It was a Saturday at the beginning of July, the one following my first week in Italy. While most of the students from other colleges went to Venice for the weekend, my little group from the University of West Georgia decided to take it easy our first weekend, to just day-trip somewhere, and save Venice for another weekend. Pienza, another Tuscan hill town a short way from Montepulciano where we were staying, sounded good. We slept late, rolled out of bed into our shorts and flip-flops, and ate at what we had already termed the Italian Zaxby's, a little pizza parlor we all loved and had already frequented at least three times that week for lunch between classes.
After lunch, we traipsed downhill to the bus station just outside of Montepulciano and, after buying our biglietti (tickets, one of the only Italian words I had learned thus far), boarded the bus to Pienza. The ride was uneventful; we probably chatted, maybe dozed, and, to be honest, our self-guided tour of Pienza was rather uneventful as well. We shopped; I bought one of my favorite pieces of jewelry, a delicate slave bracelet that consisted of a ring of Celtic knots around my finger connected to an ornate Celtic trinity symbol and my wrist by nothing more than a thin silver chain. We found a quaint park where Amanda fell asleep sprawled on a park bench, Nick fell asleep reading a book of poetry, and Rachel fell asleep behind her sunglasses so that I didn't know she had fallen asleep and sat talking to her for a few minutes before inadvertently waking her.
I believe we grabbed an afternoon snack of gelato and headed back to the bus stop. The sky had been fairly clear all day, only a few puffy clouds, faintly tinted gray, hinted at rain, but as we stood under the flimsy plastic bus shelter, it began to come down in sheets. Shortly after it started, over our laughter and conversation about barely fitting under the awning, we began to hear loud raps above our head. Looking up and around us we realized that nickle-sized hail was bouncing across the pavement, skittering around our feet. We all got out our cameras for the first time that day and took pictures at arms length of our four faces squashed together sporting mock scared expressions while the hail fell in the background.
Looking back on the incident now, it amazes me that I don't remember more about Pienza, the tourist town we set out to explore. Instead, I remember us falling asleep in a park, a piece of Celtic jewelry I bought in Italy, and how we huddled in a bus shelter to avoid the hail. We went back to Montepulciano, visited Manuel at his little cafe, A Gambe di Gatto, for a pre-dinner drink, and ate more pizza and drank wine at the restaurant where our study-abroad group ate every night. I also remember that we never made it to Venice.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Response to MacKenzie's final week memory, Final Week
MacKenzie,
I love the imagery here; evocative and detailed, I can see the caves you describe clearly. I also like the tension between the past and the present, the evolution of our species, and the questions you ask to create this tension and progression. What I would suggest is, answer some of those questions you ask. While it is a type of reflection to ask the questions, a deeper reflection might come from the speaker creating a life, thought, an experience for the people who once lived there. I mean, what makes the speaker even ask such pointed questions as "Did they watch their fire in the dancing pit cast shadows over the caves?" It almost seems that the speaker already has an image of just that in mind, an image of maybe a child casting shadow puppets against the wall, of the long legs of a shadow of a young girl distorting her length? The options are endless and, of course, you would want to make sure to stay away from the expected imagery, but dedicating time to imagining the lives that once lived there could make the last line so much more resonant. What makes the empty caves like graveyards and why does the speaker want to make noise because of that? Creating the existence of life in the cave, even if it's only in the speaker's mind (research could help here), makes the absence of it seem wrong, seem lacking, seem, like the speaker says, like a graveyard.
I love the imagery here; evocative and detailed, I can see the caves you describe clearly. I also like the tension between the past and the present, the evolution of our species, and the questions you ask to create this tension and progression. What I would suggest is, answer some of those questions you ask. While it is a type of reflection to ask the questions, a deeper reflection might come from the speaker creating a life, thought, an experience for the people who once lived there. I mean, what makes the speaker even ask such pointed questions as "Did they watch their fire in the dancing pit cast shadows over the caves?" It almost seems that the speaker already has an image of just that in mind, an image of maybe a child casting shadow puppets against the wall, of the long legs of a shadow of a young girl distorting her length? The options are endless and, of course, you would want to make sure to stay away from the expected imagery, but dedicating time to imagining the lives that once lived there could make the last line so much more resonant. What makes the empty caves like graveyards and why does the speaker want to make noise because of that? Creating the existence of life in the cave, even if it's only in the speaker's mind (research could help here), makes the absence of it seem wrong, seem lacking, seem, like the speaker says, like a graveyard.
Original Prompt, Final Week
"I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with." Amy Tan, Mother Tongue.
In traditional classrooms, students are taught to vary their sentences, begin each with different words or phrases, provide a variety of lengths. A paragraph consists of a topic sentence, at least three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence (much like the five paragraph essay structure that is championed...for some reason 5 seems to be the magic number of completion). One teacher even had me graph the number of words in my sentences to make sure that the line graph produced either a W or an M ; another had my class diagram complex sentences on the board each day, the result, what looked like a large felled tree branching horizontally across the ground; yet another teacher required that no student in his class ever use a form of the verb "to be" in their papers, on penalty of severe grade reductions. To this day, I can rattle off all of the forms of the verb, am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, and I avoid has, have, and had as well, since Coach Costley didn't like those either.
My point? Traditional classrooms have created a type of methodology, a calculation, if you will, of how and what to write. There is no right answer, it's all subjective the Math and Science students say, and English teachers respond with what can only be described as a formula. In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan addresses just these types of formulaic approaches to the English language, and frankly, breaks most of them. Her first paragraph is two sentences, the bulk of every sentence in her first two paragraphs begin with the same word, with the exception of one, and that word is the infamous "I" which should never be used in serious analytical writing. Granted, Tan's piece is "creative" in scope, but she, nevertheless, is very serious and very analytical in her treatment of the subject. Granted, she uses a literary device called anaphora, but that is usually employed in poetry. In short, my point is, Amy Tan's language, her sentence structures, her disregard for the "rules" of English discourse, help to undermine and redefine common conceptions of how English "should" signify, "should" mean, and what constitutes "good" writing, mirroring her ideas on the subject which she has taken up.
In addition to her language being perfectly suited to her subject, Tan's anaphora of the word "I" goes beyond merely debunking the "rules" of English composition and also serves to emphasize the subjectivity of English usage. It opens her piece up for extensive reflection! (Just what much of my own writing in this class has been missing.) So...
Prompt: Choose what would normally be thought of as an universal experience, like Tan does with English education and the taking of standardized tests, and using the same anaphora of "I" that Tan employs, write a draft that not only tells your own personal details of that experience, but also which expounds, using the "I", on the speaker's individual thoughts, then and now, about the subject. Granted, in subsequent drafts, and as Tan does after the above quote in her piece, the "I" will probably be greatly cut or revised, but this prompt should leave writers with a great bank of subjective and personal language which can more fully round out a draft which may otherwise be missing the personal reflection we've learned about.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with." Amy Tan, Mother Tongue.
In traditional classrooms, students are taught to vary their sentences, begin each with different words or phrases, provide a variety of lengths. A paragraph consists of a topic sentence, at least three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence (much like the five paragraph essay structure that is championed...for some reason 5 seems to be the magic number of completion). One teacher even had me graph the number of words in my sentences to make sure that the line graph produced either a W or an M ; another had my class diagram complex sentences on the board each day, the result, what looked like a large felled tree branching horizontally across the ground; yet another teacher required that no student in his class ever use a form of the verb "to be" in their papers, on penalty of severe grade reductions. To this day, I can rattle off all of the forms of the verb, am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, and I avoid has, have, and had as well, since Coach Costley didn't like those either.
My point? Traditional classrooms have created a type of methodology, a calculation, if you will, of how and what to write. There is no right answer, it's all subjective the Math and Science students say, and English teachers respond with what can only be described as a formula. In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan addresses just these types of formulaic approaches to the English language, and frankly, breaks most of them. Her first paragraph is two sentences, the bulk of every sentence in her first two paragraphs begin with the same word, with the exception of one, and that word is the infamous "I" which should never be used in serious analytical writing. Granted, Tan's piece is "creative" in scope, but she, nevertheless, is very serious and very analytical in her treatment of the subject. Granted, she uses a literary device called anaphora, but that is usually employed in poetry. In short, my point is, Amy Tan's language, her sentence structures, her disregard for the "rules" of English discourse, help to undermine and redefine common conceptions of how English "should" signify, "should" mean, and what constitutes "good" writing, mirroring her ideas on the subject which she has taken up.
In addition to her language being perfectly suited to her subject, Tan's anaphora of the word "I" goes beyond merely debunking the "rules" of English composition and also serves to emphasize the subjectivity of English usage. It opens her piece up for extensive reflection! (Just what much of my own writing in this class has been missing.) So...
Prompt: Choose what would normally be thought of as an universal experience, like Tan does with English education and the taking of standardized tests, and using the same anaphora of "I" that Tan employs, write a draft that not only tells your own personal details of that experience, but also which expounds, using the "I", on the speaker's individual thoughts, then and now, about the subject. Granted, in subsequent drafts, and as Tan does after the above quote in her piece, the "I" will probably be greatly cut or revised, but this prompt should leave writers with a great bank of subjective and personal language which can more fully round out a draft which may otherwise be missing the personal reflection we've learned about.
Response to Brett's final week Memory 2, Final Week
Brett,
As usual, your language is wonderful and the details you share are interesting and evocative. Korea really does seem to be a subject around which your writing flourishes and I'm sure the experiences you had there and the clash of cultures aids in writing. That being said, should you choose to make this post into a more detailed and rounded out draft, there needs to be more of the reflection which we've been talking about in class. Here we have the memory of what you and Corey actually did, but readers have little to no indication of what the speaker thought about the experience, then or now. Of course, the speaker didn't seem to have the great time and adventure he was hoping for, but what about his outlook made it so? How might the speaker view the experience differently after the distance of time and space? What about this particular night stuck out in the speaker's memory? What was life like in Migeum so that the speaker thought he might gain something else from Daegu? How might this desire for adventure without a specific plan, or without knowing even what direction in which to head, read culturally? Would that have been something Koreans would have done? Would it be something you would normally have done at home in the US? Have you found spontaneous adventure before? If so, was having the adventure a planned hope or just a side-effect of experience free of expectation? Why is it significant that the speaker and his friend were disappointed? Exploring the answers to some of these questions could help you decide upon a certain type of reflection which might work well here, which might make both the reader and the speaker see the experience through a nuanced light.
PS: Thanks for this post; it made me think of my own misadventures abroad and now I want to write about those. :)
As usual, your language is wonderful and the details you share are interesting and evocative. Korea really does seem to be a subject around which your writing flourishes and I'm sure the experiences you had there and the clash of cultures aids in writing. That being said, should you choose to make this post into a more detailed and rounded out draft, there needs to be more of the reflection which we've been talking about in class. Here we have the memory of what you and Corey actually did, but readers have little to no indication of what the speaker thought about the experience, then or now. Of course, the speaker didn't seem to have the great time and adventure he was hoping for, but what about his outlook made it so? How might the speaker view the experience differently after the distance of time and space? What about this particular night stuck out in the speaker's memory? What was life like in Migeum so that the speaker thought he might gain something else from Daegu? How might this desire for adventure without a specific plan, or without knowing even what direction in which to head, read culturally? Would that have been something Koreans would have done? Would it be something you would normally have done at home in the US? Have you found spontaneous adventure before? If so, was having the adventure a planned hope or just a side-effect of experience free of expectation? Why is it significant that the speaker and his friend were disappointed? Exploring the answers to some of these questions could help you decide upon a certain type of reflection which might work well here, which might make both the reader and the speaker see the experience through a nuanced light.
PS: Thanks for this post; it made me think of my own misadventures abroad and now I want to write about those. :)
Response to Pam's final week reportage, Final Week
Pam,
First of all, the language here is really wonderful. The ways in which you frame the "stalker" as "investigating" and "profiling" are really interesting and lend a more legitimized voice to the stalker. Instead of some creepy stalker, this stalker is more like a PI, more stalking for a legal reason, more valid in their views. Then, the way you turn that legitimacy on its head and invert the credibility, turn it into vulnerability, and give the stalkee the power works even better after you have built up the opposite with such language.
Also, this piece goes a little bit beyond mere reportage to me. I see you beginning to reflect on the implications of first impressions, of our own judgments, of the power structure of any given situation and how easily that structure can crumble or invert. These are the elements which I think could be built upon in later drafts should you choose to take this post in that direction. If not, these same observations could prove very interesting in relation to a number of situations about which you could write. This type of self-critique, I think, is exactly what Dr. Davidson has been looking for from us. The sense that the speaker is far from infallible and that he/she is aware of their own fault, to a certain extent, makes them a more credible narrator, and credibility, although subjective, seems to be a rather pivotal part of creative non-fiction to me.
First of all, the language here is really wonderful. The ways in which you frame the "stalker" as "investigating" and "profiling" are really interesting and lend a more legitimized voice to the stalker. Instead of some creepy stalker, this stalker is more like a PI, more stalking for a legal reason, more valid in their views. Then, the way you turn that legitimacy on its head and invert the credibility, turn it into vulnerability, and give the stalkee the power works even better after you have built up the opposite with such language.
Also, this piece goes a little bit beyond mere reportage to me. I see you beginning to reflect on the implications of first impressions, of our own judgments, of the power structure of any given situation and how easily that structure can crumble or invert. These are the elements which I think could be built upon in later drafts should you choose to take this post in that direction. If not, these same observations could prove very interesting in relation to a number of situations about which you could write. This type of self-critique, I think, is exactly what Dr. Davidson has been looking for from us. The sense that the speaker is far from infallible and that he/she is aware of their own fault, to a certain extent, makes them a more credible narrator, and credibility, although subjective, seems to be a rather pivotal part of creative non-fiction to me.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Final Week
"To see the world, after all, either through a magnifying glass or a poem, is the first step toward wanting to preserve it."
"Wendell is speculating on the brain of a bird, on what a bird can know."
"'I don't use that word [environment],' Wendell replies. 'It's an abstraction. It separates the organism from its place, and there is no such place.'"
-All of the above are from an article about Wendell Barry by Erick Reece
"Garden & Gun" -the name of the magazine from which the above-mentioned article came...the pairing of such seemingly diametrically opposed nouns for the title of a magazine about "southern" American life was interesting to me. What was really funny was that my mother and sister, neither having any literary training, were the first to comment on, and laugh at, the name of the magazine I was reading in the hospital waiting room, bringing its interest to mind for me.
"Wendell is speculating on the brain of a bird, on what a bird can know."
"'I don't use that word [environment],' Wendell replies. 'It's an abstraction. It separates the organism from its place, and there is no such place.'"
-All of the above are from an article about Wendell Barry by Erick Reece
"Garden & Gun" -the name of the magazine from which the above-mentioned article came...the pairing of such seemingly diametrically opposed nouns for the title of a magazine about "southern" American life was interesting to me. What was really funny was that my mother and sister, neither having any literary training, were the first to comment on, and laugh at, the name of the magazine I was reading in the hospital waiting room, bringing its interest to mind for me.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Response to Pam's memory week 7, Week 7
Pam,
I think the "uncomfortable turn" you refer to in your note is exactly what makes this entry interesting. I like the shift from physical pain to emotional, and the emphasis that, while both are real, one is given privilege over the other. To a certain extent, this reminds me of "The Pain Scale." This piece, like Biss' plays with the arbitrariness of measuring pain, but here there doesn't seem to be a clearly defined scale. Emotional pain is highly subjective, not quantitative.
Also strong here is your reflection, the questions you are seeking to answer for yourself. What I would suggest here, however, is that you ground that reflection more in the physical. What I mean by this is, you give readers concrete details about the scenes in which you talk about physical pain, but your emotional pain sections deal a lot more with reflection. Your emotional pain is like our understandings of it, hidden, rumored, guessed at. While this may be interesting in terms of talking about the social aspect of emotional pain, how it usually is rumored and hidden, this social aspect doesn't feature prominently here. So, in essence, it may be helpful to go either way here: amp up the social implications and instead of the actual emotional pain, show us the students whispering, the rumor mill turning or focus on the actual emotional pain and what it looks like. While it may not be quantitative, it does appear in some way. What does your pain look like? Your best friends? Do we, as you seem to suggest about physical pain, handle emotional pain differently?
I think the "uncomfortable turn" you refer to in your note is exactly what makes this entry interesting. I like the shift from physical pain to emotional, and the emphasis that, while both are real, one is given privilege over the other. To a certain extent, this reminds me of "The Pain Scale." This piece, like Biss' plays with the arbitrariness of measuring pain, but here there doesn't seem to be a clearly defined scale. Emotional pain is highly subjective, not quantitative.
Also strong here is your reflection, the questions you are seeking to answer for yourself. What I would suggest here, however, is that you ground that reflection more in the physical. What I mean by this is, you give readers concrete details about the scenes in which you talk about physical pain, but your emotional pain sections deal a lot more with reflection. Your emotional pain is like our understandings of it, hidden, rumored, guessed at. While this may be interesting in terms of talking about the social aspect of emotional pain, how it usually is rumored and hidden, this social aspect doesn't feature prominently here. So, in essence, it may be helpful to go either way here: amp up the social implications and instead of the actual emotional pain, show us the students whispering, the rumor mill turning or focus on the actual emotional pain and what it looks like. While it may not be quantitative, it does appear in some way. What does your pain look like? Your best friends? Do we, as you seem to suggest about physical pain, handle emotional pain differently?
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