The writing person just encourages you, describes your problem, and talks about it, without addressing what is really to be done. The style doesn't care about the grand scheme of how the problem looks. The style person just diagnoses and then tells you what you can do.

from Shadowboxing, pp. 35-42:

In the last section of "Memoir", we see tips for doing a life chart, workshop strategies, and an explanation about "Sentiment vs. Sentimentality", "Past or Present Tense?", and "The Naked Truth about Commas" (I don't know what that title is referring to). Some of this feels like a re-hash, but it's good to hear it again, especially for someone like me who tends to forget about tenses even though I clearly know the difference. And I'm always terrified of being melodramatic so the note on that was good, as well.

Moving into "The Personal Essay", I found most interesting the part about the "confessional" aspect of personal essays (41), which also tied in to the sentimental note above--basically, as Iverson suggests, what do I have to say that will be relevant to other people? That's some big pressure, and it's kind of making my writing go not well (it's so odd). I've read some amazing nonfiction and I love it so much when it is done well, and so I am kind of wondering what, exactly, I have to say. There's something there, but I may have to go deeper than I do with my fiction to get at it. Which is interesting in itself.