Welcome Scott Elliott

Welcome to the next installment of the Roundhouse Reading Series, generously funded by Union County Cultural Coalition, Cook Memorial Library, Libraries of Eastern Oregon, and local donors, such as yourselves. Thank you for making this possible! According to our usual plan, we’ll have an open mic following Scott Elliott’s reading. I hope you’ve signed up!

Just as a reminder, May’s Third Wednesday reading will feature Rob Schlegel of Walla Walla reading from his new poetry collection, January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014).

This week! Scott Elliott is one of two Pacific Northwest writers visiting La Grande whose work addresses environmental issues, and it has been stimulating to read their works side by side. Jennifer Boyden will read at Ars Poetica tomorrow night at 7:30 in Pierce Library on the EOU campus.  

Tonight! The Roundhouse Reading Series is pleased to host Scott Elliott, whose novel Temple Grove (University of Washington Press, 2013) I’m currently reading.

Scott is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Whitman College in Walla Walla and has previously published Coiled in the Heart (Bluehen/Penguin Putnam, 2003), selected by Booksense 76 and One-Book-One-Community, and a collection of short stories, Return Arrangements, which was named a finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and Mary McCarthy Prize competitions. He was born in Kentucky and grew up there and in Alaska and on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. He earned a BA from Vanderbilt, an MFA from Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Houston.

Scott’s most recent novel, Temple Grove, takes place on the Olympic Peninsula and features three main characters. Trace, a native Makah woman, works at an aquarium and is the mother of Paul and wife of Tom, Paul’s stepfather. In the present time of the novel, Paul is 18 and has spent his life hiking and camping in the Olympic Forest. The third character is Bill Newton, Paul’s biological father, a logger from a family of loggers, who returns to the Olympic Peninsula after years in Alaska. The plot is spurred by a chance meeting between Trace and Bill and also by Paul’s decision to become an ecoterrorist, damaging logging equipment and spiking the trees of the Temple Grove in order to protect them.

Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men who also did a reading in La Grande recently, notes that “Elliott writes from that place where the old myths and the new stories collide. In Temple Grove, he reminds us of what it means to be lost to everyone and everything we have ever loved...and to be found again. It is a story of longing, cruelty, forgiveness, and redemption, shot through with intimate descriptions of a land on the cusp of ruin that will break your heart with their beauty."

I am enjoying reading Temple Grove and wish to praise the depiction of the Pacific Northwest. I feel as if I have walked in the Olympic Forest, although I have not. The forestry issues remind me of my years spent in Humboldt County, CA, where loggers and environmentalists still vie for trees as a resource and ecosystems as a legacy. I am also enjoying the depiction of the inner lives of the main characters, particularly the complexity of their motivations and the uncertainty with which they make decisions, which feels true to my own experience. At the midpoint of the novel, the storytelling has hooked me; I have passed “the point of no return” and am having trouble putting the book down to do my real work. The last commendation I wish to make regards the imagery. I especially like the image of breaching, as in whales breaching, which seems a metaphor for all the ways in which the characters survive: they find hope in surfacing and taking the next breath.

Without further ado, please welcome Scott Elliott!

Works Cited

Book Cover Temple Grove. "Biography." Scott Elliott. n.d. Web. 16 April 2014. <http://www.scottelliott.net/index.htm>.

Elliott, Scott. Temple Grove. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2013. Print. 

Dear Jennifer Boyden

Dear Jennifer Boyden,

Where have you been all my life? I don't think I really saw poetry until now, or at least what poetry can do when unhitched from the literal. You language a dead end dominated by syntax, silencing the shoulding. I keep hearing Steve Martin's "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?" The moral is, when we teach kids to talk wrong, they make poetry that sidesteps the mundane and approaches the beautiful. Skip the similes and give me pure metaphor! To quote Steve Martin, "Listen to this..."

On a first read, I liked "Like a Frequency, Like Looking Right at It" best. It is pretty easy to understand from a literal perspective, but it has one moment where the language launches itself out of the syntax:

In June, the man noticed how quietly the evenings held
themselves. Birds did not have to ask to continue, nor
the grass. There were no answers anyway that meant
they could not do as they wished, and so flying, and so
the world greenly. (23)

The moment I mean is, of course, "and so flying, and so/the world greenly." What does that mean? Literally, it doesn't make sense because "flying" is a gerund and can't really stand by itself as a clause, and "so/the world" gears the reader up for the beginning of a clause and then pulls the rug out with "greenly," which isn't a word because "green" is an adjective and not an "adverb," and I was expecting a verb anyway. Luckily, for the first-timer, the poem folds back into normal syntax after this moment.

And yet, I'm drawn back to this moment as amazing. It seems to capture the birds' perspective. Birds don't worry about clauses; they just fly. They are always already flying, even when still, so the gerund works really well. The use of "greenly" is also pretty cool because like the gerund, it conveys action in the midst of ongoing existence, as if, to quote Kermit, "being green" is the reality of the living, interconnected forest or, to quote Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Word for World is Forest." Green is a lifestyle; it is something we see in and do to the world, and the man and the birds share a moment of this together, a kind of immanence. Wow, Jennifer Boyden.

On a first read, I didn't like the other poems as well because they didn't leap out at me literally, as this immediately obvious one did, and yet, I am still reading and realizing the need to go back for a reread, to see all that your breathtaking breaking of syntax has to offer. I spent several hours last night imitating you in my own sad poetry, and I feel a whole landscape open up. No looking back, Eurydice! Orpheus writes the only poetry. Thanks, Jennifer Boyden. See you soon! https://www.facebook.com/events/1514140552146663/

Very truly yours,

An admirer

Works Cited

Boyden, Jennfier. The Declarable Future. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2013. Print.

Kermit the Frog. "Green." Sesame Street. 1970.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Word for World is Forest. Putnam, 1976. Print.

Martin, Steve. "Philosophy/Religion/College/Language." A Wild and Crazy Guy. Warner Bros., 1978. Cassette Tape.

The Declarable Future Book Cover. Jennifer Boyden. n.d. Web. 13 April 2014. http://www.jenniferboyden.com/

Jo Walton's Among Others

Jo Walton's Among Others tells the story of Mori Phelps, a Welsh 15-year-old who has survived a traumatic experience caused by magic. The story is presented in journal form, beginning after the traumatic event, as Mori is headed to boarding school, paid for by her father, Daniel, whom she has not met until now. This narrative structure allows the events of the past to unfold as Mori attempts to move forward with her life. 

What we know about the past is that Mori's twin was killed, Mori herself was injured enough that she now walks with a cane, Mori's mother Liz was responsible, and Mori had to involve social services in order to escape. In the present, Mori deals with bullying in boarding school and adjusting to her paternal family, which includes three aunts and a grandfather, Sam. She still has contact with members of her large maternal family, with whom she would rather reside but cannot, due to laws governing guardianship of minors. 

The story is slow-moving, more cerebral and emotional as Mori reflects on her memories and experiences. I enjoyed the slow build to the action in the ending, but I'm not sure I would have read the whole book if it weren't for Mori's references to her fantasy and SF readings. Many of the texts were familiar to me, but an equal number were not--I wanted to jot them all down so I could go back and reread or go pick up some used copies (as the story is set mostly in 1979, many of the texts are now "classic" fantasy and SF). Luckily, Molly Templeton has created a book list using Pinterest: 

https://www.pinterest.com/tinyampersand/the-books-of-among-others/

Thanks, Molly! Summer reading, here I come! 

Works Cited

Among Others Book Cover. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 8 April 2014. http://www.amazon.com/Among-Others-Jo-Walton/dp/0765331721/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396984910&sr=8-1&keywords=Jo+Walton+Among+Others

Walton, Jo. Among Others. New York: Tor, 2010. Print. 

Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness

In her article “Is Gender Necessary?” Ursula K. Le Guin mentions that her novel Left Hand of Darkness arose from 1960s feminism and her interest in probing issues of gender and sexuality. In the article, she describes protagonist Genly Ai as “conventional, indeed rather stuffy” (163). What interests me about Genly’s stuffiness is his misogyny. As Genly attempts to place androgynous Gethenians into a gender box, he continually tries to make them men and is struck by their feminine qualities. Without exception, except towards the end, the characters’ feminine qualities are unpleasant. I think this misogyny may have three potential origins: Le Guin’s sociohistorical context, her intent to show Genly as patriarchal, and the fact that the attempt to define a masculine gender box tends to result in misogyny associated with homophobia.

Evidence of Genly’s misogyny can be identified throughout the novel. Here is one example from his description of the guards at Pulefen Voluntary Farm: “They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate--not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge” (176). Each time Genly references femininity, his tone is disapproving. Here the diction contributing to the tone includes “slovenly, “gross, bland fleshiness,” “bovinity,” and “without point or edge.” The Gethenians are not neat or trim, as apparently men would be; they are fleshy, which suggests not only laziness but also a kind of threat of flesh, as if too much flesh would threaten to absorb one, which suggests a kind of fear of the maternal body. In addition, “bland,” “bovinity,” and “without point or edge” suggest stupidity, as if men would be more dynamic and intelligent, while women are uninteresting and lazily stupid, just sitting around without activity, chewing cud. What a portrait of femininity!

Some of this diction likely arises from 1960s views of men and women, as both genders were stereotyped in dualistic ways. In “Is Gender Necessary?” Le Guin references Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and also Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (161), both of which highlight the dangers of stereotyping. Friedan’s book in particular argues against women’s domestic role, which might relate to the depiction of women as bovine. Because they are imagined to sit around the house all day and to go to college only to get their “Mrs.” degree, it might be a commonplace to assume lazy fleshiness and mental inactivity. Obviously, anyone who makes this assumption has not had charge of domestic arrangements for a household.

However, there seems to be some irony in this assumption cropping up in Le Guin’s novel. It seems to be more meaningful than the anachronism of bouffant hairdos and go-go boots in Star Trek. In describing Genly as “conventional,” Le Guin calls attention to his depiction as a patriarchal man. Deploying a conventional, patriarchal man in an alien context calls attention to the socialized attitudes he cannot shake. Women are like cows because his culture feeds him that assumption. The fact that Genly’s views become more balanced by the end, in his ability to see both masculinity and femininity in King Argaven without horror (291), suggests that growth away from misogyny represents an important character development and also part of the learning that readers can take away from the novel.

The other lesson that emerges for me in exploring Genly’s transformation is that misogyny and homophobia are used as a threat to police the boundaries of the masculine gender box. Boys and men are encouraged to “be a man,” to avoid throwing or crying like girls, and to be strong, not show emotion, and deal with other men in less emotional ways, for example, as teammates in sports institutions where a slap on the butt means only team-oriented support. Genly’s exclusively misogynist opinions regarding femininity highlight the fact that producing patriarchal masculinity requires denigrating women and any potentiality of homosexual feeling or activity. Any sign of femininity is “prying, spying, ignoble” (48), something not to be emulated or desired. However, once Genly has developed a deep friendship for the Genthenian Estraven, a friendship verging but not acting on sexual desire, he realizes that femininity in others and even in himself is not a threat. People are not easily divided up in to masculine and feminine; they are human beings, all worthy of kindness, respect, and love. Misogyny and homophobia are thus tools of hatred, and individuals seeking balance in the world need to move beyond them.

I have read Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness many times, and I get new ideas from it with each reading. While de Beauvoir and Friedan enacted feminism through analytical writing, Le Guin has done a masterful job in communicating feminist ideas through fiction. In this case, she provides a pathway for addressing gender inequity. We are born within gender norms, and getting outside of them is difficult if not impossible. Through the “thought experiment” of science fiction (“Is” 163), Le Guin provides a glimpse of a more self-aware gender identity where humans can spend less time denigrating the other and more time building meaningful relationships within and across gender boundaries.

Works Cited

The Left Hand of Darkness Book Cover. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2014.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Is Gender Necessary?” Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979. 161-69. Print.

---. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1969. Print.

The Windup Girl

 Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl is an important book because of its vision of global warming and of food insecurity arising from food being corporate-owned. The novel also ties together a number of interesting subplots, resulting in an explosive ending (spoiler alert: the ending will be discussed). 

The novel is set in future Bangkok where dykes keep the rising oceans off the streets. "It's difficult not to always be aware of those high walls and the pressure of the water beyond. Difficult to think of the City of Divine Beings as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen" (7). Thus, the initial conflict is the setting itself and the difficulty of preserving life in that setting: 

The main character, Anderson Lake, runs a factory making power sources called kink-springs that substitute for increasingly rare fossil fuels. The factory is a front for Anderson's efforts to locate new foods on which his company could capitalize. Most foods are corporate-owned, which comments on the current threat of seed patents leading to the inability of individuals to grow food for themselves. 

Other key characters include Anderson's employee Hock Seng, who seeks to recapture his former wealth and status by stealing kink-spring blueprints; an android Emiko, the title character for whom Anderson conceives a passion, designed to pleasure Japanese businessmen and now working as a prostitute; the aggressive Environment Ministry Captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai and his lieutenant Kanya Chirathivat, who plans to betray him in revenge for his destruction of her village; and businessman Richard Carlyle with government allies who wants to eliminate trade regulations such as pollution controls and quarantine. 

As the conflicting interests of the characters converge, it seems as if the Thai government will be forced to give up its precious seedbank to corporate profiteers, but Kanya rebels, kills the foreign corporate leader, and initiates a diaspora of monks carrying seeds. Of course, the dykes fail, and the city floods. The novel ends with an Epilogue where the reclusive scientist Gibson promises Emiko that she will have genetic offspring and that they will be fertile. 

These concluding images suggest hope but also the potential for future problems. The seeds and Emiko's fertility indicate that life will continue, despite humans' failings. The image of the deluge promises a new landscape and the potential to start again without the existing problems of corporate and government intrigue. But, the future is also clouded by the fact that Emiko is not human. The novel has taught readers to care for her, that she deserves respect and sympathy, as any other being, but the comparison between androids and cheshires, engineered cats that are fertile, suggests such fertility may be dangerous. The cheshires are a threatening presence in the cityscape, suriving off of carrion. But perhaps the key quality is survival. The seeds will survive, the cheshires will survive, and some form of quasi-human culture will survive at least through an android population.  

Work Cited: Pacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2011. Print. 

Image source: The Windup Girl Cover. Amazon.com. n.d. Web. 23 Aug. 2013. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51CGcjNWkwL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SH30_OU01_AA160_.jpg

A Princess of Mars

 My 10-year-old daughter and I read Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princes of Mars out loud and enjoyed the adventure. 

Because I was reading it aloud, I also enjoyed the language: lush, complex sentences with the big words more common to the reading culture of the early 20th century. Here's an example of a single-sentence paragraph that impressed me: "It was a chance to fight, an opportunity to loot, and they rose to the bait as a speckled trout to a fly" (180). There's something about the rhythm of the repeated "to" phrases and of the first three sentence elements ending in a single-syllable word ending in a harsh "t" and then the lightness of the trout image in sense and sound that makes that sentence just leap off the page. Of course, the sentence also signals a key turning point in the novel where the Tharks join John Carter in going to war on behalf of Helium and the Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris. 

I was surprised to enjoy the novel as much as I did. I am familiar with the pop culture depictions of Tarzan, including the various films and the Frazetta artwork depicting Burroughs's characters, which seem steeped in a stereotypical masculinity. And, John Carter is nearly a superhero with the way Mars's thinner atmosphere allows him to jump higher and hit harder than anyone else. But the novel includes more interesting gender depictions than I anticipated:

1. The Tharks are completely warlike, without softer, more "feminine" feelings. John Carter attributes their attitude to their communal lifestyle, which includes communal doling out of offspring once they have hatched. The fact that the only love arising among the Tharks does so in Tars Tarkus's illicit family where his partner secretly raises their daughter until she is old enough to insert into the communal selection of offspring suggests that the idea of love arises between parent and child. 

Of course, one might argue that this version of love relates to the patriarchal valuing of a man's biological offspring over any other children and to the patriarchal, heterosexual family unit where the father separates the mother and children from other similar groups in the community, demanding love focused on him and reciprocating it. 

But because the emphasis falls on "father or mother love" (42), on nurturing rather than filial relationship, and because nurturing is what permits friendship across racial barriers, such as that between Tars Tarkas and John Carter and that between the Tharks and Helium, the novel seems to value "feminine" feelings as important to individual and community life and to require that violence be tempered with compassion. 

2. The novel depicts Barsoomian culture as having a gender divide. Thark culture is divided into warriors and women, but women are trained fighters and have important work in addition to child-rearing, including making "everything of value" (51). Given that this novel was published in 1917, the valuing of women's work seems surprising. But perhaps the depiction of warfare and of women is influenced by World War I? Burroughs's first Mars story was published in 1912... 

While few female characters are depicted, the three main ones are key: Sola is the nurturing child of Tars Tarkas who is made miserable by Tharkian cruelty and takes care of John Carter when he arrives on Mars. Sarkoja betrays Sola's mother to the Tharks and later pits herself against John Carter. And then there is Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars. 

Dejah Thoris is depicted as a prisoner and threatened with rape at the hands of Tal Hajus; the narration repeatedly refers to her as a "girl," although she is clearly a woman; and she is routinely rescued by John Carter as they flee from the Tharks and while fighting in the palace at Zodanga. But she is also a strong presence because she is honorable, brave, and well-spoken. Her first speech when addressing her captors indicates these qualities. She does not cower but faces her adversaries, states her name, reflects on the research task that brought her squadron into Thark territory (precursor of "We are on a diplomatic mission to Aldaraan?"), and challenges the Thark culture as uncivilized and ignorant in the extreme, as the Martian atmosphere requires scientific maintenance in order to support all life, including that of the Tharks (60). These qualities give Dejah Thoris a presence in the narrative that belies the stereotypical portrayals of Burroughs's work. 

3. I'm also interested in the egg in the golden incubator that John Carter leaves behind at the end of the novel. Apparently, Barsoomians reproduce through eggs rather than gestation. So the offspring of John Carter and Dejah Thoris is an egg. What interests me about this depiction is that early development of offspring occurs outside the female body, giving both parents the potential for an equal role. While the egg remains an egg at the novel's end, and while the Tharks clearly identify child-rearing as women's work, I am curious to know how Heliumites treat child-rearing when the responsibility for early development is not gendered female by the physical reality of pregnancy. I guess I need to read more of the series. 

Work Cited: Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Mars. New York: Fall River P, 2011. Print. 

Image Source: A Princes of Mars Cover. Amazon.com. n.d. Web. 22 Aug. 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Mars-John-Carter-Series/dp/1435134486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377181718&sr=8-1&keywords=A+Princess+of+Mars+Fall+River

Connie Willis, My Hero

Connie Willis is my hero. Wow! I listened to her novel All Clear as an audiobook and was astounded by her storytelling and also by the detail associated with the World War II-London historical moment. 

All Clear is the second in a two-book series depicting time-traveling historians from 2060 who go to World War II London for research purposes and get stuck there. I haven't read the first book, Blackout, but I have read another of Willis's time-travel books, Doomsday Book, about travel to medieval England, and Willis's Passage, which is about near-death experiences but involves at least mental time travel. Both of those novels are also very good. 

With regard to All Clear, I want to note a key sequence where the trapped characters are trying to meet up with another time-traveler at St. Paul's Cathedral during a December night in 1941 when much of the cityscape around the cathedral catches fire. The scene covers the night-time hours of one day, but the scene continues for many pages as the characters are delayed, delayed, delayed. The scene is particularly impressive because of the attention to historical detail. Because the sequence is long, readers feel as if they’re in the moment in the World War II bombing of London as the characters attempt to find their fellow time-traveler, find one another, prevent buildings and the cathedral from catching fire, and save lives, including their own. My experience of the sequence's duration was particularly powerful because I was listening to the novel read aloud, which slows down the storytelling, as the eye can't skip forward when the brain wants to see what will happen. I was totally immersed in the characters' desperation to reach the cathedral. 

Perhaps a more interesting aspect of the novel from the perspective of narrative theory (and here I should warn about revealing a detail that may spoil the impact of the sequence for folks who haven't yet read the book) is the fact that Willis integrates the delay into the actual plot. Avid readers will recognize that frustrating characters' goals is a great way to build suspense and keep readers reading. In other words, frustration is an effective narrative-marketing plot device. As I was reading, I was thinking, wow, Willis just keeps throwing barrier after barrier in her characters' way, yet I want more than ever to find out WHAT HAPPENS! I was glued to the story, despite the fact that I felt manipulated by it--very impressive. Then, Willis impressed me even further by making the delays of that night part of the plot: the characters start to realize that they are trapped in 1941 and experience repeated failures to return home not because they have interfered with history but because the Net by which they travel is protecting history. Even bigger wow. The delays that were starting to feel heavy-handed were exactly the clues the characters and readers needed to figure out what was happening, which turned what I thought was a narrative weakness into an unexpected and therefore impressive strength. 

I went out and bought several more Willis books. I'm not much of a short story reader, but her stories have won top awards, so I guess I'm headed in that direction, as well as reading the rest of the novels.  

Image Source: All Clear Audio Book Cover. Amazon. com. n.d. Web. 21 Aug. 2013. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41zICyP89NL._SX260_.jpg

Textbook: Three-Day Return Policy, Full Cash Refund

Read pages 1-10 for Tuesday.

Buy the textbook. $59.95. Credit.

Feet up on desk.

Open textbook.

Heavy, slippery pages.

Page 1. I am reading. Chapter Heading.

First sentence, third word. What?

Back to Chapter Heading.

Skip third word. Reading.

Fifth sentence. What?

Slide to vocabulary insert. Not there.

Table of Contents. Glossary. Index.

Skip fifth sentence. Reading.

Second paragraph. Pretty chart. Reading. What?

Close textbook.

Return textbook. $59.95. Cash.

Feed by M. T. Anderson

I gobbled M. T. Anderson's Feed in a day, enjoying the texture of the future world depicted where about 70% of the population has a connection to the Internet wired into their brains. Language from the feed blends pleasurably with the voice of the high-school-age first-person narrator, Titus, to provide a sense of life in this context, the constant bombardment of multiple mental voices, from advertisements to chats, that constitute the setting. 

The invasion of the feed into the character's consciousness is appropriately but gently creepy. When Titus admires Violet before they have met, he is trying to figure out why he admires her. "Maybe it was her spine," he thinks, but he can't come up with an adjective that captures what attracts him, so "The feed suggests 'supple'" (11). It's creepy that the feed registers even the most intimate thoughts. It's also creepy that the feed adjusts to offer anything the characters need, from clothing to words. Even creepier is what seems to be the impact on the characters: many can't come up with words to express their thoughts because their world, while it may seem to have expanded in the quantity of information, has narrowed to focus solely on products. School itself has become a registered product, emphasizing instruction in using the feed. 

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed is the depiction of class disparity. Titus and Violet meet during spring break on the moon. While Titus visits the moon accompanied by his friends, and there's no concern about cost, just about accessing alcohol, Violet's dad has had to save up for a year to afford the trip. While Titus lives in a comfortable suburban bubble with his own upcar, Violet lives down at the bottom of the development, layers below the surface where disused asphalt roads still exist, kind of like the class-based stacking of neighborhoods in other science fiction stories such as Chung Kuo. In connection with the emphasis on control by marketing, the class discrepancy is important. The lower classes can't access all of the technology, and many don't want to, which means they are more likely to think critically about the feed but not have the ability to do anything about it. Violet's father, a college-educated professor, seems particularly ineffectual, which suggests the devaluing and also irrelevancy of real school. 

I was a little disappointed with the plot after about the halfway point: Violet, who had the feed implanted at age seven rather than at birth, begins to deteriorate. As the interface between the feed and her body breaks down, she loses control over her limbs, her brain, and any kind of bodily function. Tragically, Titus is bored by Violet's slow death. When she sends him her memories, afraid that she will lose them, he deletes them. When she takes him away for the weekend, hoping to include sex in the experiences she acquires before death, he is horrified. He tells her, "'I keep picturing you dead already'" (211), which is horrifying to her, too. Violet continues to attempt to interact with Titus while he moves on to another girlfriend. In the end, Titus does seem affected by Violet's approaching death, emptying his credit to order pants and sitting by Violet's bedside telling her a hackneyed version of their romance where "'two crazy kids grow, have madcap escapades, and learn an important lesson about love'" (234), but these gestures are shaped and cheapened by the marketing culture in which the feed maintains him. 

I think the plot fails on a number of different levels, but first, I should probably note that it could be me. Maybe like Titus, I, too, am bored by Violet's death, which is a sad state of affairs, given that the I don't even have a Smart Phone and don't visit Facebook often. But, if I am bored by Violet's death, there may also be an artistic flaw. It's possible that Violet comes across more as whining than interesting, but given her situation, she has a right to whine. It's probable that Titus is a disappointment, but that seems to be the point: he can't respond like a human being because he has become a purchasing machine living in an unimaginative storyline. So, given that these two characters should work to make the argument the book seems to make, why don't they?

Most of all, I think I was hoping for a bigger story. Violet seems an anomaly in her own culture rather than a key feature, which means that her death doesn't have the power to speak to the situation. I wonder if the storyline could have been stronger in focusing on the decline of a young person who had been connected to the feed since birth? That situation might have enabled the story to speak more to the feed itself, instead of about someone in whom the feed was imperfectly implanted. 

The tragedy of Violet's death also seems small in connection with the increasing antagonism toward America that the novel alludes to in the backdrop of the story ("the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met" [233]). I wanted more of that intercultural scope in the foreground to put emphasis on the dangers associated with the feed. The story's not just about an error in implantation. 

In addition, the larger tragedy associated with the feed seems simplistically portrayed: having the feed is bad; not having the feed would be good, if the world were different. This bleak theme seems to lash out at everyone using the Internet today and particularly at young adults, the likely readership of the novel, for their interactions with technology. While I am concerned about the profit motive behind much of the information on the web, I don't think all users are passive consumers in the way the novel suggests through the feed. The oversimplification risks having readers walk away from the story without connecting it productively to their lives. It's easy to say, "It's not like that." 

Ultimately, Feed is a novel where all resistance is futile, as Violet's father realizes that the feed is necessary equipment for navigating this culture, and as Violet discovers when her attempt at resistance plays a part in the corporations' unwillingness to help her. Total dead end. Other SF novels end this way, such as 1984, and  they feel more tragic. Perhaps because Titus lacks real human capacity to feel, the tragedy of Violet's impending death is more of a dud. 

Work Cited

Anderson, M. T. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick P, 2002. Print. 

Image Source

Feed Book Cover Image. amazon.com. 1996-2013. Web. 13 Jan. 2013. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=feed+anderson>. 

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.