Rita Traut Kabeto's Weird Steffi

I met author Rita Traut Kabeto at a reading she presented at the Eastern Oregon Word Round-Up in Pendleton, OR in October 2012: "Readings with a Metaphysical Touch." I would substitute "supernatural" for "metaphysical." Many of Kabeto's books are fiction based on actual experience with the supernatural. I enjoyed hearing her read from them and talk about her own life experience. 

Weird Steffi is the book I purchased following Kabeto's reading. It focuses on Kabeto's experience at a German boarding school where she had lived many lives. Kabeto described the school as her favorite place in the world and reported that it no longer exists. The title character Steffi is sensitive to the supernatural, and it takes the narrator, Stephanie, awhile to  believe in Steffi's abilities and in her own reincarnation. The first section of the book chronicles Steffi's prediction that bodies are buried under a local woodpile. The second tells the story of Steffi's visit to Stephanie's house, where the girls try to prevent the death of Stephanie's sister Erna, which Steffi predicted. The last addresses the loss of Stephanie's boyfriend Willi, who is also sensitive to the supernatural. 

I enjoyed the three related but separate narratives, as well as the narrator's gradual development across the three narratives into a person who believes in the supernatural. Because I had met the author and the stories were based on true experiences, the plots of each were more interesting. I would have liked to ask Kabeto what her relationship to the supernatural is now, aside from the reincarnation she mentioned. Is Oregon, like Germany, filled with invisible fairies? I can't see them myself, but I'm sure there are elements of the world that are beyond my sensory experience, and I'm interested in others' experiences of them. 

Work Cited

Kabeto, Rita Traut. Weird Steffi. San Jose: Authors Choice P, 2001. Print. 

Image Source:

Weird Steffi Cover. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Weird%20Steffi>.

A. S. Byatt's Possession

A. S. Byatt's Possession paints a picture of literary scholarship as a mystery: readers want to know the meanings of texts they enjoy, so they collect clues that help them crack the code. With student readers, the mysteries are often bound by space (school) and time (academic term). Student readers have only so much time to live with a text and produce a paper attesting to their understanding, often too early to really have solved the mystery. Scholarly readers can spend their whole lives solving the mystery, producing papers here and there to give a sense of their solutions at the present moment but perpetually collecting further clues that change their interpretations. Possession depicts the quest for solutions among groups of scholars focusing fictional Victorian-era poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. One of the reasons I enjoyed this novel was that it presented literary scholarship as engrossing and life-changing.

The mystery begins when impoverished scholar Roland Michell discovers drafts of a letter written by Randolph Henry Ash to a woman he met at a literary gathering. Through research, Michell determines the woman is Christabel LaMotte and teams up with LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey to find out more. They discover a cache of love letters between the two and trace the poets on two journeys, all the while attempting to keep friends and fellow scholars at bay so that they have the time needed to solve the mystery. However, the incentives of prestige among the scholarly communities focused on these two poets put other scholars on Michell and Bailey's trail. Eventually, all the major players end up at Ash's grave, disinterring a box with the final clue, a sealed letter from LaMotte to Ash. Solving the mystery of Ash and LaMotte's relationship also impacts the lives of Michell and Bailey, who fall in love with one another.

Possession tells the story in chunks of narrative depicting Michell and Bailey's work and also of the other scholars hot on their trail. In addition, it includes many other texts: Ash's and LaMotte's poetry, the many letters, entries from diaries of various witnesses, excerpts from scholarly texts on Ash and LaMotte, and narration of a few of the experiences of the historical characters. This patchwork represents a postmodern narrative approach that allows the reader to work alongside the scholars in attempting to solve the mystery: the reader juxtaposes this text with this text with this text, just as scholars do, and meaning arises from those connections. I like that this depiction demonstrates scholarly work as an interesting puzzle, something students of literature might wish to try. In solving mysteries associated with literary meaning, scholars contribute meaningfully to a community whose store of knowledge is always growing and changing.

I also like that Possession depicts scholars Michell and Bailey as having life-changing interaction with their work and with one another. A really important aspect of reading is that it teaches us to reimagine ourselves. Each reading encounter is an opportunity to better understand who we are and what we need to do with our lives. Michell, for example, lives a sad existence in a run-down underground flat with a woman who supports him but doesn't understand or love him. As he escapes that environment through his research, he doesn't simply transfer his depressing dependency onto Bailey. Instead, he comes into his own as a scholar whose work is important and as an individual whose life has meaning and who can become a good partner to another person. It's this aspect of reading that I think today's emphasis on assessment completely misses: we don't read just so we can turn around and identify protagonists and antagonists. We read because those characters come to matter to us, to live beside us, and to act as an educational mirror in our life journeys.

Toward the end of Possession, there is an eloquent discussion of the pleasure of reading. This passage indicates that reading "remake[s . . .] the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex" (510), and reading does this not through a reader reading alone but through a reader reading in the presence of the writer and also of all the other writers in all the other works to which this one text interconnects. As Byatt writes, "all these voices sang" (511). As with hearing beautiful music, there are some readings that create combinations of voices

that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. (512)

In this moment when a reader lives fully and deeply through a text, she has a profound experience that the text tells her own truth and puts into words  her own lived experience, even when that experience is not depicted at all in the text. This reading moment is one of transcendence. We might try to put it into words, and the best scholarship makes a valiant attempt, but because the relationship between reader and text is always growing and always accompanied by those many voices, the meaning cannot be pinned down. Yet, the reader is changed and will never return to life or even that same text in the same way.

In the end, Possession is a book about reading. It insists that reading is intellectually fun and profoundly important to humans as individuals and also as cultures.

Work Cited

Byatt, A. S. Possession. New York: Random House, 1990. Print.

Image Source

Possession Cover Image. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/Possession-A-S-Byatt/dp/0679735909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353513908&sr=8-1&keywords=Possession>

Blog Party Post: Teaching Literary Classics

Hook: In 2007, Lev Grossman published a list “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time” on the Time magazine website:

·  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

·  Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

·  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

·  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

·  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

·  Hamlet by William Shakespeare

·  The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

·  In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

·  The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

·  Middlemarch by George Eliot

I’ve read eight of 10 books in the list, but I’m an English teacher. How many have you read?  

Inquiry Question and Conclusions: As an English teacher, I will assume that, as cultural records and aesthetic masterpieces, the classics are worth reading. But, given the multiplicity of entertainment available today, how do teachers instill an appreciation of classic literature when it may not be particularly fun to read? I would argue that liking literature is key to lifelong reading, but difficult literature can deliver more profound meaning because we have to grapple with language, ideas, and artistic techniques and see through the eyes of authors and characters from different cultures and historical moments. Through reconciling what we know about the world with exotic reality alive in classic literature, the difficult text challenges us to shift our worldview, to become different and potentially wiser people. This kind of intellectual growth is important personally and culturally. Given classic literature has this potential, how do I teach classic literature as a pleasurable intellectual and aesthetic experience--that the work of unraveling difficult but beautiful meaning can also be “fun”?

At this point, here are my conclusions: students need to 1) read the book, 2) understand the book, 3) reflect on the impact of the reading experience on their thoughts and lives, and 4) wrestle with the effect of literary techniques on meaning, arriving at a more multidimensional and therefore more profound reading experience.

Evidence and Analysis

1) Students need to read challenging texts. This means those texts need to be assigned, meaningful coursework needs to be built around them to encourage students to read them, and assessments need to be established to reward students for doing so. This combination of assignment, scaffolding, and assessment is the basis of my teaching. In ENGL 104, much of the literature we read is considered classic. Scaffolding occurs through the “apparatus” of the textbook, opinionaires, blogs and discussion board activities, contemporary and popular texts read alongside classics, and informal and creative responses that allow for personal and imaginative connections to classic literature. Assessment occurs through the informal writing and also through more formal literary analysis papers.

The purpose of these curricular gymnastics is engagement. Without engagement, many students won’t read. The ENGL 104 opinionaires are a based on a technique developed by Jeff Wilhelm intended as prereading to get students interested in the focus of a particular unit, encouraging engagement before reading begins. The textbook is intended to provide background knowledge necessary for appreciation of literary techniques so that students can better understand why a text impacts readers. Because most people are motivated by interpersonal interaction, the blogs and discussion board activities are intended to provide a sense of classroom community that engages students emotionally with the work. The contemporary and popular texts, like songs and graphic novels, read alongside classic literature are intended to encourage connections between pleasurable and more challenging kinds of reading. Finally, aside from their assessment role, the informal responses and formal papers are intended as a moment where students get to have their say about their reading and connect it to their lives and thinking, engaging both emotions and intellectual pleasures. The responses that also involve creativity, like the artistic response and use of creative writing as a means of understanding genre, are intended to enhance pleasure in reading by combining it with pleasures associated with artistic creation. Based on the resulting informal and formal writing, I have the sense that students have at least read some of the classics assigned, so I think that some of these strategies work. Some probably work better for some students than others, but the quantity and diversity of approaches are intended to reach out to all students and encourage reading.

2) Just reading the classics, however, is not enough necessarily to achieve a profound intellectual experience. I read the 700 pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses in two different literature classes without understanding what was going on in the novel! (James seems to be doing a little better with Shakespeare than I did with Joyce [Mulherron].) To access the profound depths of classic literature, students need to understand literary texts. In her article “A Matter of Relevance: Teaching the Classics in the 21^st Century,” Lamiaa Youseff presents three techniques that have proved helpful in encouraging a deeper connection with classic texts: approximation, thematic relevance, and application. The foundation of interpretation, approximation helps students “understand what the text [is] saying” through techniques like summaries, presentations, or YouTube films where students identify the literal meaning of the text (29). When I tried to read Ulysses for the third time, I went straight to Sparks Notes and got an overview of the action. Suddenly, I could distinguish the physical from the mental, and the whole drama of the story became clear. Definitely, the literal meaning has to come first before students can do anything else with the text. I think some of our quote-response and paraphrase strategies are ways we take this first step in ENGL 104.

3) To create personal engagement, students need to reflect on the impact of the reading experience on their thoughts and lives. The second of Youseff’s steps, thematic relevance, encourages students to identify and connect with themes present in the text. She emphasizes that this act is “intra-thematic,” meaning that it isn’t enough to just talk about themes within a single text; we need to discuss themes in connection with readerly concerns (30). So, a text like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis that addresses religious belief challenged by evil in the world might be connected to readers’ own journeys of faith (or lack of faith). The frame where Marji kicks God out of her life is poignant. God stands on the left side of the frame, and Marji stands on her bed on the right. The background is black, and God is almost all white, except for a few black lines to distinguish features. Marji yells, “Shut up, you! Get out of my life!!! I never want to see you again!” (70) Because her Uncle Anoosh is dead, Marji is rejecting God for allowing such evil to happen. This moment resonates with all of us who have made a decision, one way or another, about our faith based on life experiences, and those thematic personal connections make texts more interesting to readers.

ENGL 104 uses opinionaires to identify themes that may be of interest prior to reading and returns to those themes in the inquiry questions associated with the formal papers. Paper 1 in particular requires connection of personal experience to analysis. However, ENGL 104 could do more between those moments to build understanding of the theme in connection with the reader’s experience. Although Youseff doesn’t mention it, I think “intra-thematic” also implies thematic connections across texts, which might be easier to accomplish with a thematically based textbook than one focused on techniques.

4) In moving through the above steps, we arrive at the fun moment where students see a text as relevant to them. Maybe now they like the text. But there’s more to literature than liking. To access a more profound reading experience, students must wrestle with the effect of literary techniques on meaning. Youseff’s third step is application or applying understanding of those intertwined literary and personal themes to a piece of literature (30). Perhaps here is also the entry point for aesthetic study. Artistic techniques transform stories from three to four dimensions. Suddenly, everything that happens is more than a chronology of events; every detail means something! Because of the complexity of multiple symbolic elements “rubbing” against one another, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term for understanding irony, readers arrive at meanings that are multiple.

For example, I can’t decide whether I think “My Papa’s Waltz” is fun or scary, so I often think about both meanings at once, which makes the poem much more complex. In entertaining both meanings at once, my understanding of parent-child relationships becomes more complex: such relationships are about moments of weakness and exhaustion, about disagreement and pretending to disagree, and about both loving and fearing the parent. In this way, through aesthetic reading experiences, I look at the world more closely and think more deeply. This intellectual and aesthetic work is “fun.” I enjoy exploring the various meanings and the challenge of making meaning from difficult texts, and it’s satisfying to write up my interpretation to share with others.

However, I’m not sure I’m very good yet at creating assignments that support students in applying themes to texts and exploring the interaction of literary techniques with meaning. I ask students to do this in the paper assignments, but it would be nice to add activities as steps toward the papers. I suspect these smaller assignments would need to be text-specific. That is, I would have to identify a particular text and frame questions related to it. Usually, I shy away from mandating students work with a particular text, favoring their choice instead. But, maybe I could mandate a few more specific texts to support this kind of work.

In conclusion, I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface in dealing with this topic, so I need to do more research. However, I do feel that my four conclusions can guide my future course development to better support students in reading the classics: students need to read and understand classic literature, they need to connect the themes of classic literature to their lives, and they need to explore the aesthetic techniques involved in literature to access the multiple meanings that create a life-changing reading experience. Good literature courses should aim to achieve these ends so that our culture will benefit by increased reading of literary classics like War and Peace and Middlemarch.

Provocative Question: What was a good experience that you had reading a literary classic? What reading and/or teaching strategies made it an interesting experience for you, or what kinds of strategies do you imagine would have been beneficial?

Works Cited

Grossman, Lev. “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time.” Time Entertainment. Time. 15 Jan. 2007. Web. 19 Aug. 2012. <http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html>.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses.

Mulherron, James. “Blog Post 18: Quote Response.” JM’s Reading Blog. Blogspot.com. 12 Aug. 2012. <http://jjmul4409.blogspot.com/2012/08/blog-post-18-quote-response.html>.

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6^th compact ed. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2010. 423. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

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

Youssef, Lamiaa. "A Matter of Relevance: Teaching Classics in the 21St Century." College Teaching 58.1 (2010): 28-31. ERIC. Web. 19 Aug. 2012.

Why Read? What She Said...

OK, here's a pretty comprehensive list of why reading is good for you: http://www.redheadedreads.blogspot.com/2012/08/adult-reading.html. What she said! :) Thanks, Jennifer!

Blog Entry 22: Freestyle: Flaming Iguanas

I'm reading Erika Lopez's Flaming Iguanas for ENGL 339. I like it for several reasons: 1) it's cheerily risque, which is not my style, so it's good for me, 2) it combines narrative with cartoon images and harkens back to Crumb but from a female perspective, so I like the genre play and the legacy of cartooning represented, 3) it claims the road narrative and an approximation of the wild road life for women, and 4) the main character is funny--she's brash and insecure at the same time, very likable.

Here is an example of what I like about the main character: Tomato (Jolene) Rodriguez has decided that she and her friend Magdalena are going on a motorcycle road trip, but she doesn't know how to ride a motorcycle. She decides she's going to become a motorcycle gang of one, the "Flaming Iguanas." Because she needs a biker jacket, Tomato attempts to embroider the gang name on the back of a leather jacket but only gets through "Flam." That's OK with her: "I didn't care about the FLAM thing. Once I put on the jacket, I was leader of the pack, armed with a Jell-O theory of independent togetherness" (47). I love the just-do-it but with humor spirit of this: it doesn't matter that she doesn't know how to ride a motorcycle; it doesn't matter that her jacket is pathetic; it doesn't matter that her gang isn't really a gang; she's still gonna seek an adventure on the road. Tomato's attitude is both heartwarming and hysterical.

Work Cited
Lopez, Erika. Flaming Iguanas. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.

Image Source
Book Cover for Flaming Iguanas. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/Flaming-Iguanas-Illustrated-All-Girl-Novel/dp/068485368X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344806808&sr=8-1&keywords=Flaming+Iguanas>

Othello Posts

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-18-quote-response-othello-i-and-ii.html
http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-entry-20-othello-acts-iii-v.html
http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-22-freestyle.html

Blog Entry 17: Trifles

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-18-quote-response-trifles.html

Blog Entry 16: Scene Response to O

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-16-scene-response-tba.html

Blog 15: Freestyle: Brooks People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks’s The People of the Book tells the story of a medieval haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, that is unique in its beautiful illuminations. Brooks writes, “But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” (19). The very fact of the book provides the first mystery--why was the haggadah illustrated?--and points to the interactions among religious groups that characterize the history of the haggadah.

Australian Hanna Heath travels to Sarajevo to do the preservation work that will allow the book to be handled and studied. In the process, Hanna inspects the book, noting the details that indicate its history: a Latin inscription, the binding, a butterfly wing. All the details of the book tell the story of its creation and its journey through history. Hanna’s story frames the narrative, and her connection with the book also unearths secrets in her past, and then other sections delve into the book’s history. In the end, the reader knows more than Hanna does about the book because the reader gets to put the historical pieces together. This multi-layered story is a gem. 

Works Cited

Brooks, Geraldine. The People of the Book. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Blog Entry 14: Satrapi's Persepolis

I've made two posts already on Satrapi, so I think I won't write a fresh one:

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-14-quote-response-satrapi-1.html

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2011/08/persepolis.html

Blog Entry 13: Frost "The Road Not Taken"

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" has got to be the most-written-about poem in ENGL 104. I imagine it resonates particularly with Americans because it seems to be about individuality, that you've got to take a road different from the one other people would take. I'm all for individuality, but sometimes I wonder if we don't stereotype it in the way that young people declare their individuality through the same clothing that all other young people are wearing. Is it good to be unique in an acceptable way, or is it good to be unique in a really weird way that others won't understand? To be honest, I don't think we're as individual or as tolerant of individuality as we'd like to think.

Also, I don't think this poem is really about individuality, at least not in the puffed up way of "I'm going to be different from everyone else!" Here's why: whenever people try to analyze this poem, they spend a lot of time on the idea that the road taken "was grassy and wanted wear" (line 8), which suggests few people have taken it. But, then, later in the poem, the persona takes back the idea that there was a significant difference between the roads: "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same" (lines 9-10). So, if the roads are "worn [. . .] about the same," the persona can't really tell the difference between them in terms of prior travel. This retraction is just A LINE BELOW the line that everyone likes to focus on. Why doesn't anyone see it? I don't think we want to see it because we want to read this poem in the stereotypical American way. Also, the ending goes back to the "less traveled by" idea (line 19), which creates a more lasting impression.

So, why did Frost even include the retraction? I feel as if what's important about the road is that the PERSONA has not traveled by it. True, he hasn't yet traveled either road, but when he picks a new road, it's less important that it's less traveled by others than that it has never been traveled by him. So, this poem is more about accepting the challenge of change than it is about being stereotypically unique.

Blog Entry 12: Poem Paraphrase: Shakespeare "Marriage of True Minds"

Here is a paraphrase of Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds": There are no barriers in the connection between true lovers. Their love does not change when they change. Instead, their love is permanent, never shaken by storms. Their love is the star by which sailors chart a course. Nor is true love dimmed by time, though the lovers lose their beauty with age. Love does not change with time but lasts until the end of time. If I am wrong about this, I never wrote anything, and no one ever loved.

Blog Entry 11: Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"

William Butler Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" tells the story of the Greek god Zeus raping Leda, a rape that produced daughter Helen, whose abduction sparked the Trojan War. The poem is three stanzas long, with a line break in the middle of the third stanza. It's mostly iambic pentameter with some irregularity.

When I read this poem, I think about Yeats in love with Maud Gonne, who never returned his affection. In the context of this poem, I think that Maud is Yeats's lost Helen, and he blames her for not loving him. Yeats's dissatisfaction with Maud seems to extend to all women, who are at least partly responsible for the tragedies in their lives. In the case of Leda, the persona indicates Leda is "helpless" during the rape but then asks two questions:

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? (lines 5-8)

The first question seems almost rhetorical, that Leda had no power to push Zeus away, yet the fact that the question is a question seems to suggest that she might have tried. The second question makes Leda more culpable by wondering how any object of passion could avoid feeling that passion, "the strange heart." In this way, Yeats suggests that Leda is partly responsible for the rape, blaming the victim, which I attribute to his negative attitude toward Maud. It's as if he asks, aren't all women slaves to their emotions?

The last stanza attributes even more destructive a force to women through Helen. The lines indicate that the passion of this moment created Helen and thereby spawned the destruction of Troy:

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. (lines 9-10)

These images are understatements: the whole city of Troy was destroyed, not just a wall, roof, and tower, and plenty more people than Agamemnon died. The understatement seems to mourn these losses, even though Agamemnon killed his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds to carry his army to Troy. Yet, Yeats feels for the loss of Agamemnon in a way he does not feel for the rape of Leda. The line break in the middle of line 10 seems to emphasize the losses associated with Troy as painful tragedy engendering a moment of silence.

The second to last line again points to women as the cause of disaster: "Did she put on his knowledge with his power" (line 11). The question, again, seems rhetorical, in this case suggesting that, yes, Leda did assume god-like knowledge, plotting the destruction of Troy at the moment of Helen's conception, and that women altogether, including Maud Gonne, have that knowledge and wield it to the disadvantage of men.

I really like this poem. It's beautiful. Knowing Yeats's background creates complex undercurrents for me that weave additional meaning throughout. The poem also makes me angry at Yeats: poor baby! Maud doesn't love you. Get over it. Eventually, Yeats would get over Maud, marrying Georgie Hyde-Lees, a woman half his age, who engaged in his creative efforts in a devoted way Maud Gonne would never have done. Maybe women aren't quite as dangerous if they stand by their men?

Blog Entry 10: Song: Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now"

I grew up hearing Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on the radio but didn't pay much attention to the song until Bend Union High School teacher and OWP Co-Director Amy Sabbadini used it in a teaching demonstration this summer. During the discussion, participating teachers came up with all kinds of interpretations, so here is mine using the first part of the song:


Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

I think the song is about understanding life. There are many ways to look at life. The song calls them "both sides," emphasizing that the many ways are contradictory. In memory, I look back on experiences as both positive and negative even when those interpretations contradict one another. 

In the lines above, the persona is looking at clouds. This passage uses a physical object as a starting point for more abstract thinking about life. The clouds are both "ice cream castles" and "block[ing] the sun." They are both beautiful fantasy constructions, tenuous as dreams, and also powerful enough to block light and threaten life.  


When looking back on these memories, the persona recalls only the positive, the castles, but she also claims not to "know clouds at all." I think she does know clouds, but it's difficult to put that knowledge into words because the memories are contradictory, and that's the point. Life experiences are complicated. Because of that complexity, we may feel we don't understand them, but we do. We just need to recognize they are contradictory and our interpretations of them are also contradictory. 

Works CitedMitchell, Joni. "Both Sides Now." JoniMitchell.com. 9 March 1967. Web. 1 Aug. 2012. <http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=83>.
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Blog Entry 9: Haiku

On the street corner,
He waits with his dog, while she
Scolds the bank teller.

Blog Entry 8: Poem Paraphrase: Pound's "In a Station"

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

Paraphrase: The crowd milling at the metro station seems one mass, yet faces emerge briefly, almost like ghosts. I see them individually, as unique as petals defined by droplets of water and by their brilliant color against wood turned black by rain.

Blog 7: Freestyle: Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle

I read Jeannete Walls's The Glass Castle again recently in preparation for teaching it as the common read in the fall. The first time I read it, I gobbled it up. I hit the point of no return early and couldn't put it down. I think it took me just two days to finish it. This time, because I knew the story, I read more slowly, still enjoying the reading but without the need to find out what happens.

What baffles me about this story is the parents' treatment of the kids. The parents are so self-involved that the mother paints instead of supervising her children, fails to hold a job despite having a teaching certificate, and blames the lack of food on her husband. Anytime the family owes too much money, the father carts everyone off to a new residence, "doing the skedaddle" (17). Eventually, the parents become homeless and seem to like it. What? I'm assuming that both have some serious mental health issues.

On the other hand, they teach their kids some important lessons: how to care for themselves, not to be sentimental, being patient with where life takes them, "good posture" from sleeping outdoors (18), the gift of gab. The kids are actually pretty well educated because the parents have a deep appreciation for science and the arts and impart their wisdom to the children.

Some of the moments of dramatic irony from the child's perspective are priceless: when a neighborhood kid calls Jeannette's dad a drunk like his dad, Jeannette retorts, "My daddy is nothing like your daddy! [. . .] When my daddy passes out, he never pisses himself!" (83) She's trying to say something positive about her dad but pretty much just admits that he's a drunk, too.

I think this book will make a good common reading book because it's accessible, we can all relate to the family dynamics in some respect, and it normalizes a variety of family relationships that often don't get covered in the media so that people can actually feel comfortable telling the truth about their histories without feeling like they've revealed something unsavory.

Works Cited
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Image Source:
The Glass Castle Cover Image. amazon.com. 1996-2012. Web. 18 July 2012. <http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/419l4z7I6RL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg>.

Blog Entry 6: O. Henry "Gift of the Magi"

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-entry-6.html

Blog 5: Freestyle: Kerouac On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is a seminal road narrative detailing four journeys first-person narrator Sal Paradise makes in association with his friend Dean Moriarty. In his “Delicate Dynamics of Friendship,” George Dardess argues that On the Road is not a series of fragmented episodes but a novel tracing the rise and fall of the friendship between the two men. While I see On the Road as a novel also, I argue that the plot has a slightly different focus. For me, On the Road is more of a Bildungsroman, Sal’s journey into adulthood. Key to this journey is Sal’s search for a male role model. Initially, that model is Dean, but as the novel progresses, Sal’s perception of Dean becomes more conflicted, and he tries to separate his own philosophical search from Dean’s destructive behaviors. In the end, Sal accepts some conventional male roles as necessary to his own happiness. In accepting these roles, Sal achieves a balance between individual enlightenment and responsibility toward others. His accomplishment demonstrates that one person’s freedom is necessarily limited by the freedom of others.

In Part One, Sal lacks a male role model and clings to the promise of hanging out with Dean that launches him across the country as a hitchhiker. Part One begins with Sal’s predicament: his parents are dead, so he has no father figure to provide a suitable male role model. Since Sal and his wife have divorced and this experience has negatively affected him enough to make him ill and despairing about finding meaning in life, Sal clearly needs a role model to help him transition into a more effective adulthood. It’s also evident that Sal has not found an appropriate role model during his military service, as he rejects guns and violence and displays of power, such as that associated with the presidential inauguration.

Stepping into this void, Dean provides inspiration. Sal would like to be “mad” like Dean, “mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, [. . . to] burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” (5-6). The image of the fireworks is beautiful. The flame represents passion, the fact that fireworks light up the sky indicates their power, and their momentary duration parallels the “everything at the same time” desire of youth to spend their energy in the moment rather than spread out over their adult lives. Sal spends Part One anticipating being with Dean, not “talking to Dean for more than five minutes in the whole time” he was in Denver (59). That fact that Dean is largely absent yet pulls Sal like a magnet indicates his power over Dean’s life.

In Part Two, Dean becomes a physically present role model, as Sal spends time with him, listening to his stories and following his exhortations to “dig” lived experience. By simple force of personality, Dean is able to change Sal from wanting to stay with his girlfriend Lucille to thinking of Lucille as an “affair [that] wouldn’t last much longer” and as someone who wants Sal “to be her way” (125). Dean’s presence turns commitment to women into the stereotypical “ball and chain,” the bride who will tie men down to domestic cares and the working world. The fact that Lucille is already married and that Dean’s wife Marylou is present and desirable just makes it easier for Sal to view Lucille this way. In substitute for domesticity, Dean indicates he plans to help Sal “’finally get it’” (127), which seems to the ultimate in ecstatic experience of living: never being “’hung-up, [. . .] go[ing] in every direction, [. . .] let[ting] it all out, [. . .] know[ing] time, [. . .] ha[ving] nothing to do but rock back and forth’” (127). “It” is the ultimate connection with the world, both peaceful and dynamic, both timely and eternal, and most importantly not “hung-up” on conventional rules, not responsible to anything or anyone. As a model for masculinity, Dean epitomizes the free man who doesn’t let rules or the needs of others drag him down. Meaning occurs only in constant motion.

Toward the end of Part Two, when Dean abandons Sal and Marylou without money in San Francisco, Sal begins to question Dean’s approach as potentially dangerous to himself and others. Once he and Marylou finally find a place to stay and food, Sal thinks to himself, “Where is Dean and why isn’t he concerned about our welfare?” (171) The kind of man who would light out after sexual pleasure before ensuring his first wife and his friend had the means to take care of themselves begins to be less appealing when Sal is on the receiving end of his insensitivity. The failure of Dean as an ideal coincides with Sal’s depression regarding the trip: “It was the end; I wanted to get out” (178). The failure of Dean’s as a role model puts Sal back where he began in Part One: sullen and uncaring.

When Sal returns to Dean in Part Three, Dean lacks the old magic that made him a mentor to Sal. Galatea challenges Dean’s lifestyle, saying “’you haven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone,’” and when Dean can’t “talk[] his way out,” Sal feels compelled to defend him, yet he can’t quite work himself up to full faith in Dean. Dean is “the HOLY GOOF,” the ultimate “BEAT,” both pitiful and “Beatific.” He is a man experiencing revelations but no longer any that might be shared or used to purify life. Sal’s best defense of Dean is to indicate he and Dean are going to Italy (194-95). In answer to Dean’s failure, Sal uses the road as an escape. No longer does Dean’s image promise an answer or a destination for a man tired of the world; Dean simply represents prolonging the moment of escape.

Sal’s disappointment in Dean permeates the rest of Part Three and the trip to Mexico City in Part Four. He comments, “With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (206), and he tells Dean, “’You’re really going much too fast’” (227). Sal is ready to slow down and make more mature connections. When Dean steals multiple cars, Sal is the one who moves the stolen cars to try and to keep the law from coming down on their friends. He cares about them and doesn’t want them to be hurt by Dean’s illegal actions. The image of roman candles (fireworks) reoccurs in that sequence, but no longer is it filled with exuberance for life. Instead, the fireworks are “lonely as the Prince of the Dharma who’s lost his ancestral grove and journeys across the spaces between points in the handle of the Big Dipper, trying to find it again” (223). In this revised version, the fireworks indicate loneliness and loss of place. The “Prince of the Dharma” is Buddha who belongs in his “ancestral grove” but can no longer find it. The fact that one of the holiest of men has lost his place and is wandering the stars suggests that the world itself is lost and ordinary men, men like Dean and Sal, are in even more trouble. In this off-kilter world, Dean cannot model masculine behavior for Sal. Sal needs to find his own path.

Ultimately, when Dean abandons Sal during Sal’s illness in Mexico City, he demonstrates that he is not a caring and reliable friend. When Sal gets well, he “realize[s] what a rat [Dean] was” (303). In this act, Dean once again proves his is not a good male role model but merely an acquaintance whose company lasts as long as it serves his own self-interest.

In the end, Sal becomes his own man, falling in love with his dream-girl Laura and rejecting the urge to skip out on a Duke Ellington concert to hang out with Dean. Although life lacks some of the spontaneity Sal enjoyed with Dean, Sal no longer needs to travel to “dig” “all the people dreaming” along the road across America (307). He has family and friends nearby who care about him. The last image of the father Dean never found confirms that Sal never found a father in Dean, but he is mature enough now to understand that “nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody,” and that that lack of control is OK. In recognizing Dean’s version of freedom and masculinity as lacking in real affection, Sal is finally able to separate from Dean’s influence and begin to make a meaningful life for himself.

In reflecting on the balance Sal achieves in growing into his own man, I think of the fact that Dean never understood freedom. He only understood half of freedom, his half. There is another half of freedom that belongs to all the other “people dreaming” in the world. If I assume that my freedom belongs to me as a human being, and I believe that other people are also human, I must admit that my freedom is limited by my responsibility to theirs. The fact that Dean never developed responsibility to others made him a poor male role model for Sal. The fact that Sal grew into a man capable of caring for and taking responsibility for his treatment of others emphasizes the need for this more mature view of freedom.

Works Cited

Dardess, George. "The Delicate Dynamics Of Friendship: A Reconsideration Of Kerouac's On The Road." American Literature: A Journal Of Literary History, Criticism, And Bibliography 46.2 (1974): 200-206. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 20 June 2012.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1955. Print.

Blog 4: "The Lottery"

Here's my "Lottery" quote-response from a prior year:  http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2011/07/blog-post-4-lottery.html

Blog 4: "Miss Brill"

Here's my "Miss Brill" quote-response from a prior year:  http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-entry-4-quote-response.html

Blog 3 Freestyle: Pamela Steele Greasewood Creek

I know Pamela Steele as a writer from Eastern Oregon who has read her work in La Grande, so I was excited to pick up her novel Greasewood Creek at a reading earlier this year. The novel is a series of scenes in the life of protagonist Avery from different moments in time. In childhood, Avery's sister drowned when she was supposed to be watching her. In adulthood, Avery's child is stillborn, a loss that her relationship with Davis cannot overcome, giving her perspective on her parents' difficulties as parents, partners, and people after the death of Avery's sister. Ultimately, Avery finds purpose in delivering babies.

Two aspects of this book were particularly powerful: the language is very spare. Steele provides language like line-drawn images, giving the reader just enough to live with and feel for the characters and nothing more. This gives the reader energy to focus on the details of the story and plenty of room to imagine the rest of the characters' lives.

The other aspect I appreciated was the use of the Eastern Oregon landscape as a character. Here is an example: "A south wind sizzles through the dry grass, brushes Avery's bare legs, rises into the limbs of the cottonwoods. It surges through a swath of apple trees to the east, whispers the names of her sister, grandmother, father before it rushes north across the pasture toward the only other house she's lived in" (1). A living thing, almost sentient, that landscape keeps Avery company throughout her life, and as a transplant to Eastern Oregon, I love getting the feel of Steele reveling in all of its details. 


The only part of the book that didn't sit well with me was the sexual abuse Avery experienced as a child. Given Avery's losses of sister and baby, the abuse almost seemed like too much--and doesn't every female character in literature get abused as a child? Of course, intellectually I know the abuse demonstrates the devastation Avery's mother experienced in losing her child--so devastated was she that she could not look out for the safety of her other daughter. I also know that at least 25% of women will be sexually abused at some point in their lives, so there actually aren't enough stories that realistically include that experience. All the same, I think the story could have operated fine without that additional pain. 


Works Cited
Steele, Pamela. Greasewood Creek. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011. Print. 


Image Source
Greasewood Creek Cover Image. amazon.com. 1996-2012. Web. 1 July 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Greasewood+Creek>.

Blog 2: Miss Emily (Take 2)

Here's my 2011 post regarding "A Rose for Emily":  http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2011/06/blog-2-miss-emily.html

Blog 1: Reader's Autobiography

I'm using this blog to post about my own reading but also to blog alongside my students in ENGL 104 and WR 121. For this reason, I'm going to complete the first blog post for ENGL 104.

1. My name is Nancy Knowles. I prefer to be called Nancy, but Professor Knowles or Dr. Knowles work fine. I got a BA in East Asian Studies from UCLA, so I didn't major in English as an undergraduate, but by the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to be an English major. I later went back to school for graduate study in English. My main hobby is reading, so I'm getting paid for my hobby! :) I also like to play with my daughter and walk my dogs.

2. I don't remember learning to read. My parents must have read to me, but I don't remember that either. I remember reading to my younger sister from a fairy tale book with a red binding. I also remember reading under the covers with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. I loved escaping into the adventure in the book! I had long "thinks" where I would picture myself in the action of the stories.

In terms of school reading, I remember reading "Dick and Jane" books in first grade. I read a book called Savage Sam in fourth grade that was the sequel to Old Yeller. I loved the smell of that book! By eighth grade, I had read all the books the eighth grade class would be reading that year, except Moby Dick. So, I read Moby Dick (I enjoyed all the whaling details, including the time a sailor fell into a whale that was being cut up--gross!), and then my teacher told me to read whatever I wanted and to write up a worksheet he could use to assign that book to other students. That was totally my style!

My reading preference has always been fantasy. My current favorite fantasy writer is Martha Wells. I also assign myself classics to read and try to keep up with my students' reading and my dad's reading. I recently read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. That was a hard book to get through because it is very bleak and violent! However, my dad read it, one of my students recommended it, so I did it. Since then, one of my other students with whom I talk about books has read it, resulting in some interesting conversations. I plan to write a separate post on it, so I won't say any more.

3. I still need to do my interviews... I'm working with some teachers today and will try to pin them down about their reading.

Warnock's Teaching Writing Online

Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online is an important handbook for college teachers of writing to consult when setting up an online writing course for the first time.

The philosophical orientation of the book is process writing. It assumes that writing is a process involving recursive steps that a course would employ, and organization follows that logical order: from developing your online persona, to lessons and syllabi, to structuring the course and managing course dialogue, and then to writing response, collaboration, and assessment. In each section, Warnock provides tips, examples, and questions for consideration.

The aspect of this book that I am using today as I get my summer online courses up and running is the section “A Word on Redundancy.” Redundancy helps students remember what to do when. This probably true in any classroom situation. Warnock provides a list of places he provides deadline information:

• Syllabus
• Assignment
• Weekly plan
• Response to the rough draft
• Course announcements
• Group email a few days before the deadline (56-57)

Deadlines aren’t the only aspect of the course requiring redundancy. I used to have weekly folders and put everything for the week in them. The problem was that sometimes we needed those things in other weeks, and then even I couldn’t find them! Now, I have a redundant structure where materials are grouped by purpose (assignments, lectures, readings, etc.), and they also exist, or I create a link to them, in the weekly folders.

Another aspect of the book that parallels my recent development as a teacher is the section “How Do We Know They Have Read?” I’ve been assuming that if we do enough dialogue (informal writing) and formal writing about reading, I will know whether students have read, and they will know that reading is important to success in the course. I am particularly careful to request that students refer to or quote specific passages on specific pages. This helps in encouraging specificity in analysis. It also indicates that they’ve read enough to find the quote. In research assignments, I’m headed toward requiring more summary and synthesis before drafting to ensure that students have read their source materials and can discuss them as unique wholes rather than cherry-picking quotations.

However, sometimes, by the time we’re talking and writing about our reading, it’s too late for those who haven’t read to catch up. So, after teaching for almost 20 years, I think I’m going to resort to quizzing, not in an antagonistic way, but in a way that gets students into the text and reminds them about important aspects of it. And, quizzing in an online environment is easy because I can set the whole business up to score and post the scores in the grade book. Here are Warnock’s quizzing recommendations:

• Same day of the week
• Easy questions
• Five-minute time limit
• Create question sets and randomize which are given to each student (to deter cheating; 64-65)

As an experienced online instructor of writing, I benefited by checking my own practice against Warnock’s step-by-step recommendations, but as I’ve started to incorporate more multimedia into my teaching (albeit not very capably yet), I feel as if I could rewrite the book to add those elements to his discussion. Of course, the book was in progress before many of the current multimedia tools existed, so I’m sure my feeling is out of line, or maybe because the field is changing so quickly, the book went out of date quickly and just needs a second edition. I’d also like to see a more detailed chapter on online collaboration and an anthology of specific assignments and documents associated with the various chapters. So, I think this book is good for the first-time instructor of writing online who just needs the big picture and general philosophy. 

Works Cited

Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2009. Print.

Asher's "Why Reading Is Always Social"

When I think of reading, I think of me, my book, a comfortable place, and time to myself. I might be reading in the quiet, sleepy time before bed. I might have taken a book to my daughter's swimming lesson or aikido class. I might be waiting in a doctor's office. Wherever I read, I often think about reading as time for myself where the world slows down, and I can relax in my own imagination. As a relatively introverted person, this time to myself is incredibly rejuvenating.

Yet, as Levi Asher argues in "Why Reading is Always Social," it totally is! Asher writes, "To read another person's words is to conduct a meeting of minds." This is absolutely true. Reading takes me to another place and time where I can see through another person's eyes. If the reading is fiction, I experience the perspective not only of the writer but also of the characters. And, if the narrative includes allusions to prior narratives, I've got windows onto those writers and characters, too.

Asher goes on to indicate that reading is social because readers like to talk about their reading with others. I get to do this in my classrooms with students, which is kind of inauthentic, as they are forced to talk to me. My family members are all great readers, so we often talk about books. I also have colleagues with whom I like to discuss reading. As Asher concludes, literature is about reading together.

But, sometimes even in this crowd of readers, I still feel lonely. I want to talk with people who like to read and who have just read exactly what I have read. Although I work with English majors, few of them read what I read for fun, and even fewer stop by to talk about their reading and suggest new books. While many people around me have heard the same news or watched the same movies, few have read the same books. So, maybe that's why I started this blog, so at least I can talk to myself! :)

I also seem to need to keep a record of my reading, as I read a lot of books and sometimes want to go back and refresh my memory about them. I even have a stack of books near my desk about which I want to write but have not yet gotten to. I don't want to put them away until I can record my thoughts. So many books, so little time!

Thanks, Ray Bradbury!

McCarthy Badass

I have yet to write a post on McCarthy, but I will write about Blood Meridian soon, as one can't read it and not write about it. I just want to keep track of the link to "10 Reasons Why Cormac McCarthy Is a Badass" by David McMillan: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/10-reasons-why-cormac-mccarthy-is-a-badass/

A Silence of Mockingbirds

My colleague Karen Spears Zacharias set out to write the story of Karly Sheehan as a journalist, using research and interviews to communicate the facts, but because Karly’s mother Sarah had been part of the Zacharias family for a year, the story Zacharias needed to tell became more personal, resulting in A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder.

In 2005 in Corvallis, OR, Karly Sheehan, age three, died as a result of injuries caused by abuse. Initially, the prosecution focused on Karly’s father David Sheehan, but eventually, Shawn Wesley Field, Sarah’s boyfriend, was convicted based on evidence that should have triggered law enforcement involvement in the case much earlier. The failure of law enforcement in this case resulted in Karly’s Law, which requires medical evaluation and record-keeping when children present suspicious injuries.

A Silence of Mockingbirds tells the poignant story of Karly’s brief life and its aftermath without sensationalizing it, instead carefully juxtaposing elements of the story to encourage readers to consider how the community failed Karly, perhaps even before she was born. The first two pages of the memoir introduce Shawn Field as “Inmate 16002306,” relate David Sheehan’s background as a Hewlett-Packard engineer from Ireland, and then identify David as Karly’s father and Shawn as Karly’s murderer. There is no mystery: from the beginning we know Karly is dead. The task remaining to readers is to understand the events that led to her death.

As indicated in Zacharias’s research, the evidence of abuse was overwhelming, beginning nine months before Karly’s death, when Sarah began dating Shawn. Karly lost weight and hair, wanted to sleep all the time, expressed a fear of being hit, and cried for her daddy. Despite some investigation, officials determined that Karly’s injuries were self-inflicted, based on anxiety associated with her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new relationship (125). At the trial, the most damning items of evidence were photographs Shawn took of Karly’s injuries, photographs that might have been used in framing David, except that Karly died from those injuries before anyone besides Shawn had contact with her (262). Shawn clearly committed the crime and was convicted of it.

Yet, Zacharias’s background with Sarah adds a terrifying dimension: the role of Sarah Sheehan in her own child’s murder. Zacharias traces this role back to Sarah’s youth. Sarah was intelligent and pretty but also erratic and selfish, making problematic decisions based on attraction to fancy possessions (63). A similar self-centeredness occurs in the depiction of Sarah two years after Karly’s death when her discussion of her charitable organization Karly’s Angels focused more on celebrity and partying than on protecting children (64-65). Zacharias uses her knowledge of Sarah’s character to make Sarah’s complicity with her child’s death explicit: “Sarah, alone, could have offered her daughter salvation. Instead, she betrayed her” (80-81). Zacharias extends this complicity to herself for not doing more to combat the potential for Sarah to neglect Karly after she divorced David (20) and to the community for not taking action based on signs of child abuse (81).

A Silence of Mockingbirds ultimately extends complicity to the justice system that failed to charge Sarah as an accomplice in her daughter’s death. As early as two months into her relationship with Shawn, Sarah began fabricating a journal intended to implicate David (94, 129). She continued this line of argument in testimony collected following Karly’s death (187). However, the district attorney determined that there was no community benefit to charging Sarah with neglect and that her grief had punished her enough. Once Sarah testified for the grand jury to indict Shawn, she could no longer legally be charged with an associated crime (214-15). Zacharias situates this failure within a tradition of courts viewing mothers as incapable of cruelty toward their children (215). The narrative in Silence of Mockingbirds indicates that, at least in this instance, the mother stereotype was overcome by the desirable-woman stereotype as Sarah intentionally traded Karly’s safety for her own relationship with Shawn.

Zacharias’s juxtaposition of these strands of Karly’s story suggests a community need to hold Sarah accountable for the selfish behavior that made Shawn’s crime possible. Accountability would deliver the justice we expect of our court system. It would also protect Karly’s loved ones from further trauma caused by Sarah’s insensitive behavior in using Karly’s death as an opportunity for self-marketing. However, Zacharias’s selection of memoir over journalistic non-fiction implies an additional need, the desire of a parent, even a parent by choice rather than blood or law, to assist in a child’s moral development, to help the child see the results of her actions in order to become a healthy, responsible adult capable of contributing to the community. In this most quixotic desire, the mourning of a surrogate parent for a child’s lost potential, A Silence of Mockingbirds is doubly tragic. 

Image source: A Silence of Mockingbirds Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 28 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Silence+of+Mockingbirds

Work Cited: Zacharias, Karen Spears. A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2012. Print.

Karen Spears Zacharias's website: http://karenzach.com/

Passage

The point of no return occurs in reading when I get to the point where I can’t put the book down. I don’t want to do anything else; I just want to read, read, read until I find out what happens. After that point, all reading is gobbling. I don’t read thoughtfully or carefully. I just read as fast as I can.

In reading Connie Willis’s Passage, I reached the point of no return very early, which made the fact the book is 780 pages slightly problematic. I wanted to gobble the rest, but the book was so long, I often felt frustrated with the pace. I do think potentially some of the muddling around in the first part might have been reduced, but the muddling also made the action realistic. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the mysteries unraveled over the course of the novel.)

Passage tells the story of researchers seeking a scientific explanation for near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Joanna Lander attempts to collect and compare details from memories of individuals who have almost died about their experiences. She is opposed by Mr. Mandrake, a popular author of books about the near-death experience that offer comfort in a particular pattern of steps that confirm a spiritual afterlife. If Joanna reaches the subject after Mr. Mandrake, the subject is ruined for scientific study because Mr. Mandrake has injected his own steps into the subjects’ narratives, and the subjects no longer accurately remember their own experiences.

Joanna joins forces with Dr. Richard Wright, who is attempting to map brain chemicals associated with NDEs. He has discovered a drug that allows subjects’ brains to mimic NDEs, so he puts subjects under the influence of this drug and photographs their brain activity. As the subjects available for his study rapidly decrease, Joanna herself becomes a subject.

Because her NDEs occur onboard the Titanic, Joanna begins to imagine that maybe everyone’s occurs in that setting. Her probing of her own experience sends her back to her high-school English teacher, a one-time Titanic enthusiast who has Alzheimer’s, and puts her in contact with “Coma Carl,” who eventually emerges from his coma to provide key information about the NDE--his NDEs take place in a cowboys-and-Indians setting.  Joanna also makes friends with young Maisie who needs a heart transplant and is routinely admitted to the hospital in the midst of an NDE. Just as Joanna reaches understanding about NDEs--that they are SOS messages the brain sends to the body seeking assistance--she herself is killed in an emergency room accident.

The remainder of the novel finds Joanna permanently in her Titanic reality with her friends in the living world scrambling to understand her last words (“Tell Richard it’s SOS” [588]) in order to find a scientific response to NDEs that will save Maisie’s life. Ultimately, Maisie is saved through Richard’s ability to use Joanna’s discovery for medical purposes, and the book ends with the image of Joanna in a lifeboat being picked up by another ship that was part of a tall tale told by one of her research subjects. While we know Joanna is really and truly dead, it’s comforting that after the terror of the big ship sinking and the sensation of drowning associated with the brain’s SOS role, the brain ultimately generates images of solace.

Passage is an important story about the last passage between life and death or whatever comes next. The word “passage” also plays in interesting ways against the idea of passage on a ship and the hallway passage that often figures in near-death narratives. The detail of the scientific world in which the characters live is depicted effectively, and the connection between NDEs and literature as another kind of message is satisfying to me as a scholar of literature.

A key component to Joanna’s discovery is based not only on her English teacher’s passion for the Titanic but also on his passion for literature. She remembers him standing in front of her class smacking a book on his desk and repeating “’Literature is a message!’” (543) As she realizes what the brain is doing physically as death approaches--attempting to send messages to other parts of the body to avert death--Joanna connects this key sentence with the images of telegraph distress messages from the Titanic with the need communicate through the Pony Express and smoke signals in Coma Carl’s NDE.

Stories are vitally important. They are the way our brain shapes reality, and they are the way we communicate that reality to ourselves and others. Perhaps the poignancy is that we don’t live to tell our stories forever. We have only our brief moment on Earth, and then our stories must be carried forward by others. And our stories, like the messages occurring in NDEs, are about survival. They alert others that death is approaching so that they can fight it and live to appreciate another day. 

Image Source: Passage Cover. amazon.com. Web 27 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Connie+Willis+Passage

Work Cited: Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001. Print. 

Gone

Michael Grant’s Gone is a riveting story of under-15s left alone in a 20-mile-diameter area of coastal California the kids call the FAYZ when everyone over 15 disappears. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the end of the novel.) Thanks to Shannon for turning me on to this series!

The story is told through the perspectives of a number of different characters including the protagonist Sam Temple, a surfer who once saved a bus-load of kids and has “four bar” psychic powers; Lana Arwen Lazar, who heals herself after her grandpa’s truck runs off the road when he disappears; Albert Hillsborough, who takes over the local McDonald’s and recognizes the coming food scarcity before other kids do; Mary Terrafino, who runs the local daycare; Computer Jack, technology expert; Dahra Baidoo, who tends the hospital; and Caine Soren, who discovers he’s Sam’s twin brother given up for adoption in infancy.

The depiction of the children’s plight is convincing and gripping. Each character has backstory based on which they make decisions in their current situation, and each character has strengths that are tested in the course of the action. I find the depiction of the less savory characters somewhat one-dimensional, although the guilt Captain Orc experiences after his actions lead to a friend’s death is moving. The single-mindedly mean characters--Howard, Drake, and Caine--seem a little less complex, and the “bad girl” Diana, who makes choices based on her own vision of herself as such, also seems a little stilted.

Although I noticed the Christian imagery in the characters’ names--Temple for the hero, Mary for the mother figure who takes care of children, Lazar for the girl brought back from death, and Caine for the antagonist--most of the book seems to treat the religious views of the few religious characters as individual to them. Only in the last few pages does the religious angle become heavy-handed.

The show-down takes place in the church where Caine and his cronies attempt to kill off the kids with psychic powers. As the love-interest Catholic Astrid is hoping to save her brother Little Pete, she launches into a prayer calling upon “St. Michael the Archangel [to] defend us in battle,” and Dekka, who can lift things with her mind, says, “Amen,” and pulls the wreckage off Little Pete (538). The juxtaposition of the prayer at this climactic moment with Dekka’s saving Little Pete seems like an answered prayer, as if the events of the story all build up to confirm God’s presence in the FAYZ.

This sequence is followed by a Thanksgiving sequence where Astrid invokes God again in modeling a speech for Sam, and Sam does the same thing in his actual speech. Although in his speech Sam allows room for non-believers, the combination of these elements and the allegorical names makes the ending seem overly religious, like a Peanuts holiday special. I don’t think I would have minded if the religious aspects were consistent throughout, but because they were not, the emphasis in the end seems like a moral imposed from outside the story. 

Image Source: Gone Cover Image. amazon.com. Web. 26 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Gone

Work Cited: Grant, Michael. Gone. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Print. 

Recent Reading

I've read the following books but not had time to write them up:

Tepper, Sheri S. The Awakeners.
Wells, Martha. The Cloud Roads.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian.
Steele, Pamela. Greasewood Creek.
Fisher, Catherine. Snow-Walker.
Crews, James. The Book of What Stays.
Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love.
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi.
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones.
Zacharias, Karen Spears. The Silence of Mockingbirds.
Willis, Connie. Passage.
Grant, Michael. Gone.

I guess I'll start with the most recent and work backward...

The Hunger Games Series

Once I finished The Hunger Games, I needed to read the series, and I was not disappointed. The second and third books complicated the fascism and resistance occurring in the first by indicating that individual moments of resistance are good but not enough; the disaster of fascism will not end until the structure is eliminated and replaced not by another kind of fascism but by a political system that respects human rights.

The second novel, Catching Fire, challenges Katniss and Peeta’s victory in the Hunger Games by revealing the ongoing manipulation victors experience at the hands of the Capitol. So, it isn’t enough for Katniss and Peeta to outwit the Gamemakers; they can’t just go home and live a comfortable life in Victor’s Village. They have captured the attention of Panem in an act of resistance against the games and must therefore be used to garner support for the government or be destroyed.

Catching Fire follows Katniss and Peeta on their victory tour as they attempt to meet the Capitol’s expectations for their fictional romance. Once home, Katniss tries to return to her hunting life but faces the imposition of more violent “Peacekeepers” on District 12. This repression combines with evidence of rebellion in the other districts, encouraging Katniss to think of fleeing and of fighting. As the tension escalates throughout Panem, President Snow announces that the Quarter Quell, a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of the Hunger Games, will draw tributes only from prior victors, which throws Katniss and Peeta again into the arena.

When I realized the storyline mirrored that of the previous book, I was worried that Catching Fire would be a pale shadow of the first story, like Return of the Jedi was of the 1977 Star Wars, with the goal of both being the destruction of the Death Star, but the differences in context between the Hunger Games and the Quarter Quell made the storylines in the Hunger Game series different enough for the second to be interesting.

In this version of the games, there’s no question that Katniss and Peeta will work together, and they build alliances with other victors in self-preservation. The need for mutuality in the face of oppression is a given. In addition, the context of growing rebellion in the districts makes rebellion in the Quarter Quell more meaningful, as any act could become a symbol contributing to resistance. And the rebellion even penetrates the Quarter Quell when other victors secretly act to ensure Katniss, the symbol of rebellion, survives and can be rescued. These additional complexities expand upon the issues of social justice from the first novel by making collaboration in rebellion necessary. A government that so little values the lives of its citizens must be brought down.

The third volume in the series, Mockingjay, further complicates the issue of fascism and resistance by making the resistance potentially fascist in its own right. At the end of Catching Fire, we discover that District 13 has been destroyed only at the surface. The Capitol has allowed its citizens to dwell underground in a kind of nuclear détente, and since that agreement, District 13 has been preparing to challenge the Capitol in conventional warfare. To survive, District 13 citizens have had to live an exceptionally regimented life. This regimentation and the undoubted necessity of overthrowing the Capitol combine to make it possible for District 13 leadership to excuse violation of human rights, namely Katniss’s rights, in the name of the rebellion. The leadership plans to use Katniss as a rallying symbol of the rebellion, just as the Capitol had planned to use Katniss to encourage loyalty. As in the Hunger Games, Katniss takes things into her own hands, mounting an unapproved expedition to assassinate President Snow.

During and after this expedition, three events occur that determine Katniss’s ultimate decision to assassinate President Coin, the leader of District 13, instead of President Snow. First, District 13 stages the death of children imprisoned in front of President Snow’s mansion, in an effort to frame him for the children’s deaths. Second, Katniss encounters the captive President Snow who comments, “I’m afraid we have both been played for fools” (Mockingjay 357). Third, President Coin proposes holding another Hunger Games using children of the Capitol’s citizens as a means of reparation. These three events, grounded in Katniss’s experience of death for entertainment in the Hunger Games, lead her to see that any power structure risks fascism, even one ostensibly intending to do good. To consolidate her own power, President Coin has engaged in the same oppressive strategies as President Snow has used. To stand on the side of human rights, one must be always aware of the complexity of power dynamics and always alert to such abuses of power.

Works Cited

Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. New York: Scholastic, 2009. Print.

---. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.

---. Mockingjay. New York: Scholastic, 2010. Print.

Image Source:

Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Book Cover Images. Amazon.com. 8 April 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Hunger+Games>

The Hunger Games

I gobbled Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games when I was supposed to be reading Life of Pi. This was interesting pairing, given both novels depict characters pushed to extremes and using other potentially deadly characters for survival. Collins’s work is written for a younger audience and is easy to digest quickly while Martel’s Life of Pi is denser, postmodern, and more aesthetically interesting.

The thematic difference between the two, I would argue, surfaces when examining the presentation of violence. The ending of Life of Pi, which retells the castaway story using humans instead of animals, suggests that it’s easier for humans to digest stories of violence when attached to animals than when attached to humans, which assumes humans find violence among humans distasteful. Hunger Games, on the other hand, suggests humans delight in watching other humans torture and kill one another, which assumes humans are comfortable objectifying one another, particularly in the service of entertainment and of maintaining power in the hands of a few. Sadly, I think the latter assumption is more true than the former, as public displays of violence for entertainment have demonstrated from games in the Roman Coliseum to CNN’s capitalization on embedded reporting during the Gulf War.

So, while the Hunger Games series is lighter literary fare than Life of Pi, it does address serious social justice issues. In the first book of the series, the main issue is fascist power structures encouraging the disenfranchised to battle one another instead of overthrowing the oppressive power structure itself. In the novel, Panem represents civilization arising in post-apocalypse America. Due to the thirteen districts rebelling against the Capitol, the Panem government keeps the districts economically dependent on the center and implemented the Hunger Games as a reminder of the price paid for treason. Each year, each of the twelve remaining districts sends two tributes, a boy and a girl, to the Capitol for the Hunger Games, which are televised live. The tributes battle each other until only one is left, and that one is declared the winner. The Hunger Games themselves illustrate the use of media to establish competition among the districts so that they cannot again collaborate to attempt a coup, maintaining power in the hands of a few in the Capitol.

In response to the “divide and conquer” political strategy that maintains the oppressive power structures, the novel also posits small ways in which individuals can collaborate to resist those structures. When the protagonist, Katniss, volunteers to replace her younger sister as District 12 tribute, her selflessness becomes an act of resistance. Same goes for the mutual support that grows between Katniss and Peeta, the boy tribute from District 12, and between Katniss and the youngest tribute, Rue. Where the games encourage tributes to kill one another, mutuality indicates a refusal to play.

The ultimate moment of resistance that saves both Katniss and Peeta occurs when Katniss and Peeta plan to eat poison berries together and thus rob the Capitol of a victor. In staging this moment, Peeta uses the media coverage that has been used against them. Peeta says, “Hold them out. I want everyone to see” (344). He wants to make sure the Gamemakers and those in the home audiences know they are intentionally eating poison berries so that either the Gamemakers intervene to stop them or so that citizens can hold the Gamemakers accountable for their deaths. Through this act of mutuality, Katniss and Peeta defeat the game, embarrassing the Gamemakers, and situating themselves in rebellious opposition to the Capitol.

It’s important to remember that individuals have power in fascist systems, even if it is only the power to refuse to cooperate. As Michel Foucault writes, “Where there is power, there is resistance” (95). The existence of resistance to domination should give us all hope that we can take action against injustice. The keys to this action are mutuality (we don’t have to work alone) and publicity (one of the few ways small resistances can put pressure on fascism).

When the movie came out, I was worried that Hollywood’s need to reap profit from entertainment would co-opt the social-justice message of the novel, but I was pleased that the film remained closely aligned with the novel. In particular, the Hunger Games were not depicted as brave or fun but as an obscene form of torture perpetrated by a spoiled, comfortable public on oppressed groups. The costuming was particularly effective in making the film consistent with the novel. Never did viewers feel comfortable in the seductive wealth of the Capitol; instead, we remained consistently on edge with the protagonist, horrified at the excess and waste, the foolish obsession with fashion and media, and the willingness of the Capitol audience to enjoy the bystander role in witnessing human-on-human destruction.

Works Cited

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1 New York: Vintage, 1978. Print.

Image Source:

The Hunger Games. Book Cover. N.d. Amazon.com. 8 April 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Hunger+Games>