Thoughts, notes, & moments in time captured in impressions of what I read this term. 

1/11/21

The first thing that struck me in Jesmyn Ward’s piece was the title: “On Witness and Respair,” “Witness,” as we discussed in class, is tied to martyrdom. Ward not only witnesses the death of her Beloved, but the deaths of millions of other black and brown husbands, wives, and children. A martyr is usually someone who is killed for his/her religious beliefs, but in this case, people are being killed for the color of their skin. This is the tragedy for Ward. But “Respair” (not “repair,” though closely sounding like it) signifies a return to hope, signified by growing social justice movements. The death and the centuries of oppression cannot be undone or simply repaired.

The death of Ward’s husband in the early months of the global pandemic – when, in many cases, he could not be affirmatively diagnosed with COVID-19 – serves as a metaphor for those who have been forgotten or erased from history. Her husband certainly will not go unremembered. The suddenness and obscurity surrounding his death and the fact that he was one of “the lost patients,” unmarked and never tracked in the database of national cases – parallels to the slaves who, after their deaths, were erased from history – reduced to birth and death dates and a name (which was often not theirs).

I want to come back to the second half of the title, which is “Personal Tragedy Followed by a Pandemic.” Because in my initial reading, I grazed over these words. It may be my desensitization to the words “tragedy” and “pandemic” used together in a sentence, but I hadn’t stopped to consider that part of the title. It’s not saying what I assumed it would say. It’s not “tragedy caused by pandemic” or “tragedy amidst pandemic.” It’s tragedy followed by pandemic. Ward certainly doesn’t want to undercut the tragedy caused by the pandemic – she’s experienced it first-hand. But she is reminding us that there always was – and still is – tragedy outside of the pandemic (namely, institutionalized racism) that also feeds into the death toll of the infectious disease.

 

By placing her personal tragedy before the pandemic, she is conveying the tragedy that exists outside the strict bounds of the disease. Her husband didn’t die of COVID-19 – he died of “acute respiratory distress syndrome.” For many Americans, the cause of death isn’t COVID, it’s the conditions of life that engender certain people to preexisting conditions. And t’s these conditions that make the disease deadly. It’s medial bias toward a black mother in a maternity ward who delivers prematurely. It’s the cavities caused by low quality water and food. It’s poverty – a trickle-down effect from underfunded neighborhoods and classrooms. Ward points these symptoms out with the repetition of a heartbeat. Thump.

I think Ward is getting at a broader point here – the inequities toward people of color that exist in the healthcare system haven’t cropped up amidst these “unprecedented times.” These inequities have always been here. And now comes time for the respair – the hope of the people finally bringing this to light.

I am intrigued by the concept of experiential journalism – the idea of immersing oneself in the action and living to tell the tale. I got super excited in class when you mentioned Tom Wolfe – I read “the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” during spring term (which felt like an acid trip without the drugs) and in the book, there is a character named Clair Brush – a journalist for the LA Free Press. She’s put on assignment for this “happening,” which is basically a drug-fueled Grateful Dead party. She’s never even had a sip of alcohol in her life and unintentionally drinks the laced Kool-Aid, leading to a life altering experience. She leaves the event the next morning with quite a story to tell. Ironically, this is also what Wolfe did with the whole of the book.

Anyway, inspired by the Wolfe, I profiled a few people during my first-year seminar last spring – I didn’t get to leave the comfort of my home, but I did get to interview Ken Babbs, who was a character in the book and I guess he was immersed in my mind-space for a few months.

In this class, I hope to continue with this profiling type of creative nonfiction and refine my writing and interview skills. I’d love to focus on the beauty in the mundane – maybe even beauty in the ugly? I’d like to develop myself in writing different types of creative nonfiction including documentary, narrative and forms that I’ve yet to discover.

 

1/13/21

I’ve come to realize that most relationships I have equated to love in my life have been tied to a self-projection (whether realized or not). It’s difficult not to equate love and deep personal connection to people who I’ve thought saw my “true qualities” – or simply confirmed how I thought about myself. A robot can easily passively facilitate these imagined projections.

“It all comes down to our willingness to believe in the robot’s emotional life and desires,” Mar says. Don’t all relationships come down to believing in the other person’s emotional life and desires? Whether they’re real or not, it’s about the feeling conjured in oneself. This is why Ishiguro “likes to imagine what they [the passers of the shopwindow] believe she [Geminoid F] is thinking,” when they walk by – they project their thoughts onto her and it doesn’t matter if she is real or not – feelings and thoughts are conjured in the minds of the people.

On another note, I felt emotionally touched by Ishiguro’s line: “I need to be identical with my android, otherwise I’m going to lose my identity.” I’ve felt this way all my life but never quite put it into words this eloquently. I have my own clone – I’m an identical twin. I can deeply relate to Ishiguro when he feels the need to stop aging and get surgery to match his perfect android. (At least my twin ages with me!) But when you live with a mirror version of yourself, it’s hard not to measure yourself against her and adopt her success as your own potential. Like Ishiguro, I never want to be “the uglier one,” “the fatter one,” or “the dumber one.” By now, I understand it’s human nature to try and pick out noticeable differences between two very similarly-looking people, and I have grown to take things less personally. But it’s still very much a test of my own ego.

Now on craft: I appreciated the detail in this sentence, written by Mar:

“One is processing, in the raw, sensory-overload manner of a human child; the other is performing a series of simple movements made possible by the servomotors installed inside the silicone casing that its skin.”

The author playfully uses “one” and “other” – two audibly similar words – to break the sentence into two parts: one that is human, and one that is automated. She uses phonetics to contrast the unpredictability of human speech and behavior with the programmed homogeneity of a robot.

The second half of the phrase has repetition of the “s” sound: “series of simple movements made possible by the servomotors installed inside the silicone casing that is its skin,” whereas in the first half, there is no deducible phonetic pattern: “One is processing, in the raw, sensory-overload manner of a human child; the other is performing.” Humans do not follow codable patterns, as robots do. This sentence demonstrates this concept through the contrast of natural human speech with alliteration patterns.

I like how the author ties herself into the story- it gives her credibility to tell the story. She becomes our conduit to understanding a potential robot human connection through her tele-relationship with her long-distance lover. It’s like the common person experience. I also appreciated the overarching comparison between Ishiguri to a robotic machine, himself. It’s as if he was programmed and is described similarly to how robots are described.

1/19/21 

In Ann Neumann’s First Draft of “Mercy Killing,” I appreciated this string of sentences:

“The exhaustion, the hours on the phone with heedless insurance companies, the antiseptic smell of doctors’ offices, the reams of hospital bills, the strangers in the house, the falls, Becky’s irreversible losses: her voice, her hearing, her teeth, her mobility, her memory. The pain. It was over, all of it.”

Neumann begins with strings of long, drawn-out phrases, painfully describing the ailments of Philip and Becky’s daily state. Neumann appeals to all senses – of the feeling of exhaustion, the sound of frustrating insurance spokespeople, the smell of hospitals, the visual of heaps of bills. She ends this tangent with a two-word sentence: “the pain.” The abbreviation conveys the suddenness of their death. It’s a sharp withdrawing of breath for a moment before it is released. “It was over, all of it,” then gives he reader a physical sense of relief, as we exhale with the natural pause. The release of tension built in the preceding phrases mirrors the relief Philip and Becky planned to experience in ending it all. With a release of breath. I’d like to keep this usage of breath and rhythm in mind as I write.

Since we were given both the first draft and the final draft to read, I couldn’t help but notice that these lines were cut from the Harpers’ Piece. The closest resemblance I found was:

“Over the last fourteen years, Becky had lost her voice, her hearing, her teeth, and her mobility after several strokes and bouts of cancer. Philip spent exhausting hours on the phone with insurance companies, trying to deal with the piles of hospital bills. They had finally found their way out.”

This string of sentences carries a lot less power to me. The sensory details are told, but not depicted, as in the draft. Maybe this version is more succinct in getting the point across to the average reader.

One sentence that I was happy didn’t make the final draft was, “The only thing that made her chemotherapy bearable, a process that required she be bolted down under a mask, she told him, was getting to see him in the hospital afterwards.” This sentence was clunky and I had to reread it a few times over to understand what was going on. I’d simply omit “a process that required she be bolted down under a mask,” because it is clear that chemotherapy is taking a toll on Becky’s physical health – it needs no further emphasis.

More notes on mercy killing:

I do not think that Philip Benight had ill intentions in what he did. In fact, I think he did it more so for the benefit of his wife (which ties to back the masculine idea of a man who must protect his wife). Prof. Brison’s talk on masculinity raised some possible explanations as to why the demographic of attempted suicide-homicides are mostly white men.

Niche details that add to the character and overall theme of the piece. Philip worked at Uncommon Threads. A nice little touch nudging at the fact that his life was a series of woven uncommon threads.

the cold January air seeping into their clothes and skin like salve.

But for seemingly no reason, or every reason, she turned on me one day. I understood.

that day and every day after

Instead, staff from ManorCare were sent by the Office of Aging to the hospital to collect Becky.

while at ManorCare, Becky spent the day in a wheelchair by the nurses’ station, slowly receding from the world.

We look at each other for a beat, then our laughs well up, his textured with the knowledge that he’s been called a murderer for poisoning his wife, mine textured with the knowledge that such labels won’t prevent me from eating this pie. Philip makes pie.

1/19/21 

I attended the MLK Consortium on White Supremacy and Violence held by the Race, Migration, & Sexuality Studies Department. I took several notes but there was one speaker who connected the dots from this Consortium to Ann Neumann’s piece, which we read for class.

Prof. Susan Brison described “masculinity,” (through the white supremacist patriarchy) as men who are white, cis, straight, wealthy, able-bodied, and strong-headed. As I listened to her words, I began to think about Philip Benight and the cohort of elderly white men who statistically commit more “mercy killings,” from Ann Neumann’s piece. I’d by no means label Philip Benight as a “toxic masculine man,” dominated by the patriarchy, but I do think that Philip was affected by this societal masculine ideology, and that in this might lie a connection between the frequency of mercy killings performed by white men and the patriarchal idea of masculinity.

In her final draft, Neumann references Appel, who says “The second category [of suicide-homicides] includes men who wish to end their own lives and think of themselves and their partners as a unit rather than two autonomous people.” Autonomy versus dependency. This is a recurring theme. The patriarchal definition of a man requires autonomy. A man who depends on his wife would not want to live with this gap. Neumann mentions Philip’s discrepancies from the white supremacist patriarchal “masculine” man. In the first draft, Philip says of his relationships with other men: “None of them made me feel okay with me.” This sentence, which was cut from the final draft, demonstrates Philip wrestling with his masculinity as defined by the patriarchy.

Prof. Brison, when describing “masculinity,” said the words: “Guns help.” Taken at face value, I see this as the emasculation of carrying a gun, and the freedom associated with it. But it immediately brought me to Neumann’s piece. “Guns help.” At least John Wise thought they would – but the gun failed on himself. Are these white men trying to escape the vulnerability and dependency of relying on another, if even emotionally? Malice or mercy?

I do not think that Philip Benight had ill intentions in what he did. In fact, I think he did it more so for the benefit of his wife (which ties to back the masculine idea of a man who must protect his wife). Prof. Brison’s talk on masculinity raised potential connections between the white male demographic of attempted suicide-homicides and the patriarchal masculine ideology.

1/21/21 Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I am blown away with how Didion weaves together different observations, perspectives, dialogue, and characters into one story to tell the story of San Francisco and the times. Didion’s characters don’t fit neat novel roles, but they share the commonality that is the shared consciousness of the Height Ashbury Experience. I adore this kind of writing of the psychedelic experience because Didion gives us something comparable to a psychedelic experience – one that is a transcendental, ego-detached, shared mind space. People are on their own trips, but the scene in Height Ashbury is, itself, a trip.  Didion weaves through the lives and the bodies of different personas, from the Cops, to Tom and Barbara (and Sharon), to Deadeye, to Max and Don – through threads of narrative with no particular attachment to one plot. Note: Attachment is something that the “heads” actively stray from. Each separate thread is unique, but each is also affected by the same major events of the day – increasing political tension, global turmoil, the looming effects of the war, and racial tension – they all breathe the same air and have collectively turned to the same “substances” or ideologies to get through.

By giving the reader a taste of LSD, Didion not only manages to convey each little corner of the ecosystem that makes up “the scene,” but she implicates the reader – to either get it, or not. You’re either drawn into this world, or you aren’t.

Didion also accomplishes this through the employment of so-called psychedelic devices. One example is Didion’s use of dialogue without direct quotation: “The air is soft and there is a sunset haze around the Golden Gate and Don asks Sue Ann how many flavors she can detect in a single grain of rice and Sue Ann tells Don maybe she better learn to cook yang, maybe they are all too yin at the Warehouse, and I try to teach Michael ‘Frere Jacques’.”

This is a dialogue between characters, heard by Didon, processed carefully, and written out delicately in accordance with setting, observation, interpretation, and action. It invokes a “stream-of-consciousness” by Didion as well as the reader.

Another way she achieves the psychedelia is through the insertion of real time observations in descriptions of setting: “Michael is fingering his red wooden beads and I notice that I am the only person in the room with shoes on.” She sets the scene from afar, then immediately puts herself in the scene. Didion also distorts time.“Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future.” There is no real sense of time in her piece, which can be overwhelming to readers who don’t subscribe to the psychedelic experience she is providing.

1/21/21 Inauguration notes

 I thought I’d write a little on the rhetoric I heard while listening to the Inauguration ceremony yesterday, which I found emotionally moving. I couldn’t help but write down this particular line from Biden’s Inaugural speech: “Make America once again a force for good in the world.” What a line. Biden has continually promised to be a President for all people and in this line, he is speaking to all people – even those who didn’t vote for him. It’s a nod to Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” and the idealization of the past, but with a twist. He manages to find some common ground – in conceding that there are aspects of our country that have taken a turn for the worst in the past few years. But there are also many aspects of our nation’s history that are despicable and need to be changed. As Amanda Gorman eloquently stated: “quiet is not peace” and “what just is, is not justice.” Chills.

I think that the message of this ceremony was the firm belief in compassion. The knowledge that we all can and should recognize and support the struggles of others, raise them up, show empathy, and be secure in knowing that doing this will not take any “compassion” currency away from ourselves. There’s plenty of empathy to go around, if we allow it.

1/26/21

“Your situation is bad, the caller wants to convince you. You sensed it, and you were right. Someone is trying to cause you harm, and they’re succeeding.” (from Kisner’s “Ring of Fire”)

The use of the second person “you,” at a very basic level, appeals to the reader in the same way these phone calls appeal to Kisner. I personally found it difficult to focus on the storyline because each time these mysterious messages appeared, I read them and found myself connecting to the “you” of the ominous messages. Maybe Kisner includes these quotes intentionally to invoke the reader. It’s a very powerful device because it allows me to empathize with the writer. When she gets these phone calls and hears these messages, I (the reader) can better relate to her actions because I have just experienced a small portion of her experience by having the words spoken to me through text.

“The phone calls sound almost reassuringly in touch with the times: this is going badly.” I read this and instantly felt a similar sentiment. I think a lot of readers would read this, at any point in time, and think of something that is going badly. It’s like the horoscopes that always seem applicable. The messages Kisner hears on the phone (and those she includes directly in her work) appeal to a very broad and present feeling in the target listener and the reader.

I loved this line: “Every consonant is rhythm, every word is beaten through the teeth.” It has a sort of syncopation and I feel myself breathing to it, like a chant or mantra or incantation, which fits our theme of thinking along the lines of the spiritual.

“This is the era of being ‘robbed,’” Kisner says. “The year of the con artist, the time of everyone losing out to someone else. Immigrants are coming to take your jobs, Republicans are coming to take your health care, angry woman are coming for men’s reputations and careers, straight white men are coming for your bodily autonomy, the police are coming for your life, trans people are coming for your bathrooms, and Democrats are coming for your guns, Silicon Valley is coming for your privacy, left-wing snowflakes are coming for your free speech, oil companies are coming for your land, and on and on.” This line just made me smile. “Immigrants are coming to take your jobs” is not an overt political statement. A far-right reader might read this and feel some touch of being heard. Not that she agrees- it’s clear, by putting “robbed” in quotation marks, that she might have well said “immigrants are NOT coming to take your jobs” and it would have meant the same thing. But skewing it positively and attacking the issues slantwise softens the blow and allows a broader audience to pick which part feels true to them and feel slightly invoked. I think this falls under the same strategy she employs when she uses the telemarketed quotes in her writing.

Kisner wrote a very clever piece – her writing slantwise about a topic reminds me a little of what I was trying to invoke in my first assignment. I think the main push of this piece is the fact that the state of the world is not so great – but what rendered us here and keeps perpetuating this state – is the blame game. Everyone believes that they are being unfairly robbed of something. Why does the Kisner keep picking up the phone? “I keep waiting for this man to ask me for money,” she says. But she never is actually robbed. Maybe it’s about trying to find the justification for our ails. A lot of the pieces we read this week circle around the idea of a curse – blaming one’s own ails on someone or something else and believing that an exterior incantation will fix the problem.

Notes on Hurston’s Hoodoo: “‘Oh, Good Mother. I come to you with my heart bowed down and my shoulders drooping, and my spirits broken; for an enemy has sorely tried me; has caused my loved ones to leave me; has taken from me my worldly goods and my gold; has spoken meanly of me and caused my friends to lose faith in me. On my knees I pray to you, Good Mother, that you will cause confusion to reign in the house of my enemy and that you will take their power from them and cause them to be unsuccessful.’

Similar to Kisner’s Ring of Fire – appealing to the idea that something or someone must be the cause of my misfortune. When I was in high school, my mom joked about what if someone had a voodoo doll on you and I hated that idea. Very interesting that the idea of a curse/cursing something is placing something or someone as the object of one’s misfortune. But there’s also agency in belief of the curse.

Loved this:

I caught a glimpse and vainly thought that, for once, I looked pretty good. It’s always like that. You get full access to the bad and embarrassing photos, while the attering one is out of reach. Who knows what happened to the photo, and my whole “dossier.”

Perhaps I feared that if I transformed them into action I’d lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has evaporated. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. In this sense, a conversion narrative is built into every autobiography: the writer purports to be the one who remembers, who saw, who did, who felt, but the writer is no longer that person. In writing things down, she is reborn. And yet still dened by the actions she took, even if she now distances herself from them. In all a writer’s supposed self-exposure, her claim to authentic experience, the thing she leaves out is the galling idea that her life might become a subject put to paper.

To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, not to dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.

“Leaving early” – to detach from a situation as a person to connect as a writer?

Notes from Ellen’s piece:

The expression of the magical thought is the creation…             

I hope you see their faces of the lives you’ve snuffed out

Wake up, night down – a dull suffering

 You noticed my absence and turned back onto the freeway to try to find me

A slow stewing suffering

Ducks came at my call, gawking at my greetings

• Asking for something, believing it to be true
• There’s a pear in the public garden as far as my memory
• Slender necks stretch out like ballet-dancers’ arms
• Their asymmetry echoed
• Water glided off their feathers

Romeo and Juliet swans – end up not being what you were told – magic is in illusion – a different outcome than expected

Expiration date on magic and the magic outlives

1/28/21

“In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The milky way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard.”

“I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom. For now, the boxes and the phone calls persuade me that things could turn around at any moment.” The style in which this piece is written reminds me so much of Emily’s love story about her grandmother. It gives me the same haunting, harrowing feeling as it touches upon the architecture of family, as well as the physical architecture of spaces occupied/unoccupied/once occupied. Perhaps the similarity strikes me in both Emily’s words and Beard’s is the narrator’s ability to insert herself as an integral part of the storyline – instead of making observations from a distance: “those are vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom,” the author implicates herself by asserting that she’s fine about the “vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom.” Yet another link I see between Emily’s piece and ‘Fourth State of Matter” is the manner in which the reader is slowly introduced to characters and relationships. I particularly remember in Emily’s piece, the reader sees the wedding frame, and then it is placed in a woman’s lap, who turns out to be the woman in the photo but doesn’t recognize her late husband. In Beard’s piece, she doesn’t overtly say “my husband” and there are code switches – she doesn’t say “my dog” – she instead refers to her pup by saying: “she is Pavlov and I am her dog.” Maybe the mislabeling or refusal of claiming possession is purposeful? It causes intrigue for a reader.

2/1/21

“Two dead hamsters on a concrete bench. My older sister cried for a pincushion rodent, my mother lamented the dullness of blades, and I stared down at little rolled-up-map bodies, while they stared up at a blank blue sky.”  

I loved this line in Cabeza-Vanegas’ “Don’t Come Back.” The characters of mother and sister are compared in relation to the shared corpse. The mother’s apathy for the animal is contrasted with the sister’s empathy for the creature. They are both crying. The environment (made up of “blue sky” and “concrete bench”) is further contrasted from the characters as it exists in relation to the corpse (the dead rats’ eyes look up at the sky and their corpses lay on the concrete bench). Cabeza-Vanegas paints a powerful scene, which describes much more than the physical setting.

I enjoyed much of the language in this piece but found myself detaching from the want to follow each story thread. I look up to this type of writing, which speckles complex metaphors into plot, but why? I sometimes find that the degree to which I respect a piece of writing correlates to the amount of time I’ve taken to understand its convoluted references and metaphors, as if the more interpretations it has, the better it is. I find myself believing that prose that can be read only at face value is limited, and that pieces that take time, dedication, and rededication just to understand – are worthy.

The type of metaphorical writing that Cabeza-Vangas achieves is difficult to create and to understand, yet I yearn to reproduce it. Maybe this pressure comes from the prestige of academia, but I find it frustrating that I sometimes want to overcomplicate my writing. It’s as if there is earned distinction in making my work indecipherable. I find myself at this junction, swept away by wanting this degree of prestige, but frustrated to the point that sometimes I don’t even know what I’m writing. I too often rely on academics to find the unintended patterns and meanings in what I have written. This ambiguity weakens my writing. In trying to make my stories fit to multiple interpretations, I often fail to make assertions.

*note: I actually think I do this out of laziness. I don’t want to have to do the work of picking out the important idea, so I leave that up to the reader.

On Doniger’s “Microscopes and Telescopes”

 “If I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full. The same thing occurs in the mysthical signifier: its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full.” Quote from Roland Barthes

Annie Dillard: “When you first look through binoculars, for instance, you can’t see a thing. You look at the inside of the barrel; you blink and watch your eyes; you play with the focus knob till one eye is purblind.”

You “watch your eyes,” like half-blind Thurber, in the binoculars; but you must also willingly half blind yourself to see the world of a microscope.

In my writing I try not to hop to large-scale telescopic generalizations. I want to write my story in the microscope and then afterwards, add the perspective of the telescope. I don’t applying the generalizations too soon to inhibit my story’s meanings to different readers.

2/11/21

“I wanted to tell the stories of people who work as day laborers, housekeepers, construction workers, dog walkers, deliverymen, people who don’t inspire hashtags or T-shirts, but I wanted to learn about them as the weirdos we all are outside of our jobs.”

This line from Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans spoke to me presently, as I sort through ideas for my final assignment. I am contacting “subjects” under the guise of “journalist” or “artist” and always qualify my requests by asking the other about their “job.” It’s an easy thing, a career – it’s an identifier, a dependable topic. It gives both of us a starting point, and it makes the whole thing more normal. People are interviewed about their careers all the time. It’s a lot less likely to be asked to divulge the oddities of your everyday life to a stranger.

I am “interviewing” a custodian in an hour and don’t know exactly what I am looking for. I will start with his job, or course. I have a list of framed questions, but I will be listening closer. When I write it up, I’ll try to avoid the fixed answers I’ll have undoubtedly received and look instead to the margins for the real story I want to tell.

2/13/21
I read “Peggy” on 40 Towns. I found it hard to get into the story at the beginning, but as it moved along it grew richer – I enjoyed the fragmented memories which circled back to common themes and settings – death, the Circle K, hope. I found aspects I would love to incorporate into my project – like the power of juxtaposing details of setting with conversation. Like when Peggy draws her family tree and Dirty Dancing plays in the background. Flowers does this often:

She gave me little fragments of her life as we talked, the smell of stale coffee wafting between us. 

She was born in Florida in 1967 – “the day the man walked on the moon,” she said as she threw out stale hot dogs from the hot dog roller. 

In my project I want to explain things without spelling them out. Like Flowers speaks about social dynamics slant-wise in her piece:

As she walks, her name tag flips back and forth between “Margaret,” and “Peggy,” Circle K sales associate. I think of her as Peggy because that’s the side it was flipped to on the day we met.

They hand her their credit card right at the cash register even though the machine where they would swipe it is right next to them. 

It was comforting to hear about the writer’s own experience of immersing herself in Peggy’s life. It gives me hope I can do something similar with Carey.

2/15/21

 Pekar’s work is different than the conventional prose I am used to writing and reading but the comic format illuminates structures that work in creative nonfiction. On the left panel below is Pekar’s narrative. It sets the scene – both in its function of providing necessary information, but also physically. Its block text precedes the rest of the image. The grocery scene on the right is a visual manifestation of the element in stories when the writing breaks from narrative and dives into a scene. It is no longer a narration, it is action. This image/dialogue box is the manifestation of what would be description and storytelling in a prosaic piece. It’s breaking away from telling, to showing. Pekar chooses to detail certain parts of the scene through what he chooses to draw and emphasize, similarly to how a writer chooses to detail certain things to convey an image. These details allow the reader to enter the writer’s world and through these details, conjure images of what is read.

I absolutely loved this strip because the experience of Pekar contemplating whether or not he should approach his acquaintance is something I can really relate to. I wrote about this a little in the first assignment I wrote for the class, but I’ve never seen this feeling articulated as well as Pekar’s image below. The multiplicities of Pekar constantly watching his acquaintance depict very accurately the cruel passage of time. This image IS what it feels like to live in your head.

2/23/21

I was interested in Julia Cooke’s “Amigos” because I am currently working on a “portrait” of sorts. Cooke’s introduction to her subject is intriguing – she starts at the beginning: “if there was one thing Sandra knew well, it was hair. She knew hair from root to split end.” This is the description of an occupation. Then she moves, without transition, to an earlier part of Sandra’s life and effectively uses Sandra to describe Havana culture. She describes the commonalities and differences between Sandra and the “other girls who hung out” “on Havana’s waist-high seawall Malecon where it hit Paseo.” Like the other girls, she “wore fashionable clothes of the barely there variety: diminutive shorts with interlocking C’s on back pockets, glittery heels, bras that peeked from tops, halters leaving midriffs bare.” But unlike the other girls, she “dyed her own long, straight hair blue-­black and lined her lips with the same dark pencil that she used around her eyes because shops hadn’t carried red in months.” This sets up the world in which Sandra exists and how she fits into it — how she pushes against it, and how she survives.

There are subtle nods that suggest a place in time, and a mood of the speculative retrospective. The writer speaks of the past, but times and dates are not certain: “By the time she was twenty­-one, she’d been working as a prostitute for around five years. The dates changed every time I asked her.” I think this method of telling stories of someone’s life can be useful, but can get confusing if it’s overused.

Another line that spoke to me was: “My presence in her home felt suddenly cruel. I sipped my coffee, nodded, and slipped away after fifteen minutes or so.” This is what I felt like when I was recently spending time with my subject – I felt a sense of shame because I was indulging in capturing a sadness, for the very reason that it was sad. I felt bad because I was choosing to be there, I could leave whenever I wanted, but she didn’t have that option — she had to continue cleaning the toilets.

…

On a separate note, I am not a fan of the ending of this piece. The writer makes sweeping generalizations about citizenship versus tourism, and then ends the piece by deeming herself the hero of Sandra’s life – by offering her “the help of an amigo” to turn her “dreamscapes into realities.” I think it’s a little too optimistic and self-centered, considering she never sees Sandra again.

2/24/21

“The Aftermath” – Teague:
Charlie Robert drove a milk truck. That’s about it. People have said since then that they didn’t notice anything dangerous about him in those final days. Didn’t notice anything too odd, or strange. but then, they never really noticed him at all.

I’m thinking about the perspective the writer uses to speak about Charlie. It’s impersonal, reduced to facts and external observations – the type made by an ignorant observer. It’s also omniscient, speaking on the thoughts of the people. The narrator knows what’s in their heads. But the narrator is not able to get into Charlie’s head, distinguishing him as the outsider. The religious content of this piece is making me think of this perspective in terms of liturgy. Like the narrator is a God-like figure, presiding over all people, except Charlie is the arch-angel, fallen from the narrator’s graces. He lurks in the shadows – “they never really noticed him at all.”

In a land where people stand some distance apart, Charlie Roberts slipped easily through the spaces between.

I found this piece to be very moving, and very honest. Teague acknowledges how it is all too common for the media to try to simplify things, to reduce things to patterns that feel familiar. This is the criticism of “Jack from Boston.” I think that Teague succeeds in escaping this. He offers threads of different stories, seemingly unrelated: Dirk Willems who saved the man who eventually arrests him, The Martyrs Mirror, which is kept in the homes of Amish families, John Bachman’s ability to pick Marie from the crowd based on her expression. These all weave together for Teague’s hook: which is that there is no hook. Sometimes, things are unexplainable. The only tangible story is the forgiveness of the community, and that is the only common thread among the anecdotes. I think this article could have veered grossly in the way of trying to reduce the story into an episode of True Crime or 60 Minutes, but it succeeded in presenting a fabric of ideas and plots from which the reader can draw to reach conclusions.

Lesy – Shochets:

Wow, this piece took an unexpected turn. At the beginning I expected something more like Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah – an investigative journalist going into different scenes to try to get the whole story. But it turned into a personal story – the story of Lesy’s encounters with death, and paranoia- there is a tinge of fear running through the piece like he’s closer to death than he seems, and what I mean is that death is in tangent to his life in the deaths of his teacher, and the sister, and the accident of his father. I wonder why he ended it lie that. With the omen of death, but not knowing he his father survived or not. It does keep constant the feeling evoked throughout the piece, that fear that Lesy had about getting too close to death. Not quite sure.

Powerful anecdote. Metaphor to death? Jumping to the other side? Applicable to so many scenarios that require belief. The kind of belief Lesy has in death.

Le Sueur, “I was Marching”

She doesn’t describe the conditions of why they were protesting, but then in the kitchen she says they’ve all worked in a factory. Which maybe tells me a labor union strike. I like that way of showing without telling. The junctions of the factory in the entity based against it.

I see that there is a bright clot of women drawn close to a bullet-riddled truck. I am one of them, yet I don’t feel myself at all. It is curious, I feel most alive and yet for the first time in my life I do not feel myself as separate. I realize then that all my previous feelings have been based on feeling myself separate and distinct from others and now I sense sharply faces, bodies, closeness, and my own fear is not my own alone, nor my hope.

Love the comparison to a clot. And the impervious feeling as one.

2/28/21  

Heather Christie – The Crying Book:

Christie’s balance between situational prose (description of what’s happening) and description as well as poetry is something I want to emulate. She takes simple ideas and stories and abstracts them. She ruminates on the act of crying, which is oddly satisfying, much like how a good cry can be. Her attention to language and the sounds of words used to describe crying, as well as crying itself, is an example of such an abstraction:

“When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of cried, the velvet cloak of wept. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted dreamt was incorrect, dreamed the only proper opposition. She was wrong, of course, in both philosophical and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which d has never dreamt.”

Christie inserts her personal experience as well as opinion into her piece, which keeps it from being emotionally detached.

“Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk the dangers of real life.”

Christie cites several works that please readers like her, who indulge in the melancholy “to practice responding,” without “the dangers of real life.” Christie’s piece does the same for me. Just like a good cry is therapeutic, reading about weeping can feel just as well like an expulsion of feelings, minus the red puffy cheeks. I think her mention of the function of cries in poems hints toward a potential aim of her piece to do that as well.

Myerhoff – “Number Our Days”:  

My initial reaction when reading Myerhoff’s “Number Our Days” was that I wasn’t a fan of the transcription style. It served to put me in a time and place where I could understand Shmuel and the narrator and their relationship, but it felt like I was watching a series of interviews, and it felt dry. However, my perspective changed when at the end we read that Shmuel dies, and that the narrator promises the tapes to his son. I didn’t quite realize until the end that there was a defined purpose of Shmuel and the narrator’s exchange, which was to capture the final moments of a life with a presumed ending – hence the title. After realizing this, the style of the piece makes more sense. It is a documentation without much judgement. It avoids cutting any of Shmuel’s words. It feels like a testament to Shmuel — inserting more of the writer’s thoughts and less of Shmuel’s words would not have accomplished the goals of the piece.

A sad quote about language which is /isn’t passed down.

Microscopic story to tell about a telescopic act. Telling stories like weaving a thread. Putting more meaning to what is there. Sometimes things explained at face value can be more impactful:

3/6/21

Angels in America – Kushner

“Americans pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual” no universal healthcare, insane gun laws, education Reagan. “in the modern era it isn’t enough to write; you must also be a Writer.”

Is this subtly referring to Harper? Intuition about ger husband not loving her? And wanting to leave? Cat = feminine energy. Dog = masculine.

“America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations”… “Six years ago, the world seemed in decline, horrible, hopeless, full of unsolvable problems and crime and confusion and hunger and…”

Harper: “but it still seems that way. More now than before.”

Joe says Harper never goes anywhere, keeps herself in all day and frets about the imaginary. Like a cat, locked in Babylonian walls.

On Scene 7 (mutual dream scene):

 Harper: “I don’t understand this. If I didn’t ever see you before and I don’t think I did then I don’t think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn’t be able to make up anything that wasn’t there to start with, and that didn’t enter it from experience, from the real world. Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions.”

…

 Harper: “So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, un untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don’t you think it’s depressing?”

Kushner addresses the intersection between art and fiction through dreams. All characters have the ability to dream, and it is through these dreams that the characters reveal their aspirations, worries, and limitations. “Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions.” Sounds a bit like creative nonfiction. 

Dreams are made from fragments of sensory experiences already processed by the brain. Theoretically, it’s impossible to see a stranger’s face in a dream – though the dreamer may think that the face belongs to a stranger, it is only a reconstruction or reproduction of a face the dreamer has already seen. If dreams do this, literary journalism also does. Dreams are a long-investigated phenomenon – they’re debatably the mind’s way of revisiting information for the purpose of solidifying certain into memories and discarding others. Dreams also allow us to nimbly tip toe around voids in memory, to revisit painful memories in a calmed state for the purpose of processing. “Trauma” has etymological considerations as “a wound, a gap.” A void in memory, a chip in the groove that triggers a cascade of emotions when visited. This is why sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder have nightmares. The mind, in sleep, therefore, tries to access and process this information – to ruminate, speculate, and piece together the fragments of thoughts, experiences and observations, to try to make sense of things, or make peace with things. Dreams don’t always succeed in this. Creative nonfiction doesn’t always succeed in this.

Sometimes the dreamer is woken up in fear or confusion from something deeply disturbing revealed to them in the dream. Revelation. As I am writing this I realize “reve” is the French word for dream. Sometimes the level of disturbance is because of the reality of the revelation. When fiction bleeds into what’s real, it can be disturbing. Bewildering.

Sometimes the dreamer wakes up with clarity, even if that clarity is delusional. Enter Kushner’s “mutual dream scene.” The reader doesn’t know if Harper is in Prior’s dream, or if Prior is in Harper’s dream. Both Harper and Prior revisit their traumas through the other person in their shared dream. “Bewildering.” Harper tells Prior he’s sick, but also that there’s a part of him that’s “entirely free of disease,” and Prior tells Harper her husband is gay. This dream has a sort of threshold of revelation. Fragments of conversations, of scenes and people that are not real? Or perhaps they are. Nevertheless, they reveal truths.

In Prior’s fever dream in the film, we see the angels and judges, who are all people Prior has encountered at some point in his life. The divine and the dream do the work of rearranging experiences for the possibility of reimagination. The dream scenes do this. They allow fiction to bleed into fact. Dreams are a very real, tangible universally shared experience. At the same time, they are potentially fictional. Like creative nonfiction. Arrangement for the purposes of revelation.