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.

Dave Eggers is a Modern Day James Joyce

I think I appreciated reading A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, because there were times when he wrote exactly how he would speak. He had this "stream of consciousness" way of delivering information, and I really enjoyed it, because even though the language was so difficult to comprehend at times, it was real to me. Even though the book is a work of fiction (I would argue that there are many autobiographical elements in it, however). A Portrait is one of my favorite works by an Irish writer and could possibly be one of my favorite books of all time. My list grows larger every day though.

I think that Dave Eggers autobiography is particularly realistic and enjoyable for the same reason. He writes as if he is speaking. He writes as if he is dictating exactly what is on his mind. Even though sometimes he writes about fantastical events, he welcomes the idea of his imagination running away with him, almost in a daydream state, because it is such a real thing that really happens to people:

"We'll get her in a few days. Beth and I have vowed to get her out, have planned to break her out, even if the doctors say no; we will hide her under a gurney. will pose as doctors, will wear sunglasses and go quickly and will take her to the car, and I will lift her and Toph will provide some distraction if necessary, something, a little dance or something; and then we'll jump in the car and be gone, will bring her home, triumphant, we did it! we did it!..."
(Page 41).

That is the beginning of a perfect example of how Eggers imagination often takes flight while he is writing. I can picture him sitting at his computer and just typing a million miles a minute at these points in his story. He doesn't stop, because he will lose the creative spark. Though Dave and his sister do not break their mother out of the hospital utilizing this elaborate plan, Dave is perfectly capable of thinking about it in a daydream-state. The situation is not real, but the way of thinking about it is. Who hasn't had these crazy scenarios work themselves out in the imagination before?

Eggers may have actually thought each sentence through when he was writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but his final product certainly does not come off that way. I am sure there were areas in the book where he wrote slowly and with precision, but some of the longer paragraphs that go on for pages at a time and contain multiple periodic sentences seem to be written at the speed they are read. Everything speeds up, like the book is on fast forward. That could be another reason why the book is such a quick read as well.

The Easiest and Hardest to Read...

I must say that I am greatly enjoying A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for what I can bring myself to read. Yes, the language is easy, and even his trains of thought are easy for me to follow. However, the subject matter is (as I'm sure it is to others) a bit too close to home. A lot of the imagery that he describes in his terms, such as the machine that "looks like an accordion, but is light blue. It is vertical and stretches and compresses, making a sucking sound." (p. 36) just reminds me of things that I myself have seen and did not know what it was. However, that's another thing that made this book so easy... there were no terms we didn't know. It wasn't written in the correct or technical terms, but rather the way one might describe what they don't know. However, that's again what makes it so difficult to read is that I recognize a lot of what he's saying, and instead applying my own unawareness to the situation. He is a lot of fun to read, but yes there have been some parts where I had to put the book down. This is funny, because the other books we've read that have had much more gruesome imagery I've been okay with... mostly because I haven't had first-hand experience with it. I know I'm not the only one, but I figured I'd share.

Kincaid & Repetition

The most noticeable writing technique Kincaid employed in Autobiography of my Mother was repetition. I think she uses this tool to really solidify the personality and aura of the main character and all the main themes of the novel (lack of love, mainly). Kincaid repeats phrases like "she did not love me" and "we were not friends" time and again, not only in different chapters and passages of the book, but numerous times within the same passage as well. Kincaid uses repetition not only with exact phrases, but with themes as well. The reader is made perfectly aware early in the story that the narrator is of a more pessimistic mind-set and that love doesn't exist in her life. We see this in the beginning with her lack of parenting and again at the end when she states that she married a man she "did not love." She viewed herself more as a generic package than an individual who could have love if she really wanted it, but perhaps never knew how to go about finding it. I think Kincaid's use of repetition proved to be an extremely strong technique that helped the themes of pity, loss, despair, anger, and isolation really bleed from the pages. Although it was certainly not an uplifting story in any way, I believe the delivery of Kincaid's message and her ultimate purpose is portrayed very strongly.

when your remembering things that havent happened yet, thats when you need to re-evaluate the validity of your memory

"And yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present." (214)

i believe that what we are involved in now, does heavily effect the way in which we recall the things from our past. but i'm not so sure i'd go as far as to say that it is not trust-worthy . . .
can it not be trusted because it is not the entire truth? then again, what is truth? is it just the facts, laid out in an objective fashion? or is there something other than truth, that memory fails to provide? i'm curious as to what it is about memory that influences kincaid to think that it's not a valid source of experience.

an example? ok. so i'm thinking of a memory from awhile back - my younger brother and i, no more than 5 and 6 years of age, running up a muddy slant in our backyard and then hurling ourselves down it, barefoot, while holding onto a trapeze bar. when i'm recalling this, my mind flashes images of my brother in his current state, between the images of him as a little boy. i also can't help but to think of how we would interact in that situation now, as the people we've become since then. my mind/memory creates this randomized culmination of then and now without any deliberate prompt from me, and so it is entirely unavoidable. in this way, it is the experiences of my more recent past and the present, which help me to regain my thoughts of the far past. how is that not accurate?

i dont believe my wandering thoughts of how things are now, negatively effect the validity of my muddy-trapeze-memory. if anything, i feel as though they brighten it, making it more accessible to me in this state of being, so far removed from my 6-year-old self. i trust my memory, even when it may not be comprised of the clearest images and the most defined experiences. because no matter what i recall, it came from within my mind. and i trust myself first, above anyone else.

A lack of something...

While reading Kincaid's novel I had a difficult time connecting to the story. Our discussion on Tuesday in class helped me to to better understand the concept of the text--but I still felt something was missing from my understanding of the story. While reading last night I came to realize that perhaps what it is about the text that is missing is the feeling of love. There seems to be such a separation between Xuela and everyone that is around her. The writing in the text is beautiful, but perhaps I am not able to connect/understand the text because I have never been in such a position as the author. The separation between life and death seems to define the text. But then again I have never been a slave and was able to connect to Frederick Douglas's narrative? There is a good chance this idea needs more thought..

Two pulchritudinous (favorite word) lines from the text are:
"To make someone forget another person is impossible. Someone can forget an event, someone can forget an item, but no one can ever forget someone else." p108 I thought these lines were astounding. So simply written and so honest and true.

Dark and Dismal "Autobiography"

I think that The Autobiography of my Mother is quite the dark and dismal book. It's message is definitely one of hopelessness. Xuela is both self-centered and loveless. The only man she admits to loving (Roland) is only discussed for about twenty pages in one chapter. She then proceeds to discuss the people in her life whom she admits that she never loved and will never love, like her father and her husband. I am beginning to wonder whether she would have loved her mother if she had lived past Xuela's birth. Is that the pivotal moment in Xuela's story, her mother's death? Could she have deeply if her mother had lived? I'm not so sure, because she discusses her mother's life in brief later on in her story. Her mother potentially lived the same loveless life. I think the last passage of the novel dictates Xuela's stance on life quite well:

"The days are long, the days are short. The nights are a blank; they harken to something, but I refuse to become familiar with it. To that period of time called day I profess an indifference; such a thing is a vanity but known only to me; all that is impersonal I have made personal. Since I do not matter, I do not long to matter, but I matter anyway. I long to meet the thing greater than I am, the thing to which I can submit. It is not a in a book of history, it is not the work or anyone whose name can pass my own lips. Death is the only reality, for it is the only certainty, inevitable to all things."

(Page 228)

Xuela returns to contradictions. Though she feels she does not matter, nor does she long to matter, that is why she does matter. She has fought against having a purpose and a passion in life (other than the love she has for herself). She longs to meet death. All of the people in her life have, by this time, passed away. She is 70-years-old and has no one left, not that she really cares. However, she learned from birth that death really is the only certainty, that is why she thinks it is the only thing that will make her submit. She never submitted to love, and therefore, I believe, never submitted to life.

The metaphor running through this last passage is one of light and dark. She says that she is indifferent toward day, which is comparable to life. She has no qualms against darkness, or the "life" that follows life. She is prepared to meet death, because it is the only thing she believes in. It is the only thing she knows will come. Not God. Not love. Not happiness.

...something? nothing? whose story?...

Something out of Nothing... out of Something

First, I noticed that it was not until we reached the chapter that begins on page 181 that we really learn much about Xuela's mother other than that she's dead. Yet, at the same time, we really don't learn anything, because it's all conjecture. Xuela tells us over and over again that she's guessing, assuming, making things up, because, as she repeats countless times, her mother died when she was born. So... in this chapter we learn something, but really we don't learn much of anything.

In the final chapter we learn a bit more about Xuela than I think we really learn before this. On page 213 Kincaid writes:
"I had been living at the end of the world for my whole life; it had been so when I was born, for my mother had died when I was born. But now, with my father dead, I was living at the brink of eternity, it was as if this quality of my life was suddenly raised from its usual self, embossed with its old meaning. The two people from whom I had come were no more. I had allowed no one to come from me. A new feeling of loneliness overcame me then; I grew agitated with a heat, then I grew still from a deep chill. I grew used to this loneliness, recognizing one day that in it were the things I had lost and the things I could have had but refused. I came to love my father, but only when he was dead, at that moment when he still looked like himself but a self that could no longer cause harm, only a still self, dead; he was like a memory, not a picture, just a memory. And yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present."

Then, a few pages later, on page 226, she says "I refused to belong to a race."

I thought that this one long passage and the other short line seemed to connect. In the long passage, Xuela explains how she comes from nothing, in a way. How she came from nothing, she produced nothing, and therefore has nothing as she ages and approaches death (does this mean she is worth nothing?). So, to me the words "I refused to belong to a race" indicated that because she refused to have parents and she refused to have children she took herself out of any heritage (biological, emotional, psychological, familial) and then kept herself separate by not perpetuating her own self, not creating a new heritage. I'm sure that the short quote also relates to the colonial story at play in this book (in her Carib mother, her Irish(?) father, her white husband)... but I was intrigued more by this other interpretation.

So, we write to become something other than what we are, according to Foucault. Kincaid wrote to become nothing (a race-less, history-less, family-less, childless, love-less, legacy-less woman), which is something other than what she is, because everyone is something (except Xuela). (That made sense, read it again.)

...searching Kincaid for thursday...

Use Foucault's statement as a lens for thinking about Kincaid's novel:
"One writes in order to become other than what one is."

Not an autobiography, huh?

So, maybe I'm an idiot and missed the whole memo on The Autobiography of my Mother not being a real autobiography. I mean, I knew from the title that it was probably going to be very Danticat-like, most of the story being told about the protagonist, who I assumed to be Jamaica Kincaid's mother. Oh, how wrong I was. I read about two pages in, and then I realized that at the beginning of the course Ann Page said we would be reading one piece of fiction, a book that was not an autobiography at all. Ah-ha! It must be this one! So, I read the copyright information and realized that there was a note from the publisher:

"This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental."

And so I decided that I would have to read The Autobiography of my Mother in a much different manner than I have been reading the other pieces we have covered in this course. All along I have been reading the autobiographical pieces and wondering to myself, how much of this is true? How many liberties has this author taken in representing and retelling his or her life's accounts? Now, as I read The Autobiography of my Mother, I ask myself some different questions. I keep trying to find evidence of why the events seem untrue, or as if they never actually occurred in a real person's life. I think I am starting to find these pieces of evidence that have really made me say to myself, "That right there is why this book is not an autobiography. That is why there is no way that Xuela could possible be real."

So, maybe some of these events, or the ideas associated with these events occurred in Jamaica Kincaid's life. More likely, they did not. This book definitely aims for the shock factor for sure. I am sure there are some events that just evoke a HOLY CRAP reaction. I was that way when I read about Xuela pulling the fetus from her sister's womb (I apologize if you haven't gotten that far yet...at least I prepared you for it). I guess I have two questions, upon all this reflection:

Could Jamaica Kincaid have masked some of these events as fiction (because I trust that some of them really are complete fiction) in order to receive that detached feeling that we get when read Danticat? And...do we read texts differently, looking for different things, depending on the genre?

Speech in fiction..

I keep noticing the number of times Kincaid writes about the theme of speech. I find it interesting that she discusses her experiences with speech so often through writing. Perhaps the character has always found it easier to express themselves through writing rather than speech? I think there is evidence to this through the character's letters to her father.
I also find the themes of love and hate throughout the novel to be very interesting. Kincaid discusses the similarities of arguably two of the strongest human emotions...

...Kincaid....

"An Autobiography of my Mother"

"Mother Dying" (3)
"And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world."
--self reflection, realization of the self, in relation to one's family

"Ma Eunice" (5)
"brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given."
--product of social reconstruction

from Paul:

"Why are people prompted to write their autobiographies? Is it because they are vain and believe they have an important story that needs to be heard? In some cases I believe that this is the case but I think that in the vast majority of cases it is because the person has woken up one morning realizing that their life is finite. That one day, maybe in the very near future they will die, writing an autobiography is a way to immortalize themselves. I am sure that there are more reasons, and different ways of looking at this question. But at the heart of it I think autobiographers are just trying to preserve a part of themsleves, regardless of the reason they feel the need to do so."

we are the books we read

"a literary work is a communal act"

why?

when i first heard this, i sort of brushed it off as just another quote that was trying to get at the backbone of writing. but the more i considered it, the more it began to make sense for a number of reasons. the first one being that, our whole lives we are around other people, creating experiences and interacting with one another. the stories of these events are the basic material of our autobiography (as well as other genres of literature), and they undoubtedly include people other than ourselves. in this way, our writing would not have been possible without the effect of the community we live in. even if your a hermit and havent been in the company of others in 50 years, there would still be fundamental parts of yourself that would have come from the people you were raised by. as humans we learn everything by imitation, and so everything within you essentially comes from someone else.

not only does the society in which we live, influence the matter of our past experiences. they also help to recreate the stories of each literary work. the writer physically scribbles their intangible experiences onto a page, making it concrete between the two covers of the book. but if no ones eyes ever read over those specially arranged symbols - no ones mind ever contemplates each written word into meaning - no ones perception of 'now' is suspended so that they may listen to the 'then' . . . the writers story might have been better off free from the binds of text. without an audience or a receptive community of readers/listeners, the literary work fails to exist anywhere but between the white margins of pages never noticed.

and if no one acknowledges it, does that even exist?

"People often confuse life narrative and fiction. Typically, they call autobiographical texts 'novels' though they rarely call novels 'autobiographies.' A life narrative is not a novel, although calling life narrative 'nonfiction,' which is often done, confuses rather than resolves the issue." (Smith & Watson 7).

Autobiography of My Mother... initial observations

When I first picked up this book, I noticed two things just on quick observation. On the second page of the book (not the second page of the text... the actual second piece of paper behind the cover), there is a quote that says:
"Through subtle, poetic meditations that continually question the boundaries between solitude and family, love and hate, black and white, colonialism and the colonized, Kincaid casts a lucid wash of language over Xuela's tragically barren life." (St. Petersburg Times)
This struck me as interesting because of the phrase "solitude and family." I doubt whether any of us would have asserted that the opposite of solitude is family... but it's true. And especially poignant at a time of year when so many people gather their families together. It seems like a sad point to make, but I was somewhat taken by surprise in finding such a genuine sentiment and idea in a review of the book. I found it interesting, anyway.

Another thing that I noticed before even beginning to read was the simple, and somewhat obvious, visual clues that the book gives us. At the start of each chapter is a piece of the picture on the cover... with each chapter, more of the picture is revealed. I assumed that this meant we would learn more about Xuela's mother in each chapter. Perhaps I won't win a Nobel Prize for that astute piece of observation, but I thought it was worth noting.

And, it held true as I did read. In the first chapter we really learn very little about the mother other than that she was Carib. Not a lot to go on. But, in the second chapter we learn more. We learn that Xuela shares her mother's name: Xuela Claudette. We also learn that she was abandoned at a convent, and that the narrator's father loved her. In each chapter, we learn a little more, and maybe by the end it will add up to a whole person. I guess that's the point...

The Autobiography of my Mother

"I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice, that my loss had made me vulnerable, hard, and helpless; on knowing this I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for myself."

The impact of family in one's own story, yet again. But, fiction this time...

This book makes me happy...

Sorry I am not in class today to be really excited about this book but I'm trapped in a smelly hockey arena for the afternoon.
I could write my blog post on how hysterical I find this book, but since I wrote my last one on that perhaps I should find another topic..
One of the greatest lines from this text that relates perfectly to the class is on page 138.."It is the kind of event that should have surfaced as the first chapter of an anguished autobiographical novel." Throughout the course we have discussed what we would put into our autobiographies; would the stories be sad, funny, enlightening? I think the way in which Ondaatje writes is beautiful. He writes his autobiography on a lighter note..his family does not seem to live the perfect life, but he is always able to find humor in not so fabulous situations. My favorite character in the text is obviously Lalla. She reminds me so much of my Grandmother in the way that neither of them care at all what anyone else thinks of them. It is also to think about all the references to flowers in the sections on Lalla....

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

..TAXI CAB DRIVER IN BOSTON...

...remind me to tell you about the Haitian taxi cab driver in Boston....

...or a kaleiodoscope?....

"No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory of funny hideous scandal, we will return to it later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized." (Ondaatje 26)

...fractal....

...could the fractal or scattergram be a way of describing Ondaatje's style in "Running in the Family."

Cheers for Ondaatje

In Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, I noticed the involvment of family and stories to tell his story. These are techniques we've seen already, including using family history to tell your own, and splicedness, or the use of other stories to represent the events unfolding in the authors life. Ondaatje also introduces us to humor in his memoir, which we've been slightly deprived of thus far in class. "'Sissy,' Francis' sister, "was always drowning herself because she was an exhibitionist.'" (51) He uses humorous anecdotes about his family and the people around him, and a lot of witty one-liners. We're once again seeing a foreign account of life, but Ondaatje brings his reader into his world. This is one of the more "easy" reads we've had so far, in terms of the enjoyability and fluidity of the memoir.

The Cinnamon Peeler

The poem in Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje entitled "The Cinnamon Peeler" really caught my attention. I can't really explain what it is about this poem that made me so fascinated, but I would like to say that I love the duality of sense and sensuality that occurs throughout. That, and the first lines
"If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow."
drew me in with such an unusual and bluntly put statement

The Photograph

I do believe that the chapter entitled "The Photograph," in Running in the Family, is a reminder of Geoffrey Douglas's "autobiography" The Classmates. Ondaatje looks at a photograph of his parents on their honeymoon and he describes it in full detail, how his parents are posed, what their faces look like, etc. We see the photograph on the following page, and we see that he has done a pretty good job of explaining what the picture looks like to him. His parents are making hysterical faces and his father has written, "What we think of married life," on the back of the photo. In this short chapter, we know exactly what that quotation means. The marriage was doomed.

"Everything is there of course, their good looks behind the tortured faces...The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father's tanned skin, my mother's milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making. It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together."
(Page 162)

We know right then that they did not take many photographs together, which indicates that the marriage certainly had more downs than it had ups, and I can't blame Doris for leaving Mervyn. He was completely off his rocker and was an alcoholic to boot. However, I am absolutely blown away by Ondaatje's ability to express something so heartbreaking in such a short amount of text. He is clearly still pained by the idea that his parents separated and that his father did not die anywhere near his mother. It seems wrong to him, and he sees in the photograph how right they were for each other. Yet, the last line of the chapter must have been particularly tough for him to write. His parents probably didn't take many photos together, because they were rarely happy with each other toward the end of the marriage. So sad!

Ondaatje's Anecdotes...Are they like scenes?

I think that Michael Ondaatje lays out exactly how is autobiography is going to be set up pretty early on in his book. It's sort of hidden within the text, but I think I figured out exactly why he has set up his autobiography in such a sporadic manner. His sporadicness may not be so sporadic.

"But I love the afternoon hours most. It is now almost a quarter to three. In half an hour the others will waken from their sleep and intricate conversations will begin again. In the heart of this 250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a ship. No story is ever told once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgments throw in. In this way history is organized..."
(Page 26).

Ondaatje's family likes to tell stories to each other, plain and simple. Ondaatje has learned about his family's history in anecdotes and from multiple sources. Why would he not construct his autobiography in a similar fashion? I think his style suits how he grew up and how he took in information as a child and adolescent. I also feel that these anecdotes, especially the vision that he constructs of his grandmother's death, apply directly to the idea of "performance," or a "performative piece." Though I don't think I grasped exactly what "performative" meant in terms of Ondaatje's work, I can clearly see the anecdotes as various scenes in a play or performance piece. Some of the anecdotes could be read on their own and little to no meaning would be lost. Perhaps that is what performative means here?

I think that the last two chapters of the autobiography are particularly representative of this anectdotal style and hearing stories from multiple sources. Ondaatje introduces information about his father's death from the perspective of his sister and his father's two friends, as well as detailing what he was up to the morning his father passed away, or at least that is what I see the last chapter of the text to be. Correct me if I'm wrong?

Final Paper

I just wanted to share my excitement via blog about our final paper. As a writer I've always been interested in finding a way to share my story for when I think my life is worth sharing. I know that some people in the class sort of had a hard time accepting the format of the paper, but I am looking forward to it. I plan to use three author's styles as well as including my own sort of style: collage. I want my memoir to be almost cut-and-paste with techniques from the other autobiographies we have read in class. This should be fun!

Odaatje and Danticat - Family and Self

The element of Ondaatje's work (or the strategy he uses) that most caught my attention when I began reading Running in the Family was his examination of his family rather than of himself. Much like Danticat, Odaatje uses his family to identify himself. He examines his family's history to explain the direction of his own life.
I find it interesting that both of these authors have done this, and I find it interesting that these are the two authors who have most engaged me and some others in the class. Maybe this is because they both use this strategy... Maybe we can better understand these authors for the same reason that these authors believe they can better understand themselves: because we understand their histories, there families' histories, their cultural histories.

I found Kazin fairly engaging, too, mostly because he so richly describes and explains his surroundings (and his relationships to those surroundings, like the synagogue, the block, the movie theater, his kitchen, etc.). I think this suggests that one of the most effective strategies in writing an autobiography is to write around yourself, rather than about yourself. Write about where you're from, both physically (as Kazin does) and - I don't have a real word for this - "familially" or historically (as Ondaatje and Danticat do); write about what led up to you; write about the things that were going on around you as you became you, as those things inevitably effected your development.

Perhaps this is a strategy I will employ in my own autobiography...

...post-colonial and performative and post-modern perspectives...

"Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act." (Smith & Watson 47)

"A performative view of life narrative theorizes autobiographical occasions as dynamic sites for the performance of identities constitutive of subjectivity. In this view

, identities are not fixed or essentialized attributes of autobiographical subjects, rather they are produced and reiterated through cultural norms, and remain provisional and unstable." (Smith & Watson 145)

why is it that cheese is being wrapped individually, slice by slice?

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --
For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --
The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --
For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --
And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --

-E.D.

though she's always been my favorite poet, i never appreciated the weight of her work until recent years. she's got hundreds and hundreds of poems to show for all her time spent in this physical state she seemed to be so weary of. and though i could list pick at least a few hundred as being extraordinary, 'the brain is wider than the sky' would definetly be among my top 5.

i find that there is an incredible level truth behind the simply formed letters of this poem. she's talking about infinity and divinity within our brains - what a beautiful truth we so rarely permit ourselves to acknowledge!

i believe the greatest strength and the greatest flaw of our human species, is our incessant instinct to divide things. not just anythings, but EVERYthings. we are constantly separating, labeling, categorizing, organizing, stereotyping, and so on and so on, until everything has its own everything. individuality has become the most important state of being for the world today, and not just for people, but for every aspect of existance, the physical and in the intangible. we are separated by towns, states, political parties, race, religion, the size of our income checks, our GPA's, and even our worth as humans - reflected in the value of life insurance policies. food isn't just food, its brand names! apples aren't apples, they're granny smith or macintosh. sex isn't just sex, its trojan or lifestyle. sleeping is no longer the time you spend mulling around in the unified consciousness of the world within the infinities of your brain. instead, it belongs to Ambien and Lunesta. its crazy what we're doing . . . putting sleep up against sleep!

but . . . . because of this class i've been noticing that in a lot of cases, the separation serves us as a means to better bring things together. the connection-through-division i've read in this course seems prevalent in every autobiography we've discussed this semester. every writer had to separate, in one way or another, in order to get back to that wholeness they were writing to convey.


so - in short!
this poem means a lot to me for many reasons, and i think everyone could benefit from reading it over more than a few times. understanding it is an even sweeter permission.

...attentiveness...

Kazin was attracted to the French philosopher Simone Weil's thought that modern rootlessness as attributable to "a lost contact with the world's recollection of divinity" and compared her definition of prayer - 'attentiveness without object' - to Emily Dickinson's attentiveness in beginning a poem 'without knowing what she was beginning."

Kazin for Jenna

American Reference
"I remember how the checkbones worked in his face and how the gray little Assyrian beard leaped into the air as he threw his arms out in entreaty. The crisp "American" eloquence of his speech bewildered me as I listened to him from the open window of that room, now mine, where our cousin had lived with us for so many years." (140-141)

Kazin makes yet another reference to American culture, as well as the characteristics of Americans.

Descriptive Memory
"There was still another, with a small growth of beard--they called him Ilyich, in honor of Lenin--a boy much older than the rest of us, a strange boy who lived by himself in a furnished room off Dumont Avenue, who had sworn never to shave until the boss class freed Tom Mooney. His long matted hair and beard gave him so archaic a look that I could never take it in that he was really there with me, talking in his gently condescending voice as I stared at the clotheslines."

Here, I can so vividly picture what Kazin is describing. Even as he is recalling this from deep in his memory, Kazin uses descriptive words and phrases that assist the reader to mentally visualize each and every detail he is describing. (147)

Ondaatje Makes Me Chuckle..

I am always a big fan of books that make me laugh, but it is not too often that I find a book I have to read for class that makes me laugh--so I'm pretty excited. The writing style in this text is so descriptive and beautiful I feel as thought I am next to Ondaatje as he is inserting images into his memory. I think it is this ability to be so incredibly descriptive that makes the novel so humorous. I also find this book so wonderful because it describes a dysfunctional family in a positive light.
Here are some of my favorite lines from the text--read and laugh : )
"It was two and a half years later, after several modest letters about his successful academic career, that his parents discovered he had not even passed the entrance exam and was living off their money in England." p. 31
"After a large meal and more drink my father announced that now he must shoot himself because Doris had broken off the engagement. Aelian, especially as he was quite drunk too, had a terrible time trying to hide every gun in the Ceylon Light Infantry building." p. 35
"And poor Wilfred Bartholomeuz who had large teeth was killed while out hunting when one of his companions mistook him for a wild boar." p.40

God & Kazin

"Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit. For me, He was horribly the invisible head above the Board of Superintendents, the Almighty Judge Who watched you in every thought and deed, and to Whom I prayed for help in passing midterms and finals, His prophetess Deborah leading me safely through so long as I remembered to say under my breath as I walked in the street, 'Desolate were the open towns in Israel, they were desolate, until that I arose, Deborah.' He filled my world with unceasing dread; He had such power over me, watched me so unrelentingly, that it puzzled me to think He had to watch all the others with the same care; one night I dreamed of Him as a great engineer in some glass-walled control tower high in the sky glaring fixedly at a brake on which my name alone was written. In some ways he was simply a mad tyrant, someone I needed constantly to propitiate. Deborah alone would know how to intercede for me. Then He became a good-luck piece I carried around to get me the things I needed. I resented this God of Israel and the Board of Superintendents; He would never let me rest." page 46

"Yet I never really wanted to give him up. In some way it would have been hopeless to justify to myself-I had feared Him so long-He fascinated me, He seemed to hold the solitary place I most often went back to. There was a particular sensation connected with this-not of peace, not of certainty, not of goodness-but of depth; as if it were there I felt right to myself at last." page 47

Sorry those were so long. I felt that they encapsulated not only the essence of Kazin's spiritual and intellectual growth and fears, but many others as well. These passages are very relatable; it's hard for us humans to fully grasp the concept of an infinite and ubiquitous God. If He's listening to ME then how can He also be listening to another person, let alone billions? I also think there's a point in time where everyone questions either their particular faith or the existence of a higher power in general. In Kazin's instance, he was born into a Jewish family and culture and refers to God saying, "He was our oldest habit." Judaism becomes a part of their identity and daily lives and practices, but going through the motions is entirely different than actually having your own spiritual and personal relationship with God. I also like the imagery of his dream with God in a control tower. It's entirely believable yet portrays a scarier side of God, like he's Big Brother rather than a loving Father. Faith, whether strong, weak, absent, or questioning, always plays such a large role in the lives of humans and we've certainly seen that in the autobiographies we've read so far (Mary McCarthy comes to mind). It's just another human element that as a reader I am able to relate to and further understand the author (how many of us can say we've prayed to pass midterms and finals?), even if he's of a different faith.

Religion and movies in Kazin's city

We were asked what sorts of divisions we had noticed in Kazin's autobiography, and I keep returning to the same one over and over: Kazin's almost comparison of the movie theater and his synagogue. It seems as though the movie house holds more power, more influence, and more mystery for Kazin than does the synagogue.

"That poor worn synagogue could never in my affections compete with that movie house, whose very lounge looked and smelled to me like an Oriental temple. It had Persian rugs, and was marvelously half-lit at all hours of the day; there were great semi-arcs of colored glass above the entrance to the toilets, and out of the gents' game a vaguely foreign, deliciously stinging deodorant that prepared me, on the very threshold of the movie auditorium itself, for the magic within. There was never anything with such expectancy to it as that twilit lounge." - Pg. 40...

and

"Though there was little ritual that was ever explained to me, and even less in the atmosphere of the synagogue that in my heart i really liked, I assumed that my feelings in the matter were of no importance; I belonged there before the Ark, with the men, sitting next to an uncle. I felt a loveless intimacy with the place." - Pg. 44.

Clearly, the movie house is much more interesting and appealing to Kazin (and I assume also to the reader when we are exposed to Kazin's impressions of the two). He even goes on to say that in the theater he "knew a secret happiness, as if [his] mind had at last been encouraged to seek its proper concerns" (pg. 41). This sounds much more like something someone would say about a synagogue than a movie theater, but for Kazin religion appears to have been somewhat empty. Even after he discovers a "deepness" to prayer (pg. 101) that he had previously not been aware of, Kazin is still left feeling out of touch with God and with the practices of his synagogue. The prayer itself seems to "encourage Kazin's mind to seek its proper concerns," but religion itself (or at least the practice of religion) cannot do this for him.

This is an interesting parallel that Kazin draws, and I found that it somehow resonated with me; perhaps this is because I, too, have never felt inspired by organized religion, and I can much more easily relate to his experiences at the movies than I can with his experiences in the synagogue.

just something i liked . . . .

this is a passage tied a lot of things together in a way that i could relate to. it's the second paragraph on page 114.

"Under the quilt at night, I could dream even before I went to sleep. Yet even there I could never see Mrs. Solovey's face clearly, but still ran round and round the block looking for her after i had passed her kitchen window. It was an old trick, the surest way of getting to sleep: I put the quilt high over my head and lay there burrowing as deep into the darkness as I could get, thinking of her through the long black hair the women on the counter wore. Then i would make up dreams before going to sleep: a face behind the lattice of a summer house, half-hidden in thick green leaves; the hard dots sticking out of the black wallpaper below; the day my mother was ill and our cousin had taken me to school. The moment i felt myself drifting into sleep, my right knee jerked as if i had just caught myself from tripping over somtheing in the gutter."

while i think this passage is beautifully worded, i was also drawn to it's illustration of what is between real and what is made up. while kazin is imagining a fictional narrative within his dozing mind, they seem to slowly melt into memories which were real. i also really liked the idea of the darkness within the quilt being the form, which physically enabled him to create these non-physical memories/dreams. it is much like the autobiography itself. physically, the book holds the content - the written word of the authors past. but the intangible memories; the images and emotions evoked, always seem to be floating somewhere above the book itself.

this transition from wake to sleep reminded me of the boundary for authors of autobiographies, and how they have to go about recreating their memories. i think it will always be hard to draw the line between truth and lie, when your dealing with memory. since everyone's perceptions are always completley subjective, and relative to their ever-changing emotions, personality, morals & values, etc., there can never be a one, black and white truth. the truth is in vibrant colors! and no one's red is the same as the guy next to him.

A Walker in the City

Kazin's memoir is a very engaging read. I like how the reader has the feeling of being taken on a tour through his home (his actual home and the part of the city in which he lives) and also a tour through his family history. I really find the dynamic between the different nationalities of the authors we've seen so far to be incredibly interesting and important. In each autobiography, we've seen suffering, but it's interesting to see how the foreign writers all eventually make their way to America to acquire freedom, which was ironically where Douglass was literally enslaved. Douglass's memoir brings about shame, horror, and embarrassment in the country's history, but also shows a bit of hope and what was to come. Moving on to the rest of the memoirs, Danticat's is probably the most devastating with the family tragedies that occurred, but America was her family's beacon of light. With Kazin, we see his roots grab hold in Brownsville and create a new microcosm of his family's heritage.

"The light pouring through window after window in that great empty varnished assembly hall seemed to me the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. It was that thorough varnished cleanness that was of the new land, that light dancing off the glasses of Theordore Roosevelt..." (page 26)

Senses

While reading A Walker in the City I am struck by how many senses Kazin uses to describe his surroundings. The text is brought to life by the sights, smells, and textures of his environment. During the section "The Kitchen" Kazin describes the brilliant white of the recently white-washed walls. He describes the textures of his mother's dress fabrics. The smells of the table overflowing with Sabbath food.
When I read this I thought do we all think of home in terms of our senses? Or is home something we describe with emotion. When I think of my home the only smell that comes to mind is the scent of the wood stove. Home to me is thought of as simply happiness, but maybe this is because I had never thought to describe it in terms of my senses.

Maybe this is just my "I'm really excited to go home for Thanksgiving" post.

Kazin on Kazin

"...a key to my book is of course this constant sense of division, even of flagrant contradiction between wanting the enclosure of home and the open city, both moral certainty and intellectual independence. ...to rebel against the tradition was somehow to hold fast to it." (Alfred Kazin at a symposium at the New York Public Library in 1987).

The Pressing Question to Mrs. Solovey

"You have lived in many places."
"Oui. Nous avons habité des pays differénts. La Russie, la France, l'Italie, la Palestine. Yes, many places."
"Why did you come here?" I asked suddenly.
She looked at me for a moment. I could not tell what she felt, or how much I had betrayed. But in some way my question wearied her. She rose, made a strange stiff little bow, and went out.
~A Walker in the City p. 130

What stood out to me the most in this passage was that "moment" of not knowing what Mrs. Solovey felt. It's a foot-in-mouth moment that I'm sure we've all encountered at some point. Especially with immigration or even just small moves, there's always the question of why they went to where they did. Everyone has their reasons, and some people are proud to say exactly what it was that made them settle on a certain place. Others, however, may have no explanation or no desire to share so they can keep certain events in the past, avoid a sob story, stop any further questions, or many more reasons. It's interesting to get a glimpse of discomfort (as I'll call it) in a situation that may be different from the majority of what we see today, but in a way that it is a believable situation.

More on Freedom and "Slavery" in Kazin

"In every cry of every man,

In every infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

-William Blake: London

This is the epigram that appears at the beginning of Kazin's autobiography. I don't think literary critics pay close enough attention to authors' uses of epigrams. I know exactly what kind of mental journey I am going to go on in Kazin's autobiography just by reading the epigram above. I already know a theme: the opposition between being enslaved and being free. Of course, in Kazin's case, he is not literally enslaved like our dear friend, Frederick. Kazin is enslaved by the idea that he does not know who he really is, and he has lost connections with what it means to be Jewish. America has done what it does best, Americanized another family of immigrants. That is why Kazin describes his feelings of lonliness. He is wearing the "mind-forg'd manacles" of misidentity (yup, I think I made up another word).

The epigram also relates directly to Alfred's conversation with Mrs. Solovey that I dissected in full detail in my previous entry. The "mind forg'd manacles" that Mrs. Solovey hears are the English words spoken every day by every one around her. These words are often spoken by immigrants just like her, immigrants who should stay attached to their native languages and values.

I always loved speaking French...

First of all, it made me quite pleased that I could understand most of the French that was utilized by Kazin in the third chapter of A Walker in the City. It definitely brought me back to my high school days when I was struggling so hard to learn that darn language. I took five consecutive years of French, and I was willing to bet that I would not remember any of it come college. Apparently, I have been proven wrong. I thought that a particularly poignant passage in the text included Mrs. Solovey's feelings on speaking a second language:

"Do you not think it is tiresome to speak the same language all the time? Their language! To feel that you are in a kind of prison, where the words you speak every day are like the walls of your cell? To know with every word that you are the same, and no other, and that it is difficult to escape? But when I speak French to you I have the sensation that for a moment I have left, and I am happy" (Page 127).

Talk about deep! I really love the way this passage sounds, and I enjoy reading it out loud, because I feel like so much feeling can be conveyed in just a few short sentences. There are few conversations that take place in Kazin's autobiography, so this one between Alfred and Mrs. Solovey must mean something. Obviously, Mrs. Solovey, Alfred's "Anna," is making a statement on the English language. She feels as if she has assimilated too much into American culture. She has lost her sense of identity and feels lonely because of it. She literally believes that every times she opens her mouth to speak, she has lost a piece of herself, because English is not her native language. Speaking French frees her from "the prison," in a way, because not all Americans can speak that language. Not all Americans can understand it. She feels happy, because she has something in her possession (the ability to speak another language) that not all English-speaking Americans have.

I wonder if she feels this same sense of freedom when she speaks Hebrew...

Response to class & Abby

Adding to what Abby said, I think it really comes down to how well one can write their story. At the start of the semester, we discussed autobiography in terms of questions: What makes a story worth reading?; Why would anyone want to read your story? and so on...I think what can be partially concluded at this point is that anything can be interesting depending on the "hook" you use to entice your readers and reel them in with, and on the flip side, you can have the most compelling story in the world, but if you can't translate that story smoothly onto the page it just won't reach people the way you may want it to. Perhaps some stories are better told orally and some are just better written down. Does that mean the writer trades vivacity in person for animation on the page, and vice versa? Not always, but we've certainly seen this.



PS--I totally support a class trip to NYC.

Response: visitors to the class

I guess the thing that our visitors made most clear to me is that writing style, clarity, and ability (for lack of a better word) are really what makes a story worth reading. Maybe that doesn't sound like groundbreaking news... but we always talk about what makes a story (a life) worth telling... and I'm beginning to think that's not really an important question at all. Or perhaps the answer is simply "whether or not it gets a good writer to render it." I think the real question should be "what about this story inspired this author to tell it to us?" or "why did this author invest such effort in creating such a well-made piece?" I guess the question I'm most interested in is not what made the story worth telling, but what made the author want to share it? Arrogance? A need to purge the story from his or her life? Belief that it could help those who read it? There are many answers to this question.

memoir = diet autobiography..... i beg to differ!

just coming from class, there are a few ideas freshly floating around in my mind.

in the beginning, we dismissed "memoir" from our intangible class list of important-sometimes-not-real-words. i believe the reason was that 'memoir' is not a literary term, whereas autobiography is. in defense of memoir, i'd like to say that that type of black and white reasoning is not satisfactory enough for me to strike 'memoir' from our list of important terms/ideas to consider. not only do i believe the term 'memoir' evokes quite a different definition than 'autobiography' does, but i also think that almost all written works should be considered valid under some kind of appreciation for creation.

explaining these two points . . . . when i think of what a memoir is in comparison to what an autobiography encompasses, the great weight of difference is in the content, its translation, and the portrayal of all involved persons. for me, a memoir is like a written memory. it focuses on a specific time or event in someones life and is retold through a foggy lense of subjective perceptions and influencing emotions. i feel as though they are mostly concerned with repainting the experiences of the person writing them, by way of a natural embellishment that comes with the filter of memory. we scarcely remember moments from a strictly objective point of view, and so while we are recounting actions of a true event, 'ourselves' will always heavily influence those recreations, whether we know it or not. i also think memoirs focus more strongly on the main character, rather than those surrounding them. while sometimes it is necessary to include information about others in order to gain a better sense of context, i think memoirs stay closer to their owners.

autobiographies on the other hand, evoke a more factual foundation for me. i feel as though they are the moments and events of someones life, laid out on the page in form and analysis. though authors of autobio.'s also utilize that subjective filter of perception to relay their messages and meanings, i think the moments were first created to serve an objective purpose. i suppose i think that autobiographies are more limiting than a memoir. i also expect them to be longer and to provide a more 'complete' look at whats happened in the life of the writer. i'm not saying that one is better than the other, just that i think memoir is as valid a way to write about ones self as autobiography is. . . . .

Boland: Searching for an Identity

"My solitude was circumstantial. I had returned to Ireland in my teens; I had no knowledge of the Irish language. Therefore, I had to do the General Certificate of the British system. I was an erratic, hit-and-miss student, averse to discipline and hardly able to connect my intense reading of poetry with any other part of my studies." page 73

I found this passage interesting for a few reasons. The first is the fact that she had no knowledge of the Irish Language; was it because she had left, or was it because she grew up while Ireland was still struggling to escape the grasp of the British, however loose it may have been at that point? Also, I think it's worthy to note that she found no interest in any subject but poetry, as she became such a prominent female poet in a patriarchal society (especially in Irish literature). I also think it's strange that she couldn't connect poetry with anything else, considering many poets find their subject matter in everything, including the mundane.

It's a nice transition from the previous chapter, "In Search of a Nation" to this one, "In Search of a Language." Boland is constantly searching for an identity, which is reflected in this memoir as well as her poetry, and is a common thread we've seen through all of the autobiographies we've read so far.

i apologize for the disruption of chronology...

but there was something i wanted to point out in danticats "brother i'm dying" during a class , when we ran out of time to get around to the whole room. we were discussing the private v.s the public and finding specific examples of that in the text.

on page 171, danticat retells her uncles experience of waking up to gunfire and chaos; the day the government tried to eradicate the gangs from the city by force. though she herself was not a part of the experience, she gave great details about the day and the actions of her uncle. What struck me, was when she spoke about her uncle looking around at all the debris and destruction, and thought to himself how he was happy his wife was deceased so that should wouldn't have to witness such horrible conditions.

for me, to be greatful of someones death is quite a heavy thought. in my opinion, to have a sincere thought like that would require an incredible amount of love and concern for the deceased person and an unimaginable state of pain for whomever is having the thought. having considered how deep an emotion like that is, i would like to know why Danticat would write something like that.

i think the only way for that statement about her uncle to be true, would be if he had actually admitted this to her. i dont believe that's a kind of emotion you can assume about someone. for me this ties into the private v.s. public because it is exactly that. it is the incredibly personal idea of someone other than the writer, being made extremely public, in attempts to portray the private aspects of the author.

the fact that danticat was not even present during that moment in her uncles life is crucial to this story working for her autobiography. not physically being there allows her to become an omnipresent entity for the retelling, which grants her access to really private information. this personal aspect of her uncle in turn, shapes the image of herself. i think it's incredibly intriguing how she separates herself in order to get closer.

and thats all i have to say about that!
sorry its so outdated.....

Language

Apparently this is my semester to become obsessed with language in text. As I read all of the texts for this class I have been so struck by how each other uses language in their texts. While reading Danticat and Nabokov I noticed their uses of language because they used more than one language in their texts. After noticing this I began to look at how they used the English language to strengthen their works. Did they use short sentences? Periodic sentences? Poor grammar? Once I began to think about the seemingly simple aspects of language the texts became so much more than words in phrases.
While reading Kazin I began to think about my language theme again while reading pages 22-23. In these pages Kazin describes how difficult it was for him to speak. It is interesting for me to think about writing down the difficulties of speech...
I think I'll stop rambling now : )

A trip to NYC through Kazin

Similar to what Casey was saying about having these same memories, I can find myself in Kazin's novel but not as an immigrant. Every time I visit New York City, as a tourist, I am always completely fascinated in my surroundings. While reading A Walker in the City, I could picture exactly what he was talking about. Not by location, but rather by senses and his feelings towards it. Especially coming from a small state in a relatively small city, NYC has a different atmosphere and life of its own. Though I couldn't imagine living there, it is always a treat to regain the same sense of wonderment as I walk down each street.

As soon as I started reading Kazin's memoir, I felt like I was talking to a member of the family. It was weird, but I think it was because of the Eastern European background. I was raised in a Ukrainian family and everything that Kazin talks about in his childhood, the feelings for religion (I was raised Catholic), the fact that no one was ever allowed to go hungry and most poignantly, that his parents wanted him to be better than they were in their new country, could have been straight out of my first years. It can be strange when a memoir seems to tell you your own memories but it is fascinating at the same time. It definitely bridges time to hear these stories but also offers a way to connect.

Kazin's Use of Place as an Agent to Memory

Kazin is constantly conjuring memories through his observations of places he once knew. Geoffrey Douglass utilized props as his agent to memories, so perhaps that is what Kazin is doing in his autobiography. Kazin often describes a specific place, in which he spent time during his childhood or adolescence and then recalls exactly what occurred in those places. The places actually help Kazin introduce plotlines (mostly in the form of short anecdotal stories) and even some characters.

“In the darkness you could never se where the crane began. We liked to trap the enemy between the slabs and sometimes jumped them from great mounds of rock just in from the quarry. A boy once fell to his death that way, and they put a watchman there to keep us out. This made the slabs all the more impressive to me, and I always aimed first for that yard whenever we played follow-the-leader” (Page 87).

This is an instance in Kazin’s autobiography where he is able to take a place that he was familiar with and transform that place into a mirror that reflected his insides and what he was like as person, or what he is like in the present. A boy fell to his death in the quarry and yet, Kazin can’t help but still want to play there. From this little story in this particular place, we learn that Kazin was (and perhaps still is) a risk-taker of sorts and that he had a certain amount of respect for dangerous places. The quarry caused someone to die, and Kazin is enamored with that place’s natural power.

Kazin and I Agree that "Character" is Crap

"Character. I always felt anxious when I heard the word pronounced. Satisfactory as my ‘character’ was, on the whole, except when I stayed too long in the playground reading; outrageously satisfactory, as I can see now, the very sound of the word as out teachers coldly gave it out from the end of their teeth, with a solemn weight on each dark syllable, immediately struck my heart cold with fear—they could not believe I really had it. Character was never something you had; it had to be trained in you, like a technique. I was never very clear about it” (Page 20)

Me either, Alfred. Lack of “character” is the whole reason I was never inducted into my National Honor Society at my high school. It was a load of crap, let me tell you. I graduated fifth in my class, performed multitudes of community service work, especially with the community theatre troupe in town, and I served on Student Council. I had been the Foreign Language Student of the Year, and I had been named Social Studies Student of the Month three times. Yet, lack of character, that’s what killed me. I took that to heart for awhile, and I still don’t think I understand it completely. How can someone have a lack of character? How could Alfred’s teachers not believe he had character? What exactly is this ambiguous term, “character,” comprised of? Is it integrity? Is it enthusiasm? Is it a sense of self-value? Does it mean being an absolute brown-noser? I don’t think I’ll ever know. Alfred goes on to say that he believes character is related to (or maybe really is) the definition for unwavering obedience. I think I may agree with that, because though I participated in plenty of extracurricular activities and spoke up for the student body, I caused controversy. I was vocal. I didn’t let things die. I was a rebel-rouser, in some cases. I think that is something that my high school couldn’t take. Shame. Shame. Shame…