Richard Rodriguez (piqued my interest) From "Mexico's Children"
M.J. Iuppa Daylight Savings Time
This reads like straight poetry, abstract and lyrical. I'm not going to act like I completely have a handle on it, because I spent most of my time reading this just admiring sentences and thoughts and fragments and phrases. "watching the highway lines breaking up like Morse code." She compares shutting a door to the flick of a Zippo lighter. I think the title is a play on that phrase, saving as in preserving in mind, not turning back the clock (though I know the author wishes she could relive it). There's almost no general detail about the relationship, just the wildly specific, but I envy this sylvan and inherently natural passion of both the affair and the writer's voice. And I mean natural as close as possible to the root of the word, the intended meaning, nature-al.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Rodriguez/Didion response
I thought, in the first few pages of Rodriguez' essay, that I would enjoy it throughout. However, I didn't care for his shift from presenting San Francisco as a location of change and of sadness within the gay rights movement to the emphasis on architectural characteristics. I loved presenting the parade as at first unabashed celebration, and then as a sort of tarnished but still-proud beast, a bird of prey with sharp talons but clipped wings. Rodriguez kept going from spectacular writing to mundane sections for me; I was never fully invested. One place where I thought he connected was the body building, which he describes as "a parody of labor, a useless accumulation of the laborer's bulk and strength...and yet there is something businesslike about habitues, and the gym is filled with the punch-clock logic of the workplace. (764-765)" Overall though, I thought it was a promising writer with tedious subject matter.
Didion seems to present New York as a place for perpetual outsiders; everyone is transient in their own minds, but the city eventually becomes habit, with familiar faces and similar high-minded attitudes abounding. Perhaps that's a lot of the appeal of New York; It's like a bright light for ambitious minds, irresistible to dreamers, they swarm like flies, most getting zapped by the current of the city. The rules of other places just don't seem to matter; you swap keys and pull all-nighters and live without furniture and with billowing gold curtains dancing outside windows. Didion seems to believe that there is a process for New York, the early wide-eyed romanticism of whimsy, followed by settling into possibly peculiar habits, before being disenchanted with the pomp of the city, a claustrophobia of the body and mind. "It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair," says Didion (687). This was more palatable than Rodriguez' portrait of San Francisco, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed either.
Didion seems to present New York as a place for perpetual outsiders; everyone is transient in their own minds, but the city eventually becomes habit, with familiar faces and similar high-minded attitudes abounding. Perhaps that's a lot of the appeal of New York; It's like a bright light for ambitious minds, irresistible to dreamers, they swarm like flies, most getting zapped by the current of the city. The rules of other places just don't seem to matter; you swap keys and pull all-nighters and live without furniture and with billowing gold curtains dancing outside windows. Didion seems to believe that there is a process for New York, the early wide-eyed romanticism of whimsy, followed by settling into possibly peculiar habits, before being disenchanted with the pomp of the city, a claustrophobia of the body and mind. "It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair," says Didion (687). This was more palatable than Rodriguez' portrait of San Francisco, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed either.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Media
The tragic arc is an invaluable element of storytelling. It casts an entity in a sympathetic light, begging "what-ifs" and "why them's?" Television news loves to do this, disasters that humanize the victims, the story between the lines of the police report.
Tangent time; it's bullshit that people use the expression "Only the good die young" when someone passes away unexpectedly. My friend's sister died in a car crash in Florida this week, and people are consoling themselves with that expression. Do they even understand what they're saying, peanut-brained simpletons?
It's not that literally bad people live longer, and that duration of life is inversely proportional to kindness. If their thick skulls could process beyond the surface level, they would realize that the expression refers to the change in perception once someone's gone. "Only the good die young" means that those lost are always seen more favorably; if they were a douchebag, you just shelf that info to be respectful. People are kinder in death, wax nostalgic in ways that would never happen during life. No one ever calls me a "beautiful angel" within earshot.Appreciate what you have when it's there, not when you miss it.
But what I'm also mad about is so loosely threaded with this essay's topic, it literally only shares the same word. I feel like this is supposed to be about forms of media for entertainment, not the news media. So, um, yeah that Bachelor finale was really something. We sure learned alot about the minds of people from the voyeuristic mating process. Oh, and the roses and the love, so genuine, for sure can be found amidst meddling producers within a fucking bubble. That's how love works.
I'm moving back to the Steubenville rape case, so I can lose more of you in your own opinions of it, incite other angers. CNN, supposed bastion of neutrality, made the unfathomable decision to paint the rapists as victim, sentences ruining their "promising" futures. God knows I want the fate of society to be in the hands of juvenile rapists. Those poor children, and they're still innocent children, have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. Oh the humanity! How inconvenient, almost as inconvenient as dragging around a lifeless girl described as a "corpse" from party to party, repeatedly violating her, and documenting it. Stupid, broken court system, making these local upstanding heroes serve as much as two years for these silly offenses. Just let boys be boys and kids be kids, lighten up, y'all--it's only rape.
Fuck Poppy Harlow, the CNN reporter who said it was difficult to watch Malik Richmond cry out that no one will want him after his sentencing. She said it was “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.” LINK
Fuck CNN for adopting a tone sympathetic to rape. Candy Crowley, the anchor at the time of their coverage, happened to be on campus Monday night. I wanted to confront her on the network's inexcusable tone, how could a sound-minded, good-hearted person accept that filth? "You're morally bankrupt," I would shout in the climax of my admonishment. "A sellout. And you should be ashamed."
I almost made it to the event, but I was too busy watching TV, desensitized and drowning.
Tangent time; it's bullshit that people use the expression "Only the good die young" when someone passes away unexpectedly. My friend's sister died in a car crash in Florida this week, and people are consoling themselves with that expression. Do they even understand what they're saying, peanut-brained simpletons?
It's not that literally bad people live longer, and that duration of life is inversely proportional to kindness. If their thick skulls could process beyond the surface level, they would realize that the expression refers to the change in perception once someone's gone. "Only the good die young" means that those lost are always seen more favorably; if they were a douchebag, you just shelf that info to be respectful. People are kinder in death, wax nostalgic in ways that would never happen during life. No one ever calls me a "beautiful angel" within earshot.Appreciate what you have when it's there, not when you miss it.
But what I'm also mad about is so loosely threaded with this essay's topic, it literally only shares the same word. I feel like this is supposed to be about forms of media for entertainment, not the news media. So, um, yeah that Bachelor finale was really something. We sure learned alot about the minds of people from the voyeuristic mating process. Oh, and the roses and the love, so genuine, for sure can be found amidst meddling producers within a fucking bubble. That's how love works.
I'm moving back to the Steubenville rape case, so I can lose more of you in your own opinions of it, incite other angers. CNN, supposed bastion of neutrality, made the unfathomable decision to paint the rapists as victim, sentences ruining their "promising" futures. God knows I want the fate of society to be in the hands of juvenile rapists. Those poor children, and they're still innocent children, have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. Oh the humanity! How inconvenient, almost as inconvenient as dragging around a lifeless girl described as a "corpse" from party to party, repeatedly violating her, and documenting it. Stupid, broken court system, making these local upstanding heroes serve as much as two years for these silly offenses. Just let boys be boys and kids be kids, lighten up, y'all--it's only rape.
Fuck Poppy Harlow, the CNN reporter who said it was difficult to watch Malik Richmond cry out that no one will want him after his sentencing. She said it was “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.” LINK
Fuck CNN for adopting a tone sympathetic to rape. Candy Crowley, the anchor at the time of their coverage, happened to be on campus Monday night. I wanted to confront her on the network's inexcusable tone, how could a sound-minded, good-hearted person accept that filth? "You're morally bankrupt," I would shout in the climax of my admonishment. "A sellout. And you should be ashamed."
I almost made it to the event, but I was too busy watching TV, desensitized and drowning.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Eggers comparison
pp 90. "So we usually eat on the coffee table. If the coffee table is beyond clearing, we eat on the family room floor. If the family room floor is covered with plates from the night before, we eat on my bed." (and the half-page leading up to this)
pp 178 "We do not know why he wants to do this, to get in a car with four strangers and run naked on a beach and be photographed doing it, and come to think of it, we do not want to know."
Both of these are weird and funny predicaments that Eggers ends up in, and they show a sort of incompetence that he uses to undercut his anger at being criticized for being inept (or actually being inept). In the first, Eggers is unable to serve a meal on the main table because of the ping-pong net sawing it in half. Of course it's far too much effort to unhook one side, walk a few steps, and repeat. Why do that when there's so much room in other spaces. You know you're living when you recline and dine sprawled on memory foam. The Romans ate while relaxing, and they did some good shit, so it's clearly part of Eggers' desire to impart culture onto Toph, and not because he's lazy as hell.
Likewise, as the nude photoshoot idea is deflating in a kind of freefall of expectation, Eggers gets what he wants in a willing participant. But on further rumination, is that what he really wants, this weirdo? I think it's a really funny spot to kind of backtrack and make a joke about this Prince-Albert clad enthusiastic exhibitionist. I just had the urge to use lol at the end of the last line, then realized that doing so would eliminate the modicum of academic respect we're still trying to preserve. Close call though, in all honesty.
So both of these passages are in a similar style, kind of plain writing in covering a clearly funny premise. Overindulging in language would negate the humor, so Eggers reigns in the length and allows the funny to roam free. Considering most of his style is verbose eccentricity, this shift allows the humor to shine through and made both of these moments stand out amidst a sea of hyper neurosis.
Friday, March 1, 2013
An Exploratory Post of Staggering Mediocrity
For my Eggers emulation, I'm going to introduce my last post, found directly under this...you could read my blog from the top and it would be pre-essay material coming before the real piece. Link here
The following essay ventures into the mind of an erratic and honest thinker. A thinker who battles anxiety now, and bears in the future.
Is the title of this blog post insinuating that this post is mediocre, or that the previous Woolf emulation is mediocre? Is the mediocrity spread in a thick layer through both posts? Where does the underselling stop and the beauty begin? All of these questions, and more, will not be answered in this piece. I'm seriously going to not answer so many questions, things like: Why is the world poor? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if it was paired with a lumberjack like how police have K9 units, in a deciduous forest? Why does Krispy Kreme throw dozens of donuts in the trash every night? I'm not going to answer any of that.
Some components of a great story are action, violence, and confusing love triangles- or at least that's what Hollywood tells me. You get none of that, unless your idea of a love triangle is a brief and misplaced homoerotic longing, then there's plenty of that to go around. So sultry!
I'd like to take this time to acknowledge some important people in my life that have shaped both this and the ensuing piece. Hey, Ms. Lynch! Remember when you said that I changed from 7th to 8th grade, implied it was for the worse, and asked if my parents were getting a divorce? I do! Then I'd like to shout out my mom for believing that I would be painfully shy and it would inhibit my life. Does a painfully shy person rap over Gucci Mane's Orange Juice instrumental with words inspired by Huxley's Brave New World? I think not (John was the only Caucasian on the Savage Reservation/Information got me sayin' 'What the Ford is up with that?). Thanks to Mrs. Knight for banning all balls on the playground and teaching me how to successfully stage a peaceful protest, making me like a Gandhi of Jr. High, but fatter (Buddha?). And finally, thanks to my editor, the squiggly red line under shittily-typed words; couldn't have done it without ya, buddy.
Make up your own damn themes, I'm not spoon-feeding you.
The following essay ventures into the mind of an erratic and honest thinker. A thinker who battles anxiety now, and bears in the future.
Is the title of this blog post insinuating that this post is mediocre, or that the previous Woolf emulation is mediocre? Is the mediocrity spread in a thick layer through both posts? Where does the underselling stop and the beauty begin? All of these questions, and more, will not be answered in this piece. I'm seriously going to not answer so many questions, things like: Why is the world poor? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if it was paired with a lumberjack like how police have K9 units, in a deciduous forest? Why does Krispy Kreme throw dozens of donuts in the trash every night? I'm not going to answer any of that.
Some components of a great story are action, violence, and confusing love triangles- or at least that's what Hollywood tells me. You get none of that, unless your idea of a love triangle is a brief and misplaced homoerotic longing, then there's plenty of that to go around. So sultry!
I'd like to take this time to acknowledge some important people in my life that have shaped both this and the ensuing piece. Hey, Ms. Lynch! Remember when you said that I changed from 7th to 8th grade, implied it was for the worse, and asked if my parents were getting a divorce? I do! Then I'd like to shout out my mom for believing that I would be painfully shy and it would inhibit my life. Does a painfully shy person rap over Gucci Mane's Orange Juice instrumental with words inspired by Huxley's Brave New World? I think not (John was the only Caucasian on the Savage Reservation/Information got me sayin' 'What the Ford is up with that?). Thanks to Mrs. Knight for banning all balls on the playground and teaching me how to successfully stage a peaceful protest, making me like a Gandhi of Jr. High, but fatter (Buddha?). And finally, thanks to my editor, the squiggly red line under shittily-typed words; couldn't have done it without ya, buddy.
Make up your own damn themes, I'm not spoon-feeding you.
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