Assignment 6:

Thank you for being patient with me as well! We're both traveling, I know, and you don't have to worry about writing comments soon if you're busy b/c I don't get near a computer often and can't see it for a few days after you post it, most of the time.

I do have some self-doubt, and I'm not wholly sure where it all comes from, but it helps to hear that it's not me who is "awful"--that I am doing all right. That the doubt might be less valid than I usually think. I guess I'm very much a discouraged perfectionist who goes through erratic periods (usually right before I turn in an essay or story) where I feel like I can't do "it" anymore.

I was being harsh on "Fear and Loathing" and "Ali in Havana", so I will try to look closer this time and see what I missed. And for my chosen piece from SHADOWBOXING I chose John McPhee's "Coming into the Country" because I was confused by what sort of message he was trying to send through and wanted to explore that further.

JOHN MCPHEE'S "COMING INTO THE COUNTRY"

McPhee starts out right away by telling us that things are not as they seem: on p. 111 he thinks that there is a "higher proportion" of people living in the wilderness who do not want to actually BE in the wilderness. This sets up a definition of wilderness as elusive and mysterious, yet something that is somehow undesirable to most people. McPhee hints that there is something wrong with living in a place where you are not going to follow the rules. Perhaps even that there may be consequences. By calling it "Coming into the Country", McPhee might also be saying that everyone and everything "comes" to this place (Eagle, AK)--comes from outside, is unecessary, and in a way spoils the wilderness unless it/they learn to be "wild". That's the traditional answer, maybe. It also may be saying (by calling Eagle "suburban" "in a way") that one place is like another, and Eagle AK may be no different from a Tampa suburb.

By connecting Jack Boone to Daniel Boone, the famous frontiersman, legend, pioneer, who lived off the land, the question comes up: do genes play a part? When you get into populism and "living off your work" kind of stuff, Boone was pioneer royalty (I used to read little Daniel Boone books and hear stories when I was a kid). I hope this makes sense: therefore, the writer kind of defeats his own purpose of saying how great Boone is, because if Boone is predisposed (in a way) to be able to live off the land, then he is just doing what comes naturally. His comment about not needing welfare also makes it seem unfair to the other people who have to compete for work with someone to whom it comes so easily (112). Why, then, do people go out to live in Eagle if work is so hard to find? It is a kind of self-inflicted Great Depression, where the more one struggles, the more points one gets, isn't it? Sort of?

When, on the same page, Boone tells the writer that he is "putting on" an "aura of education and culture" in his voice, we get a kind of elitis, Othello-type metaphor: the civilized savage theme. I don't like this, whether or not it "wins over" the writer. Maybe I'm just being tough, but when I read this the first time, I liked it. The second time, it seemed immature. Boone rejects his "history" of education, even as he cultivates the myth of his geneology. Ambiguous, complex, naturally. But I think that perhaps what the writer is trying to show (or maybe what I read into it, that the writer didn't catch) was the different kinds of pride that the two men have: Boone's in his ability to work the land, and Greene's in his ability to create his own idea of beauty and help the environment even as he destroys (i.e. shooting moose and birds out of his car, for Pete's sake)the land that he "works".

The transition from the sign (113) on Boone's door to the Greene's is excellent. Although the description of all of the characters could have come earlier (I like the way people look! haha), McPhee is indeed excellent at the way he characterizes Diana as having "sparkling" eyes and Greene as a face one might see on an American coin. Diana's degree in classical literature is, according to Boone (from whose POV we consistently see the Greenes) irrelevant, standing for man's achievements in the past--he is not impressed by the "advantages of modern civilization (112)."

Diana and her husband , in searching for an "exotic" place to stay (113) come off sounding like Caribbean/safari tourists. Everything they built is made to Keep Things Out: the panes of glass are three inches thick, the cabin is "tight", and two kinds of insulation are used.

Boone is therefore put off by their insulation from himself. He constantly speaks in terms of things that he apparently despises: "I"m kind of anti-money", he says on 115, and then proceeds to list the price he made on a house. He seems proud of his ability to manipulate the system even as he rejects it. Thus, I found it difficult to figure out what McPhee's point was. If he was siding with Boone, then the story was simple and easy: the hard-working type of life pays off. But I couldn't help thinking that even if Boone built an octagonal cabin because he couldn't carry larger logs, he still burned almost three times as much wood as the Greenes.


"ALI IN HAVANA"

This time I noticed that Talese might be going for something deeper: a black/white theme. I say this because on p. 262 he points out two "copper colored women" who are watching one white man, and one black man, as they argue over cigars. I thought that the women might represent Cuba and the two men might stand for the US and Cuban governments, fighting over Cuba or something along those lines. Then I remembered that the essay is about Ali, a black man, and Fidel, who is white. I don't want to get too into the theme b/c of obvious comment mishaps I might make that would offend, but I thought I would notice the political bent that Talese seems to be hinting at here. But does a piece about a leader (Castro) need to be political? Perhaps Talese is trying to show both Ali and Castro as "apolitical" in a sense, as men, rather than the mythic hero/villain's they have been made out to be. I was reassured of this when I saw on p. 263 that Ali had drawn a little heart under a photo inscription to Castro.

Ali's closest friend, Bingham, is a photographer. This suggests that Ali wants to "appear" a certain way, and that even his friends will be pulled in to this part of his identity--the need to look good, i.e., to be photographed best (as one would be, if one's best friend were a photographer). Thus do Bingham and Ali represent the USA? Cuba is known to be a place where blacks and whites have few "race" issues, and yet Talese seems to be noting that the black men come not from Cuba but from the capitalistic USA. When we saw Bingham and the white man arguing over the cigars, we saw that even in Cuba men are "capitalists".

The note about Bingham as a photographer also suggests that Ali is not as "political" as he seems. Bingham followed Ali through all of his periods, and this suggests that Ali has been building an image of himself that has come undone with his Parkinson's disease (I feel awful, by the way, writing this about a HUMAN BEING with an illness. This is what is so hard about nonfiction--it's hard to critique real people as characters). The one thing that does seem natural about Ali is his relationship with his (most recent?) wife, Yolanda, who is portrayed as a kind of young girl in his entourage who finally "got" him: it doesn't make her seem very good, even though Talese tries to (well, maybe) disguise his intentions by describing her well--flowing, vivid, and a good companion.

The most important theme is that of trade, money, and self-promotion. When Talese introduces a side character, Cuban fighter Stevenson, on 265, we see that he has (unlike Ali?) "stubbornly refused the Yankee dollar" and other "promoters." Yet on 266 we see his muscular body as a previous means of deterring abuse to his "Latin looks"--something that, ironically, he is likely interested in. By refusing Yankee promoters, he cultivated an anti-Yankee image of his own. And there is the theme's definition: Talese is writing about how all of these men push their images even as they "resist" a culture that is infatuated with images.

I tended to skip through parts where Talese began to overdescribe the characters. Much of the description is excellent if a bit detailed. As far as prose goes, nearly ever sentence is active: "Fraymari may . . .", "He senses . . .", "Stevenson lowers . . . ." and with every important word shifted to the right of these sentences we see that Talese is, in a sense, playing games with our own notion of "promotion". Perhaps he is making the sentences deliberately strong in order to hide the weakness of the men involved, or maybe he is using his own writing as a kind of "strong-yet-soft" sort of (image?)idea.

There are countless images that relate to the theme of consumerist communism: i.e. a "modern 1950's building" (269) that is part of the Palace of Revolucion (?). And Ali furthers this by "putting down" one of his opponents (I would guess), Joe Frazier, by comparing him to a "grotesque tribal" figure (270). This suggests that Ali looks down on "earlier" (i.e. more primitive, i.e. lesser)things made by man as weak and/or unnatural, even as he does not realize that doing so shows his consumerist bent (?).

I don't know what to make of the monstrous social mistake Castro makes with Stevenson's wife, Fraymari, who is tiny but steps up to embarass the leader (dictator?) publicly. It shows perhaps that even though Castro might love his people and consider himself their equal, he still does not value them equally because he forgets some of them. This is evident because he does not forget Stevenson, rather, he forgets Stevenson's wife. Along these lines, again, when on 276 Castro "strokes his beard" and tries to "revive the vitality of its fiber", we are reminded that he is not what he used to be and that he is trying desperately (via this conversation, which is a parallel) to regain his lost glory. Talese is commenting on the failure of communism (?)perhaps. But I don't know enough about communism or Ali or Castro to see how this piece works on them as a whole. I can only guess from what I'm reading on its own. Talese does a good job of setting up the characters' backgrounds even though he keeps their previous achievements very much in the back of the essay.

In relating this piece to "Writng for Surprise", I noted that the momentum of the essay moves constantly forward at a slow, steady pace--like a slow moving river--because we see that they are getting ready to meet Castro and the immediacy of the present tense makes us feel that we are watching it happen. Why is it any different than simply watching the tape of what happened? Because Talese inserts the themes I talked about in order to "use" the raw data and make it into a good "story". Yet nonfiction is more than just a story--it's a way to comment on life and people in a way that cannot be done in fiction.

When, on 277, Castro "retaliates" against Stevenson by asking if he had taken his "new" lawyer wife with him to the USA (meaning: you don't really care that much about all 4 wives, do you, you just switch around b/c you don't know yourself, do you?) we see Castro's view of "consumerism"--Stevenson is a consumer of women. But Fraymari refuses to be labeled as an object. I don't know. This part is so dense. It's incredibly difficult for me to get what Talese is going for, after a while.

And finally we get to the part where Ali performs the trick with the rubber thumb. What does this mean? Well, it could show that he refuses even HIS OWN created image of himself by acting the clown, or it could simply be another aspect of his performance-oriented personality. It seems kind of childish and pathetic (almost depressing) that he does this. It makes the reader feel like, "Wow, he's getting old now, isn't he?" And because Castro LOVES the trick, we see that Talese is grouping the two men in to the same "childishly" imaginative, yet dying-out, breed. Ali performs the tricks, and Castro is delighted by them. Yet both men may be playing with us and our own views. I just can't figure out how. Maybe, because both men acknowledge the "fakeness" of their "consumerist" magic trick, they are redeemed?