Reading and Writing to Find Out Who We Are and What We Think
Archive for July 16, 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
