"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!
Thursday, December 11, 2008
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.
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.
"'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.
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.
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