Reviews

Monday, June 18, 2012

No Mirror: Native American Story Structure in Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”

As I need some time to flush out some current post I'm working on, I thought this would be a good time to share an essay I wrote last summer about Alexie's story, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  What I'd really appreciate is feedback, especially by Natives.  Please post your thoughts and experiences, whether you agree with my observations or not.

In a recent class in my MFA program, I was assigned to write an essay on Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and decided to write off the following question developed by my professor:

Some critics would refer to Alexie's and other contemporary writers' fiction as "committed" fiction--that is, fiction with a clear political point of view and set of political arguments, often satirical. Committed fiction, they argue, makes its political arguments organic to the narratives they tell but they are not "didactic"--that is, intended to teach as moral instruction in a patronizing way. Is Alexie's story didactic or "committed"? What implicit political arguments is the narrator making? How are they organic to the narrative? Or are they simply heavy-handed?

I say “write off,” because, based on the information given in the prompt, I’m not sure either term quite works, and so I’ll have to modify the prompt, as I use it.  At first glance, it seems “Committed” would probably work:   any politics in this story are “organic to the narrative” and are not meant to “teach…moral instruction in a patronizing way.”   And yet, the term and its definition feel wrong to me.  To explain my reaction, I must first explain that I’m married into a Navajo family and have lived and taught on the Navajo Nation for eight years.  (As I write this, my wife’s family is sponsoring a family reunion.  However, if I let them know my intentions, they’ll say, “Always the bilagaana (white-man) trying to steal our culture; always the bilagaana trying to teach something.”  They’ll be joking and deadly serious at the same time and there will be no way to separate the joke from the non-joke, because in Navajo culture the joke and non-joke are fused—the sarcasm is there, but it is not meant to sting or change anything, it just is.)   Navajo obviously is a complete separate culture and language than Alexie’s, an oversight often made by whites, who treat Native Americans as if they came from one single, united culture, even though each tribe has its own language and religious beliefs, many of which clash.  However, there is a common Native culture and humor that is shared among the tribes, which is either intrinsic to all Native Americans, or has developed through the long history of white-imposed Indian Schools and the more recent inter-tribal Powwow circuit.  It is, I believe, this larger contemporary Native American culture Alexie is writing about, and this larger Native American audience Alexie is writing to, not Anglo-Americans.   It is a mistake to believe this story was tailored for our sensibilities in any way.

Which is why, ultimately, as useful as the prompt is, it fails.  As I will show, it imposes Anglo-American thinking on a Native American narrative structure.  It assumes an Anglo-American purpose for story telling, which Native Americans do not share.  Anglos, as I’m doing here, write primarily to persuade.  Rhetoric is just a part of who we are.  To make a point, to be slightly combative, to outwit, outsmart, debate, is just who we are, and we assume that is universally true of all cultures, and it’s not.  From what I’ve observed, “out-smarting” is definitely part of Navajo culture, but it’s in jest, and unlike in white-culture, it is not the primary purpose of language.  We use language to try to change the world to how we want it; Native Americans use language to share the world as it already exists.  There is no political agenda.  The point of the story is the story itself, as evidenced by an interview with the Acoma Indian poet, Simon J. Ortiz:

Why do you write?  Who do you write for?

Because Indians always tell a story.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.

Who do you write for besides yourself?

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

                This short excerpt models Native American thinking and communication in several important ways.  First, it uses repetition, by fours, as its primary structure.  First Ortiz says he writes, “to tell a story.”  Then he says, “the only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.”   Next he says “the only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.”  Finally, he says, “Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.”  He repeats, and then adds, deepening the meaning, each time he repeats, until the fourth time, when the “ah-ha” moment is allowed to shine through in all its glory.  It’s significant that this comes from an interview.  Ortiz did not compose it this way for an effect; it’s just how he organically thinks and communicates.  Native American students in public schools, and I presume college as well, often have their writing marked down for being redundant because Anglo-writing is thesis-driven, whereas Native American communication is experience-driven.  In white society, you state your theses, and then back it up with evidence.  In Native American societies, you share your experience and discover the truth through the narrative journey.   An Indian will not tell you what you need to know; they will only share with you what they learned along the way, which completely obliterates political discourse as we understand it.  Politics at the Chapter House do not proceed as they do in Washington, even if the outcomes are similar.

                This is the same basic narrative structure for Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  Because I’m Anglo, after I finished the story, I initially thought, “Where was the fistfight?,” which of the characters are the Lone Ranger? (Tonto was obvious enough even for me), and “Where is heaven in the story?”  The title seemed random, and the events seemed unrelated:  1) a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk; 2) a break-up with a white girlfriend, 3) a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief; and 4) looking for a job in the white-man’s world.

            But, the title is not random—it is the essential experience the story shares: how “The Lone Ranger” (whites) and Tonto (the narrator) battle it out.  However, there is another important part of the title, which is “Heaven.”  As there is absolutely no reference to an after-life in the story, and all the details are clearly of this world—7-11, driving around Seattle to avoid his girlfriend, playing basketball, looking through want-ads—one can only assume “heaven” is this life.

            That was my experience living on the Rez.  I was treated as the enemy, but a friendly enemy, like an opponent in a game of Rez-ball, which is both serious and not serious at the same time.   There was a keen awareness of what my people had done to the Navajo people, a distrust that anything had fundamentally changed (in other words, my being there and teaching their children was still eroding the traditional culture as the presence of whites always has done), but a bond still existed, in the bigger bother-hood of life, that was larger than the tribal warfare between whites and Navajos.  Native Americans, unlike whites, have no need to hate their enemies, nor convert them.   Tease them, yes.  Laugh at them, yes.  But hate, or wish to alter their basic nature, no.  And, whether we like it or not, no need to forgive us either, because, first what we’ve done is so profoundly awful it is beyond forgiveness, and second, as Native Americans are culturally inward looking, rather than outward looking, we are not important enough to forgive.  We are not “the people.”  Native Americans believe they continued just fine before us, fine with us, and will continue just fine without us, if that day shall ever come.    

            My initial trouble at fully understanding the text arose from the fact that despite being married into a Navajo family, despite having lived and taught on the Navajo reservation for eight years, I am still primarily a white-thinker.  After reading Ortiz again, thinking about story telling in my classroom, thinking about story telling in my wife’s family, it became obvious.  This story is not about seemingly unrelated events--a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk, a break-up with a white girlfriend, a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief, or about looking for a job in the white-man’s world—all used as details to frame a larger story about more global historical issues.  It’s not political at all.

            This brings us to the second important point about Native American narrative structure as evidenced in the Ortiz quote:  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.  Native American narrative overall is designed for the good of the tribe, the clan, the family, not some external audience.  As a white, you are more than welcome to sit in the circle and listen to the story being told, but the story telling is not for you, it is for the Natives.  Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is not written for us; even though we are free to enjoy it—it is written for Alexie’s people and other Native Americans who share a united experience and immediately get how the title and the four retellings of what it is like to be an Indian in white society are all different versions of the same experience.  It is meant as bitter humor—ain’t that just how it feels bro, when you’re in a 7-ll late at night, and it’s just assumed you’re there to steal?   This is not explaining, this is not converting, this is not making political statements.  It’s shit, this is how it feels, ain’t it?  And then big, rolling laughter after because it hurts too damn much to cry.  No fault.  No demon.  Just is.

 The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says:  this is what it was like when Kit Carson and his Calvary rode through the Chinle Valley and burned our crops and homes, and chased your great- grandparents up into Canyon de Chelly and the only reason you’re here alive is because your grandmother as a baby was taken and hidden in a juniper tree and somehow survived a couple of days without food or water until her parents could come back to get her.     The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  And this is what it’s like to go to boarding school and not be able to see your family or speak your language or eat your food or practice your religion.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them.  This is what it’s like to be “Too hot to sleep”  and “walk to the Third Avenue 7-11 for a Creamsicle and the company of a graveyard-shift cashier” (Alexie, 15) in a city that is built on your land but is built in the image of your enemy—to be alive in a country that attempted to annihilate your people and now wants forgiveness;  this is how [you] were born, how [you] came to this certain place, how [you]  continued:

  “Disembodied, I could never see everything that was happening.  Whites killing Indians and Indians killing whites…Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head… Even more terrifying, though, is the fact those kinds of things are happening today in places like El Salvador” (17).

The story isn’t political because there is not enough evidence to credibly believe things will ever change between cultures who dominate and cultures who are dominated.    Instead, the story is a manual on how to survive, written for much the same reasons Ortiz writes:

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

If the story is political in any way, it is political this way.  It is sovereign: independent of our usual rhetorical structures, independent of our usual purposes in writing, independent of Anglos as an audience, only sharing what is universal—anger, hurt, love, getting on with life—because there is no way not to share those universal feelings when telling a good story.  In short, it is political in that it refuses to mirror Anglo society.    And that does change us, because it forces us to accept that the way we mentally organize the world is not the only way.   We have to let go of our expectations, our politics, and enter the story on its own native terms or sit around the peripheral only half getting the humor, which is what I spend much of my life doing.  But that too is a good journey. 

It is significant that Alexie closes with these parallel journeys.  The narrator and his girl friend can both say sorry, but she, very Anglo, ends by saying, “I want to change the world” (19).

The narrator, in contrast, closes by saying:

I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where the ghosts of salmon jump.  I wish I could sleep.  I put down my paper or book and turn off al the lights, lie quietly in the dark.  It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again.  There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that.

I know how all my dreams end anyway. (19)

 For her, there is still the possibility of a better world, that distant horizon, that brighter tomorrow, that final frontier, that constant movement that keeps her from the present.

For him, there are only the ghosts of some better yesteryear and the heaven of now (with or without sleep).  There is only the past and the is.   The future does not exist, except as another is moment, because experience has taught him dreams “end anyway.”  Surviving, carrying on, is moment by moment, story by story, survival.

 © Steve Brown, 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

No Mirror: Native American Story Structure in Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”

As I need some time to flush out some current post I'm working on, I thought this would be a good time to share an essay I wrote last summer about Alexie's story, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  What I'd really appreciate is feedback, especially by Natives.  Please post your thoughts and experiences, whether you agree with my observations or not.

In a recent class in my MFA program, I was assigned to write an essay on Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and decided to write off the following question developed by my professor:

Some critics would refer to Alexie's and other contemporary writers' fiction as "committed" fiction--that is, fiction with a clear political point of view and set of political arguments, often satirical. Committed fiction, they argue, makes its political arguments organic to the narratives they tell but they are not "didactic"--that is, intended to teach as moral instruction in a patronizing way. Is Alexie's story didactic or "committed"? What implicit political arguments is the narrator making? How are they organic to the narrative? Or are they simply heavy-handed?

I say “write off,” because, based on the information given in the prompt, I’m not sure either term quite works, and so I’ll have to modify the prompt, as I use it.  At first glance, it seems “Committed” would probably work:   any politics in this story are “organic to the narrative” and are not meant to “teach…moral instruction in a patronizing way.”   And yet, the term and its definition feel wrong to me.  To explain my reaction, I must first explain that I’m married into a Navajo family and have lived and taught on the Navajo Nation for eight years.  (As I write this, my wife’s family is sponsoring a family reunion.  However, if I let them know my intentions, they’ll say, “Always the bilagaana (white-man) trying to steal our culture; always the bilagaana trying to teach something.”  They’ll be joking and deadly serious at the same time and there will be no way to separate the joke from the non-joke, because in Navajo culture the joke and non-joke are fused—the sarcasm is there, but it is not meant to sting or change anything, it just is.)   Navajo obviously is a complete separate culture and language than Alexie’s, an oversight often made by whites, who treat Native Americans as if they came from one single, united culture, even though each tribe has its own language and religious beliefs, many of which clash.  However, there is a common Native culture and humor that is shared among the tribes, which is either intrinsic to all Native Americans, or has developed through the long history of white-imposed Indian Schools and the more recent inter-tribal Powwow circuit.  It is, I believe, this larger contemporary Native American culture Alexie is writing about, and this larger Native American audience Alexie is writing to, not Anglo-Americans.   It is a mistake to believe this story was tailored for our sensibilities in any way.

Which is why, ultimately, as useful as the prompt is, it fails.  As I will show, it imposes Anglo-American thinking on a Native American narrative structure.  It assumes an Anglo-American purpose for story telling, which Native Americans do not share.  Anglos, as I’m doing here, write primarily to persuade.  Rhetoric is just a part of who we are.  To make a point, to be slightly combative, to outwit, outsmart, debate, is just who we are, and we assume that is universally true of all cultures, and it’s not.  From what I’ve observed, “out-smarting” is definitely part of Navajo culture, but it’s in jest, and unlike in white-culture, it is not the primary purpose of language.  We use language to try to change the world to how we want it; Native Americans use language to share the world as it already exists.  There is no political agenda.  The point of the story is the story itself, as evidenced by an interview with the Acoma Indian poet, Simon J. Ortiz:

Why do you write?  Who do you write for?

Because Indians always tell a story.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.

Who do you write for besides yourself?

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

                This short excerpt models Native American thinking and communication in several important ways.  First, it uses repetition, by fours, as its primary structure.  First Ortiz says he writes, “to tell a story.”  Then he says, “the only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.”   Next he says “the only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.”  Finally, he says, “Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.”  He repeats, and then adds, deepening the meaning, each time he repeats, until the fourth time, when the “ah-ha” moment is allowed to shine through in all its glory.  It’s significant that this comes from an interview.  Ortiz did not compose it this way for an effect; it’s just how he organically thinks and communicates.  Native American students in public schools, and I presume college as well, often have their writing marked down for being redundant because Anglo-writing is thesis-driven, whereas Native American communication is experience-driven.  In white society, you state your theses, and then back it up with evidence.  In Native American societies, you share your experience and discover the truth through the narrative journey.   An Indian will not tell you what you need to know; they will only share with you what they learned along the way, which completely obliterates political discourse as we understand it.  Politics at the Chapter House do not proceed as they do in Washington, even if the outcomes are similar.

                This is the same basic narrative structure for Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  Because I’m Anglo, after I finished the story, I initially thought, “Where was the fistfight?,” which of the characters are the Lone Ranger? (Tonto was obvious enough even for me), and “Where is heaven in the story?”  The title seemed random, and the events seemed unrelated:  1) a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk; 2) a break-up with a white girlfriend, 3) a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief; and 4) looking for a job in the white-man’s world.

            But, the title is not random—it is the essential experience the story shares: how “The Lone Ranger” (whites) and Tonto (the narrator) battle it out.  However, there is another important part of the title, which is “Heaven.”  As there is absolutely no reference to an after-life in the story, and all the details are clearly of this world—7-11, driving around Seattle to avoid his girlfriend, playing basketball, looking through want-ads—one can only assume “heaven” is this life.

            That was my experience living on the Rez.  I was treated as the enemy, but a friendly enemy, like an opponent in a game of Rez-ball, which is both serious and not serious at the same time.   There was a keen awareness of what my people had done to the Navajo people, a distrust that anything had fundamentally changed (in other words, my being there and teaching their children was still eroding the traditional culture as the presence of whites always has done), but a bond still existed, in the bigger bother-hood of life, that was larger than the tribal warfare between whites and Navajos.  Native Americans, unlike whites, have no need to hate their enemies, nor convert them.   Tease them, yes.  Laugh at them, yes.  But hate, or wish to alter their basic nature, no.  And, whether we like it or not, no need to forgive us either, because, first what we’ve done is so profoundly awful it is beyond forgiveness, and second, as Native Americans are culturally inward looking, rather than outward looking, we are not important enough to forgive.  We are not “the people.”  Native Americans believe they continued just fine before us, fine with us, and will continue just fine without us, if that day shall ever come.    

            My initial trouble at fully understanding the text arose from the fact that despite being married into a Navajo family, despite having lived and taught on the Navajo reservation for eight years, I am still primarily a white-thinker.  After reading Ortiz again, thinking about story telling in my classroom, thinking about story telling in my wife’s family, it became obvious.  This story is not about seemingly unrelated events--a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk, a break-up with a white girlfriend, a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief, or about looking for a job in the white-man’s world—all used as details to frame a larger story about more global historical issues.  It’s not political at all.

            This brings us to the second important point about Native American narrative structure as evidenced in the Ortiz quote:  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.  Native American narrative overall is designed for the good of the tribe, the clan, the family, not some external audience.  As a white, you are more than welcome to sit in the circle and listen to the story being told, but the story telling is not for you, it is for the Natives.  Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is not written for us; even though we are free to enjoy it—it is written for Alexie’s people and other Native Americans who share a united experience and immediately get how the title and the four retellings of what it is like to be an Indian in white society are all different versions of the same experience.  It is meant as bitter humor—ain’t that just how it feels bro, when you’re in a 7-ll late at night, and it’s just assumed you’re there to steal?   This is not explaining, this is not converting, this is not making political statements.  It’s shit, this is how it feels, ain’t it?  And then big, rolling laughter after because it hurts too damn much to cry.  No fault.  No demon.  Just is.

 The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says:  this is what it was like when Kit Carson and his Calvary rode through the Chinle Valley and burned our crops and homes, and chased your great- grandparents up into Canyon de Chelly and the only reason you’re here alive is because your grandmother as a baby was taken and hidden in a juniper tree and somehow survived a couple of days without food or water until her parents could come back to get her.     The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  And this is what it’s like to go to boarding school and not be able to see your family or speak your language or eat your food or practice your religion.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them.  This is what it’s like to be “Too hot to sleep”  and “walk to the Third Avenue 7-11 for a Creamsicle and the company of a graveyard-shift cashier” (Alexie, 15) in a city that is built on your land but is built in the image of your enemy—to be alive in a country that attempted to annihilate your people and now wants forgiveness;  this is how [you] were born, how [you] came to this certain place, how [you]  continued:

  “Disembodied, I could never see everything that was happening.  Whites killing Indians and Indians killing whites…Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head… Even more terrifying, though, is the fact those kinds of things are happening today in places like El Salvador” (17).

The story isn’t political because there is not enough evidence to credibly believe things will ever change between cultures who dominate and cultures who are dominated.    Instead, the story is a manual on how to survive, written for much the same reasons Ortiz writes:

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

If the story is political in any way, it is political this way.  It is sovereign: independent of our usual rhetorical structures, independent of our usual purposes in writing, independent of Anglos as an audience, only sharing what is universal—anger, hurt, love, getting on with life—because there is no way not to share those universal feelings when telling a good story.  In short, it is political in that it refuses to mirror Anglo society.    And that does change us, because it forces us to accept that the way we mentally organize the world is not the only way.   We have to let go of our expectations, our politics, and enter the story on its own native terms or sit around the peripheral only half getting the humor, which is what I spend much of my life doing.  But that too is a good journey. 

It is significant that Alexie closes with these parallel journeys.  The narrator and his girl friend can both say sorry, but she, very Anglo, ends by saying, “I want to change the world” (19).

The narrator, in contrast, closes by saying:

I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where the ghosts of salmon jump.  I wish I could sleep.  I put down my paper or book and turn off al the lights, lie quietly in the dark.  It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again.  There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that.

I know how all my dreams end anyway. (19)

 For her, there is still the possibility of a better world, that distant horizon, that brighter tomorrow, that final frontier, that constant movement that keeps her from the present.

For him, there are only the ghosts of some better yesteryear and the heaven of now (with or without sleep).  There is only the past and the is.   The future does not exist, except as another is moment, because experience has taught him dreams “end anyway.”  Surviving, carrying on, is moment by moment, story by story, survival.

 © Steve Brown, 2012

Thursday, December 6, 2012

5 Books that Changed Me: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn. (Part 1: Reading Validates Interiority)

Part I:  Reading Validates Interiority
Reading was not part of my childhood.  Great Expectations was my official entry into the world of literature.  Before opening it, pop-lyrics and movies served that purpose--a place for slow, reflective dialogue between writer and audience that opens interior doors and stirs the heart to want more than what currently is.

That is, after all, why we read, isn't it?  To sip from something substantial, have a meaningful dialogue while sitting near the window, looking up now and then from the page to the snow falling in waves outside, to say, "yes, this is just how it is.  I've been looking for a long time for a way to say this."  Reading validates interiority--that the majority of our life occurs inside ourselves and that we are our own best friends, flaws and all.  I've also found, overtime, that literature alters those conversations we have with ourselves--deepens them, broadens them, and in the process makes us better people.

Marci and I have often talked about how it was always the English professors in college who were open, honest, flexible and understanding.  I actually switched majors because of this.  Growing up, I'd always wanted to be an architect and I have always loved a good structure tied to the environment.  That has never changed.  But when I entered the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, I was confronted with a competitive, corporate philosophy designed to weed out the weak and allow access to only the great.  I'm pretty talented in most creative forms--painting, drawing, writing, film, photography--and probably could have made the cut, but competitive, I'm not.  Being told the first day, "half of you will drop out of the program within the first year," did not stir me to greatness, just hate.  Reading The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand as required by all freshman Architectural students didn't drive me to become the next Howard Roarke, it just drove me to hate.

At my core, I have always known we only become fully human when we take ourselves lightly and at the same time take humanity seriously, when our goal is to help others, not obliterate them.  I quickly found that kind people inhabited the English department and that's where I wanted to be.

English professors, overall, are special people for a reason.  Books.  Not just any books, but the right kind of books.  Books that deal honestly with interiority, who we are in between doing, behind doing, in front of doing.  What we think in the midst of surviving (or not surviving) the chaos of humanity.  You simply cannot read those types of books on a regular basis and not be changed in some way no matter what type of jerk you are by nature.  And so it is the English professor who is usually the one willing to sit down and listen, ironically, even more than the psychology or sociology professor.  I always found English professors were less professional, more casual, more human, and most importantly, more versed in human nature--something an extremely shy person like myself with lots of thinking errors, needed desperately to get me through the next day.
 
I hope, like my professors, books have developed some level of depth and understanding in me that I can pass on to others.  In particular, I want to share five books that had an impact on both my writing and myself.  These are the books that have been the most essential in my life: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn.

I know most have their own list--and that's what is so wonderful, that at certain times in our lives books are our bread.  But there are also those who don't have their own list, who are struggling desperately to find interiority, but have not yet found that slow, reflective dialogue between author and self that says, "yes, this is just how it is; I'm not alone after all."  Perhaps these will be books that open that door, or open it a little wider, as interiority is an on-going meditative process which opens us up and deepens us.  I'll start next time with Great Expectations.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

5 Books that Changed Me: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn. (Part 2: Great Expectations)

1.

Great Expectations came into my life three times prior to this post.  The first time was in ninth grade, the year my family and I left my hometown in rural Utah and moved to a suburb north of Dallas, Texas.   The second was my second year at The University of Texas at Arlington, the year I switched my majors from Architecture to English Literature, which was significant, since I’d planned on being an architect since I was eight.   The most recent encounter was two years ago, the year my father died. 

Great Expectations is a unique book in that it so accurately captures the span of a life from childhood, to young adulthood, to adulthood, that as you return to it throughout your life, the book’s focus seems to shift with your own perceptions.  The Great Expectations I read in ninth grade was not the same one I read in college; nor was the Great Expectations I encountered in college the same as the one I received on my long, wintery drive back from Dad’s funeral two springs ago. 

The book is so crammed with living that it provides a lifetime of meaningful encounters.  It is now a winter afternoon at Dry Creek, eleven degrees outside, drops of water none-the-less dripping off the end of the icicles hanging from the roof eves in the afternoon sunlight.   Beyond the glass doors, the white field stretches south toward the banks of the pond and the snow-loaded spruce behind, the mountains rising in deep blue shadow beyond that.  Fire crackles in the fireplace, and I know that if I pursue Great Expectations a fourth time it will again unfold in new light.  It is simply a book that expands with each reading.

First, however, I will indulge in a bit of nostalgia along with this eggnog and chocolate cherry.  What better way to spend a winter afternoon?

2.

I must have first encountered Great Expectations in the fall for I see big, sloppy wet leaves strewn across the suburban lawns as I cut my way along the back streets between Central Expressway and the school.  At one point there is a small pond with a cul-de-sac at one end of it.  The water is stone still and sky and trees and backyards turn upside down in it.  It makes sense that this small oasis of nature between Beltline and Arapaho enters my mind and not the actual school where I read the book. Ninth grade was not a pleasant experience and I’m sure I made that walk take as long as possible.

I want to say two classes made my days there bearable, but that would be a lie.  Ninth grade was only bearable for me in the way war is for survivors.  Yes, I did make it through alive, but I was no longer whole.   I was missing the greater part of me and wouldn’t find it again until I was nearly forty.  But Mr. Terrant’s US History and Mrs. Becker’s 9^th Grade English classes did provide some intellectual framework, some spectacles, with which to make some sort of semblance of sense out of the brutality I encountered there.  Perhaps that is why I’ve spent most of my adult life teaching middle school.  Certainly, I didn’t plan on becoming Virgil leading young Dantes through the inferno of puberty, but then I don’t think spiritual journeys are ever chosen.  All our learning and growth takes place in the exact areas we choose to avoid.  Those unfortunate enough to have nothing to avoid never really grow up because they never have that ah-ha moment:  “Oh, this is how that feels.”

Anyway, at some point, I arrived at school that day.  I have blocked out the hallways--the pushing, the shoving, the stupid remarks  by tobacco-chewing, Skoal-spewing jocks followed by the giddy laughter by the most beautiful women on earth (which is what ninth grade girls seem like to a ninth grader), the embarrassment, the self-loathing, the visions of smashing those smirking faces against the lockers even though it’s absolutely impossible as they are built like Greek gods and you’re a ninety pound Mr. Gumby with limbs having as much gumption as the swaying branches of a weeping willow.  Okay, I haven’t quite blocked it out, but I’m trying.

So, instead, I’ll focus on Mrs.  Becker’s class.  She had the face of a prune, but she was clearly an angel, for she brought me the world of Pip--a world that didn’t make any more sense than my own, and therefore made all the sense in the world.  Here was a youth, like myself, with great expectations, thrown into a world so brutal and unresponsive to dreams that the only thing that could develop is clarity, regret and spiritual growth.  In this way, Great Expectations is clearly Victorian and not modern.  Out of the chaos is born insight, and therefore meaning and order.  But unlike many of its predecessors, that chaos doesn’t seem contrived to intensify the order that comes together with the happily-ever-after ending.  In fact, there is no significant happily-ever-after ending, only regret, understanding and wisdom gained--the natural products of life.  Or at least this is true if you read the original ending to the novel.  Dickens rewrite does force Victorian expectations on the novel a bit more, but even so, the ending has a soberness to it, unlike the endings of a Jane Austin novel.  In this way, it’s more mature than say many modern works, which are stuck in the nihilism of puberty:  aware that great expectations are never reached, but unaware that growth occurs in the areas we are most disillusioned with.  Much of modernism has the intellectual framework of an adolescent--a lashing out at what seems to be an unfair universe--without any openness to the grace inherent in imperfection.  Great Expectations, on the other hand, neither clings to the childlike fairytale endings of Victorianism, nor does it sit on the steps, smoking dope, wondering why life sucks like much of modernism.   Like life, Great Expectations is petty, grand, humorous and tragic.  Like life, it’s comprehensive.

But, I jump ahead.  I was not aware of all of this in ninth grade.  No, what attracted me to Great Expectations then was Estella.   I felt I knew her, longed for her, and like Pip, that I would never gain her love.  She was one girl in particular, a girl from my home town, Kelly Krouse, who I’d loved since the fifth grade (which from a ninth-grade perspective, seems like an eternity), but she was also the girl sitting behind me in Mrs. Becker’s class, sandals off, sliding the metal bars of my bookrack between her toes while we read about Estella.   I longed to turn around and tell her something courageous and true, something about how her feet were perfect, as were her eyes and smile.  But I couldn’t, because I was flawed.  I was a child and lacked the courage to reach up and partake of the forbidden fruit.   She, on the other hand, was mature and to me at least, perfect.

This is what is so universal about the Pip/Estella relationship captured in Great Expectations.  Estella is every girl to pubescent males.  Not that all girls are raised to break hearts, not that all girls are cruel, but that the nature of male and female development make them so.  Girls are busy developing into women while boys are still boys.  Girls’ earlier development gives them a magic, a power that boys just can’t comprehend, which makes boys feel insignificant.  It’s a matter of perception, but it seems fairly universal, even today, when boys and girls interact more with each other earlier in life.  Girls, perhaps experience something similar, later on, in high school and college.  But during the early teens, girls rule the world and boys long only to say, “As you wish.”  Thus, during my first reading, Great Expectations was primarily a novel about the relationship (or lack of relationship) between Pip and Estella, captured so powerfully by Dickens:

Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was about my own age.  She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.

3.

When I came to Great Expectations a second time, I was in college and never seemed to have enough money.  I came to it voluntarily, devouring it in a cold dorm, instead of working on projects over at the School of Architecture with my peers.  My roommate, Phil, and I didn’t have a microwave or fridge in the room and I didn’t have enough money for a meal plan.  I’d eat cheap foods that didn’t require refrigeration, such as bread, peanut butter and Sure Fine cookies, for as long as I could and then splurge on a hot chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes smothered in country gravy from the dining hall in the student union building.  It would have been much better to have rented a fridge and microwave and had some semblance of food in the room so that hunger wouldn’t force me to what, given my budget, were extravagant binges.  I was never too bad with money, but I always seemed to need to buy CDs  and clothes, and given my budget, these small purchases sent me into the red.  I’d bounce checks, which then would cost me more money.  During this time, Pip in London seemed to speak directly to me:

At certain times--meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our humor--I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery:

“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”

“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will believe me,” those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”

“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “Let us look into our affairs.”

We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for this purpose.  I always thought this was business, this was the way to confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat.  And I know Herbert thought so to.

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark.  Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper.  For, there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationary.

Of course finances were not my only connection with the London portion of Great Expectations.  Pip is an archetype male--as a youth, a young adult, and adult.  His fears, his follies are ours.  I had an English professor who accused us of “genuflecting greatness” and spoke of the omniscient twenty-year old embarrassed by his roots, knowing not who he really is.  We were reading The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, the story of a young minister who knows not himself, but we could have just as well been reading the London portion of Great Expectations.  The sense of arriving, the sense of intellectual superiority, the embarrassment of being connected to common folk--this is the twenties and early thirties.  And for most young men, the most common and embarrassing thing of all is Dad.  There has never been a twenty-year-old male who wasn’t sure he was so much more sophisticated, so much more intelligent than his father.  Joe fulfills the father role in Pip’s life and is no exception to this universal rule.  Pip is embarrassed by Joe’s awkward, country ways around him now that he’s a gentleman, and only realizes after, “I had neither the good sense nor good feeling to know that this was my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me”.

At that age I too was embarrassed by my past, in my small town Mormon upbringing.  But, I’m not unique in this.  For at least children born of goodly parents, it is just the pattern:   in our teens and twenties we believe we must set out to be everything our parents were not,  and by our thirties and forties we realize they didn’t do such a bad job, and often wish we could be a little more like them.

4.

It is this realization that came to me while listening to Great Expectations on my drive down the Oregon and Northern California coast and across Nevada after my father’s funeral: we find ourselves after we’ve realized that not only did our great expectations elude us, but that it doesn’t even matter.   As Pip says to Biddy, it is the journey, not arriving, that counts:

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life t hat ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there.  But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!”

To the young, this may seem like resignation.  But to the mature, it is a softening, an opening.  Except for the short Victorian nod towards a happy ending with “I saw no shadow of another parting from her,” Dickens captures this perfectly.  Estella begins:

“…I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better shape.  Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.”

“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

And the original ending never even makes that nod toward a happily-ever-after.  The journey occurs to open Pip up to understanding, not joy.

5 Books that Changed Me: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams and Small Graces by Kent Nerburn. (Part 3: Small Graces)

It’s a slate-gray day with grainy flecks of sleet dropping on old, crusted snow and bent, broken stands of rye and rabbit brush. Wild turkey peck seeds from the bare ground along the ridge between the upper and lower fields. It’s far darker than your average storm day and I’m feeling the weight.

I work with special needs children and although they are very sweet, they are physically demanding. So, I’m feeling worn out on a day I need to do lots of work on my church calling, Ward Historian.

Right now, I just don’t feel up to it. But rather than numb my mind with television or video games, as I sometimes do, I thought I might as well write the next post for my blog.

It’s somewhat appropriate that I write about Kent Nerburn’s Small Graces on a day I’m not finding much enlightenment because gritty honesty is what separates Nerburn’s inspirational writing from much of what is out there. He provides what have become common, maybe even cliché tips for transcendence through Buddhist-like attention to the moment, but there is a softness, a quiet integrity, an unspoken awareness that, yes, life is hard, that gives his writing substance.

It’s simple writing. Marci read a bit of it, concluded there wasn’t much to it and thought I could probably write a similar book better, but I don’t think she’d gotten to one of his stories, examples from everyday people who live extraordinary lives and have taught Nerburn extraordinary lessons. These small graces unfold magnificently, one after one, showings us a way to make life our art.

I would like to share one here:

In the chapter “Why Birds Fly,” Nerburn shares the story of Nikki, a friend of his who has cerebral palsy. He says, “her days were spent in a ‘sheltered workshop’ sitting at a long lunchroom table putting spatulas in plastic bags with her toes,” but “at night she wrote—holding a notebook with one foot and the pencil between her toes of the other—creating poems, visions, stories of birds in flight” (83).

He then admits that as much as he admired her vision, he was quietly horrified of her muse, for she wrote “poems to a nonexistent and unknown lover” (83).

She would say, “Someday I’m going to get married” and he would smile and nod, but admits, “like the parents in the supermarket, I averted my eyes” (83).

He then shares how he was wrong. She meets him on a street corner, shows her engagement ring, declares, “See!... I told you” (84)

Then she asks, “You know why birds fly?” (88).

Unsure whether she is joking or serious, he says, “No, tell me” (88).

To which she responds, “Because they are so damn bad at walking” (88).

I am like Nikki. If I can fly at all, it is only because I’m so damn bad at walking. In my teens and early twenties, I was driven to write because I was too damn shy to talk to anybody. But I now realize I’m not that unique. All our gifts are compensations for inadequacies. We need to realize this in order to live up to our own potential, but more importantly, we need to know this so we recognize greatness in unlikely places. What future flight goes un-fostered because we focus on stumbling feet instead of outstretched wings?

Nerburn, Kent. Small Graces. Navato: New World Library, 1998.

 

No Mirror:  Native American Story Structure in Sherman Alexie’s

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”

by Steve

In a recent class in my MFA program, I was assigned to write an essay on Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and decided to write off the following question developed by my professor:

Some critics would refer to Alexie's and other contemporary writers' fiction as "committed" fiction--that is, fiction with a clear political point of view and set of political arguments, often satirical. Committed fiction, they argue, makes its political arguments organic to the narratives they tell but they are not "didactic"--that is, intended to teach as moral instruction in a patronizing way. Is Alexie's story didactic or "committed"? What implicit political arguments is the narrator making? How are they organic to the narrative? Or are they simply heavy-handed?

I say “write off,” because, based on the information given in the prompt, I’m not sure either term quite works, and so I’ll have to modify the prompt, as I use it.  At first glance, it seems “Committed” would probably work:   any politics in this story are “organic to the narrative” and are not meant to “teach…moral instruction in a patronizing way.”   And yet, the term and its definition feel wrong to me.  To explain my reaction, I must first explain that I’m married into a Navajo family and have lived and taught on the Navajo Nation for eight years.  (As I write this, my wife’s family is sponsoring a family reunion.  However, if I let them know my intentions, they’ll say, “Always the bilagaana (white-man) trying to steal our culture; always the bilagaana trying to teach something.”  They’ll be joking and deadly serious at the same time and there will be no way to separate the joke from the non-joke, because in Navajo culture the joke and non-joke are fused—the sarcasm is there, but it is not meant to sting or change anything, it just is.)   Navajo obviously is a complete separate culture and language than Alexie’s, an oversight often made by whites, who treat Native Americans as if they came from one single, united culture, even though each tribe has its own language and religious beliefs, many of which clash.  However, there is a common Native culture and humor that is shared among the tribes, which is either intrinsic to all Native Americans, or has developed through the long history of white-imposed Indian Schools and the more recent inter-tribal Powwow circuit.  It is, I believe, this larger contemporary Native American culture Alexie is writing about, and this larger Native American audience Alexie is writing to, not Anglo-Americans.   It is a mistake to believe this story was tailored for our sensibilities in any way.

Which is why, ultimately, as useful as the prompt is, it fails.  As I will show, it imposes Anglo-American thinking on a Native American narrative structure.  It assumes an Anglo-American purpose for story telling, which Native Americans do not share.  Anglos, as I’m doing here, write primarily to persuade.  Rhetoric is just a part of who we are.  To make a point, to be slightly combative, to outwit, outsmart, debate, is just who we are, and we assume that is universally true of all cultures, and it’s not.  From what I’ve observed, “out-smarting” is definitely part of Navajo culture, but it’s in jest, and unlike in white-culture, it is not the primary purpose of language.  We use language to try to change the world to how we want it; Native Americans use language to share the world as it already exists.  There is no political agenda.  The point of the story is the story itself, as evidenced by an interview with the Acoma Indian poet, Simon J. Ortiz:

Why do you write?  Who do you write for?

Because Indians always tell a story.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.  The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.

Who do you write for besides yourself?

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

                This short excerpt models Native American thinking and communication in several important ways.  First, it uses repetition, by fours, as its primary structure.  First Ortiz says he writes, “to tell a story.”  Then he says, “the only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says.”   Next he says “the only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.”  Finally, he says, “Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.”  He repeats, and then adds, deepening the meaning, each time he repeats, until the fourth time, when the “ah-ha” moment is allowed to shine through in all its glory.  It’s significant that this comes from an interview.  Ortiz did not compose it this way for an effect; it’s just how he organically thinks and communicates.  Native American students in public schools, and I presume college as well, often have their writing marked down for being redundant because Anglo-writing is thesis-driven, whereas Native American communication is experience-driven.  In white society, you state your theses, and then back it up with evidence.  In Native American societies, you share your experience and discover the truth through the narrative journey.   An Indian will not tell you what you need to know; they will only share with you what they learned along the way, which completely obliterates political discourse as we understand it.  Politics at the Chapter House do not proceed as they do in Washington, even if the outcomes are similar.

                This is the same basic narrative structure for Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.”  Because I’m Anglo, after I finished the story, I initially thought, “Where was the fistfight?,” which of the characters are the Lone Ranger? (Tonto was obvious enough even for me), and “Where is heaven in the story?”  The title seemed random, and the events seemed unrelated:  1) a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk; 2) a break-up with a white girlfriend, 3) a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief; and 4) looking for a job in the white-man’s world.

            But, the title is not random—it is the essential experience the story shares: how “The Lone Ranger” (whites) and Tonto (the narrator) battle it out.  However, there is another important part of the title, which is “Heaven.”  As there is absolutely no reference to an after-life in the story, and all the details are clearly of this world—7-11, driving around Seattle to avoid his girlfriend, playing basketball, looking through want-ads—one can only assume “heaven” is this life.

            That was my experience living on the Rez.  I was treated as the enemy, but a friendly enemy, like an opponent in a game of Rez-ball, which is both serious and not serious at the same time.   There was a keen awareness of what my people had done to the Navajo people, a distrust that anything had fundamentally changed (in other words, my being there and teaching their children was still eroding the traditional culture as the presence of whites always has done), but a bond still existed, in the bigger bother-hood of life, that was larger than the tribal warfare between whites and Navajos.  Native Americans, unlike whites, have no need to hate their enemies, nor convert them.   Tease them, yes.  Laugh at them, yes.  But hate, or wish to alter their basic nature, no.  And, whether we like it or not, no need to forgive us either, because, first what we’ve done is so profoundly awful it is beyond forgiveness, and second, as Native Americans are culturally inward looking, rather than outward looking, we are not important enough to forgive.  We are not “the people.”  Native Americans believe they continued just fine before us, fine with us, and will continue just fine without us, if that day shall ever come.    

            My initial trouble at fully understanding the text arose from the fact that despite being married into a Navajo family, despite having lived and taught on the Navajo reservation for eight years, I am still primarily a white-thinker.  After reading Ortiz again, thinking about story telling in my classroom, thinking about story telling in my wife’s family, it became obvious.  This story is not about seemingly unrelated events--a mock confrontation with a white 7-11 clerk, a break-up with a white girlfriend, a basketball game with the white son of the Bureau of Indian Affairs chief, or about looking for a job in the white-man’s world—all used as details to frame a larger story about more global historical issues.  It’s not political at all.

            This brings us to the second important point about Native American narrative structure as evidenced in the Ortiz quote:  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.  Native American narrative overall is designed for the good of the tribe, the clan, the family, not some external audience.  As a white, you are more than welcome to sit in the circle and listen to the story being told, but the story telling is not for you, it is for the Natives.  Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is not written for us; even though we are free to enjoy it—it is written for Alexie’s people and other Native Americans who share a united experience and immediately get how the title and the four retellings of what it is like to be an Indian in white society are all different versions of the same experience.  It is meant as bitter humor—ain’t that just how it feels bro, when you’re in a 7-ll late at night, and it’s just assumed you’re there to steal?   This is not explaining, this is not converting, this is not making political statements.  It’s shit, this is how it feels, ain’t it?  And then big, rolling laughter after because it hurts too damn much to cry.  No fault.  No demon.  Just is.

 The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says:  this is what it was like when Kit Carson and his Calvary rode through the Chinle Valley and burned our crops and homes, and chased your great- grandparents up into Canyon de Chelly and the only reason you’re here alive is because your grandmother as a baby was taken and hidden in a juniper tree and somehow survived a couple of days without food or water until her parents could come back to get her.     The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way.  And this is what it’s like to go to boarding school and not be able to see your family or speak your language or eat your food or practice your religion.  Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them.  This is what it’s like to be “Too hot to sleep”  and “walk to the Third Avenue 7-11 for a Creamsicle and the company of a graveyard-shift cashier” (Alexie, 15) in a city that is built on your land but is built in the image of your enemy—to be alive in a country that attempted to annihilate your people and now wants forgiveness;  this is how [you] were born, how [you] came to this certain place, how [you]  continued:

  “Disembodied, I could never see everything that was happening.  Whites killing Indians and Indians killing whites…Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head… Even more terrifying, though, is the fact those kinds of things are happening today in places like El Salvador” (17).

The story isn’t political because there is not enough evidence to credibly believe things will ever change between cultures who dominate and cultures who are dominated.    Instead, the story is a manual on how to survive, written for much the same reasons Ortiz writes:

For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home.

If the story is political in any way, it is political this way.  It is sovereign: independent of our usual rhetorical structures, independent of our usual purposes in writing, independent of Anglos as an audience, only sharing what is universal—anger, hurt, love, getting on with life—because there is no way not to share those universal feelings when telling a good story.  In short, it is political in that it refuses to mirror Anglo society.    And that does change us, because it forces us to accept that the way we mentally organize the world is not the only way.   We have to let go of our expectations, our politics, and enter the story on its own native terms or sit around the peripheral only half getting the humor, which is what I spend much of my life doing.  But that too is a good journey. 

It is significant that Alexie closes with these parallel journeys.  The narrator and his girl friend can both say sorry, but she, very Anglo, ends by saying, “I want to change the world” (19).

The narrator, in contrast, closes by saying:

I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where the ghosts of salmon jump.  I wish I could sleep.  I put down my paper or book and turn off al the lights, lie quietly in the dark.  It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again.  There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that.

I know how all my dreams end anyway. (19)

 For her, there is still the possibility of a better world, that distant horizon, that brighter tomorrow, that final frontier, that constant movement that keeps her from the present.

For him, there are only the ghosts of some better yesteryear and the heaven of now (with or without sleep).  There is only the past and the is.   The future does not exist, except as another is moment, because experience has taught him dreams “end anyway.”  Surviving, carrying on, is moment by moment, story by story, survival.

Why do I Journal What I Read?

by Marci

I like to think I’ve grown into the reader I am today.  I don’t like reading the same types of books over and over again.  I like to challenge myself.  I try to get out of my reading comfort zone.

Maybe when I started keeping track of what I read is when I decided to challenge myself.  I wanted to have something to write about a book, something other than the plot.  When a book speaks to you, the plot becomes a little less important.

In 2003 I decided I wanted to keep a written record of the books I read.  I mainly did this because I couldn’t remember everything I wanted to-- about the books I had taken the time to read.  A few years later, Steve gave me a little journal called “Books to Check Out”.  There was a section called “favorite books/passages.” I had never thought about copying down my favorite passages.  I often underlined my favorite parts, but the books didn’t always belong to me so writing in them wouldn’t have done me any good.  Now I have a “review” journal and a few “quote” journals.  The quotes are almost always longer than my reviews.

Here’s my first review:

A Dry Spell by Susie Malony

Completed in the wee hours of June 23, 2003

A banker named Karen Grange writes to a rainmaker named Tom Keatley. 

The town of Goodlands, North Dakota has had a drought for four years.  Karen hates having to foreclose on the people of her community.  She has finally found a place where she fits.

Vida Whalley takes revenge and plants a seed of fear into the people by secretly causing bad things to happen.  She becomes possessed by a woman whom the author leaves us clueless about.  We only know her name and that she lived on the property about 100 years prior to Karen Grange.

The spirit is punishing the town and Tom must fight it in order to bring the rain.  The spirit kills Vida and tries to kill Karen.  After she nearly dies, and they are both struck by lightening, Karen and Tom fall in love.

I liked the book.  The author should have told us more about the spirit and why it is so angry.

Here’s the first book I copied quotations from and the book review that goes with it:

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Vintage, 2004)

“His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise.  And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence” (pg. 174).

“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in the banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meeting and call them riots?” (pg. 315)

“To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story.  There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness” (pg. 396)

The Review:

June 27, 2006

I don’t normally read nonfiction or historical fiction, but I enjoyed this book.  I agree with the reviews from Esquire because I am asking myself, “Why didn’t I already know this historical information?’

I learned quite a bit about architecture and the history of American Architecture.   I learned that Frederick Law Olmstead had some very strong views about landscape architecture and designed central park.

John Welborn Root and Danial Hudson Burnham started an architectural firm in Chicago and made some great changes.  Root came up with a way to solve the problem of Chicago’s lack of bedrock by inventing the floating foundation.

The White City sounds like it would have been awesome see.  I learned a lot about what was going on in 1893. 

The Murderer H.H. Holmes seems to be a pretty terrible guy, much like any serial killer.  The science of how he might be thinking, and how he plans and gets away with his crimes is interesting.

It would be cool to be a profiler and try to figure out how these people think.