Reading and Writing to Find Out Who We Are and What We Think
Archive for July, 2009
July 16, 2009 at 8:44 am · Filed under 1
I’m happy to share my current night table reading with you. It’s nice of you to ask.
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III imagines the meeting of a 9/11 hijacker and a stripper. He knows from the investigation of the men who took over the planes that they visited strip bars while they were living in Florida. It was part of their cover. He tells the story by shifting the point of view, always third person, from one character to another, Basaam the hijacker, April the dancer, her landlady, AJ, a customer in the club, Lonnie the dyslexic bouncer, but while some of the characters are real everything that Dubus writes is his own imagination. He also manages to make the third person feel as intimate and connected as a first person voice. It’s an excellent book.
The Dumbest Generation or “Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty” makes an frontal assault on you, my students, and your general ignorance. In particular how digital technology has dumbed you down in to what the author calls “pancake people” who have broad knowledge of trivia but who lack depth. It’s an interesting if offensive, to you as I am WELL over thirty, argument.
Everyone from Aristotle to Homer Simpson makes a contribution to Thank You for Arguing. I looked at this as a supplemental text for our AP Language class but it really looks more at verbal rather than written approaches to persuasion. It is a easy read, or skim, and would help with your study of rhetoric.
As for periodicals every one seems to be doing a Micheal Jackson retrospective but here are a few interesting things I’ve come across. If you’re into politics take a look at Vanity Fair’s article on Sarah Palin then contrast it to the cover story on last week’s Time. Esquire’s regular feature “1000 Words About Culture” is still offering great and entertaining writing. Every one that I’ve read has been excellent. This month’s is about vengeance.
I don’t see it very often but Adbusters magazine, there’s a picture of Spongebob Squarepants on the cover, has two articles I liked quite a bit. I can’t remember the title but one article was written by Roland Kelts who wrote the book Japanamerica, another good read, and is about current Japanese culture. The other is The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics by Steve Keen. My favorite part of this is where he revokes Nobel Prizes from economist’s like Milton Friedman who got it all wrong or whose theories have completely failed.
That’s all for now. Be safe and do good work.
RK
July 16, 2009 at 8:43 am · Filed under 1
My friend Leah and I were talking about this book and how bothered we both were by the way that the entire town is geared towards one goal-success in football. Everything takes a backseat to that singular goal. The town uses its monetary resources to fund the team, coach’s salary is more than the entire budget of the English department, private plane. The cheerleaders become a “support system” for their assigned players. Teacher’s abandon their duty to teach in favor of keeping football players eligible, and ignorant. Bissinger uses the game as metaphor for everything.
I know that many of you are on teams. What have you been taught about sacrifice and putting the success of the team above your own interests? I know plenty of people who see sports as a means to an end. They see scholarships or in some cases professional contracts as their ultimate goal and lose sight of what they sacrifice. How does Bissinger use Boobie as a symbol? In nonfiction the writer can’t make up a character who stands for something. He has to find one and then write him in a way that demonstrates the person’s meaning without losing him as a person. Look at the way he portrays the people in the town. How does he keep their humanity intact while still managing to use them to advance his theme? As Leah and I stood hashing this out another friend, Dennis, asked whether we felt like Bissinger was fully honest in his portray of Permian or if he’d played up some aspects of the town while avoiding or under developing others. Is Bissinger’s book a caricature? It’s a good question. Of course, writers make choices about what they choose to include but in this case does Bissinger cross a line? It’s here where readers start to ask questions about the writers motivations. What does he want us to experience. It’s a tricky balance. A novelist can do whatever he wants as the characters are not real. He does not owe any fidelity to their true natures but in nonfiction, or journalism, the writer has to be truthful. The trade off is that real stories have to be factual but they are real. The people in Permian feel real pain when they lose football game. Jay Gatsby can get shot a million times and he’ll never feel it. Whether or not we feel it as readers depends on how well the story is written.
In yet another kind of writing this distinction blurs. The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III imagines the meeting of a 9/11 hijacker and a stripper. He knows from the investigation of the men who took over the planes that they visited strip bars while they were living in Florida. It was part of their cover. He tells the story by shifting the point of view, always third person, from one character to another, Basaam the hijacker, April the dancer, her landlady, AJ, a customer in the club, Lonnie the dyslexic bouncer, but while some of the characters are real everything that Dubus writes is his own imagination. He also manages to make the third person feel as intimate and connected as a first person voice. It’s an excellent book.
July 16, 2009 at 7:12 am · Filed under 1
I’m seeing a lot of good work on this novel. I know hat it’s a heavy read for the summer and that the style can be a challenge. I see that many if not most of you want to interpret the thematic elements of the novel without looking at the writing. The plot of the novel is very straightforward. A father and son walk down a road to get to another place, not very interesting. Along the way they meet some people who try and steal their stuff and others who may want to kill, and maybe eat, them. Again, this isn’t new. I’ve seen this same thing many times in other post apocalyptic stories.
But this feels different. It’s more disturbing, somehow sadder than the others. I usually walk away from books like this with some catharsis and a sense that the end couldn’t be that bad. But McCarthy is different. This novel unsettles me. Some of it is the way that McCarthy never really explains what happened to the world. There’s the part where the man and his wife, “watch the cities burn” but the details are withheld, or ignored in a way that pushes the two main characters to the forefront. By removing details, and reducing the dialog to its bare bones-he even strips away the conventions of punctuation-McCarthy’s character’s become more vivid. He invites us to become invested in their struggle because it is primal and basic. A father wants to protect his son. A son wants to become a man. It’s just that simple and the fact hat world as we know it has ceased to exist doesn’t really matter. The dialog is bare and simple because the emotions are bare and simple. When those moments of terror occur, the boy gets sick at the boat, or as the father slowly dies, I feel it instead of reading it. The father’s last talk with the boy is as poigniant because it’s not a big speech. McCarthy makes it small enough to fit inside his reader’s chest but it’s universal. That’s what distinguishes McCarthy’s writing for me.
Peace,
RK
July 7, 2009 at 7:27 am · Filed under 1
Most of you seemed to have honed in on the thematic elements that Patchett and Greely are working to impart. I see that some of the conversation has drifted towards the idea of knowing who Lucy is. Someone said that just because we know her story doesn’t mean that we know her. That set me to thinking about how we know one another, and the way that I see it we do know someone when we know her story. What are we but a collection of stories? Think about it. What binds us to our friends, to the people that we think we know is a common story. I can tell someone I just met who I am, father, teacher, husband, coach, dude, but what do any of those titles mean without a stories to fill them in? Many of you are soon going to be working on your college applications and coming to realize that based simply on your resumes you’re not unique. Out of the 100,000 or so applications that will overflow mailbags at the University of Michigan how will you stand out? Every one of those applications is trying to tell a story about the person who filled it out. All of those hopefuls will have high G.P.A’s, long lists of involvement and community service, and stacks of laudatory recommendation letters but none of that will ever tell a story about a person worth knowing. How will you tell a story that shows your beauty?
Lucy Greely doesn’t want people to know her as “cancer girl” because she’s more than that. Her difficulty lies in that people think they know her by her scars. What is missing from her face is how people define her and because that injury is so prominent she has to go to extreme measures to get herself and other people past it. On the cover of her book is the picture of the little girl, I think it’s Lucy, covering her face with a scrap of cellophane. It obscures her and blurs the scar but it also separates her from a world she wants to know and wants to know her. The book tells the story from behind the cellophane. Patchett’s tells the story from the front of the cellophane, our side. This perspective affects the writing.
Truth and Beauty is an incredibly ambitious title for a book but it’s exactly what both authors-all people really-are trying to accomplish. In writing this book Patchett is caught between writing about Lucy’s truth, the promiscuity, drug use, her manipulative and desperately needy side, and her beauty, her writing, bravery, friendship. As you know, Patchett took quite a bit of criticism from readers, and some of the Greely family, who saw her portrayal as a glorification of Lucy’s struggles but I don’t know how else she could have written the story without presenting the truth of Lucy Greely.
When it comes right down to it, it’s not our beauty that connects us and makes us love each other. It’s our scars, our struggles and how we write our stories. Because of her dedication to the hard truth, some of it ugly, Patchett’s readers get to know Lucy’s beauty.
Peace,
RK
July 2, 2009 at 6:24 am · Filed under 1
If you’re looking for material for your periodical review here are a few ideas. I’ve recently read and liked the following:
- Get past the photo of the Jonahs Brothers on the cover and find Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone about the history of Goldman Sachs and financial bubbles. I know, it sounds dreary but it’s really good. Read it if you want to be angry about where your bailout money is going.
- Last Sunday’s New York Times, Week In Review section has excellent pieces on Micheal Jackson and Farah Fawcett (sounds like those belong in Rolling Stone) as well as Nicholas Kristof’s piece on innovating and inventing our way out of the recession.
- If you read the rest of the Times I have no doubt that you’ll want to do everything you can to change the world. The last issue of Harpers is all bout that.
- The first president most of you remember is Bill Clinton. He wrote a piece in Time magazine about FDR.
I want to emphasize that these are just ideas, not even suggestions. You should find articles that interest you and read those.
Peace,
RK
July 2, 2009 at 6:19 am · Filed under 1
In the last week my experiences have gone from the sublime beauty of rafting down a Western Pennsylvania to the totally manufactured environment of an indoor water park. Squeezed in between those two extremes we visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house and the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame.
I Did a little reading in Pennsylvania but I got distracted by the night sky. It’s hard to concentrate on fiction when real stars keep appearing. The stars felt more real to me than the book in my hand.
I liked the Falling Water house and it made me think of Bridget and Laura (graduated AP students) because they did their research papers on Ayn Rand who used Wright as a model for his architect. I also thought about a book I read during Spring Break. T.C. Boyle wrote The Woman about Wright’s relationships. I didn’t like it much then but I might have to go back to it.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is becoming one of my favorite spots in Cleveland-a great trip to a city that, unlike our beloved Detroit, seems to have found a way to reinvent itself. It’ll never be New York or Paris but it seems like a very livable city. At the museum I saw an exhibit devoted to Bruce Springsteen, one of my favorite musicians. In an interview he describes how it took 50 pages to write the song “Born to Run.” 50 Pages to write a 5 minute song seemed like an exaggeration to me but there on the wall of the museum was the journal. I looked through it an I could see the evolution of the song. I could see how on phrase from page 5 got carried forward to page 8 where it was married to another idea. The whole process is there in the journal and it’s accompanied by music which he also wrote. I like seeing the process. I like that it’s messy and frustrating and alive. It’s evolution but with a purpose in mind. On the walls were posters of all of the different bands that Springsteen started or belonged to and again I can watch the evolution of a great band. I just finished reading Please Step Back which is about the birth of a rock star ad seems to get it right. I don’t actually know of course but it did seem to capture the feel of the time. We should look at music writing. Not writing music, writing about music. I’m a regular reader of Rolling Stone but a lot of the time the writing about music doesn’t ring true to me.That put me in mind of the concert I attended at the Magic Stick. I saw the band X. I know, none of you have heard of them.
Books Read:
The Night of the Gun
Lullabies for Little Criminals-I got this book because I heard the author read a poem on the radio and it was so striking that I wanted to read more. I think she’s a better poet than novelist but she can really turn a phrase.
My Lobotomy-In the past week lobotomies have come up twice. I’m reading a book with Eli where the main character is being threatened with a lobotomy. Her evil guardian says she’ll take out Katrina’s brain and replace it with cake.
A book by Walter Mosley, The Long Fall, this guy wrote the Easy Rawlings mysteries and, while I still think he’s a good writer I don’t think he’s written anyting I’ve enjoyed as much those early books.
That’s where I’ve been.
Peace,
RK
