nknowles Reading

Natasha Trethewey's Domestic Work

2012-01-29T19:14:00.000-08:00

I love Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work (Graywolf 2000). No wonder it won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize! “White Lies” is probably my favorite of the poems because I can read it repeatedly and get depth from it. The poem addresses the experience of growing up biracial. The persona can pass for white without effort. A white girl in her class feels intimidated by a mostly black student body, squeezes her hand, and says “Now/we have three of us” (lines 17-18), meaning that she is relieved to see another white person. When the persona does make an effort to pass, her lies are “white” lies, both seemingly harmless and intended to represent herself as white. Of course, the persona is part white, so there is some irony in the mother’s washing the daughter’s mouth out with soap, yet the pride in that act is palpable and painful in that it has no effect on the daughter except to encourage her to wish the “suds” would “work/from the inside out” to make her truly white (lines 26-28). The dramatic irony there impacts the reader like a punch in the gut: we want this child to stop wanting to be other than what she is. We can see the complexity of the experience, and she just wants to feel accepted. Wow! I wonder whether young people feel the need to pass that previous generations did?

Another poem along similar lines is “Flounder.” The persona is fishing with Aunt Sugar, and the racial dynamics are evidenced by Aunt Sugar’s dialect and by her comments regarding the persona’s white skin color, which she got from her father. The central motif is the fish, the flounder, which has a black side and a white side, clearly illustrating the persona’s deriving from two races. The word “flounder” also means to struggle or to waver among choices, and at the end of the poem, the caught flounder “flip-flop[s],/switch[ing] sides with every jump" (lines 27-28). The fish image indicates the persona’s own flip-flopping about her racial identity, emphasizing the difficulty of doing so by the fact that the fish is caught and dying. This poem is one of the few in the collection that employs rhythm and meter, in this case approximating ballad stanzas of three and four feet, rhymed abcb. When I discussed this poem with students, they thought the ballad form emphasized the conversational quality of the poem and made it memorable. For me, poignancy arises from using this old form with an increasingly modern issue and perhaps even disappearing issue. More and more people hail from two or more ethnic groups, so perhaps the old-fashioned poetic structure makes lyrical a traumatic phase in human progress that is fading? I hope so.

What is perhaps interesting about this collection is that many of the poems do not relate explicitly to race. Another of my favorite poems, “Tableau,” depicts a couple at the breakfast table. This couple could be anyone. The images associated with the couple indicate relationship difficulties: the fruit between them is “a still life,” as if their relationship has been arrested and evacuated of feeling in this moment (line 4). The woman’s cup is chipped. The man is attacking his fruit aggressively. These details indicate problems in the relationship. The woman, in particular, recognizes the chip, the problem, and just shifts the cup to avoid it. Each is depicted thinking something different, so they are not communicating, and the poem ends with a “hairline crack” beginning to split the cup “in half” (lines 23-24). This relationship is ending, just like any other failed relationship. The fact that the poem allocates three lines per stanza also makes the pair seem off-kilter, unbalanced. If one reads this tableau against Trethewey’s biography, perhaps these are her parents, and she is the third, the extra line, the one not considered in this tableau. Thus, the third line speaks to the rift and also to the absence of the child who was impacted by the split.

Work Cited

Trethewey, Natasha. Domestic Work. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 2000.

Image Source

Trethewey, Natasha. Domestic Work. Amazon.com. 29 Jan. 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Trethewey&x=0&y=0

The Blind Spot in Death and the King’s Horseman

2011-11-16T18:21:00.000-08:00

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida argues that the writer doesn’t have full control over the meaning in the language he or she uses. He writes, “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely” (1825). This idea is similar to a fish swimming in a fishbowl. Because the fish is in the bowl, his world is defined by the bowl, and his understanding of that world cannot get outside the bowl, so he can only partially understand the concept of the water that fills the bowl. Because human beings operate within language and cannot get outside it, they will never fully understand it and therefore cannot fully control their use of it. This relationship between writer and language creates a “blind spot” wherein the writer “lets himself be determined by that very thing that he excludes” (1830). In other words, the blind spot in language permits texts to operate in contradictory ways uncontrolled by the author. Therefore, it’s partly due to the nature of language that basing interpretation on author intent is a fallacy, although Wimsatt and Beardsley don’t go that direction. This blind spot moves the burden of interpretation to the reader, who, because no “transcendental signified” or exact meaning exists (1825), is also only partially equipped to render an interpretation in language. The fact that language thus “deconstructs” itself can be illustrated through analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which both undermines and reinscribes authoritative power structures.

In the Author’s Note appended to Death and the King’s Horseman, Wole Soyinka decries the misuse of plays that involve colonial themes because “they acquire the facile tag of ‘clash of cultures’” (3). Instead, Soyinka prefers productions of his play to emphasize “the play’s threnodic essence” or, per the footnote, the play’s exploration of death (3). In other words, Soyinka would prefer interpretations focus on art rather than on politics. Unfortunately for Soyinka, in Derrida’s model the author’s interpretation becomes one among many.

“Ideology and Tragedy” by Biodun Jeyifo represents one example of an interpretation that critiques Death and the King’s Horseman on a political basis. Jeyifo argues that the “clash of cultures” theme that Soyinka rejects actually masks “the real, objective differences between conflicting groups and classes within the indigenous system” and thus supports “class rule” (171), so Soyinka has himself made a mistake in depicting the events because he should have been focusing on and urging more equity within the class distinctions existing in the native culture. Jeyifo’s interpretation could be supported, for example, by the depiction of the police officer Amusa, as we have discussed in class: is it an oversight that Soyinka depicts Amusa speaking pidgin throughout the play when the other African characters seem to code shift successfully from perfect English spoken to one another as a translation of the native language to perfect English spoken to the colonizers? Perhaps Soyika is blaming Amusa for his go-between position caused by the colonial presence in Nigeria, which suggests a callous kind of class judgment on Soyinka’s part. This kind of judgment would be consistent with the fact that the deaths of Elesin and his son Olunde at the end of the play potentially bring the traditional, authoritarian civilization back into order. This order is demonstrated by a version of the suicide ritual occurring in Elesin’s prison and Elesin’s successful suicide there. Iyaloja’s focus on “the unborn” in the last line of the play (63) suggests a forward view that indicates perhaps tradition was finally satisfied in this instance.

However, and again regardless of the author’s interpretation of his work, the play contains elements that could result in an equally defensible but contradictory political interpretation. This interpretation relies on elements of the dialogue where the native characters explain the events. For example, the Praise-Singer says, “this young shoot [Olunde] has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is not the way of life” (62). This image of sap moving from child to parent indicates that the ritual has not occurred properly, so the world lost its sense of order. Similarly, Iyaloja blames Elesin’s ultimate death on the colonial people: “No child [Pilkings], it is what you brought to be, you who play with strangers’ lives, who even usurp the vestments of our dead” (62). Iyaloja’s criticism of Pilkings indicates the events represent something for which to criticize him, which also indicates they have not brought order. In this case, rather than reinscribing traditional hierarchies the deaths of father and son have inaugurated a revolution from which a new culture will emerge, which requires a different interpretation of Iyaloja’s focus on “the unborn” at the end (63). In this case, the unborn may be responsible for an altogether different society, which could be more equitable although no details provide evidence either way.

These contradictory readings resulting in narratives of authority or lack of it may be read back in a self-reflexive way onto the author himself. Just as the play inspires contradictory versions of the traditional culture’s authority, so does the play illustrate the contradictory role of the author in his own creation. While the play emerged from the creative genius of Wole Soyinka who has a right to his own interpretation of his work, the playwright himself has a “blind spot” that cannot allow him full authority over his own creation. Thus, his own work “deconstructs” his power and makes room for the reader to exert his or her ideas.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “From Of Grammatology.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 1822-30. Print.

Jeifo, Biodun. “Ideology and Tragedy.” The Truthful Life: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon, 1985. Rpt. in Death and the King’s Horseman. By Wole Soyinka. Ed. Simon Gikandi. New York: Norton, 2003. 164-71. Print.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. Ed. Simon Gikandi. New York: Norton, 2003. Print.

Kill the Author!

2011-11-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

I subscribe to the belief that readers can’t really discover the intent of authors. The words of a text aren’t enough to indicate what the author was trying to do. It’s entirely possible that an author was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something completely unexpected. It’s also possible that the author couldn’t even tell you what he was trying to do, or if he did, he might not remember correctly. Therefore, I share the formalist assumption expressed by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (1374-75). The words “available” and “desirable” are key. The intent is not available to readers, even if we ask the author.

Moreover, going off on a wild goose chase after the author’s intent as the key to understanding is not a desirable form of interpretation because it wastes time away from the text, and getting a juicy tidbit about the author’s intent may seem to close off all other possible interpretations. As Roland Barthes writes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1469). Interpretation is so much more complex and open-ended than the intent-only method allows. While knowing an author’s biography is useful, I don’t think it should end interpretation. Rather, it’s just one of the many tools the reader can bring to bear on interpretation.

I diverge from the formalists by valuing the reader’s role in interpretation. While the formalists eliminate the psychological/affective problems associated with the reader’s response by assuming a unitary “sufficiently informed” reader (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1399) who should arrive at the standard interpretation of great works, I don’t think texts have single meanings. Based on my experiences, I am likely to have a different reading experience not only with each text but with each time I read the same text as my “horizon of expectation” shifts (Jauss 1554). My understanding of the reader’s experience represents another reason why the author’s intent cannot determine interpretation: even an author who fully understands his own intent can’t predict how his text will affect me as a reader.

For all these reasons, I tend to avoid language in analysis that indicates I know the author’s intent. Instead, I talk about texts and what they do, and I talk about readers and how they might interpret texts. I’ve essentially killed off the author.

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing provides a metaphor for the death of the author in the disappearance of the narrator’s father in the Canadian bush. We could read the father as the author and the narrator’s search as the reader’s attempt to make meaning from a text. Textual interpretation literally occurs in the novel when the narrator takes a look at her father’s papers. She reads the author’s various sketches of hands with numbers and words, as well as some “stiff childish figure[s],” and because she “can’t make sense out of them,” she thinks, “he might have gone insane” (69). In this example, the author is absent, if not dead, and the daughter is searching for his intent in producing such odd drawings. Because she doesn’t understand them, she jumps to the conclusion that the author must be crazy.

Yes, this isn’t a typical moment of literary analysis because the narrator is trying to find the author, not just trying to interpret his texts, and typically, we don’t jump to the insanity conclusion in interpreting literary texts. We assume the text has some basic literary quality, or otherwise, we wouldn’t analyze it. However, I think the metaphor of the search comments on reading. One might connect my equation between author and father to Derrida’s phallogocentrism, which implies a stable truth associated with patriarchy. In Atwood’s novel, the absence of the father suggests there isn’t a stable truth, there isn’t an author whose existence will explain everything. Instead, we’ve got fragments of meaning that need to be pieced together. This is the task of the narrator in the rest of the book, and it’s also the task of the reader in reading about her experiences. In the end, it’s the interpretive work, reading, and not the missing father that’s ultimately important.

Author and Reader in The Shadow of the Wind

2011-10-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

I just finished the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in English translation). I enjoyed it very much. It reminds me of The Thirteenth Tale, which is also a novel about a novel, an ekphrastic or self-reflexive novel, where the protagonist attempts to uncover the truth about an author. (There is a bit of a spoiler in the discussion below, so stop now if you want the mystery to remain intact until you read the novel.)

In The Shadow of the Wind, set in Barcelona in 1945-1966, ten-year-old Daniel visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and selects the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. He enjoys the novel so much that he searches for other novels by the writer and finds someone is buying and burning them, so there are very few left. His search becomes an obsession, and he interviews various people who knew Carax, slowly uncovering the secret of Carax’s parentage and childhood, his romance with Penelope, his years of writing in Paris, his return to Barcelona to discover what happened to his beloved Penelope, and the mystery of the book-burnings. Meanwhile, the details of Daniel’s life mirror Julian’s.

While the mystery itself is worth unraveling, the novel is also interesting in its commentary on authors, readers, and books. It represents an allegory of the reading experience where an engaged reader attempts to better understand a novel by understanding the author. This search models the traditional way literary interpretation has been taught in the US. My English teacher Mrs. Jackson would lecture on the author’s background and the historical moment, and then we were supposed to read her mind to determine the kind of interpretation she wanted. Yet, in the novel, the author-biography turns out to be dangerous, as Daniel’s search begins to be shadowed by a man with a burnt face who goes by the name of Lain Coubert, the name of the devil character in Carax’s novel, and also by a sadistic police officer who arrests and attacks anyone he doesn’t like. The danger suggests that the author’s background is important but risky; therefore, other keys to understanding literature exist, including the reader’s response.

The allegory pits the author and reader against each other regarding control over the aesthetic experience. I like this quote from Isaac, the caretaker of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, who comments, “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it” (Zafon 5). On the one hand, the text is “the soul of the person who wrote it,” which suggests the romantic view that artwork is the product of genius, of a man with “a more comprehensive soul” (Wordsworth 655), of a “specially gifted spirit” (Hegel 637), and the reader has no right to critique such a work, which “stands higher than any natural product” by virtue of its “journey through the spirit” (Hegel 638). In imagining they might challenge the right of the spiritual parent to his own offspring, readers are the “Fools [who] rush in where Angels [authors] fear to tread” (Pope 455). Readers are in this sense like young Daniel who inserts himself into the mystery of Carax’s life without understanding the threat to himself and others that his sleuthing represents.

On the other hand, Isaac suggests that the soul of books also belongs to readers, “those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.” There is something imaginative that happens in reading as well as in writing. While romantic theorists pay attention mostly to the writer’s self-expression, there is self-expression that occurs for readers in books as well. Kant describes this response as the “free play of the cognitive powers,” invoking both imagination and understanding (512). While Pope acknowledges the governing power of author intent in interpretation, “Since none can compass more than they Intend” (446), he also grants the humble, educated reader imaginative space in the interpretive process. Pope argues that “Wit and Judgment,” creativity and interpretation, are “meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (443), by which he means that good interpretation, with rules drawn inductively from great works, can guide authors in producing better texts. There’s an ongoing interaction between author and reader that’s valuable to improving the quality of literature overall. As it turns out in The Shadow of the Wind, Julian Carax is still alive, and to a certain extent, he helps Daniel uncover the mystery, seeing in Daniel the possibility of averting a repeat of his own tragic life. Thus, the self-reflexive allegory echoes the writer-reader collaboration Pope identifies. Without a reader, a literary son, the genius no matter how great his soul, dies alone, his texts lost in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

I am also interested in the backdrop of war in Zafon’s novel--the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War II (1930-45), and the peril of required military service--which emphasizes the threat of patriarchal violence also in the foreground as the legacy of fathers threatens sons, biological, adopted, and literary, as they learn to become men. Sons and readers need to negotiate the difficult terrain of their inheritance from their (literary) parents. Doppelgangers Julian and Daniel represent the tragedy or balance that may arise out of this contest, as well as the cyclical nature of the effort.

Works Cited

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. From Lectures on Fine Art. In Leitch 636-44.

Kant, Immanuel. From Critique of Judgment. In Leitch 504-35.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print.

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism. In Leitch 441-48.

Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In Leitch 648-68.

Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind. Trans. Lucia Graves. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Poetry Dangerous?

2011-09-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that poets “establish[] a bad system of government in people’s minds by gratifying their irrational side” (78). The government metaphor is interesting because this argument is situated within a larger discussion of what makes the best society. In this case, Socrates ends up concluding that the poets do not belong in his imaginary utopian republic because they rely too much on the emotions rather than reason. In this sense, poets “colonize” normal, rational minds and cause people to make irrational decisions.

What’s kind of funny today is the idea that poetic texts might be threatening. I can see violent movies, video games, and rock and roll as potentially making people more accepting of violence in the real world or obsessions with celebrities or Facebook diverting people from taking care of themselves in the real world, but I find it humorous to imagine anyone would be influenced in destructive ways by poetry. It’s even kind of hard to think of a poem that might be dangerous. I’ll try the dagger sequence from Act II Scene 1 of Macbeth where Macbeth is contemplating murder:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.

Basically, Macbeth has decided to kill the king and is imagining he sees a dagger, perhaps because he feels guilty in advance. In response to this illusion he draws his own dagger and says that the illusion of a dagger has encouraged him in his resolution to commit murder. I can picture Macbeth doing this, I can even imagine why he might be interested in killing someone else for political power, but just hearing about it doesn’t make me want to pull a knife from the kitchen drawer and hunt down my boss to get him out of my way to power. So, if literature is going to have an evil effect on me, it’s got to be more connected to my life and emotionally and rationally motivating. It would have to restructure my way of thinking. I can’t remember any texts with negative influences, but I have been influenced by Dead Man Walking to oppose the death penalty, and by Real Food to eat less processed food, neither of which is fiction or poetry. I wonder what makes these different? They were both rational and emotional in their impact.

Works Cited

Plato. From Republic. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 49-80. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. Jeremy Hylton. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. N.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2011. < http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html>

Blog Party Post: Save Reading!

2011-08-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Here is my conspiracy theory: the American political system is bankrupting public education in order to dumb down citizens so that they’ll experience knee-jerk responses to political messages, they’ll vote according to those responses, and they’ll keep in power people who make big money and help their friends make big money based on their political position. If I were going to take to the streets to protest any crackpot notion this would be it.

Every other problem I have with American politics is connected to it. The current American wars are just one example: we claim to be promoting democracy around the world and use violence to do it. This bait and switch ensures that there will always be terrorism so that America will always have an excuse to go to war, which puts big money into the pockets of people who make weapons and other war-related products and who make money off of that industry. War also allows politicians to whip Americans up into a frenzy of patriotism whenever they need votes in support of troops whose lives they are wasting to line their pockets.

This money-making machine falls apart when Americans have enough education and experience to think critically through the messages communicated to them, so it’s no wonder that politicians claim the public school system needs to be policed instead of properly funded. Increasing requirements and less money… hmm, I wonder what that will do? It will ensure that the American public loses faith in public-school teachers, that the politicians will take over and shut down “low-performing” schools (read: schools with a lot of poor kids), and that increasing sums of money will flow into the for-profit sector in support of high-cost “solutions” to the problem that poor families will not be able to afford. At the moment when America is poised to make real education accessible to all Americans (note the rhetoric of No Child Left Behind), we are actually chopping away at the public-school foundation that makes that access possible. Like everything else in American culture, we are talking one way and acting another. It’s called hypocrisy.

Inquiry question: What is the connection between reading and the “decline” of the American educational system?

Conclusion: Reading grounds academic success because it encourages imaginative, emotional, and intellectual connection with ideas. When educational and social structures encourage us away from reading, we lose the opportunity to advance ourselves and to support our culture. Currently, both educational and social structures are killing reading, which will increasingly undermine education in America and widen the gap between rich and poor. While this may not have been intended by those in power, these institutional structures benefit the privileged few who can survive the system and then capitalize on it.

Point #1: Reading and socio-economic class correlate. More affluent families have more money and leisure for reading, and they have generations before them who valued reading. So, we might reinterpret the following statistics: “fewer than 50 percent of high school graduates from families without college experience are regarded academically qualified for college [. . .], compared to more than 80 percent of graduates with college-educated parents” (Arum and Roska 42). These statistics assume that families’ lack of experience with college culture interferes with children’s ability to get to college. While this is likely true, another aspect of underpreparedness may have to do with low levels of reading in the home. If young people are not comfortable with reading and discussing reading, they may not choose reading-heavy courses or succeed in the rigorous coursework leading to college, and they may need lots of support to tackle the reading associated with college-level academics.

Moreover, reading is one way to unconsciously absorb all kinds of cultural knowledge. Many assessments of skills and knowledge rely partly on the skill or knowledge sought and partly on the greater cultural context surrounding the task. If a student’s critical thinking skills are being assessed by being asked “to generate a memo advising an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed” (Arum and Roska 21), the student needs to know more than merely how to argue based on evidence. The student needs to know what a memo is, understand the relationship between an employee and employer in a professional situation, and have some familiarity with airplanes. Students who have never come into contact with the cultural aspects of this prompt may struggle to determine how to answer it. Students who have not themselves come into contact with the same cultural aspects but who are also readers may be able to better address the question through their imaginative journeys into the lives of others who have encountered these things. The problem is that cultural exposure and reading are both class defined; the more well-off students who more likely to have a broad cultural exposure to the professional world assumed to be the norm by people writing tests (rather than, for example, assuming most students understand gang activity) are the same students likely to have broad reading exposure to additional aspects of culture.

Point #2: Schools are committing “readicide.” Kelly Gallagher defines “readicide” as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools” (2). Reading involves emotion and imagination. Reading occurs most effectively when students care about the subject matter and the mode of expression. Reading requires emotional and intellectual interaction with a text, not just processing of facts. Reading, even challenging reading, can be fun! For example, my eight-year-old daughter recently discovered the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. She’s not even done with the first book, and she loves the series. She imagines she is a cat, her stuffed animals become other cats, and even our real cat Ichabod gets dragged into the role-playing. Then, my daughter found the website for the series and discovered a related game. This game has a 54-page instruction manual. I told her that I didn’t have time to read it and help her, but because she is emotionally invested, this little kid is reading a 54-page instruction manual, understanding it, and not even thinking about it as work. My observations of her indicate that she moves easily from reading the manual to writing her own Warrior Cat stories, to acting out scenarios, to playing problem-solving Warrior Cat electronic games, and to discussions with other people about issues raised as part of this process. Her challenging reading is embedded in an entire intellectual, physical, imaginative, interpersonal, and emotional package that keeps her developing her thinking. Reading in school could be like this. In some schools, it is.

However, because of the culture of high-stakes assessments, many schools are forgetting how reading happens and focusing on reading as a simple transaction based in comprehension rather than engagement. In emphasizing reading in the service of test-taking, schools are making reading a chore completely disconnected from students as individuals and thereby ironically undermining their students’ ability to succeed on tests. Gallagher says, “In an effort to ‘help’ prepare [students] for reading tests, we starve readers” (32-33). Young readers hungry for interesting ideas and stories increasingly denied the opportunity to feast in sustained, authentic, pleasurable, intellectually stimulating reading moments will stop seeking them. Through readicide, schools are killing the potential for students to enjoy reading in more advanced school work and in later life. This situation particularly disenfranchises children of less affluent families who may not have opportunities and encouragement in the home to consider reading as fun.

Point #3: Popular culture substitutes quick superficiality for deep thought. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” smart characters like George have buzzers implanted in their heads to interrupt their thinking and make them more “equal” with less smart characters. During the story, George watches his son Harrison get killed on TV for defying the equality rules and showing off his strengths. Moments later, George can’t even remember this personal tragedy because “a handicap signal shook him up.” Instead, he says to his wife Hazel, “’Forget sad things’” (185). This is a tragic ending because parents are not even allowed to feel the loss of their child due to the politics keeping the powerful in power. One of the messages conveyed by “Harrison Bergeron” is that equality is not sameness but everyone having the support to use their talents. Another message is that structures of power protect themselves. In the story, these structures protect themselves through handicapping people into sameness and gunning down anyone who bucks the system. Thankfully, American structures of power don’t frequently turn guns against citizens, or at least not in white middle-class reality.

Yet, American culture includes structures that encourage distraction equally as devastating as George’s handicap buzzer. As an example, commercial news sources operate for pay based on advertising. This means they need to attract viewers who will stay and read the ads. This need to retain viewers’ attention means that news sources will highlight news stories most likely to do so. Often these stories, such as what’s going on with Lindsay Lohan’s rehab, are visually highlighted on the screen, while Middle East peace talks fall into a list of other world events. In our fast-paced world where we don’t have time to read every news story, we may find ourselves reading about Lindsay Lohan instead of Benjamin Netanyahu (who?). When it comes time to use our hard-won political right to vote, will we be ready based on our superficial understanding of current events? Maybe. Maybe we won’t vote because we don’t know enough. Maybe we’ll vote in alignment with our political affiliation because we haven’t had time to examine the facts. Maybe we’ll vote for the person who comes across most favorably in Yahoo! News photos rather than understanding anything about his or her politics.

While such media involve reading, the structures of such media do not encourage the habits of reading: first of all, commercial news sources don’t foreground important facts. They tend instead to cater to the lowest common denominator of public opinion, gossip. Secondly, such media don’t encourage spending time with information, pursuing ideas in-depth, living in characters’ experiences for days and years, and connecting those ideas to one’s ongoing thought processes. Instead, media like commercial news sources repeat the same kinds of stories over and over again, encouraging only momentary uproars and feeding our sense that nothing is happening worth worrying about. Real reading, reading that invokes our emotions and challenges our thinking, helps us to think outside the confines of our lived experience, to understand other people and cultures, to value individual and ordinary experiences, to imagine better futures and long for justice (Pontusco and Thornton 65), and to better understand ourselves (Felski 7).

Conclusion

OK, so maybe there’s not a conspiracy to dumb down American citizens, but there are structures in our culture that encourage us to invest our time and money in not thinking. In a democracy where successful government hypothetically relies on educated voters, the failure of our school system and culture to value reading and its connection to deep thinking subverts democracy and keeps a privileged few in power.

Questions for discussion:

1) I’m probably totally biased. I love reading. I don’t remember learning to read. Reading has always come easily for me. What are other structures in our culture that actively encourage deep thinking that could similarly assist in supporting democracy?

2) If reading is so all-fired important, what are strategies that could encourage kids and adults to read more?

Works Cited

Arum, Richard and Josipa Roska. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. U Chicago P, 2011. Print.
Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle Review 55.7 (19 Dec. 2008): 7.
Gallagher, Kelly. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2009. Print.
Pontuso, James F. and Saranna R. Thornton. “Is Outcomes Assessment Hurting Higher Education?” Thought & Action (Fall 2008): 61-69.
Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergeron.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th compact ed. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Boston: Longman, 2010. 181-85. Print.

The Thirteenth Tale

2011-08-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert! This post refers to the ending of the novel!

In response to Anna's interest in Twitterature, here is my tweet regarding Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale:

Bookseller and biographer, who lost her own twin at birth, discovers the family secret of a famous twin author, allowing her to die in peace (137 characters).

Mine is not very interesting. It doesn't feel much different from the punchy sentences used to promote books. Let me try again:

How I ache for my twin lost at birth. I wonder how this famous author lives without her twin? (spoiler alert!) Aha, she’s not a twin! (133 characters)

That's a little more dramatic, coming from main character Margaret Lea's perspective.

I enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale and would recommend it to anyone who likes ghost stories, gentle gothic, and literary allusions. I have two criticisms: 1) It did seem a bit plodding. As Emperor Joseph II says to Mozart in the film Amadeus: "There are simply too many notes." Maybe there are too many pages? Maybe that says about as much about Setterfield as it did about Mozart. 2) I do like the unraveling of family secrets but thought there could be a few more clues regarding the outcome buried earlier in the storyline to make the outcome more satisfying. The outcome was kind of deus ex machina somehow.

Works Cited

Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale. New York: Washington Square P, 2006. Print.

Image from: http://www.amazon.com/

Persepolis

2011-08-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

Like Susie in her discussion board post, I am often struck by the fact that Americans don't take to the streets more often. People all over the globe vocally, physically, and non-violently protest all kinds of abuses. We're seeing this in the "Arab Spring" this year. Americans used to protest. Take the Civil Rights Moment and the Vietnam War as two examples. What has happened to us?

I find myself silenced by not wanting to incur the animosity of my neighbors, not wanting to disrupt my classroom by having my political views interfere with student learning, and not feeling as if I know enough even to comment publicly on the larger issues that make me angry. Yet, I do believe political voice is the foundation of our democracy, so why the paralysis?

I like Satrapi's depictions of protests in Persepolis. On page three, she depicts a group of men and women dressed in black against a black background. Each person has a raised fist, and the fists and the faces are the only white parts of the image. The caption reads "In 1979 a revolution took place. It was later called 'The Islamic Revolution.'"

Another frame depicts women after the revolution protesting for and against the veil. One one side are women covered except for their faces in black shouting "the veil!" and on the other are women in white clothes with black hair shouting "freedom!" Again, both groups have fists raised. The background here is white, and the caption reads, "Everywhere in the streets there were demonstrations for and against the veil" (5).

What strikes me in both of these depictions is the groups of individuals doing the same thing, and the fact that protest involves raised fists, which suggests the capacity for violence. These aspects capture another aspect of my reluctance to protest: I'm not comfortable with group protests. Somehow, my participation in a group protest reduces the complexity of my understanding of a situation to the party line. I'm not comfortable being perceived as wholly agreeing with others in my group with whom I only partly agree. Maybe that's just an excuse.

The violence aspect, that even peaceful protests symbolized by raised fists involve the attempt to force others to share my view, is also not comfortable for me. I'm angry enough to believe in my view, but my recognition of the complexity of the situation makes me wary of imposing it on others who may better understand the details.

The Iranian revolution is a good example of the problem of complexity. In that revolution, the liberals and the fundamentalists collaborated to overthrow the Shah's excessive regime. The Shah needed to be overthrown, but the liberals did not predict that the fundamentalists would take that opportunity to impose Islamic law. If they had, they might not have joined the revolution. The situation was not as simple as it appeared, and the liberals like Satrapi's family have suffered for their simplistic reading of the situation. As we watch the various "Arab Spring" events, we would do well to be mindful of this history, as revolution involves tearing down existing structures, and it's never sure how they will be replaced.

And yet... all action is action. Even inaction and silence are action. When it comes down to it, we'd better just pick a stance and take to the streets even if our knowledge is not complete or risk never having our voices heard.

Blog 13: Quote-Response Dickinson

2011-08-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

I love Emily Dickinson! She reduces huge natural phenomena to managable size and wrestles with big philosophical questions like, will I be able to recognize my loved ones after death? In "The Lightening is a yellow Fork" (606) Dickinson does both. She uses understatement about lightening to imply the power and negligence of whoever lives in the sky.

In the poem, lightening becomes a fork dropped from a table, which makes the reader wonder about who lives up there. In imagining a person in the sky who has dropped a fork, Dickinson also implies negligence on the part of any diety: he has "inadvertent fingers" to carelessly drop something so powerful as a lightening bolt. This probes whether God is actually paying attention and caring about humans.

Because heaven, the "mansions," never appear clearly, we can't know anything about God, but the lightening reveals the awful truth: God's "Apparatus" is "Dark." He keeps us in ignorance, only revealing his power and lack of caring in the moment when lightening strikes.

Despite my interpretation of this poem, I don't think Dickinson was an atheist. I think she just practiced a very questioning faith through her poetry, avoiding the convenient assumptions about God that keep people comfortable.

Blog 12: Poem Paraphrase

2011-08-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" (576): I am familiar with despair from my own loneliness. No one cares about me. Even the sun by which understand time cannot provide moral direction and cannot tell me why I exist.

Blog 11: Quote-Response Brooks

2011-08-06T15:31:00.001-07:00

I love Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool." It's in the rhythm section of our textbook because it employs only single-syllable words. Those words capture the force and naive fearlessness of young people:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We... (557)

In addition to the single syllables, the voice reminds me of the boys in "Greasy Lake" posing as tough kids. The avoidance of standard English suggests a rejection of authority in "We real cool." It's not "We're really cool." Skipping school or not graduating also bucks authority, as does staying up late, beyond bedtime or curfew. This rebelliousness here is connected to an accuracy of violence in "Strike straight." This might be a shot in pool or a punch delivered to an assailant. In either case, the young people are equipped by their rebellious lives to be effective. Of course, the end of the poem undermines their confidence.

I'm also interested in the use of "We," always at the beginnings of sentences and always at the ends of lines. This suggests a collective persona, as if the group members never do anything alone. This resembles the narration in "A Rose for Emily" where the town gossipped enough to share the same unhelpful opinions about Miss Emily. Here, it seems as if peer pressure creates this life of deadends for these young rebels. Because they work as a group, they can't think critically about their behavior, and they all, without regret on their part but sadly for the reader, careen toward death.

Blog 10: Song Response

2011-08-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

Does anyone listen to Kenny Rogers anymore? I don't listen to much current music. Somehow, I lost the desire to keep up, preferring talk radio and audio books. But music was very much a part of my childhood and young adult life, and sometimes lyrics will come to mind. Kenny Roger's "The Gambler" has a great chorus that seems pretty important to my adult life:

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away, know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table,
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

The song is a narrative about a down and out young man encountering an experienced gambler who gives him advice. The chorus is the advice: you need to know when to keep playing and when to quit, and in quitting, you need to know when to get out fast. I do think it's hard for young people to know when it's time to give up. We're taught to "hang in there" and that courage involves seeing something through to the end. I think it's also important to know when no effort on my part will do any good. There have been important times in my life when I've folded and run, and I haven't been disappointed in that choice.

The other part of the advice is not to count your money while you're still playing. I read this as don't judge yourself. Whether you're winning or losing, judging doesn't do any good. Just keep going with the work until it's finished. I've found even after the work is done that judging doesn't matter because I'm on to the next job. It's really the game that's important, life, career, family, not figuring out whether you're winning or losing. Just be happy in the action of life.

I don't really think of Kenny Rogers as providing my life philosophy, but clearly my own experiences connect enough with the idea of this song to make it meaningful for me. :)

Blog 9: Haiku

2011-08-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

From Rilke's "Panther":

The caged panther paces.
His fierce hunter’s heart seeks,
Finding only bars.

Blog 8: Poem Paraphrase

2011-08-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Panther": The caged panther paces, momentarily opening the eyes that once hunted only to find himself surrounded by bars.

Road through Wonderland

2011-08-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Dawn Schiller wrote The Road through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes about her experiences as a “throwaway teen” victimized by the porn star John Holmes. The memoir follows Dawn on a road trip with her father, a Vietnam vet, from a tough neighborhood in Florida to Southern California where she met John. She was then 15, and he was twice her age. With the neglect of her father and John’s separating her from family and friends, Dawn came to see John as a protector, but their sexual relationship constituted rape, as she was not young enough to give consent, and he preyed upon her vulnerable situation.

Eventually, John became increasingly involved with drugs and abusive of Dawn. In one instance, John hit Dawn out of paranoid jealousy:

“Bam! John’s hand flies out across the glass and lands hard across my face.
I hit the ground with a thud that sends the air from my lungs. I immediately feel the searing pain of the blow rip through my jaw. It cracks with a loud snap and aches like it is broken. Stunned and in shock, I have no vision except for sparks of light against a black background” (259).

The use of present tense here and throughout the book makes the increasing violence gripping for a reader. While violence in a consensual relationship is never appropriate, it is even more terrifying that this is a big, male adult hitting a child, and the child has no adult to turn to and no frame of reference to use in understanding the violence as wrong.

John went so far as to traffic Dawn, prostituting her to raise money to spend on drugs. I can’t imagine that experience as the norm for a young woman. At the end of the book, following the Wonderland murders in which John was implicated, the couple fled to Florida where, finally, with the help of caring friends who notice the abuse, Dawn turned John in to the police.

Dawn’s book is written as a means to voice her side of the story in response to the film Wonderland, which focuses on John’s connection with the Wonderland murders. I had to watch the film version in small chunks, as I found the violence difficult. Kate Bosworth plays Dawn, representing her as a cute tagalong along for the ride. One planned scene of physical abuse was cut from the film, as the filmmakers were worried about making John look bad. One trafficking scene appears in the film, but it’s depicted so vaguely that it’s difficult to understand what is happening. John himself comes across more as pathetic than terrifying, which distorts his role in Dawn’s life.

As a means of turning the horror of her childhood into productive action, Dawn has founded the non-profit Empowering Successful Teens through Education, Awareness and Mentoring (ESTEAM): http://www.empowerteens.com/. Through this non-profit, Dawn plans to develop mentoring models that can guide adults in supporting teens experiencing neglect and in protecting teens from predators who prey on neglected youth. Nancy

Works Cited
Schiller, Dawn. The Road through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes. Medallion P, 2010. Print.

Image Source: http://www.medallionpress.com/authors/schiller.html

Blog Post 6: Gift of the Magi

2011-07-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

I love O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi"! Della and Jim demonstrate their love for one another by each sacrificing his or her own prized possession to get a special gift for his or her partner. Of course, the irony is that neither can use the special gift because they sacrificed the possession to which it relates. The irony emphasizes their love by tinging it with regret, but it is only a regret for things, not for people, so it is dwarfed by the love their feel for one another.

What is often lost in this love story is the title and the last paragraph addressing the magi. As the last paragraph states, the magi were the three wise kings who brought gives to Jesus at his birth. Henry states that Della and Jim, and people like them who give gifts, "are wisest." "They are the magi" (162). In a sense, Henry is saying they are better than the magi. I think there is irony in operation here, too. Della and Jim are not kings; they do not have wealth and time; they have to work hard for the people they love. It is the very irony that they can't use the gifts that makes them wiser and better than the magi because they gave of their whole hearts, sacrificing themselves for their beloved, without a thought to getting anything in return. Their gifts, therefore, are more in line with the story of Jesus than those provided by the actual rich, leisured magi. Nancy

Blog Post 4: The Lottery

2011-07-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is one of the scariest stories ever. It starts out all happy--a sunny summer day--and everyone's going to the lottery. Based on the general understanding of a lottery, it seems as if someone's going to win something. Then, it turns out that the "winner" is the big loser, getting stoned by her fellow townsfolk.

Stories of ritual human sacrifice are part of traditional agricultural societies that believed something(s) valuable needed to be sacrificed in order to guarantee a good harvest. This one has a small detail that indicates the connection: Old Man Warner, who has lived through 77 lotteries, mentions the old saying, "'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon'" (216), which makes the connection between the lottery and the crops.

Other similar stories occur in the film The Wicker Man, which is very creepy, and in Wole Soyinka's play The Strong Breed. In these two, the sacrifice is made ironic by the fact that the community opts to sacrifice an outsider; they aren't willing to sacrifice their own, which seems to undermine the whole purpose.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of these stories is that tradition continues without reason and is so strong that it overcomes all human feeling. While hopefully we don't make human sacrifices anymore, there are ways in which harmful traditions outlast their usefulness just because that's the way it's always been done. When we can't think beyond "We've always done it that way," we're in trouble. Nancy

Silver's Edge

2011-07-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

I recently read Anne Kelleher's Silver's Edge, which is a fantasy novel that includes a couple romance plots. Normally, I'm not a big fan of fantasy novels where mortals travel to fairyland. I do appreciate the tradition. I taught a British fantasy course this past year that included several influential fairyland novels: George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lord Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter. These authors influenced other more well known fantasy writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In that class, we also read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which is a very recent version of the fairyland story that was also made into a movie. Both are delightful. (And, I have more to say on Neil Gaiman, whose novels are awesome.) I appreciate fairyland stories. I appreciate their impact on other works. But, generally, I find the depictions of fairyland rather simplistic, kind of like the wonderful children's book The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies or the film Darby O'Gill and the Little People. The stories tend toward cuteness rather than complexity because they don't take the fairies seriously.

However, Kelleher's depiction of fairyland seems more interesting. The characters are entangled in realistic relationship issues, some impacted by class, whether the need to make money or the need to marry for political advantage, and some impacted by political and racial tensions, such as those between nations or between mortals and the sidhe (fairies).

The borderlines are also drawn not just between the moral world and fairyland but also between the realm of goblins. The intersections among these three territories multiply the conflict and heighten the political intrigue, as characters make deals for their own advantage.

I also like the complexity in the depiction of the magical elements. There isn't just one kind of magic that some people have. There are differing kinds of magic and imlements that have magical effects, such as silver, and magic doesn't solve every problem. Instead, magic is one factor; bravery, honor, professional expertise, and hard work are others. It seems as if Kelleher takes fairyland seriously. It's not a realm of cute elfish caricatures as in Lloyd Alexander's work but more along the lines of Tolkien, drawn from a long history, with the sidhe simply being a race of non-humans for whom time moves differently.

Finally, I want to mention that I enjoyed the depictions of the female characters who are well-rounded and of the main character, Nessa, who has trained as a blacksmith in her father's smithy. She is capable and brave. She can make weapons and is willing to go weaponless in to the Otherworld to find her father. One sidhe character watches her swim back to the Shadowlands (mortal world): "He was forced to acknowledge her courage, and the intelligence, as well as the intuition that led her to not only chop off the goblin's head, but to bring it to the attention of the sidhe as well" (281). Although the sidhe are both attracted to and repelled by humans, this character, who seems trustworthy himself, views Nessa as a key player in the unfolding events, which allows the reader to take her seriously as well.

Nessa is likeable also because, like many fantasy heroes, she is looking for her future, whether that will be partnered with her father's apprentice Griffin or with the sidhe Artimour or working as a blacksmith or following the path of corn magic. She seems capable of many things, and the end of the novel leaves her future unresolved and her family mystery still hidden. So, now I have to buy the next book in the series...

Works Cited

Kelleher, Anne. Silver's Edge. New York: Luna, 2004.
"Silver's Edge" [cover image]. Amazon.com. 2011. Web. 9 July 2011.

Blog 2 Miss Emily

2011-06-27T08:05:00.001-07:00

I love "A Rose for Emily"! It's kind of grotesque to realize that (spoiler alert!) she has been sleeping next to a dead guy for a long time. Ah, love! :)

I'm teaching a gothic course also this summer, so maybe I'll write about the gothic elements in Faulkner's story. Gothic fictions tend to have a creepy, ancient, aristocratic house and family, both of which are decaying. The domestic spaces, which should be safest, are risky. Usually, the characters are pretty clearly defined: virginal woman at risk threatened by dark villain and rescued by gallant, handsome, unmarried hero. So, "A Rose for Emily" has some of the gothic elements and plays on the others.

Clearly, the house and family are decaying. The house is disappearing among "garages and cotton gins" with its "stubborn and coquettish deay" (30). The house has regal elements of a prior age that are being obliterated by time, but it is still clinging to them ("stubborn") and teasing ("coquettish") the community with wisps of memory and desire for times past.

In her earliest days, Emily might have seemed the virginal heroine, "a slender figure in white," and her father seems the dark villain, "a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip" (32). "silhouette" means he is shadowy and dark, and the whip suggests violence. Her white clothing put her in the innocent role. Her father will not let her marry, so she cannot escape. She is the victim trapped in a mouldering house by her father's violence.

Faulkner definitely turns the tables on the traditional melodramatic gothic theme by making virginal Emily into the villain. Homer Baron decides to leave, clearly not the gothic hero coming to the rescue, despite the obvious signs of Emily's affection: the "man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece" (34). She can't stand the shame and loneliness, so she poisons him to keep him forever. I can just hear the "a ha ha ha" of the villain laughing. And she doesn't get caught until she dies. Victory! The once victim has her last hurrah. There's something about the twist of making the innocent into the murderer that heightens the creepiness.

ENGL 104 Blog Entry 1

2011-06-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

1. My name is Nancy Knowles, and I prefer to be called Nancy. I am really busy and don't have hobbies. I like to cook, read, walk my dogs, and play with my child and husband. I'm originally from Southern California and have lived in La Grande, Oregon since 2000.

2. I don't remember learning to read, so I must have learned before Kindergarten. My parents had lots of books and liked to read--popular fiction, art books, magazines, my dad liked books about cars. I read a lot of the classics before they were assigned in school. In high school, I had Mrs. Jackson, a passionate Scot ("Scottish not Scotch"), as my English teacher for three of my four years. She loved Laurence Olivier, so we read every Shakespeare play for which there was an Olivier film. I am very grateful to her for that exposure.

Now, I prefer to read fantasy and science fiction or at least novel-length works. I like to disappear into the story, and short stories and poetry don't allow me to do that, although I enjoy analyzing them.

3. I did the interviews when I taught this course in 2009. I'll see if I can pin down anyone to be interviewed again...

The Women

2011-06-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

I've been away from my reading blog due to a crazy busy schedule and also because something in EOU's move to gmail messed up my ability to connect to my blog. I think everything is fixed, and teaching ENGL 104 again this summer gives me an excuse to catch up.

I plan to write about a number of books I read this past year. The first is a book by T. C. Boyle called The Women. I have read a book by Boyle in the past, which was a humorous look at minor environmental terrorists. I remember someone living in a tree and characters attacking logging equipment. The Women is nothing like that book.

The Women retells the story of the lives of three women who loved famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Milanoff, Maude Miriam Noel, and Mamah Cheney. The book addresses each woman's story in turn in that order. Olgivanna was Wright's last wife, Mirim his second, and Mamah a tragic love affair while he was married to his first wife Kitty, so the book tells the women's stories in reverse chronological order. I think this order allows the story to climax (spoiler alert!) with the murder of Mamah and her children at Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, which is very effective. The narrative deftly captures the different personality of each woman and her intersection with Wright's life. The focus on the women gives them the power of perspective over the reader's interpretation of Wright, which is a refreshing approach.

The book is narrated by a Japanese apprentice, Sato Tadashi, which is an interesting technique. It gives the narrator an insider perspective without using the first-person perspective for any of the main characters, which perhaps avoids biasing the reader in favor of any of them. The narrator doesn't interfere much in the story except for some rather humorous footnotes and the introductions to each of the three sections. In the introduction to the third section, Tadashi visits Taliesin with his wife, and Wright meets him at the station. Tadashi is weeping from "joy, recollection, nostalgia, pain" and is deeply honored by the fact that Wright respects apprentices well enough to take time to meet him (326). Tadashi's awe of Wright echoes the experience of the women in depicting Wright's charisma. Despite his ambition, arrogance, and insensitivity, Wright was a powerful, fascinating, and charming man, whom individuals might love or hate but couldn't help admire.

At the time I was reading this book, I also watched a PBS documentary by Ken Burns called Frank Lloyd Wright. The documentary told the story of Wright's plans for his famous house Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Always needing money, Wright took the contract for Fallingwater and then went back to work on other projects. When finally the future owner wished to see his plans, the owner called to say he had arrived at the station and would get to Taliesin in an hour or two. Wright spent those hours drafting freehand from the work he had been doing mentally all along and was ready to meet the owner as if he'd been working on the plans for months. That story seems representative of many qualities of Wright: again, his arrogance, partly also his insensitivity to the needs of others, and finally most definitely his impossible genius.

I also watched a documentary on the renovation of Heurtley House in Chicago called The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House, which was a really interesting way to explore Wright's design by tracking the ongoing attempt to revive the house's original qualities.

My interest in this book arises from the fact that my dad, architect George T. Knowles, was apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1950s, toward the end of Wright's life. My dad lived at Taliesin East in Wisconsin and also at Taliesin West near Scottsdale, AZ, so he knew Wright and his family. My dad is working on a book of photos about his experiences at Taliesin and has many funny stories about the celebrities who used to visit. Because Boyle lives in a home designed by Wright in Santa Barbara, my dad has attempted to contact him to see whether he might tour the home, but he has met with no success.

As a child, I visited a number of Wright buildings, including Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Pennsylvania.

Works Cited

Boyle, T. C. The Women. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Burns, Ken and Lynn Novick. Frank Lloyd Wright. Florentine Films, 1998.
Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House. Perf. H. Allen Brooks. 2002.
"The Women" [cover image]. Penguin. 2011. Web. 26 June 2011. us.penguingroup.com

ENGL 104 Blog Party Post 2010

2010-08-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Fantasy literature is for geeks. When the film Fellowship of the Ring, based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s book, came out in 2001, I saw it in Eureka, California with a crowd of people wearing cloaks. I’m frequently embarrassed to say that I read fantasy novels and love them. I’m even more embarrassed to say that I’m also writing a fantasy novel I started when I was a child.

At the recommendation of students over the course of some years, I began reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I had resisted for awhile because I’m not overly fond of the kind of sword-and-sorcery fantasy that relies primarily on brawny men and screaming women off on a quest. While Jordan’s work does not fit this Conan stereotype, it is a “chosen one” story, which is another pet peeve of mine regarding fantasy literature. I like stories where average people can do great things without having to be the son of Darth Vader. Yet, I do like Robert Jordan’s writing, so my inquiry question is, “Why do I like Robert Jordan’s writing?” After thinking about this topic for some months, my conclusions are: 1) I like the complexity of the world in which the story is set, 2) my personality type draws me to this kind of fantasy where the whole world of the story exists in my head, and 3) more broadly, given the crisis in reading, I need to recognize the benefits of escaping into a good book for no other purpose than pleasure.

1) I like the complexity of the world in which the story is set. During the first book, The Eye of the World, a group of characters sets out on a journey to take the “Dragon Reborn” Rand al’Thor to Tar Valon where he can prepare for the Last Battle with the “Dark One.” Notice the very stereotypical “chosen one” plot! This book was not my favorite because it just followed the characters from point A to point B.

However, the subsequent books continue to follow the main characters as they split up. They develop as characters, each with his or her own challenges and successes, and they travel to countries in this fictional world where the customs are very complex and different from one another. The farmlands of Two Rivers and the palace at Caemlyn are pretty standard fantasy fare, but there are also the desert-dwelling Aiel whose sense of honor is complicated. There is a port city inundated with mud where people in the lower parts of the city wear thick clogs to raise their shoes above the muck. In another city, the politics are deadly, and the nobles wonder feverishly whether others are moving against them in the Game of Houses, as in a chess match. Here is one example of the cultural detail Jordan provides:

Tairens in helmets rimmed and ridged, and breastplates over fat-sleeved coats striped in the colors of their various lords. Cairhienin in dark coast and battered breastplates and helmets like bells cut away to expose their faces. Small banners called con, on short staffs fastened to some men’s backs, marked minor Cairhienin nobility and younger sons, and sometimes merely officers, though few Cairhienin commoners rose to rank. Or Tairens, for that matter. The two nationalities did not mingle [. . .]. (97)

I like that the different soldiers have different armor reflecting their culture. The helmets for each kind of soldier have different structural elements, and the cloth portions of the uniforms have different ways of recognizing allegiance. I also like the politics depicted, that although these soldiers are traveling together, they don’t get along. So, the complexity of the world is very realistic. It makes the experience of reading the novels resemble a journey where they reader explores new cultures.

As the story follows the various characters, the pattern of the narrative becomes more complex as well, which is fun for avid readers who like challenges. There are about 10 characters the story follows, and the chapters zip among the events the characters encounter so that the narrative is like a patchwork or a jigsaw puzzle. This structure enlists the reader in putting the pieces together, and it makes me admire Jordan for keeping track of all the details from the tiny descriptions of helmets to the experiences of each of his characters. He does this not only in one 700-page book, but in a series of them. I can’t imagine the notes that would require!

2) My personality type draws me to this kind of fantasy where the whole world of the story exists in my head. There are many methods of categorizing personality, all ways of identifying the ways individuals process information, relate to the world, and gather energy. According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am an INFJ—Introverting, iNtuiting, Feeling, and Judging. Based on these preferences, one might recognize that I am more inward-focused (introverting), I like abstract concepts and idealistic endeavors (intuiting), and I care about individuals and humane behavior (feeling). So, based on my preference for introversion and for feeling, it should be no surprise that I like to read. I enjoy living in my head and connecting emotionally with the lives of fictional characters. The intuiting aspect of my personality type indicates why I would like fantasy literature: fantasy is all about good vs. evil, light overcoming darkness, which is very idealistic. While I don’t see magic and elves in every corner, I do apply this idealism to my daily life, trying to do the right thing.

The aspect of personality that I think draws me most to Robert Jordan is introversion. My most powerful experience in studying the impact of my personality type on my preferences occurred at a summer 2008 workshop by Lee Knefelcamp that used the Kolb Learning Style Inventory. She used the inventory to divide up the participants, and I found myself in a group of people with similar preferences. We all liked ideas more than action, enjoyed complex intellectual tasks, found abstract theories to be “delicious,” sought knowledge in books, and liked to work alone. In other words, we were total geeks! The reason this experience connects particularly with Robert Jordan’s writing for me is that he puts a whole world into his series. For someone who likes to process information in her mind, having so much detail available to experience and think about makes the pleasure of the reading experience that much more powerful.

3) Given the crisis in reading, I need to recognize the benefits of escaping into a good book for no other purpose than pleasure. According to the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk, “literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.” This decline is important because it indicates our culture is turning away from an artistic activity that requires engagement, patience, reflection, attention, and creativity and fosters participation in social and cultural activities (vii). All of these qualities are important life skills not only for the individual but for the nation, and their decline makes me wonder what America will look like 50 years from now. Will we find other means of accessing these qualities, or will we become even more driven by the need for immediate satisfaction through media like reality TV and even more dominated by people who understand how to manipulate us through that need?

Based on this decline and on my work as a teacher of reading, I think it is important for me to stay connected to why I read. Like most other people, I don’t enjoy subjecting myself to unpleasant reading just because it is good for me. However, I do think reading broadly is important, particularly reading classics and best sellers, and I invest time in reading books recommended by others that I would not necessarily choose for myself, The Road, Grapes of Wrath, and Three Cups of Tea being my most recent forays into this territory. I also catch up on canonical literature that I haven’t read through the textbooks I use in teaching literature. For example, I’m not a poetry reader for entertainment, but I love analyzing poems. William Stafford’s “Ask Me” is a good example. I don’t know what this poem means. The last line is, “What the river says, that is what I say” (14). OK, great—what does the river say? According to a line earlier in the poem, the river is “silent”! Maybe that’s the point? This is not a fun poem for me to read. It doesn’t resonate with me, yet I enjoy combing through the wording and structure to try and figure out what that last line means. When I do this kind of reading, I find myself thinking about the ideas presented, and I stretch my knowledge and abilities. As Stacy Carleton notes, “literature serves as bridge to the real world and back again” (8). Even literature I dislike provides an opportunity for reflection on life. Sometimes, as with Grapes of Wrath, I fall in love with a book I didn’t even know I would like.

Reading Robert Jordan reminds me of the power of art to transport readers into other worlds, to completely erase the present in favor the emotional and intellectual experience depicted by the artwork. This artistic impact connects me with the events and characters depicted, it connects me with past writers, and it teaches me about history and culture. By walking in the shoes of the characters and experiencing their choices even when or perhaps especially when I disagree with them, I acquire empathy for others because I get to see why they do what they do. I respect their human strengths and failings. I learn to become a better person myself, which means I am better able to contribute to my own life, my family, my workplace, my community, and my nation.

So, given all the benefits of reading good fantasy literature, and despite the success of films series like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, why is fantasy still considered kind of cheesy? Why isn’t it taught alongside classics in college? Why might readers of fantasy be embarrassed to admit they really like the genre? Is there something wrong with it?

Works Cited

Carleton, Stacy. “Heavy Act with Heavy Hearts Relate: Finding Hope in Literature.” Oregon English Journal 32.1 (Spring 2010): 6-9. Print.

Jordan, Robert. Lord of Chaos. New York: TOR, 1994. Print.

Knefelcamp, Lee. “Kolb Learning Style Inventory.” Association of American Colleges and Universities Institute on General Education. Minneapolis, MN: 30 May – 4 June, 2008.

National Endowment for the Arts. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004. Web. 26 Sept. 2009. < http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf>.

Stafford, William. “Ask Me.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th compact ed. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2010. 421. Print.

Recent Reading Part 3

2010-07-20T08:49:00.001-07:00

The book I'm reading right now is Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book. This is a fantasy or science fiction story, depending on whether you think time travel is possible. The novel is set in 2054 England and treats time travel as a science, so I guess for me that would categorize it as SF. In the novel, the Medieval Department sends a woman historian back to 1320 without many precautions, and then a bout of influenza or something breaks out, quarantining Oxford, where the time travel is taking place. So, the historian is living in 1320 not sure if she'll get back, and because of the quarantine, the scientists haven't been able to check on her in preparation for bringing her back in a couple weeks. The narrative moves back and forth between the time periods and makes me wonder what will happen. I am enjoying reading it and looking forward to my half hour before bed when I can find out about the next events.

Recent Reading Part 2

2010-07-20T08:45:00.001-07:00

The book I finished most recently is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which my sister sent me years ago. Because she doesn't send me many books, I assume this was one she really enjoyed. It tells the story of a 90-something man in a retirement home when a circus comes to town, and he remembers his youth as a circus vet. The book begins with a violent moment that actually occurs toward the end of the main story and spends much of the narrative moving between the man's present and past. It's a good story with complex characters, and I kept wondering what was going to happen.

Recent Reading

2010-07-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

I do quite a bit of reading for relaxation before I go to bed, and I've been trying to alternate between reading I do for total immersion (fantasy and SF especially) and reading that would be "good for me" or that others have recommended. I just finished Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, both recommended by family members, and am now reading Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book, fantasy/SF. I think I'll talk about each in the next postings, with Three Cups of Tea first.

My dad recommended Three Cups of Tea, and of course I heard about it, as it seemed as if every book group in the country was reading it. I was kind of worried about starting it because I was afraid it would depict a nice white guy going to save the third world. Although I suppose that's what happened, the tone was humble and built on Greg Mortenson's interest in Pakistan and the people of Pakistan more than the cause. It was a slow read for me. I think it took almost a month. I don't read non-fiction quickly, probably because there's no plot to draw me along. There's just this set of events and then that set of events and then some more events, so I don't tend to wonder what is going to happen. I'm glad I read it because I can talk with my dad about it. As he is caring for my mom now, who has Alzheimer's, talking about books is one way for me to try to support him at a distance.

(All of the book images come from Amazon.)

New Post for 2010

2010-06-27T09:26:00.001-07:00

I'm teaching ENGL 104 again this summer and think I will allow my 2009 archives to provide examples of class posts. If anyone wants to see them, click on 2009.

What I'd like to write about instead is some of the thinking I've been doing about reading over the last year. As I have posted earlier on this blog, I have been reading off and on Robert Jordan's fantasy novels from the Wheel of Time series, and in the spring I did an inquiry project for my ENGL 339 course thinking about the question, "Why do I like Robert Jordan?"

I came up with three answers: 1) I enjoy the complex world and characters he creates because readers can kind of live there, which is like a vacation.

2) I think my reading may be influenced by my personality type (since it is all about me!). I'm more of a shy person than a talker, and I like to think through things first before talking about them. My guess is that people like me might like this kind of in-depth world-creation fantasy. I can fit all the details in my head and come back to them during the day to wonder about what will happen next.

3) I keep coming back to the idea that having an emotional connection to reading is really important. When we do all this school reading on subjects we don't care about, it's hard to know that some reading can be fun, that we might find a kind of reading suited to us out there in the world. I think I experience an emotional connection to fantasy because I like the heroic good vs. evil struggles that occur there. I have friends who think fantasy is kind of silly, but I do think, despite its escapist quality, it gets at some important value issues that are relevant to the real world. Nancy

Blog Party Inquiry Post

2009-11-11T15:35:00.000-08:00

According to the National Endowment for the Arts Reading at Risk report from 2004, the number of American adults reading literature has dropped 14% from 1992 to 2002 (ix). As a lover of and teacher of literature, this decrease saddens me. What saddens me further is that literature instruction cannot seem to halt this decline. Kids seem to be hardwired to rebel against authority as part of their growth into adults, including against reading as a required educational activity.

So, my inquiry question is, how is it possible to teach reading without killing the love of reading? Since we probably need to continue requiring literature, my current conclusion is that instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests and learning styles and to the outside world.

1. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their learning styles. I have known about learning styles for many years, but a turning point for me occurred in 2007 while I was researching student engagement. In a source I can’t find now, I read that 95% of learners prefer styles other than “linguistic intelligence” (PBS) or processing by reading and writing. This shocked me! I prefer reading and writing, but my students probably don’t, and there I was using reading and writing to teach reading and writing to students who don’t prefer reading and writing!! This sounded like a recipe for failure.

Due to this revelation, I’ve begun to build opportunities for students to use different learning styles to understand literature: music, art, comic strips, Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, tableaus, personal experiences, collaboration, and connections to larger life questions through opinionaires, an idea I got from Jeffrey Wilhelm’s 2007 book on inquiry. These strategies use learning styles that may be more accessible for that 95% of students so that they can access literature through them.

2. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests. The use of personal interests and experience in teaching motivates learning. It is even more important in literature because literary interpretation relies on personal experience to make meaning.

As an example of this, I’ll share that I had a very sheltered childhood. My parents and teachers were kind. I always had food, housing, clothing, and money to spend on occasional extras. This background caused me to read Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” as a fun romp in the kitchen. It sounded fun that the father and son were causing “the pans/[to] Slid[e] from the kitchen shelf” in their enthusiasm, and the cute “unfrown” suggested that the mother was just pretending to disapprove. It was not until I read this poem with students who had other life experiences that I realized the poem could also represent abuse. Because our life experiences inspire a wide variety of interpretations, life experience should be central to literature instruction.

3. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to the outside world. All I need is a good book or classroom discussion to make me happy. Unlike me, my students need to know the value of literature in relation to the outside world. I believe that literature study teaches many real-world skills: Through reading, we learn to think outside the confines of our own lived experience, to understand other people and cultures, to make meaning from stories and think critically and artistically, to value individual and ordinary experience, to address future challenges, to long for justice (Pontuso and Thornton 65), and to better understand ourselves (Felski 7). These skills are vitally important to ensuring our culture moves in a constructive direction whether it be in business, politics, health care, or parenting.

To help students see the value of literature, I tried two new strategies this term:

a) Our first week’s readings and our first paper demonstrated that people care and talk about reading outside school and that reading connects to our real-world lives.

b) My on-campus students presented a Town Hall meeting on reading, and my online students will host a Blog Party on reading. In each case, students developed inquiry projects on topics related to reading and/or literature and presented or will present their results in public forums. These efforts represent an attempt to demonstrate to students that discussions of reading are an important part of our culture, not just academic work shut away in classrooms.

Because I am still in the process of this experiment, I don’t know whether these efforts will result in greater learning and engagement among my students. My on-campus students seem to like to come to class and don’t resort too frequently to texting under the desks. My online students seem overwhelmed. I think all the little activities might be easier to keep in perspective if we were working in person, so I’ll need to fine-tune the balance.

To conclude, I would be interested in discussing the following questions: Should we stop teaching literature to encourage reading? If not, how can we change reading education to avoid killing the pleasure of reading?

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle Review 55.7 (19 Dec. 2008): 7.

National Endowment for the Arts. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004. 26 Sept. 2009. < http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf>.

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007. 438-39.

Pontuso, James F. and Saranna R. Thornton. “Is Outcomes Assessment Hurting Higher Education?” Thought & Action (Fall 2008): 61-69.

Public Broadcasting System. “Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory.” Great Performances. 11 Nov. 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. Scholastic, 2007.

Blog 22: Freestyle

2009-11-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go back to the idea of "ocular proof" in Othello (III.iii.376). Based on Iago's clever suggestions, Othello moves from fully trusting Desdemona to seeking "ocular proof" or visual evidence that he should not trust her. In this movement, he seems to go from loving on faith in his own heart to loving based on evidence of reciprocity; he moves from what I consider to be true love to love that exists only if returned and demands evidence from the beloved. In this sense, he has already fallen out of love with Desdemona, at Iago's mere suggestion that she has been cheating on him. Maybe he is as pitiful as Iago.

The fact that he identifies visual evidence as the way he will decide plays right into Iago's hands because Iago can set him up by encouraging Desdemona to speak on Casio's behalf and by stealing the strawberry handkerchief and setting it up as evidence against her. If instead, Othello had loved Desdemona enough to just talke with her about Iago's comments, he could have cleared things up right away. But, then there would be no play!

Blog 21: Scene Response

2009-11-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed watching the scene from Act III in the three different productions of Othello. I like the Fishburne version most because I like the imagery of the armory and Othello's handling of weapons during the dialogue. However, what I think impressed me most about the Welles and Fishburne versions was the way they move from sunny, outdoor settings to dark interior settings. It's almost as if we move from pleasant, transparent, truthful conversation to the darkness of lies, insecurity, and cruelty. I think the use of the mirror in the Welles version is very effective because it indicates that Othello is questioning himself.

Blog Entry 20: Othello Acts III-V

2009-11-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

It's kind of sad that Iago encourages Othello's jealousy by telling him the truth about jealousy: "It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on" (III.iii.179-80). Iago's words mean that jealousy feeds on love and mocks it as it does. This means that jealousy in love should be avoided at all costs because it will destroy love. Instead of hearing this truth, Othello hears only the suggestion that he should be jealous. Rather than setting that suggestion aside and trusting to the fact that Desdemona "had eyes, and chose [him]" (III.iii.203), he says, "I'll see before I doubt" (III.iii.204), which sets him up to find all of the clues Iago sets up.

Blog 18: Quote-Response Othello I and II

2009-11-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

I like the earnestness with which Othello and Desdemona love one another in Shakespeare's play. At the end of his life story, he says simply that "She loved me for the dangers I had passed,/And I loved her that she did pity them" (I.iii.169-70). What interests me about this line is that he appreciates her pity, not her admiration. He does not need excessive attention or praise. Instead, he needs someone who understands that his life, though brave, has been difficult and whose heart reaches out to solace him for those difficulties.

This simplicity and lack of arrogance contrasts with Iago's spite. At the end of Act II, Iago indicates that his plan against Othello arises from gossip: "it is thought aborad that twixt my sheets/He's done my office" (II.i.366-67). Iago thinks Othello has slept with his wife, and it doesn't matter to him that he "know[s] not if 't be true" (II.i.367). He is so wound up in his appearance and what people think of him that he will take any pretext to plot. Perhaps the difference between Iago's pride and Othello's simple humility and trust is illustrated by fact that Othello waits the whole length of the play and collects plenty of "evidence" left by Iago against Desdemona before he succumbs to jealousy, unlike Iago who uses the briefest suspicion to fuel his deadly plot.

Blog 19: Freestyle

2009-11-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

In addition to reading literature for class and for fun, I also read many student papers. I'm heading into scoring Paper 2 for my on-campus English 104 class today, so I thought I'd write a bit about why I assign papers the way I do and what happens when I read them.

Academic writing is an important skill for college students because they are asked to use that form frequently in their classes to show what they know. Even though most students will write different kinds of documents in their work after college, the form is also helpful to learn because it is set up to make one's thinking clear. Having a thesis at the beginning provides the reader with a good understanding of the writer's overall conclusions without mystery. Body paragraphs then each make a supporting point, and their separation allows the reader to move easily through the writer's reasoning, in a sense following the steps in the thought process that brought the writer to the thesis conclusions. The details in the paragraphs and analysis of them indicate how the writer is processing ideas so that the reader again has a window into the writer's thinking. For me, academic paper format provides the best way to pin down students' thinking so that I can tell whether they've learned the knowledge and skills the course provides. Once students have graduated and moved into the working world, the skill of making their thinking clear to a reader is useful in other kinds of writing they may pursue, such as letters to the editor, legal briefs, or proposals.

When I read student writing, I catch the thesis and tuck it into the back of my mind. When each paragraph connects to the thesis and helps demonstrate why the writer believes what he or she does about the thesis, I think, "Yes!" Good transitions at the beginnings of paragraphs help me follow those connections in easy steps so that I understand why the information is being presented in the order it appears. The examples provide sensory experiences that help me picture why the writer believes what he or she does, but I can't process them in connection with the thesis unless the reader follows them with analysis. In the analysis, the writer explains the connection for me so that I don't have to try to make it up in my head. For this reason, analysis is one of the most important parts of academic writing and makes the difference between good and excellent in my scoring.

I really love reading student writing, and I love trying to help students make their ideas as clear as possible. I think that being a good reader of student writing involves listening carefully for what students want to say and not imposing my own ideas on their writing. It also means encouraging students to use the tools of academic writing to clarify their thinking both in their heads and on paper. To respond effectively, I need to remind writers to use those tools.

Blog 17: Quote-Response Trifles

2009-11-11T11:36:00.002-08:00

I love Trifles! It is such a short play, but it makes a strong impact. I like how it sets up women's knowledge against men's. The men are investigating the murder of John Wright, whose wife is being held on suspicion of having committed the crime. Dramatic irony occurs as the men reject evidence in the kitchen; the Sheriff says, "Nothing here but kitchen things" (Glaspell 840). This bit of dialogue suggests that the men reject the "kitchen things" as evidence because they are kitchen things; they are part of women's lives and therefore not important. In their arrogant reasoning, they somehow forget that the suspect is female, which should make "kitchen things" very important. The men go upstairs to investigate the scene of the crime, and their wives, left behind in the kitchen to pick up some things for Mrs. Wright, locate all the evendence needed to indicate not only that Mrs. Wright killed her husband because of his brutality but also that they shared some of the blame for knowing "how things can be--for women" and not "com[ing] over here once in a while!" (847) The men's reaction to "kitchen things" indicates "how things can be." Women's lives and women themselves were treated as inconsequential, and when one is inconsequential, one is not really human in terms of rights or in terms of treatment, which allows brutal men like John Wright to torture his spouse. In this "Jury of Her Peers," Mrs. Wright is acquitted by the women because they understand that she murdered her husband because he killed all the joy in her life and because they should have seen the problem and tried to help.

Blog 16: Scene Response

2009-11-11T11:36:00.001-08:00

I have viewed the film O about three or four times now, and I liked it better this viewing because I noticed more of the film techniques. I want to discuss the montage where Odin watches Desi and Michael, looking for signs that they are more than friends. There is a point where he looks at them through a doorway that he doesn't enter, through a window where Desi sees him but he doesn't acknowledge her, and through a gate onto a patio. I really like this sequence because all of the threshholds involved indicate that Odin is again seeing himself as an outsider at this school. His race and class differentiate him, and the status he has gained as a basketball player has masked his difference for awhile, but now that he is unsure of Desi, he is reminded that there is a door between him and his white classmates that might be closed against him at any time and might even now be shut. So, his questioning of Desi's loyalty is more than merely her fidelity; it's about his own worth and his own ability to succeed in a white world.

Blog 15: Freestyle

2009-11-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

I completed Sight Hound a week or so ago, and so as not to spoil the ending, I won't discuss it. I also completed the second book in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, The Great Hunt, and am on to book three, The Dragon Reborn. I usually read this for half an hour before I go to bed, and I've just been gobbling it up. In this book, the narrative mostly follows characters other than the main character, Rand, so we get to see the adventures of Egwene, Nynaeve, and Elayne as the move up in the ranks of the Aes Sedai and begin to hunt the Black Ajah. And, we watch Matt and Perrin as they draw the attention of Gray Men and other Shadowspawn, which suggest they remain important to the fate the land. At the end of the last chapter I completed, Chapter 43 "Shadowbrothers," we discover that one of the Forsaken, the evil Ba'alzamon's followers, has taken power in Illian. Perrin and some of the other characters have arrived there, so now I'm wondering, as they are, whether they'll make it out. When Moraine say that they need to leave "Unless you want to make closer acquaintance with Sammael," it's clear that they've got to go. We already know there are no ships bound for Tear making port in Illian, so they'll have to go on horseback. Since Chapter 44 is called "Hunted," I would expect there to be a bit of a chase. These plot elements keep me wondering and keep me reading.

Blog 14: Quote-Response Satrapi 1

2009-11-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. In the first half of the book, young Marji has all of the black-and-white perspective of young people, which is why I like the extreme black-and-white color of the panels (no grays). Whatever she commits herself to, she does it without reservation, and like many beloved children, she feels she is the special one for the task. I like how she thinks she will become a prophet and the images of her relationship with God. In one image on page 8, God is holding Marji like a baby. He says, "Yes you are, Celestial Light, you are my choice, my last and my best choice" (Satrapi). This image is very comforting because God calls Marji "Celestial Light," as if she will bring the love and wisdom of God to the world like nourishing sunlight. Because she is God's choice, his "last" and "best," the dialogue also suggests she is God's chosen one, and no one but she can do what she needs to do. Also, the pose of God and Marji makes the panel comforting. She is held like a baby in God's arms. What safer place could there be? His body is white, which indicates the goodness of light, and around him is dark, as if he were protecting Marji from the evils of the world. I think the world gets a lot more complicated for Marji as the book moves forward, so it's harder for her to think of herself as a prophet.

Blog 13: Quote-Response Kooser

2009-11-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to respond to "Carrie" by US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (635) because I've met him. I'll try to locate and post one of the photos I took of him. "Carrie" is an 11-line free-verse poem without regular rhythm. The poem contrasts the persona's Aunt Carrie's cleaning dust with the dust resulting from her death. While alive, she worked energetically "like a thunderhead" to keep the house clean. The storm image suggests pressure, power, and drama. I can picture a woman who throws people out of the room so that she can attack the furniture with her rag. What is perhaps sad is that she wasted her energy on an activity that can never be completed. Upon her death, "dust/is her hands and dust her heart." She turns into the dust she fought; in the end her very hardworking hands and the heart that motivated them are utterly defeated. The last line "There is never an end to it" suggests that because the world and even people are made of dust, Aunt Carrie might have spent her life in more rewarding ways, perhaps applying her heart elsewhere, rather than trying to undo what will always be. I take that as a message that it's OK to leave the dishes in the sink so that I can play with my daughter.

Blog 12: Poem Paraphrase Millay

2009-11-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" represents an older woman persona speaking about having had many loves in her life. Perhaps because she has had many or because she is older, she can't remember then all. Tonight, those lost loves seem close though still unremembered, and she thinks sadly that she is lonely. Yet, she knows and perhaps is comforted by the fact that she once loved. I love the line "summer sang in me." It seems to suggest fulfillment of young love, which would be a good memory.

Blog 11: Quote-Response

2009-11-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

I really like Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool" (579). The poem has four two-line stanzas, and what's interesting about the poem for me is that every syllable is stressed. That's pretty hard to do in English, as most words are comprised of a set of stressed and unstressed syllables. Brooks uses all single-syllable words divided into three-syllable sentences. Each line has four syllables and ends in "We" without punctuation (enjambment) except for the last line, which has two syllables "Die soon." I think the rhythm punctuates the short lives of these people. The syllables are all stressed, which indicates they are using every hard moment of their lives. The use of a plural first-person protagonist indicates that the characters, including the narrator or persona, act as a group, so there may be some peer pressure to participate in this lifestyle. The last line being short a syllable, ending with a period (end-stopped), and including the words "Die soon" emphasizes exactly that: because these people (I think of them as young men) live hard, they won't live long.

Blog 10: Song-Quote Response

2009-11-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

Because my musical tastes got stuck in the 80s, I'm going to write about the lyrics of a Howard Jones song, "What Is Love?" Here is a verse from the song:

Can anybody love anyone so much that they will never fear
Never worry, never be sad?
The answer is they cannot love this much nobody can
This is why I don't mind you doubting

I really like Howard Jones for the philosophy in his songs. These lyrics don't have much poetry about them in that they don't employ the figurative quality of words. However, they do include the irony of love--that love must trust enough to assume there is no risk of loss and yet exist in the constant fear of loss. I like the confidence in these lines that the speaker at least believes in his own power to love so much that he can stand the doubts of his partner. I like also the realistic grasp of love, that love can't erase problems. It's nice to be assured of love despite whatever problems may arise.

Haiku

2009-10-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

Words going places fast
Poems through tunnels like trains
Out into the sunlight

Blog Entry 8

2009-10-21T05:23:00.000-07:00

Before I paraphrase "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound, I should mention that some literary scholars argue that good poetry cannot be paraphrased because it's not just about words; all of the formal and aural (sound) elements also matter to meaning. Cleanth Brooks, for example, talks about "the resistance which any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it" (1356). Paraphrasing just translates the words, so it doesn't really get at the full meaning.

Poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Paraphrase: Faces of the people in the metro float into view like ghosts. They are busily heading to their destinations in the ordered chaos of the station. Although the lives of each beautiful and fertile, they are also fragile and transitory on the difficult, sad road of our shared existence.

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Heresy of Paraphrase." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 1353-1365.

Blog Entry 7: Freestyle

2009-10-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

So, back to Pam Houston's Sight Hound...Part Five is called "The Fires," and I can relate to the blanketing of fives over thousands of acres of forestland. Fires occurred off and on throughout my childhood in Southern California and turned smog days into stay-inside-at-all-costs days for me (as a childhood asthmatic). Now, living, in Oregon, I dread the tail end of summer when the blazes begin. Thundershowers are so delightfully drenching and cool, but here, unlike Connecticut where they include huge but largely harmless lightning displays, they spark wildfires that can burn for weeks. Breathing ash is not the worst part. Many young people make their summer money fighting fires around here, and once in awhile, they don't come back. I wish for them to stay safe!

In this section, Rae introduces herself to Jodi, who owns a huge ranch with a natural aquifer. There's something magical about Rae's feet in the rare mud of this landscape. While the land is drying, cracking, and burning around them, Rae "was about shin-deep in sand when I first felt it, first a layer of sand that had to have been twenty-five degrees cooler than what was above it, then the bubbles of icy water bursting up through the sane against the bottoms of my feet" (225). The change in texture and temperature seems almost like a revelation, a spiritual experience. And, the mud isn't just goopy; instead, the water is "bursting up" as if to shout to the death-giving landscape around them that life continues and will prevail.

It seems like this book comments on life itself, with Dante miraculously living through cancer, befriended by a child who has survived also, the bubbling of life. I hope the book follows Dante all the way to the end of his rich life. There's also some indication that Jonathan isn't living at the time the narrative is being told. He calls the 9/11 people who jump from the Twin Towers "cowards" and says "they died of shame" (212). I almost sense that perhaps he will commit suicide and that this judgment of others in their last moments of life is a projection of his own guilt. I do think life is miraculous, which isn't to say it's not also deathly difficult for those of us who live longer than our loved ones. I am all for those precious bubbles of life, but I would hesitate to judge those who facing horrors chose another alternative, and I would hope not to be judged harshly if in other circumstances, I chose differently. Nancy

Blog Entry 6

2009-10-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

I really like O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi." It's very ironically romantic when Jim and Della find they have sold prized possessions to buy each other Christmas presents related to those prized possessions so now the presents can't be used. This is a story about gifts symbols of love. The gifts need to show you care, but they don't actually have to be useful. At the end of the story, Henry writes, "of all who give gifts these two were the wisest" (168). This statement suggests that Jim and Della are more wise than the magi, the wise kings who brought gifts to Christ in the Christmas story. Maybe this is because the kings could afford to bring the gifts they brought. They didn't have to take upaid leave from work. They didn't have to sell their prized possessions to raise money to purchase the gifts. Probably, they just picked up a little of whatever was lying around and brought it with them. Jim and Della, on the other hand, thought long and carefully about their gifts and sacrificed possessions that represented their own identities to give perfect gifts to one another. Maybe they know better than anyone else the spirit of Christmas, that it's not about gifts; it's about giving yourself in love to those you love and/or to Christ, if you're a believer. Nancy

Blog Entry 5: Freestyle

2009-10-08T06:51:00.001-07:00

After I finished the Robert Jordan book (and thanks, Shauna, for offering the next in the series! Yay!), I picked up something totally different. My friend Leslie let me borrow her book Sight Hound by Pam Houston. It's mainly about a woman Rae and her dog Dante who gets cancer and loses one of his legs, but it's told from the perspectives of many people and dogs involved, which is very cool! In the most recent section I read where the dog Dante is speaking, he quotes Buddha. One quote he likes is "If you know the power of a generous heart, [.. .] you will not let a single meal pass without giving to others" (161). I love the quote because I feel amazingly lucky to be capable of working for my living and of making mostly tasty, mostly healthy meals when so many other people are out of work or otherwise unable to get food for themselves. I think it's important to find ways to support folks who are struggling. I also like the way Dante reflects on the quote: "That's one of my favorite sayings, one I like to medidate upon specifically when I am lying under the dinner table, waiting to see if a little lamb or pork or chicken might fall my way" (161). So, just when I'm taking myself so seriously, the dog makes a joke. I love it! Not only does he quote Buddha, but he comes at the situation from the very dog-ish position of under the table. My big, pushy dogs don't often sit under the table at meals because they're too big, but they're only too happy to clean up the Cheerios my daughter leaves on the floor. Speaking of which, they desperately need to be walked, so I'm going to do that.

Blog Entry 4: Quote-Response

2009-10-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

I think "Miss Brill" is a sad story. Here is this woman who lives alone on a limited income, and she gets all gussied up to go out on Sunday and sit with other people. She doesn't interact with them, but she imagines herself as part of the "play" (86). On this day, the conversation she overhears upsets her because the careless young people make her see herself as they see her instead of the "performance" she imagines herself part of (86). The quote that really conveys her disillusionment is when she puts her "dear" fur back in its box: "But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying" (87). I think the words "lid" and "something crying" are important. The lid suggests something is being closed. Perhaps a chapter in her life has now ended because she sees her own life as sad and small. The "something crying" almost seems to be the fur that is her friend. Yet, of course, part of a dead animal can't really cry. So, maybe she is projecting the way she herself feels onto the fur. She is so devastated that she can't cry, so she imagines hearing something outsider herself crying. I think that dislocation from her own feelings emphasizes the pain of her realization.

Blog Entry 3: Freestyle

2009-10-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

I finished Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, and of course, it ended in such a way that I need to get the next book in the series immediately. I won't spoil the ending by talking about it, so I'll write about another aspect that I've been thinking about: except where the characters spend some time apart from one another, the storyline is chronological, and there are no subplots. This structure is a little simplistic, and I think I would have even more interest if the trajectory of the story were interrupted and made more complex with a more fragmented chronology and/or subplots (not that the novel needs to be longer because it's already 782 pages!). Basically, the characters start on a journey that they follow through to the end, even though they don't end up where they initially intended, and in each place, they can't stay because they're a danger to others, and the dark creatures hunting them keep them moving.

Another related aspect of this is that each of the characters on the journey has a special skill or issue. This feels very Dungeons-and-Dragonsy where you roll dice to determine the point value of the characters skills in various areas, and usually each character has skills in some category. It kind of feels like a fantasy of equal power, like kids on the playground saying, hey, I have magic powers, and hey, so do I. I'd like a little more comlexity. We aren't all the chosen ones (and they all seem to be here), but we do have productive lives. The whole chosen one thing is also really tedious and suggests that heroes are born rather than made through courage, which I totally disagree with. I really like, for example, how Tolkien makes a hobbit the main hero of his Middle Earth books, a totally unexpected, not royal, not tall and beefy, and not chosen character

Aside from these issues, I found the novel very readable and looked forward to reading it before bed each night. I liked particularly the character of Perrin as he finds he has a connection with the wolves and doesn't want to admit it. Here's a passage that depicts Perrin's discomfort with this connection: "If he could outrun their eyes [his traveling companions'}, outrun the ravens [the Dark One's spies], outrun the wolves, but above all Egwene's eyes, that knew him now for what he was" (431). The talent of communicating with wolves and seeing like wolves comes so easily to Perrin that he can't hide it, and his companions notice and begin to realize he's changed. They don't criticize him, but he feels embarrassed about the change. This conflict makes him very human and engaging. I look forward to seeing him come more into his own in the later books. Nancy

Reader's Autobiography

2009-09-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

My name is Nancy Knowles. I hold a BA East Asian Studies from UCLA, an MA in English Literature and MA in Teaching Writing from Humboldt State University, CA, and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Connecticut, Storrs. My hobbies are hanging out with my family (husband, daughter, two dogs, and one cat), reading, exercise, teaching, writing, photography, and when I have the chance, horses, skiing, soccer, and softball.

I have always enjoyed reading. I don’t remember learning to read, so I must have learned young. I do remember reading Dick and Jane books in first grade. When I was in third grade, I made a film strip about a book called Champ the Gallant Collie. I was a sucker for horse and/or dog books. I also read all the Nancy Drew books.

In Mr. Soderberg’s fourth and fifth grade classes, we got to pick books to read for silent reading time after lunch. Mr. Soderberg would get out the big pillows, and we would all lie around on the carpet reading whatever we wanted. Savage Sam was my favorite. I even remember the kind of musty smell that book had.

In Mr. Soderberg’s class, I made a book float for a science fiction book, maybe Door to Another World, although I think the float had a space ship and planets depicted, and that book didn’t really have any outer space scenes that I remember. Mr. Soderberg would sometimes turn off the lights after lunch and read aloud from a book. This book was about some boys who went into the Andes and encountered piranhas. I was so entranced with the story that I didn’t realize I was sticking my pencil in and out of the side of the book float, and it was squeaking. After awhile, I noticed that Mr. Soderberg had stopped reading, and the class was quiet. When I looked up, he was standing behind me with his finger between the pages, smirking.

When I got to sixth grade, I told my reading teacher I had read all the books on his list for the year except Moby Dick, so after I finished Moby Dick, he had me read whatever I wanted and write up study questions for him.

Outside of school, I visited the public library often. When I was little, we had a book mobile that would come to the Alpha Beta grocery store parking lot once a week. I remember looking at the spines of the books for the science fiction symbol. Then, my architect parents designed a library building, and I would spend hours there in the young adult section. I determined to read all the books from A to Z, but I don’t think I made it that far. In high school, I wrote an essay that won a scholarship about how visits to the library were like journeys into adventures. I thought it was neat that the first annual scholarship went, without intending it, to the daughter of the building’s architects.

In high school, I found out that you didn’t have to read everything teachers assigned. I did read most everything, including plenty of Shakespeare because my teacher Mrs. Jackson had a crush on Laurence Olivier, but I remember getting an "A" on a paper about Crime and Punishment even though I’d read only two of the five sections in the book.

I really liked the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. I decided I would write the AP Literature exam on that play, no matter what the prompt. The prompt turned out to be perfect—write about the impact of the title of a literary work—but I had gotten myself so overexcited about the play that I couldn’t write very clearly about it. I got a four out of five, and Mrs. Jackson said she thought I could have done better.

Even though I loved books, I didn’t plan to study literature in college. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought I needed something to write about, so I entered the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University, planning to become a diplomat and travel the world. My complete inability to do economics foiled that plan, but when I transferred to UCLA, I just wanted to finish school, so I completed an East Asian Studies major, taking all the literature electives I could get.

Only after I’d been working in accounting for a few years did I realize I needed to go back to school and really study literature. Of course, I still thought I was going to be a writer and that master’s level study would give me time to write. It wasn’t until I stepped into my own classroom during my third year of master’s work that I discovered I wanted to teach reading and writing because I enjoyed talking about ideas with others.

Now, as an instructor of literature, I read and reread a lot. For example, I’ve probably read John Updike’s "A & P" 100 times since I first taught it in 1994. It’s such a great story! My favorite kind of reading is still science fiction and fantasy. Currently, I’m finishing Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, and I often teach one of my favorite speculative fictions, Sheri S. Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country. I would also like to read more "serious" literature, but when I’m tired from teaching too much, SF and fantasy is a refuge. In my small chunks of spare time, I am writing my own fantasy novel.

My family enjoys reading. My father is currently reading everything by Cormac McCarthy, which he enjoys for the style of writing. My husband is a writer and tends to read books that will inspire his current project. Right now, he’s reading first-person novels because he is working on a first-person-narrated novel of his own. My daughter is six. She can read pretty well but prefers to be read to. We read Calvin and Hobbes every day. I think she likes Calvin’s rebelliousness and the irony with which he is depicted. We’ve also been reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman and a book called Butterfly Meadow. She also likes the Magic Treehouse books, and we’re in the middle of Summer of the Sea Serpent.

Sample ENGL 104 Quote-Response Assignment

2009-09-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

I really like the way John Updike’s wording in "A & P" captures the character of the first-person narrator. Updike writes in Sammy’s voice, "The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed" (Updike 16). The words that convey Sammy’s character are "sheep," the way he restates ideas like "or anything" and "kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup." The sheep comment indicates that he separates himself from conventional housewives; he’s male, he’s younger, he sees girls as more attractive, and he would of course never do anything sheep-ish in terms of conforming to social norms. His restating also conveys his masculinity and youth. He is casual and irreverent. These qualities are why the girls impress him so much. In addition to being pretty or at least charismatic, they buck the system by doing the unexpected, coming in very casually dressed in bathing suits, and they seem to enjoy the attention they get. That’s the quality he admires most in himself, rebellion, and that’s the reason he decides to stick up for them by quitting. In the end, it’s his youth that has betrayed him because he doesn’t understand that society pressures adults to stay within the bounds of social norms. He can rebel and quit, but the world doesn’t have to admire his rebellion. As the ending of the story suggests, the world from then on was going to be difficult.

Summer Reading

2009-09-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

I've read a number of good books this summer. One I really liked was Deerskin by Robin McKinley. I also reread Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. In honor of Oregon 150, I also read Craig Lesley's Winterkill and Molly Gloss's Jump-Off Creek, both of which are set in Eastern Oregon. I really enjoyed recognizing places, particularly downtown La Grande in the early 20th century.

Now, I'm reading a book by Robert Jordan called The Eye of the World. I've never read anything by Jordan before, but I've heard good things about his writing. It seems pretty traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy so far. I tend to read more women fantasy writers than men because I get tired of the traditional women's roles in fantasy, but I'm enjoying Jordan's story and characters so far. It's a very thick book with plenty of description, so maybe I won't finish it for a few months, especially if I'm reading for classes, too. Here is a link to information about the book on Jordan's blog: I also pulled the book cover image from this site.

ENGL 104 online

2009-09-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

I'm creating an online ENGL 104 Introduction to Literature course for Fall 2009, and I want the course to be interactive and have a real-world connection. So, I'm thinking that maybe asking students to use and maintain blogs about their reading would be a good way to address these goals. I like that the blogs are personal, we can include photos, and students and friends can comment. I'm a little concerned about teaching students to use blogs at a distance and about the time commitment required of us all to maintain and read the blogs. But, I would be assigning reading journals if the students were on campus, so perhaps this is a good substitute. I'll play around a little more with this and see what I think...