an almost graduate

"But you know," she's saying, "it could take five, ten years to get anything like that together. And it'll cost so much money...I mean, even if I started right now...it's the waiting that's the killer --the waiting to be wherever you plan to be. The groping through the days..."

"Everything takes forever."

"Right. To know exactly what you want to be doing, to know exactly what you'd make, given the means, given some time, all the projects lined up, the body of work, have it all mapped out -- who will be involved, what the office will look like, where the desks will go, couches, hot tub..."

page 144

This passage really struck me while I read it. I meant to post it awhile ago....anyway, it seems to really hit home these days with graduation looming on the horizon. Essentially four more months of predictability, and then we will be left to our own devices, our own means, and must find some way to carve our own niche out of the great woodwork; to leave our mark. The waiting really IS the killer.

happy new year

...well. i'm here and checking...and reading...and thinking...is anyone else checking? and happy new year, ann page.

APS for Jenna

Dave Eggers 319)

 Perhaps Eggers is a perfectionist in his own life?

"Toph, there are so many things you have yet to learn"

"Right, right"

"Just stay close to me, and you will glean"

"Right"

"Fear not"

"I fear"

He looks perfect.

"You look perfect"

He's grimacing.

"It's too short. It's brutal."

"No, no. It's perfect"

 

Eggers wants everything to be perfect, even though he knows he is not perfect; as he expresses this to Toph.

 

Final thoughts on Eggers? Relationships between any other author we have read?

 

Concluding thoughts on the autobiographical approach to writing? How has this course impacted your style of writing to a more signature style of writing?

Funny!!

"She was alone!
She never knew!
(something something something!)
When we touched!
When we (rhymes with "same")!
All (something something)!
All night!
All night!
Alll every night!
So hold tight!
Hoo-ld tight!
Baby hold tight!
Any way you want it!
That's the way you need it!
Any way you want it!

Toph does not know the words, and I knew few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing. I'm trying to get him to do the second All Night part, with me doing the first part, like:

ME: All night! (higher)
HIM: All-lll night! (slightly lower)

I point to him when his part comes but he just looks at me blankly. I point to the radio, then to him, then to his mouth but he's still confused, and it's hard doing any of this while trying not to careen off the road and into the Pacific and I guess in a way the gestures look like I want him to eat the radio. But Jesus, he should be able to figure this out. He isn't cooperating. Or he could be dumb. Is he dumb?

Fuck it -- I go solo."

(page 48)

This part was memorable to me as the first part where I literally laughed out loud. It amazed me that this seemed so ordinary a moment, something that could easily, and has happened in anyone's life; just a sing-a-long in a car ride. It's almost got an edge of bravery in the moment considering it isn't just two brothers singing in a car. It's an older brother who has suddenly become a father and an orphan simultaneously. The way Eggers frames serious and tragic situations within a humorous context is extremely effective and also appreciated by me as a reader. I LOVE this book!

An Autobiography Holiday Blog from Megan and Jackie

Seeing as Megan and I have spent the entire semester thinking the same things in class..we figured we should be REALLY cool and blog TOGETHER. So here you have it--a final blog from Jackie and Megan!
A Sixty second overview of 15 weeks of autobiography!
Things we may want to mention:Smith and Watson’s Five Elements of Autobiographical Subjectivity-•
Memory- how the writer recalls events; how he/she accesses the memory•
Experience- retelling of events that are mere interpretations of the past•
Identity- the writer makes himself/herself known through implication and differentiation• Embodiment- knowing the world through the body (senses)•
Agency- the reader recognizes that the writer has implemented free choice in the telling of his/her story
Hybridity•
What makes autobiography a hybrid genre? Auto (self) bio (life) graphee (writing)- a narrative of the self told by the self-Freud’s effects on the genre-Enlightenment’s effects on the genre-Ego-grams (for those of us that actually presented them)-Six word memoirs-Our writing prompts Amneusis-Bringing something back from the past into the present
Gusdorf’s Argument--People write autobiographies, because they feel like the world would be incomplete without their own existences. Autobiography is culturally imbedded. It does not exist everywhere.

-Thoughts from Megan!
A Sixty second rambling of Jackie's knowledge of autobiography..
After reading Megan's post I thought about the syllabus as a whole. Where did we begin and where did we end? When I had entered this class I believed that an autobiography was telling one's life story from beginning to end. It was not spliced, it did not involve creative metaphors, it was simply telling the story of one's life. As the course progressed I became confused; was it possible that a person could write their life story without writing specifically about themselves? Was it still an autobiography if major chunks of the person's life were missing? Could it be an autobiography if it was fiction?!
Finally, could an autobiograpy be tragic, heartwreching, and hysterical all while telling the story of a life? Dave Eggers seems to have combined every element of every text that we have seen before thus creating the most interesting piece of work we have encountered all semester! Plus, its hysterical.

Artifice & Verisimilitude?

James Wood in How Fiction Work (FSG 2008) writes in his introduction: "If this book has a larger argument, it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities."

That simple observation has been rattling through my winter-bent mind for several weeks and I think it's apt for thinking about Eggers' autobiography.

Wood's ends the book this way: "Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what must be called lifeness; life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind - lifeness - is the origin. It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants; it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naive as opportunists charge; almost all the great twentieth century realist novelsalso reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice.(247)

Still enjoying Eggers

I find it hard to pull out quotes from this book to talk about, but I will say that his sense of humor is very similar to mine, and most of what I find funny is because of my mom. I would like to share the part on page 389 going onto 390 where he interprets (or tries to interpret) the symbolism when he meets with Sarah.

"'You look older,' she says.
Right away, I think: symbolism. I look older. It's also symbolic that, as we sit on the couch, in the dark, the light through her large windows, the weak yellow light from the streetlamp, brings her father into her face. I had only met him a few times, and never saw that strong a resemblance but now-- Now her eyes are darker. It occurs to me that her smoking, as she did when we were at the last bar, is also symbolic. That must mean something, that she says I look older, that she looks like her dead father, that she is smoking like my dead father, that we are opening our mouths on each other even though, outside of having lived similar lives, walked the same path from the parking lot to the pool at the Lake Forest Club, swum the same laps at dawn, we barely know each other. All this means something. What does this mean?--"

I am always looking for some form of symbolism that happens in my life that I can then apply them to some sort of poem. For example, while wearing an old shoe, I found it funny how shoes have "tongues" yet when they "talk to you" it's from the sole. I then started playing with sole/soul. I just liked how I could find my own little quirks in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that help my own writing style.

Thursday's thoughts... a little early?

Remember how we talked about semicolons in class the other day? (I've suddenly remembered, after planning to write this post for a bit, that this may have happened in British Literature... so... just play along, please.) Well, I found it ironic, after talking about how semicolons are the most sophisticated grammatical device out there, that Eggers wrote, on page 288, that "you can hear his semicolons!" (speaking about Bill Clinton). Just a note about the irony of... things. Yep.

On a related, if somewhat disjointed, note, I find Eggers' writing style really appealing. We talked on Tuesday about the way he presents a little bit of a story and then skips to something else and then back and forth again... well, this is sort of like that... but it's more that he starts his stories, or anecdotes or whatever else you'd like to call them, right in the middle. Or, somewhere not at the beginning. For instance, flip the page over to 291, and at the very beginning of the paragraph after the break, Eggers writes "Toph is better at it than I am. Half the time, mine go behind me, which is funny on its own, but is not the effect we've been going for. We are doing the thing where we pretend to throw the baseball as hard as possible, with a huge windup, leg-kick and everything and then, at the last minute, instead of actually gunning it, we let it slip off our fingers, suddenly in slow motion, the ball let go with a high, looping arc, the trajectory slow and sorry, a one-winged pelican." So, he starts out explaining their game... without explaining their game. You know? And this happens on a larger scale, even in this instance. Really, Eggers is beginning a story about him and Toph visiting apartments in San Fransisco, but it starts as a story about fake baseball throwing. See what I mean? I always find syntax and word choice and word order really interesting (sometimes passively, sometimes not) so this... not quite word order choice, but uh, story order choice is sort of fascinating because it's anything but linear... which is kind of the way I like syntax to be. Convoluted is good.

So. There you have it. My Thursday thoughts... do with them as you will.

Tuesday thoughts... a little late

So, as I said in class, one thing that I noticed in AHWOSG is that Eggars, when outside the narrative, is very funny, very light weight, etc., but that the narrative takes on a lot more weight than that while still keeping humor present.

I also thought that Eggars was much more self-aware than most writers we've looked at. Mary McCarthy was pretty self-aware, but not quite to the degree that Eggars is, I think. I guess we addressed this when we talked about his work being the most performative that we've seen yet.

Another thought I had was that, although he spends a great deal of time in the acknowledgements and preface talking about falsehoods and so forth within his text, it actually seems as thought it is the most honest. Someone pointed out in class today that he doesn't shy away from letting himself looks dumb, that he's very self-depricating in that way... althought it's almost more passive than actively self-depricating.

So... those are my sleepy, late thoughts. My apologies.

Writing Styles - Eggers

Dave Eggers's writing is incredibly fluid and easy to read. He writes like he talks, or rather, he writes like he thinks. He uses repetition possibly more than any other writer we've encountered this semester. What I really noticed about his writing, however, was his technique of breaking up stories and scattering them throughout the book, getting back to them after placing another piece in the puzzle. The story I'm thinking of in particular is his father kneeling in the driveway. He tells his sister's story with such clarity it's hard to imagine it isn't seen through his own eyes (I suppose that's the mark of a good writer) but it's interesting how, instead of telling the entire story in one passage, he inserts snippets here and there, and builds the characters of his family (including the house, a character in its own right) before revealing the new developments of Beth's story. This, in my opinion, is smart writing on Eggers part, because he is able to keep the attention of his reader by building the mystery and anticipation.

His humor is an incredible agent to his writing as well. It's funny because it's about real things, like his wallpaper or his mother's bile. He could have taken on a number of other emotions and tones (depression, annoyance, humiliation, anger) but chooses to go with comedic appreciation, which I think was very wise. It makes it much easier to read and also much easier to relate to. The passage where he goes on about all the ways he would murder the people who knew about his mother's illness and pitied his family was funny because most people know what it's like to be in that situation; to be gossip fodder for the town or community in which you live, and wanting nothing more than for it to all go away. He takes it one step further by actually explaining (in sometimes grotesque detail, I might add) the ways he'd like them to die. There's really no reason for his hostility, but it's understandable just the same.

Eggers is able to reign in his audience with his use of comedy, fluidity, normalcy, and anticipation. You know the path his parents are heading down, but you have to know how and when it ends anyway. His writing is so easily relatable, and yet the way he tells his story makes it unlike any other I've read.

Similar writing style: iamgettingfat.blogspot.com (uses humor to tell strange and mundane trials and tribulations of everyday life)

Thinking and Writing

One of the words used by Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times critic, to describe Egger's book is a "stew." I think this is a brilliant description of the novel. The text is one that is filled with numerous thoughts, often simultaneously, that seem to be going nowhere and then suddenly they all seem to collapse into the conclusion of a story. The way the text is composed reminds me very much of the way a stew is cooked; a great amount of ingredients are added that do not seem to mix, but when finished the end result makes the taster understand why all of the ingredients were used. The style in which Egger's writes reminds me of a periodic sentence, except that it is with a story. A fabulous example to prove that I really do have some sort of intelligent thought behind this rambling lies in Part V dealing with the stolen wallet. Egger's writes and writes about his fears for Toph and his anger that his wallet has been stolen. He has elaborate theories on what has happened to Toph, and what he will do to the "Mexicans" once he finds them. It all comes to a resounding conclusion when he tucks a safe Toph into bed and returns to his room to find "The wallet. On the dresser. It was here." p. 165

Eggers Creation of Portraits and Performative Moments

We learned about performative literature when we were reading Running in the Family, by Michael Ondaatje, and I think that word applies to Dave Eggers' autobiography as well. I also think that Eggers capture singular moments extremely well in his autobiography as well. There are moments that seem like snapshots, especially those that describe his father's final fall on the front lawn. He includes them over the first 30 pages of the book, describing the moment in perfect detail and dictating exactly how his sister felt when she was observing the moment.

"At the end of the driveway my father knelt. Beth watched and it was kind of pretty for a second, him just kneeling there in the gray winter window. Then she knew. He had been falling. In the kitchen, the shower. She ran and flung open the door, threw the screen wide and ran to him."
(Page 29).

The description above is the final portrait provided regarding that particular moment in Dave Eggers' life. I think the moment is so drawn out, because it is so monumental in Dave's life. The snapshots seem to read like one of the those cartoon books that move if you flip them really fast, similar to Jonathan Saffron Foer's flipbook in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The moment could also be read in slow motion. It is set apart from Eggers' fast-paced stream of consciousness writing. Dave Eggers knew his mother would pass away. It was only a matter of time. He did not expect his father's downfall and death to be so sudden. That is why the moment had been so monumental in his memory. Without both parents, Eggers had a harder time accepting his situation. He was no longer a brother, but a parent, and a guardian.

The momeny is also quite performative in nature, as are many of Eggers' daydreams and exaggerated scenarios in the text. Eggers provides numerous visual moments in the text, and his readers are able to picture exactly what is going on. He does not skip a beat. Not to mention the fact that Eggers provides some conversations that appear as lists in the text. There is no indication of who is saying what, but yet, you just know. The reader just knows. These conversations read as scripts, and once you know which "character" is speaking, you exaclty how the line would be delivered.