Assignment 8:

After a somewhat difficult "selection process", I have decided to write about the very first piece of reading that I was assigned--Betsy Lerner's "Food and Loathing" piece. I feel that it is a very graceful piece, and my personal favorite, all told. It may not have been elegant by Williams' standards, though. He frequently uses examples by Lincoln or Churchill, which don't exactly jibe with the everyday sort of grace that I find in Lerner's piece. For a moment, I considered doing the Gay Talese piece again (I was not able to find the White or Didion pieces at my local library, but will try to find them soon)--and then I thought, "Nah. I've done this one enough." Besides, the Talese piece was more "journalistic" and less concerned with style (I feel) than the Lerner one. Although I must admit that Talese has a more bombastic, take-charge sort of literary style that states its pretty language clearly, the quiet style of a smaller (and perhaps less "lauded") piece might be more "elegant" in the long run. Damn the writers who write about famous people (like Castro and Ali), they are always going to last longer than the ones who write about food.

It's too bad that I didn't have a more old-style piece to work on for this assignment. Halfway through the chapter on Style, Williams notes that "You just don't see that kind of [elaborate, elegant] sentence anymore." Which is true--and interesting. Presidents sure don't speak like Lincoln anymore! Speeches and presidential addresses are more short and to the point. And rather than blame Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway and whoever else was involved in this rather quick 20th century shift, I'd like to simply look at a good example of short sentencing, because when it is done well it is really nice.

First, however, I would like to say that I thought Williams begins to tread on frail ground with this chapter--it is impossible to define elegance, and the few examples he gives are (it seemed) exactly the kind of musty, 19th century excerpts that he was trying to get writers to avoid in the first part of the book. And then he just lists several examples of metaphor! I felt that this chapter was a very poor one, overall, and that while I learned about complexity of sentencing I did not really learn about elegance or grace. However, I am not sure that I totally picked up on all of the lessons that Williams was trying to impart. Maybe this book was a bit too "far" for me. I am the kind of reader who has to go back to the glossary to remember what exactly prepositions and nominal clauses are (and if you asked me now, I'd still blank out). Sometimes I feel like I am just missing the point, and I'm not smart enough to get all of this. But maybe not.

In the end, there are a few areas of Lerner's essay that struck me as incorporating elegance, yet in a way maybe I am just trying to push her into a box when really she breaks the rules (and gets away with it?).

First, Williams talks about balance and symmetry (". . . for the administrATION and for the opposITION", p. 155). On page 2 there is some of this: the echoing balance of "her cheeks are always either firing up or fading out", or the more subtle symmetry of "she protectS me from the Same fate".

Actually, now that I am writing all of this, I realize that there really is no "stylistics" in this piece, and that I am going to be hard pressed to find some. SO never mind. I will instead focus upon the LACK of style in this piece! Her sentences are NOT complex! And I like them! And I'm blanking out on what else to write about. Mostly, I like writing that feels delicious. Talese's writing doesn't feel delicious. I don't really care about how deep or interesting the subject is. I just care about whether I can jump into the writing and feel at home.

So now I'd like to discuss what the semester has taught me about what creative nonfiction is.

I have far more respect for the "genre" now than I did before. Earlier, I thought that nonfiction was reaching a crescendo of popularity just because people had given up on being able to write fiction, and nonfiction was just going through a popularity phase, etc. etc. but really, nonfiction has only recently been "genre"-lized. I'm not sure why, in this day and age we feel the need to categorize styles of writing (even as, in history and lit crit, we are finding everything more and more "ambiguous" and "ambivalent") when we could just enjoy them, but never mind that.

Now I see that it is not "nonfiction" that has become popular, it is more like a rising tide of interest in it. Nonfiction books have always sold well, but it was with Truman Capote's SAYING that he was writing a nonfiction novel that things got started, at least in the contemporary age, I would say. There really is no such thing as a nonfiction novel. It's just a fancy label to sell books. And no one really uses the term now. It's as if Capote had a one time monopoly on the phrase.

But back to the class. I noticed in one of the earlier replies to my posts that you mentioned EMPATHY as a big factor in nonfiction--life is messy, art isn't, and while art can appeal to more universal reader-souls, nonfiction is like telling a story of something that happened to you, to someone. It's like a conversation. It has to work, or you're just another bore.

It has really challenged me to be truthful in my writing. It was the most difficult thing in the world--to not make up details simply because I forgot them, or wanted to. And I'm not wholly sure that I succeeded. But I tried. And nonfiction has ultimately defined for me that I am a fiction writer.

Assignment 7:

In answer to the question of whether or not Truman Capote included himself in his work, I would have to say that, in the case of In Cold Blood, he did not--and yes, there is a ton of questioning about the legitimacy of the work. I heard on an NPR show about Nelle Harper Lee that she took copious notes for Truman and therefore, he had likely plagiarized her notes in parts? Anyway, in his other work--including one famous piece about Marilyn Monroe--he puts himself in, but he is always a cynical, sardonic sort of voice of truth who berates the other character.

So I am not sure exactly how objective one might want to classify Truman. But he's a good writer, and his writing is interesting and good. Some of it is about men who are in prison for murder, so I don't really feel sorry for them. But I realize that even that is a problem--that everyone has their rights--doing this indep. study has made it viscerally clear to me (personally, if not universally) that there is a strict sort of ethics involved. That is broken, in a way, by all journalists.

SHADOWBOXING

I had a friend who took a "nature writing" class for her EP at Eckerd one winter term, and all I heard about for months was how stupid it was. It really irritated me because I think one can write well about anything if one looks hard enough at what makes it interesting. That said, I do think that nature writing is not really about nature, per se. I agree with Iverson that it is "a response" to the world around us. It gave me an idea, as little as I may use it, about writing about New York as a garden or something. But I have a feeling that it's been done. If there is some sort of writing about New York's gray buildings and chipped sidewalks as a metaphor for the natural world or even a replacement for it, let me know. I'd like to read it.

Iverson states that "the most important responsibility of the nature writer is to define and deconstruct our relationship to our natural environement and defend aspects of the environement that are far too often overlooked or exploited (137) . . . we like nature to represent what we are not." I would argue that there is more to nature writing than a kind of fulbright-fellowship-winning, Pulitzer-prize-style reportage on the dangers of what we are doing to the environment and/or simply rehashing the same old argument of where our place is in relation to nature, along with "embrac[ing] ambiguity (138)." But maybe that is a subject for my own essay. I think that we ARE nature, whether we think we are or not--most people seem to think that we are apart from nature, as I will discuss in the Owens piece. So what does it mean that we "interpret" a difference between ourselves and nature?

Also, if the last paper is to be nature/travel writing, I'd like some more input about travel writing. Even though I think I have a pretty good idea :) it might be nice to see some examples/writing on it.

OWENS

This piece creates a conflict of sorts for me. On the one hand, it belongs in the spectrum of nature writing. But on the other, it is simply a speech about humanity, as most speeches given at commencement seem to be. Also, it was laced a bit strongly with irony--for example, the first part about a human working to remove the traces of humanity left in a park (155), and distrust of humanity: "the government was trying to minimize impact . . . never mind the mining operation just a few miles back (156)." Irony upon irony! Owens is setting up his position as an anti-anthrocentric one (of course, or should I say, NATURALLY haha) only so that he can tackle it in a few paragraphs. He ends page 156 with a good moment tackling anthrocentrism by saying that we have foolishly written about nature with regard to ourselves. This implies that we do not "deserve" nature, or to be "in nature"--that there is a kind of separatism evident. Most people don't seem to notice how "heil hitler" (i.e. fascist) this comes off as being.

I read a book a while ago called "Ishmael" (horribly written by the way) and that was the message of the book--that anthrocentrism is killing the world. I remember coming to the same conclusion that Owens does here: don't WE deserve something? We ARE part of nature, after all. It is a kind of reversal of bleeding-heart strategy. And while I did find it completely wrenching that the women cried over the little burnt-down cabin, it felt a bit manipulative. I don't know, maybe I've just read/heard too many commencement-speech-like pieces. The piece felt a bit obvious in places, such as when (157) Owens states that he is guarding the wilderness against his own presence.

Or how about on 159, when he makes the general statement: "It is dangerous and wrong, I ALWAYS say, to generalize about Native Americans"?, and then just goes on to list facts about Native Americans and to attribute the trait of responsibility to them. This is an issue I wanted to tackle in my essay--that attempting to be "fair" in dealings with Native Americans (or any other misunderstood "subject"--not object!!)often leads to even more unfairness. If Native Americans are humans, as they are of course, then why do THEY have a monopoly on environmental responsibility? Owens gets far more on track when he gets to his main theme: we are ALL here, and we all belong here. It is a powerful statement, and he states it well. Enough of my criticism. But I just had to say what I thought about certain parts of it. It felt a bit patronizing, is all.

EDMUNDSON --

This essay was funny & interesting, but I wasn't quite sure what the story was. The first moment we get about how she feels about nature is when she is confronting the poison oak with its own existence, daring it to try and "get her." On p. 162, she says : "You'll never get me now!" which implies that she has been duped by it (and nature?) before. Nature has camouflaged itself from her previously, and with the natural change of seasons, which is nothing to the plant, but important to her, she has been able to "beat" it and not fall into its trap. Was it setting a trap for her earlier? Probably not! If nature inadverdently camouflages itself from humanity, what does that mean?

On the same page, she addresses another ecological "issue": when she sees a beer can tucked behind a bush, she thinks to herself, "Does hiding [the can] a little bit make you sort of ecological?" This goes back to the theme of seeing/not seeing -- it is a very interesting idea, that of perception and what nature and saving nature means to different people.

On p. 163, she equates nature with God ("I have been pondering the whole idea of it--the outdoors, wildlife--God, in a way--"). This fits with the next thing I noticed that, in talking to the dogs about the bunny she has just seen, she might be seen as someone who gets along better with animals than with humans. This contradicts the earlier impression of her as "desecrating" a poison oak shrub. And also with her "categorizing" of things into a points system--for example, a lizard is only one point. Only one point? That certainly doesn't seem very "nature-loving" of someone. On the other hand, just because she is contemplating God and nature doesn't mean that she can't desecrate a bush or squish a lizard. That sort of harshness is a part of nature, after all. But it is interesting that she has points -- and needs to slap things in an obsessive-compulsive sort of way. She seems to think that just because she has categorized nature, that it follows her whims--but really it is the other way around. She is categorized and made into a rule-abiding, fact-collecting creature by her reaction TO nature.

Finally, at the end she says that cats are zero points. What does that symbol of domestication, the house cat, symbolize in this essay? I wasn't quite sure. Maybe it just went to show that human ideas about wildness and domestication are ridiculous, or maybe the fact that cats (and lizards) are more ubiquitous than deer shows that it is not just nature that is sacred but that which we create in our minds as sacred.

STYLE: "Concision"

I learned that I frequently am redundant and use metadiscourse. I learned to do this mostly because of word counts on essays. However, at the end of the chapter Williams notes that it is not good simply to be short and sweet. The writer risks being terse. Thus the "garrulous charm" that he attributes to Strunk and White might apply to me as well! It will be very difficult to stop using redundant words and phrases, and to become more confident in what I am saying to simply just say it. It's hard because the excersises make sense in the book but when I actually get to the point of trying to write, it's a lot harder to actually put it to use.

Both of the pieces I read for this week actually combined garrulous charm and concision. At first glance, both seemed quite concise and straightforward--but then I started to notice little quirks that made the writing unique to its respective authors. For example, Edmunson used phrases like "Not much of a spitter," or "Not one to gape at Nature." This made her narrator seem in control of the "lightness" with which she treated her subject--Nature--and thus she was able to be humorous about serious issues: God, desecrating Nature, etc.

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?

Assignment 5:

SHADOWBOXING:

It is ironic about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas being the selection, because the person whose character sketch I am doing used to love Hunter S. Thompson and actually was like the narrator in a way. And while I find the piece brilliant in ways--the language and the drugs and the humor is so original--there is also a scary desperation to it that makes me want to shy away from oh, say, psychedelics. It reminds me of the character I wrote about because, like the sketch, this story doesn't seem to be about more than simply itself. It is ridiculously outrageous and even today this seems like way too many drugs to be taking--but honestly when I try to figure out what the kid stands for, and the lawyer and everything I start to think that it's just there for shock's sake and maybe I'm wrong but I don't see much there. I don't like this kind of writing because it thinks it's so outrageous but really it's not, and while I love the first sentence and the writing is great (the dialogue is fantastically visceral), I just keep thinking, "So what?"

The change between the "levels" of the personal essay to literary journalism is intriguing because of the requirements demanded of the writer. In a personal essay, I gather that the important thing is to tap into something personally important, while a literary piece would be something more relevant to everyone else. Kind of like the difference between a poem you write for a lover, and a poem you write that you want to get published?

The amount of research involved in literary journalism is both interesting and scary. How much is enough? I've read those New Yorker articles, and the people who write them seem so into their topics. And yet, my topic is tentatively about how people perceive Indians (Native Americans) and then delving into my own journey and seeing how going to a reservation has changed or not changed that. Most of the writing will be a story of how I came to be interested in writing about Indians, what that says about me, and of course going beyond the basic answer (which I already know) which is not to objectify people and treat them differently. I'm still sort of sketching things out on this one. It just fascinates me how people perceive others to be sooo different and yet the same, and then I get lost and don't know what I think about anything.

I read a New Yorker article once about a vanishing native language in Alaska. It seemed to me a perfect example of what literary journalism is about--the writer researched vanishing languages, linguistics, and then traveled to talk to the last remaining speaker of Eyak (the language), all the while making larger connections about how we treat natives and whether a vanishing language is a good or bad thing--should something be done to stop the disappearance, or is that the way that life flows?

Anyway. I meant to describe that to show what Shadowboxing was talking about--a piece that appeals to a great many readers and connects to an important issue while the writer's journey into the research and their own reaction to it is catalogued. But perhaps I might not want to appear as much in my writing. I don't know.

What I got most from this reading was the idea of letting the reader know where you stand--dropping hints about how real you are being, when you are saying things like "I imagine that Joe thinks . . . ". Also, the issue of audiences seems very important here. One enters into a sort of contract with the reader that says the writer will point out what he or she thinks is important (in a sense, it is very political writing, but then didn't some famous writer say that all art is political? Some Marxist writer probably)--and then showing why it is important. Rather than simply telling a story and pointing out the importance of the instance to the writer, the writer acknowledges the audience in a way that includes the audience and yet takes them on a special ride they may not have any clue about. Which leads into . . .

STYLE and Gay Talese's "Ali in Havana":

It's quite difficult to focus on style and clarity and cohesion when I am writing this, a gonzo journalist, on a laptop that belongs to my mom's housemate. My mother is working as a midwife on an Indian reservation because it pays well, and we have come to visit her. Outside my window are mountian lions, apparently--some kid got mauled by one the other day. There are greyish yellow rolling hills and lots of cattle and sparsely spaced out little houses. Most of the Indian kids hang out on their trucks, and there was a little girl yesterday who came up to me and asked why my pants had holes in the knees.
"Because they're old," I told her.
"Why?" was the answer I should have guessed was coming.

I feel like the holes in my pants right now. I can't explain why I'm so worn out, but I am. I honestly have not had time to sit down and consciously think for about a week. So. While it may seem that my writing does not follow the rules of cohesion and coherence, I found this chapter to be the most exciting so far. It helped me to realize that my writing is not cohesive nor coherent much of the time. It was an exciting revelation. And since I mix the passive and active forms of sentences so much it was wonderful to see that I don't need to stay active or "character-action"-oriented the whole way. Sometimes passive sentences are good because they help the flow. My boyfriend, who is less "active" than I am, told me the other day that quiet people are good because they smooth everyone else's edges down a bit. Now I get it. Before, it was as though I was thinking: so, I'll become more and more direct until my writing explodes?

Also in this chapter was the idea of starting out with something familiar to the reader-- in the Talese piece, we start out with a breezy Havana evening, rather than simply jumping into a description of Muhammad Ali. I also liked the part in STYLE about not needing all of the "thus"'s and "therefore"'s that I consistently employ in my own writing (more in essays, but anyway) because I am actually NOT making connections!!

The Talese piece is interesting because it transforms everyday actions--a meeting with a president-like figure--into something completely unique and fascinating. However, I wonder if some of the fascination comes from the fact that the two main players are Ali and Fidel Castro. It was the same when I read parts of Norman Mailer's Marilyn (when I was a kid of course and had no idea about what he was talking about) and thought "Wow, interesting, but if she wasn't so hot, would I care?" Yet what I like about this piece is that it turns Ali and the others into characters--especially I liked the detail about the twinkle in Ali's eye on page 265. I've seen footage of Ali, and he does have that twinkle sometimes when he smiles.

But it's harder to read this piece, and the Thompson piece as literary works with themes and stuff. Mostly because, if all of that stuff happened, then it can't all be relevant, I think. And then I realize that the writer is being selective about details--still, there are so many. Most obvious, I think, is the cigar/smoking motif. What does it mean that everywhere in Havana there are cigarettes and ashtrays, while Castro himself does not smoke? What does it mean to the story? Why is Cigar Aficionado the only magazine that "connects" the USA to Cuba? Does this mean that we can only connect via the "bad" measures we take to carry out our parallel countries? Does this mean that we have more in common than we think? Does Castro's lack of smoking mean that he refuses to be defined by his country and by outsiders? Or do all of these things simply mean that they are there, and that the writer is not planning anything but is hoping we will find something interesting in all of the details.

Of which there are an attic-full! Talese's explicit detailing of how everyone looks and acts seems to have been drawn from a video (unless he was there, or heard about it from one of the others) and he intersperses it with information about the characters' pasts. Some of the details feel true, like the twinkle, and others feel false: for example, on 276 Castro strokes his beard "as if trying to revive the vitality of its fibre." This refers I'm sure to Castro's age and possibly some sort of decline in morale of his regime, which he hopes will be revitalized, but I don't think it's fair to make Castro look like that from stroking his beard. This is why, even though I read the New Yorker, in many ways I hate it.

The only other thing that bothered me about this was how boring it was. I guess Talese is trying to bring down some idols, but he is not Truman Capote. He makes Ali seem like a sleeping, childish boor and Castro like a delicate moron. It's kind of distasteful. Why is he focusing on the boring speech about the flights at the end? I was mystified, but maybe I'm just being reductive.

Which leads me back to Fear and Loathing--I had serious Fear and Loathing about this assignment because I was so worried, ha--and the similarities/differences between the two pieces. Both pieces list details in a way that is not exactly exciting to me. But the details build up so that I definitely have a "feel" about each piece. Fear and Loathing feels hot, dry windy, with that sickening sort of feeling one gets when one has drunk too much (I won't comment on the drugs, but suffice it to say that I could never do that many at once!). The Talese piece feels hot, as well, and stifled, and awkward and tense.

Assignment 4:

Elissa Schappell's "Novice Bitch"

I assume that the title refers to the role of the narrator herself. Her mother is a Mature Bitch, and this story is all about how the mother "trains" the daughter (like a puppy) to be like her. The writing in this story is a bit too vivid in places--i.e. p. 38 when the narrator describes frown lines as "two wrinkles in her forehead [that] cross like swords on a family crest." It makes sense, and I can see it, but it's kind of blunt and awkward. Sometimes it bothers me when a similie or metaphor is a bit TOO good. Like the Novice Bitch one. The important thing that I learned was that I need to be aware of overripe metaphors and similes in my own work, even if most of it works, I need to think more about what a reader would see. And readers are different. Some want writing to be transparent and others don't mind a little self-conscious ego. SO I don't know.
However, I was pulled back into the mind of the narrator when she finished, on the same page, with "a ruby in the center, caught between my tits. Could you die?" It's as if there are two levels at work here. One, the narrator wants us to be pulled in to HER story, to ignore her MOTHER's. Yet, she is pretty much only describing her mother to us! There we see how the REAL narrator wants us to see both of these women at the same time, and to see how we can "hold two opposing viewpoints" (a la Fitzgerald) in our head at the same time--we are meant to feel sorry for the girl, and yet we see how much she is like her mother.

Here I had written a whole section about how Williams connects to Novice Bitch because of the language. In addition I wanted to mention that I liked the Williams book in general because, even though he puts his opinion in a lot (showing it off as "balanced"), it makes you feel better about yourself (not in a cheesy way either) to know that just because you can't understand some writing doesn't mean you're dumb. I'm just terrified that I have nothing to say and when I sit down to write I get ADD or something and bounce around. Just writing this was extremely hard, and so when the blog didn't save correctly and I lost the first draft I went insane. That's why it's so short. I'm sorry.

David Sedaris' "Monie Changes Everything"

Sedaris starts out with an image of hand-tooled leather shoes--and continues the image of leather and meat throughout the essay as a metaphor for pretension and "reality". Monie eats a diet of lamb chops, which is seen initially by the narrator as a marker of wealth but later on seems to be pathetic and gross, like the "luxurious" bear rug that is quite impractical in the average dorm room! Monie is married to a big-game hunter and this makes her seem like a huntress of sorts--when she gets old, she can no longer finish her lamb chops and she loses weight. This also makes one think of social evolutionary type theories. If Monie is rich but unable to truly survive in the hunter vs. prey sense, then Sedaris is also like this because he identifies with her and with his mother's gay brother. We get the sense that Sedaris is also gay but does not know it yet (well, I have read everything he's written, but in the story it's not clear).

There are two mothers in the story: Sharon is literal, and Monie is figurative. The latter occurs because Sedaris has pretensions to aristocracy of his own, and Monie serves as a catalyst to potentially provide that. But she disappoints him repeatedly, just as his own mother disappoints him with her down-to-earth toughness.

The essay is a constant switch back and forth from pretensions and "realness"--outside vs. inside, rich vs. poor, fake vs. real, high-class vs. low-class, etc. We are tested as to who we believe is the true hero of this sketch. Is it Sharon? Is it the narrator? Is it Aunt Monie??? In the end, I think it is Monie, because even though her pretensions kept her from interacting (in Sedaris' POV) from her family, she showed how she cared in other ways, and because she is the object of the narrator's fascination. When he attempts to write to Monie, to make an elaborate letter, we see how like a little servant he is in his pretensions. He doesn't want her money as much as he wants to have that elusive something that makes one "higher" up.

This interestingly connects to STYLE (a section I lost) because Williams also talks about a kind of pretension in writing that can lead to obscurity of meaning! In Sedaris' case, meaning is the person herself.

I wish I'd gotten a book like this sooner. I wish I'd gotten a basic grammar book as well, because I still am not quite sure about prepositions and dangling modifiers. Luckily, Williams explains things fairly well (and the excercises are helpful but I'm never sure if I've done them right).

Assignment 3

The Nitty-Gritty: Yes, let's do 4 essays. And if it would be all right let's extend the class a bit so I can revise them, because I will be writing most of them "on the road": one in South Dakota, one in New York, and one in Boston (I think!?). I'm excited because it will be back to days of writing on notebooks and transcribing them, which I haven't done since high school.

My target audience would probably be: everyone. I want everyone to like what I read, everyone to be interested, and smart and dumb people to cling to each other when it gets to the scary parts. That sort of thing. Mostly I guess I just want to write something really good. And I know that I have to lower my expectations sometimes, because I can be a perfectionist (but that's what makes me get better, I always think). I guess I'm just freaking out. The story turned out all right, I think. It just seems like something that men would NOT be interested in reading about, but I really want men to like my writing. I don't just want to write something that women would like. I don't know why that is. It's not because I like men better, it's because I'm just interested in EVERYONE and I want to try and "get" the hard readers.

AMENDMENT:

First, I apologize for the weird tone of the above post. Some of it came off sounding really snide, and I didn't mean it to. I just get really myopic about my writing sometimes.

And now . . .

1. What, from the readings, did you learn to do or not do when crafting your own essay?



I learned a lot about writing in general--especially the kind of humor that I started to see in all of the excerpts I read. I really liked it and I wanted to be able to do that in my writing. I like how definitive the Shadowboxing book is--I didn't know that there were all of these categories! But I'd like to see a book that had the "feint" and terms that you gave me, in it. At the same time, I don't really think about structure until it's finished, and then I go back to the weak spots and try to figure out why they need editing. So I guess I need to pay more attention to structure from the beginning. I learned a lot from the excerpts because I analyzed the tone, style, etc. (just all of the elements) to see if I could explain how they "did it".

The Style book helped me to be more aware of "strong" nouns and verbs. I found it interesting to see how "flowery" language versus the more minimal style differ -- I swear, I don't know this stuff. I just go by instinct, but when I make a mistake, and can't understand why it doesn't work, then I'm completely lost. Some people seem to think I'm lying when I make mistakes -- for example, one professor was kind of shocked that I won the writing award, because I had just turned in a last-minute, hastily-written paper to her. She said she was "kind of surprised."

2. What stylistic techniques did you employ?

Probably the "Memoir" (though I'm not wholly sure) because, although I told it as a chronological story (sort of) I began the story by "looking back" on myself from the future. So the reader knew that I was writing this as a (semi)adult. I also kept dipping back in between sections and during sections to explain how I felt about it overall.

3. Anything else you choose to comment on: audience, challenges you faced, etc.

I would guess that my target audience for the personal essay would be young women, ages 13 to 30. But why can't guys read it? Wouldn't some guys be interested? When I write, I focus more on making it something that I would read--or that my "ideal reader" (I heard that term somewhere) would--which is to say, it's more singular than an audience. But I'm into classic sort of writing, like Flannery O'Connor, and I always want to write those kind of things. Stuff that manly men read, too :) I don't know where this need comes from. Maybe having 5 brothers?

Next, you said that you were curious as to why I found my personal piece to "not be as interesting as anything else I've written or read". I tried to write about going to the lake with my family, but I got bored. And then I started to write about my first writing experiences, and I ended up finding the ballet theme. Then I got interested, because ballet is this weird hole in my life--I loved it so much and I wondered what it had to do with how I started writing. When I looked back at my life, I just thought that I wasn't interested in making any of it into an essay. Whether it was too personal or I kept making up details because I didn't remember much, nothing seemed to work. But I may just be in a slump. I have no idea.

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.