Blog 13: Quote-Response Dickinson

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

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

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

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

Blog 12: Poem Paraphrase

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

Blog 11: Quote-Response Brooks

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

We real cool. We
Left school. We

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

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

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

Blog 10: Song Response

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

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

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

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

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

Blog 9: Haiku

From Rilke's "Panther":

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

Blog 8: Poem Paraphrase

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

Road through Wonderland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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