A Catch-Up

It has been a long time since I have posted in this blog, and for that I apologise. I have never been good at committing to a thing, to doing it day in and day out. I will get passionate about something and do it for a week or two and then, when the week is out, I have moved on to a new toy and the old passion has become a chore.

But I’m going to try to list a few thoughts about the various readings we’ve done.

Anne Sexton’s “Resume 1965” puts me in mind of Sherlock Holmes’ quote in the first episode of the recent BBC series Sherlock: “I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for hours on end. would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.” Perhaps Anne Sexton is operating under that principle–if you know the worst about me and still hire me, then perhaps we are a good match as employer and employee.

Natalia Ginsburg’s piece makes me sad. Perhaps she describes all their differences and arguments with a tone of fondness, but I kept thinking that I couldn’t see myself with someone like that, someone who would make fun of me for the things that I am not able to do or for the way I do things. I can’t tell if she truly loves him or if she is resigned to life with him. Perhaps it’s more complicated than that, after so many years together. I want someone who would cherish our differences and it seems that Ginsburg does cherish the differences between herself and her husband but the way she describes it, it doesn’t seem that he reciprocates. Of course this essay is not the whole picture. I’m certain I am being too hard on him. It just rubs me the wrong way somehow.

When it comes to Andre Dubus’ “Digging”, I am struck by the poignancy of it. I find myself just this painfully shy with my grandparents. I don’t know how to talk to them or to listen to them. I found it interesting that Dubus made certain to separate out his fear of his father from his shyness with his father. I think that’s important… they are quite different things and when one is not caused by the other, you must deal with them separately. The imagery, the physical descriptions in the essay, were so clear and so vibrant and vivid that I felt that I was there with him under that burning sun, getting heat stroke (though he never uses the word), feeling my arms getting weaker with every moment. I’m glad that Dubus and his father came to an understanding with each other, though it took years. I think it has to take years for children to understand their parents and vice versa. Only when you’re all adults can you talk on an equal footing. This is a little rambly. I think I’ll stop now.

Noted Without (Much) Comment: Quotes from Hampl and Lopate

From Hampl:

“I think of the reader as a cat, endlessly fastidious, capable by turns of mordant indifference and riveted attention, luxurious, recumbent, ever poised. Whereas the writer is absolutely a dog, panting and moping, too eager for an affectionate scratch behind the ears, lunging frantically after any old stick thrown in the distance.”

“A memoirist must acquiesce to selectivity, like any artist. The version we dare to write is the only truth, the only relationship we can have with the past. Refuse to write your life and you have no life.”

From Lopate:

“…but the kinds of students drawn to creative nonfiction usually retain a taste for the unadulterated truth, and a naïve hope that here at last they will not have to lie, so that when you tell them “art is a lie” or some such clever- ness, they look at you with these large disappointed eyes.”

“The greater sensitivity that today’s academy brings to issues of stereotyping seems to have rendered writing students preternaturally cautious, as though making any generalizations were invid- ious. It seems to me obviously desirable for a writing style to be able to move freely and easily from the concrete to the general and back. As for debatable generalizations, when a workshop voices exceptions to this or that generality in a fellow-student’s piece, I point out that we are not in a court of law. I would rather the emerging writer get into the habit of attempting sweeping generalizations, even if they prove not to be true in every instance, so long as they are enough true to stimulate thought.”

I selected these for their imagery or their relevance, respectively. I certainly feel like a pup seeking attention when I write. And like the students with “large disappointed eyes” in Lopate, I am frightened of inaccuracy. I want non-fiction, even creative non-fiction, to be really, really true. Everything I read suggests that this is impossible.

As for the second quote of each writer, I am taking them for advice. Or I’ll try. Not to fear sweeping generalisations. To write even when I know that I can never touch “the whole truth and nothing but.”

An aside: It’s telling about memoirists that both Lopate and Hampl comment on (and decry) the old writers’ adage: “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Another aside: I nearly wrote “It’s interesting to me that both…” but then I remembered that “interesting” is meaningless. All it means is that I noticed it. “Telling” is slightly less vague. “Telling about memoirists” is better (although my browser doesn’t believe that “memoirist” is a word).

Essay as Experiment…

…or what is Lopate saying?

Where to begin? Philip Lopate’s introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay is a dense (dense meaning “containing much matter per unit volume”, not dense meaning “thick-headed”) opening which could itself be a treatise on the personal essay, rather than a mere introduction. He describes in great detail what an essay entails (here’s a short list, from his headings: a conversational element; “honesty, confession, and privacy”; contractions and expansions of the self; “the problem of egotism”; “cheek and irony”;  “the idler figure”; “the past, the local, and the melancholy”) and what worth the essay has in this modern world.

Being an egotist myself, I read this entire essay through the lens of someone looking to write personal essays and found myself daunted. Lopate says, and I’m inclined to agree, “While young people excel at lyrical poetry and mathematics, it is hard to think of anyone who made a mark on the personal essay in his or her youth.” I certainly am better at lyrical poems than I’ve ever been at essays (though I’m crap at mathematics, so I’m not sure what young people Lopate’s been talking to). Essayists focus mostly on the past, he says, and I find that daunting, as well, because the past eludes me at every turn (I’m crap at memory, too).

I can be as self-effacing as E.B. White, but self-effacement alone won’t write a good essay and I’m not sure my tone is one anyone would want to read (some whiny twenty-something complaining that their writing isn’t what they’d like it to be? Please. [The key point here is the “whiny” not the content of the complaint]). I find myself judging myself by the standards Lopate sets for good essayists and am reminded of the Kerouac quote on my mini-fridge: “The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved … who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…” I judge myself by that, too, and inevitably fall short (though I’ve read On the Road and I wouldn’t live Kerouac’s life for anything).

I took a glance at the already existing blog posts when I first started writing this response (this is my 2nd try, the first one got eaten by an accidental click of the Back button on my browser. I’m smarter now; I’m writing it in the Notes app) and some of my classmates already seem to have a grasp of the form of the personal essay–the conversational tone, the honesty and vulnerability, the digressions that nevertheless lead back to the main point…

I think I’ve gotten into the habit of reading advice for writers or works about writers from the perspective of someone who’s already done their best work and will never write that well again. Wrong perspective. I’m only twenty-one. I think I’m going to have to re-read this introduction as advice rather than as judgment and see what I think then.

Oh, hey, there’s the epiphany in the midst of my writing! I think I’m getting the hang of this!