Reading Groups 4, 5, 6 Panel Presentations

Reading groups 4, 5, and 6 presented their theses to the class on Tuesday and Thursday, researching the three books Joshua Ferris' And Then we Came to the End, Christopher Bohjalian's Trans-Sister Radio and Deavid Sedaris' Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, respectively.

Each of these three books were vastly different in content, unlike last week's presentations in which the books' conflicts and characters somewhat overlapped. Here, we were dealing with the indifference of corporate America and the economic recession, transgender roles and the detrimental societal effects of heteronormativity, and familial tensions and gay humor.

Group 4 is researching the book And Then we Came to the End, which deals with a very interesting first-person plural narrative perspective. Seldom used in literature, it is effective in evoking camaraderie, ironically lacking in the advertising company which this story is set in. Some other theses included discussing the office workers' mood disorders, job-related issues, and Lynn Mason's struggle with breast cancer as a metaphor for the overall themes of the book. I'm particularly interested in the narrative structure and how an author can truly delve into the individual lives of characters using a recurrent "we" if at all.

Group 5 presented their research panel on the book Trans-Sister Radio, delving into the topics of Dana's journey from a man on the outside and a woman on the inside to a woman in and out, how he learns gender normative stereotypes from his girlfriend Allison and societal concepts of sexual orientation and gender identification.

Group 6 did their panel presentation on one of David Sedaris' latest installments: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. As most of the book deals with familial ties and embarrassing stories, most of the theses delved into Sedaris' relationships with his father, siblings, and mother. I'm really interested in him as a gay humorist and how his sexuality plays a role of placing him as a perpetual outsider, as someone discusses in their thesis.

Everyone did a really great job, and I'm sure their papers will come out well-developed.

So this is my last post on this blog, pretty sad, but I've learned a lot. What I've liked about this class is that the literature we've read pertains to the times that I've grown up in: when I watched the twin towers fall on 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina sweep through New Orleans, gay rights issues, and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

So good luck to everyone in your future literary endeavors! I'm sure I'll be seeing some of you again!

..but not until Tuesday, I shall not be resurfacing til this paper is done! ;)

Reading Groups 2 & 3 Panel Presentations

Reading groups 2 and 3 presented their theses to the class on Tuesday and Thursday, researching the two books James Patterson's The Postcard Killers and Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes, respectively.

Both bestsellers revolve around a major conflict of murder, which got me thinking more about what we discussed on Tuesday/Thursday: the glamourization of murderers and murdering. Although The Postcard Killers and Nineteen Minutes deal with two very different instances of death: a European couple who view their murders as art and a life-long victim of bullying driven over the edge to commit a high school shooting and sees it much like a video game, they both provide a brief glimpse into the murderer's delusional mind. Someone who commits such atrocities has to be delusional to some extent, whether they think its a video game or its art. The fact that so many authors in contemporary American literature delve into death and murder as a routine happening shows a lot about the interconnectedness of the media (shows like CSI, Dexter, etc.) and our everyday lives.

In The Postcard Killers, some theses included death as an art form, the ethics of journalism, the bestseller formula, and nationality as a cultural barrier. They all seem very original, which makes for a harder base for sources, but also provides an opportunity for original thought. One thing that I think Joanne should keep in mind with her "bestseller formula" thesis is the aforementioned ideas about how the media hypes up murdering, since it is very telling of our gore-obsessed culture.

As for Nineteen Minutes, I had no idea that that novel was based on a real-life situation in a small New Hampshire town. It really brings it home to think of such atrocities happening so close to home (too close for comfort!), even if it is an unfortunate reality of today. Some thesis ideas circulated on the panel included high school characters using "masks," how teenagers view death, and the conditions that set the stage for tragedies like in Nineteen Minutes. I think that definitely the coined "high school hierarchy" is the motivating conditional factor that causes these tragedies and should be researched.

I commend both groups for developing original, well-thought theses. Good luck!

(Im)Perfect Peace

"Momma! Why didn’t you love me? That’s all I ever wanted. Somebody to tuck me in at night and read me bedtime stories. Like white folks do with their kids. But you never did. I tried to clean up so good that you’d have to love me, but I guess I never did it good enough.  And you know what’s funny? I woulda done anything, I mean anything, to get your attention...” (146).

This is the scene depicted in Perfect Peace, after Perfect's true gender identity has been revealed and Emma Jean has retreated from her family's shunning to her mother's grave site. Up until this point in the text, Emma Jean has refused to speak with her mother, carrying a long-held resentment against her for being mistreated and disfavored over her other sisters in her childhood.

Her damaged relationship with her mother makes her question her relationship with her own children. I think this particular passage defines community as a body of power. While we think of community and familial ties as a means of bonding and togetherness, conversely, it has the power to divide and disenfranchise.

We have seen other instances of this in our reading: from Fun Home and Alison Bechdel's strained relationship with her homosexual father to I'm the One I Want and Margaret Cho's relationship with her mother. Children disassociating from their parents and parents shunning their children. Eventually, Emma Jean is hated by her family for what she has done and, in doing so, perpetuates the relationship she hated and hoped to change with her mother.

Daniel Black's Perfect Peace is a story of familial bonds and the shunning and togetherness of community. I hope everyone enjoys their families and has a great Thanksgiving break! Hope to recover from a turkey coma before classes start up!

Research Thesis and Annotated Bibliography

Research Thesis

Teenage sexuality and specifically, unplanned pregnancy is a timeless taboo subject and by no means an untold story. Throughout literature, teenage mother characters have struggled against judgment, social ostracizing, and shunning by their community, and yet, this sub-genre dealing with these concepts is still largely overlooked.

In Meredith Hall’s memoir Without a Map, tells her untold story as a pregnant teenager growing up in 1960s Hampton, New Hampshire. She describes being exiled by her parents, teachers, classmates, and members of the larger community in Hampton, New Hampshire. Even when she escapes her hometown, the shadows of her past sins haunt her and she lives in perpetual self-exile.

As of right now, I’d really like to do a close reading of the memoir to build my argument that the story uses the larger subject of teenage pregnancy as a timeless taboo to frame the context for Hall’s self-exile. The stigma attached to teenage pregnancy is timeless, hence, why Hall is in a state of perpetual self-exile through the 1960s to the contemporary 21^st century.

As this is a close reading of the novel, Without A Map, supplemented with the literary subgenre of teenage pregnancy, I will be sampling numerous novels across time from as early as the mid-19^th century and as late as the 2000s to keep it as literature-based as possible.

Annotated Bibliography

Gregson, Joanna. The Culture of Teenage Mothers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

     This book, Culture of Teenage Mothers written by Joanna Gregson is a scholarly study into the culture of teenage pregnancy from the female perspective. Gregson traces the process from typical influential factors to conception to how the dynamics of familial relationships change over the course of the pregnancy. In this book, girls give voice to their experiences, providing several first-hand nonfictional accounts of teenage pregnancy.

I will use this scholarly source to provide the historical and sociological context to considering teenage pregnancy for my research paper.

Letts, Billie. Where the Heart Is. New York : Warner Books, 1998.

     This fictitious novel, written in 1998 by Billie Letts, follows the travels of Novalee, a down-on-her-luck Southern teenage girl. She is seventeen years old and seven months pregnant, driving with her boyfriend and father of her baby, Willy Jack, from Tennessee to California. Novalee and Willy Jack make a pit stop at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma where she is abandoned by her boyfriend in the parkinglot, left with nothing more than her beach bag and $7.77 in change.

     I will use this novel to draw literary similarities between Where the Heart Is and Without a Map as narratives in the stigma of teenage pregnancy. Like Meredith Hall, the character Novalee is exiled from her community. She is literally “exiled” to a Wal-Mart where for the majority of the story, she is left abandoned in the store. A close reading of both stories will endorse my argument that teenage pregnancy is portrayed as a timeless taboo subject in literature.

Inclan, Jessica Barksdale. Her Daughter’s Eyes. New York: NAL Trade, 2001.

    This fictional novel, written in 2001 by Jessica Barksdale Inclan, follows multiple narratives involved in a teenage pregnancy, mostly between the adult father and the teenage mother. The main character, Kate Phillips is a seventeen-year-old girl growing up in a quiet suburban neighborhood with her younger sister Tyler and emotionally distant father who is absent from the house often since their mother’s unexpected death. Alone in the house, Tyler and Kate deliver her baby girl alone in the upstairs closet of their home. Kate insists that her baby's existence must remain hidden, but inevitably, the the secret is discovered, involving the police and children's protective services. 

    I will use this novel to draw literary similarities between Her Daughter’s Eyes and Without a Map as narratives in the stigma of teenage pregnancy. Similar to Meredith Hall, Kate is secreted in her home and then sent to a foster house for teenagers, having been exiled by her family and community. A close reading of both stories will endorse my argument that teenage pregnancy is portrayed as a timeless taboo subject in literature.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Dodd, 1850.

     This work of classic literature, written in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is perhaps the most archaic novel that deals directly and unabashedly with the stigma of pregnancy. The main character, Hester Prynne is a young woman who finds herself unmarried and pregnant. Set in austere, Puritan New England, she struggles between the moral authority of her faith, the shunning of her community, and her own love for her daughter, Pearl.

      I will use this novel to draw literary similarities between Her Daughter’s Eyes and Without a Map as narratives in the stigma of pregnancy. There are several similarities between the two narratives from a New England setting to the effects of communal shunning and self-exile. Hester Prynne exiles herself from the village to raise her daughter and Meredith Hall too, leaves her roots in Hampton for a free life in Boston. A close reading of both stories will endorse my argument that teenage pregnancy is portrayed as a timeless taboo subject in literature.

Sherburne, Zoa. Too Bad About the Haines Girl. New York: W.Morrow, 1967.

      This fictional novel, written in 1967 by Zoa Sherburne provides a unique perspective on this unspoken topic of teenage pregnancy as it is from the same time period in which Without a Map is set in. Like Hall’s memoir, the story is told from the perspective of a high school senior, Melinda Haines in a small town. With a great family, popularity at school, and bright future prospects, she seems able to have everything until she becomes pregnant after a night at a dance by her boyfriend Jeff.

      I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but given that it is such an anomaly for pregnancy to be discussed so blatantly even in literature during this time, I think it is worth it to study a narrative from a pregnant teenager in this timely perspective. Again, both stories endorse my argument that teenage pregnancy is portrayed as a timeless taboo subject in literature.

Girl, you're such a Slut!

We've already beaten this poem to death in class, but I really love it so I'd like to return to it with a few added ideas of my own...

So for anyone who is a horror-movie buff or anyone who's watched  even one of these big name blockbusters: Scream, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, you should know the Rules for Surviving Horror Films. One of these rules is (listen up girls, this is for you) don't be a slut.

See if you're anything like the sexually active teenage girls in these movies, you're destined to die. In fact, if you're liberal, free-thinking, sexually empowered, and wearing anything but a turtleneck and a string of pearls, you're pretty much toast. Yep, Paris Hilton, see yah!

"Slut" by Daphne Gottleib from the Spoken Word Revolution Redux book, addresses the stereotypes and dehumanizing connotations of the slang term "slut" with humanizing imagery. She talks about the "slut" as human being with a past, as a baby, with childhood toys and coming-of-age troubles.

She describes the movie scenes we're all familiar with,

"sometimes I enter a dark
room and unbutton
my shirt, rock my hips
side to side
until the killer's music comes on.
Then I button up
quick, laughing or
shaking, sometimes
both."

The movie scene strikes a chord with the reader/listener because it is something everyone is familiar with, something everyone can visualize.

The poem makes us reassess our views of the word "slut," the imagery it conjures, and the power of the word as a weapon against women or a vehicle for taking back power for women. It is the difference between a guy calling his girlfriend a "slut" and girlfriends calling each other "sluts" jokingly. Or is there a difference?

Something I realized the other day is that in horror movies, while the rules for surviving a horror movie still apply, there are in fact some mainstream slasher flicks that are diverting from this long-tread path. In the SAW series, no one is safe. Parents, teenagers, children, virgins, sluts, drug-dealers, little old Grannies. It doesn't seem to make a difference. In the SAW films, everyone has a dirty little secret.

Similarly, the movie Jennifer's Body depicts a sort of role reversal. While Amanda Seyfried is the innocent, guileless one, Megan Fox is depicted as the "slutty friend." Its interesting to see that in this movie (Ok, if you care, SPOILER ALERT), Megan Fox is turned into a succubus after she is kidnapped and offered as a (failed) virgin sacrifice to Satan by an up-and-coming emo band in exchange for fame and fortune. Meanwhile, Seyfried loses her virginity and survives. Fox dies by the end of the film.

Maybe (and I think Gottleib would agree) we're getting closer to a point where "being a slut" isn't such a bad thing.

Without a Map: A Story in Self-Exile

Meredith Hall's memoir Without a Map  tells her untold story as a pregnant teenager growing up in 1960s Hampton, New Hampshire. She was shunned by her classmates, family, church, and school and for the rest of her life lived in perpetual exile.

What struck me the most in reading this heart-wrenching, despairing story, is the idea of shunning and self-exile. Even after the pregnancy, after she gave up her child and everyone else had given up on her, even when she moved to the city in Cambridge to start a new life, she was lonely. She put herself in the odd position of self-exile as she isolated herself from boyfriend Erik, from girls at her boarding school, and even those that reach out to her like a male classmate that writes to her.

I would like to do a close reading of self-exile in Meredith Hall's Without a Map and how her own chaotic life reflects the chaotic time in terms of world events (referred to in the text), especially pertaining to the 60s and 70s.

Midterm Reflections on Literature, the Self and Life in this 21st Century

I've always been a self-reflective writer.

I like to inject my own personal experiences and reflections into my literary observances. For my "1 Dead in Attic" Hurricane Katrina post, I realized that the day I started reading was the five-year anniversary mark. For my "Falling Man" 9/11 post, I reflected on that infamous "where were you on 9/11" question and where I was on that day and how I've grown up and moved on from that point in time. For my Abu Ghraib post, the torturous images of POWs got me thinking a lot about my own military history. I have friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers who served or are currently enlisted. My father is a retired commander in the Navy and my mother was a Sargent in the Marine Corps. I'm very proud of my family's service and it upsets me to think that people could now have such misguided views about the military at large because of what a couple of idiots did on a night shift with a camera.

I like to pose questions that concern me and evoke memories of my own experiences to use myself as a vehicle for provoking thought.

That is a strength of my posts I think. I don't know if my fellow classmates can always relate to me as they are my experiences and mine alone, but I think that everyone has a 9/11 story, everyone has an impression of the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think it is a great downfall and a great disadvantage in this generation of ours that everyone is so self-involved. Facebook statuses aren't going to change the world. But your self-reflections can change the world as it seems for you. We make sense of this crazy, fast-paced, sometimes disorienting, sometimes liberating new millennium we live in today through ourselves. Fact and frame, right? Everyone has an opinion and a story to tell.

And this blog tells mine.

This Blogger takes a Holiday

Hi guys, so I'll be taking my blog holiday for tomorrow's due post. I'll be riding with the Fire Department all tomorrow from 8 in the morning til 8 in the morning on Saturday as part of a special feature article in The New Hampshire and I'll be gone for exactly 24 hours. So, naturally, it doesn't make sense for me to post when I can't read everyone else's blog posts.

Cheers!
-Allie

A Permanent Accusation

 

Take note of these two images. They both depict naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib being stacked on top of each other, being tortured by the hands of American soldiers in power. But do we react differently to one or the other? Does torture, graphic and horrific, translate from an objective photograph to a subjective painting? What does this say about how we view art? Can something this horrific be made into ethical, acceptable art? What is exaggerated in the painting? What is captured truthfully in the photograph?

In 2004, the Taguba Report investigated the 320th Military Police Battalion occupying Abu Ghraib prison and accounts began to surface of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of the prisoners held at the Iraqi prison at the hands of American Army soldiers.

Fernando Botero, a Colombian artist famous for his pudgy, warmly-nostalgic, folkloric paintings, was living in Paris when he saw the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners at the American-occupied Abu Ghraib.

He began to paint. He painted a series inspired by the Abu Ghraib photographs which is on display at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. 

A majority of the initial photographs depict a woman with cropped-cut brown hair giving a thumbs up or beaming proudly over the naked, cowering (and sometimes dead) prisoners. Her name is Lynndie England, former United States Army reservist with the 372nd Military Police Company. Since the investigation she was convicted along with eleven other military personnel by Army courts-martial for the abuse of prisoners of war. Why anyone might accept such an order from a superior officer is beyond the scope of anyone's understanding, but what is important to note about the paintings by Bolero and the photographs is the absence of perpetrators. Our focus is solely fixated on the tortured prisoners: their gaping mouths in agony, their wide, frightened eyes, their exaggerated poses, blood spatter.

In her online article regarding the art series, Mia Fineman says, "Yet Botero, by tackling this imagery in a focused and extended series, has demonstrated not only that such things can be represented in art but also that a figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity." 

Its true, cartoons and graphic novels have evolved into a new media form of modern-day literature and art. But where does art cross the line from being journalistic to expressive, from objective to subjective? I don't think the lines are always so distinct anymore. Photographs can be staged and paintings can attempt to portray accuracy. Botero calls art "a permanent accusation," so you could make the stretch that art is akin to journalistic reporting since his art is meant to portray something real. Botero's paintings relates to the falling man of 9/11 also in the sense that there is at times a fine line between art and journalism. As an aspiring journalist, I feel conflicted when I see art like this.

It's sort of scary and eerie to me, that Lynndie England was a 20 -year-old (like me) when she entered the prison of Abu Ghraib where they were committing these tortures. I think it's always a little eerily unsettling when we uncover something we share (like an age) with an individual we would otherwise loathe to be compared to. Since serving her jail time, she has returned to her hometown in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. I think we have yet to see the full consequences of her actions and the actions of those other Americans who have tarnished the reputation of their fellow officers and who have made military goals in Iraq that much harder.

Meanwhile the rest of us at home, American families, politicians, and artists like Fernando Botero, will be scanning the headlines on our t.v. screens, watching.

The 9/11 Generation

 Everyone has a 9/11 story.




Where were you on 9/11? What were you doing? When did you hear the news? Did you stop and watch the T.V. screen? Did you tune into the radio? Did you ask your neighbors? Did you look up to the clear blue September sky? Did you listen for airplanes? What were you feeling under that heavy weight of silence?

For some, their lives ended on 9/11. And for some, life went on. People moved on. The date changed. Soon after that, the headlines changed. And New York worked to rebuild itself.

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, follows the lives of those Americans who were forced to pick themselves up from the rubble and move on: Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, their son Justin and their friends and family. At first, for me, this book was hard to get into. It’s disjointed and disorienting. It switches through time and space. It’s erratic. It’s surreal. It’s dreamlike. It’s walking through someone else’s dream.

I didn't understand it. I didn't feel like I could relate to it. All of the characters and their experiences seemed so far-off and inaccessible to me. Then it hit me at chapter five of part one (p.71-73):
 

"He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings'. Any idea why?"

"They're searching the skies."

"For what?"

"Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl."

...

"Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?"

"Just once. He wasn't supposed to tell anyone."

"What was he hearing?"

"He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying Bin Laden."

"The kid slipped. He let the name slip. He told me the planes were a secret. I'm not supposed to tell anyone the three of them are up there on the twenty-seventh floor."

It took the kids in this book to bring into a vague sense of understanding for me. We talked about it in class on Tuesday: that the novel, in its disjunctive structure is only imitating the mentality of a nation under attack. Its hard to make sense of an act so tragically senseless. Especially for young minds.

And it rings true through all Americans. All of us, metaphorically, had to pick ourselves up from the rubble and move on. When I read that passage, I thought of myself nine years ago: I was eleven years old. Entering the sixth grade. School closed. The atmosphere in my neighborhood was oddly silent. No planes overhead. My mom was fixated on the television screen and we watched it together in the semi-darkness of the basement: those stark, grim images. I've heard that we've been dubbed the 9/11 Generation. Funny to think that our lives could be defined by that one day. Sitting there on the couch, none of it made sense to eleven-year-old me. I'm twenty years old and I still don't have all the answers. Probably, not much more than the questions that I started out with.

And that is what DeLillo is trying to do is not so much provide us answers, but relate to us through our unanswered questions.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003215,00.html

Newsflash, Jerk: You're not Funny.

Look at these two images. Which one is funny? Are either one of them funny?

It's a touchy subject: making light of or even flat out making fun of an event or situation that was clearly never funny. In class, we talked about this subject in terms of Hurricane Katrina and The Boondocks episode "Invasion of the Katrinians" (the comic strip equivalent depicted to the left) and the attacks on 9/11 and this demotivational poster (depicted to the right).

In The Boondocks episode, originally aired two years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Grandad's second-cousin Jericho and his family from New Orleans take up residence in the Freeman house, having been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Freeman's hospitality quickly runs out as the N'awleaneans take over the house: racking up their bills, eating their food, breaking their possessions, and using the tragedy as a guilt-trip over the Freemans. Jericho reassures them that he is to receive a check from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), money that mysteriously never seems to appear.

The episode is pretty funny, but as the series typically does, it raises underlying questions of racial stereotyping and humor. How far is too far to be funny? "The Invasion of the Katrinians" episode depicts the Katrina refugees as lazy, manipulative moochers. They use the tragedy and the inherent racism in the event to perpetuate themselves as victims needing of taking care of. We can laugh at it up here in New England five years later, but I can't imagine Katrina refugees finding that episode very funny three years ago.

Now, alternatively, we also discussed as a class the controversial significance of the "Falling Man" photograph. The photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, depicts a man of falling from the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41:15 a.m. on 9/11. Why do we shy away from these suicides? Can they even be labeled as suicides considering the circumstances? And if not, why do we as a society still yet to this day associate them with the negative connotations of a typical suicide? What is it about a real death immortalized on film that raises such emotions?

If the raw photograph wasn't controversial enough, images on the Internet (colloquially referred to as demotivational posters) have started surfacing very blatantly making fun of the jumpers off the World Trade Center. Classy, guy.

Someone in the class tried to justify these images, saying, "Well, the person who made this image, they come from a younger generation- so its harder for them to fully comprehend the ramifications of their actions."

So? I didn't live to see the Holocaust, but an anonymously-posted internet comic turning the phrase into "LOLocaust" doesn't exactly tickle my funny bone. Its like saying idiots should get a free pass because they're young, a preteen, maybe twelve or eleven years old. When I was eleven years old, I saw the World Trade Center topple into dust before my eyes, before I even knew what the World Trade Center was. So maybe they should know, if they don't already. 9/11 isn't funny.

I'm not suggesting we subject another generation to the same thing -it was a traumatic day for us all- but what I'm saying is that children are more resilient than we realize at times. They don't need to know the nitty-gritty. They don't need to know the details. They don't need to see the falling man to know that 9/11 was a big deal and that its impacted our daily lives and the way we look at the world. But maybe they should know the 9/11 happened. When they are asked what day it is, they should be able to say, "Its September 11th. Its a day to remember and memorialize the people that died."

So think about it. Think about these two instances. Why is The Boondocks episode funny? Why is the falling man not funny? Do you agree? Can we ever move far enough from these tragedies to laugh about them? Can these events ever be funny?

"As God is my witness… they’re not gonna lick me!"

I picked up 1 Dead in Attic on my backyard porch at my family’s house over Labor Day Weekend and I was struck by irony at the first date chronologically in the book.

9/6/2005.

I had forgotten that five years ago on this date, New Orleans had been wiped out to rank-smelling flooded streets by Hurricane Katrina. How so suddenly, in a matter of hours, the city was swarmed with controversial governmental (in)actions, racism, crime and tragedy.

And ongoing tragedy. We saw our television screens swarmed with image after despondent image of toppled buildings, keeled over streetlights, looters and families alike wading through waist-high water. Cars, appliances, toys, living breathing bodies, dead unmoving bodies, people, their homes and everything they ever owned carried down the hurricane current.

Over 1300 miles away in dry, stable New Hampshire, we could turn the television set off and I think that’s what made the difference. Those images: the mourning people, the destroyed places, the loss, were detached from the rest of America. Sure, we empathized with New Orleaneans, shook our heads at an inadequate federal government, and sighed at the homeless hundreds huddled outside the Superdome, but we could turn those images off. And in the end, the t.v. always got turned off at my house. For the most of us, everyday life moved on uninterrupted.

Five years later, I’m sitting on my backyard porch on Labor Day weekend, the smell of charcoal barbecues, and warm, balmy sun and the post-Katrina devastation seems worlds away as it did in 2005.

Chris Rose brings a post-Katrina New Orleans to readers of his book in a strong, startling way. His memoir, a collection of columns from the Times-Picayune local newspaper, he depicts post-Katrina life in and outside of New Orleans. While his off-kilter humor and accessible down-to-earth personality, makes his columns easy reading even when the material he deals with isn’t, I’m interested in Chris Rose’s frame as a writer.

Frame and fact is something we’ve been talking about in class the question I raised for debate on the class blackboard is this: What is Chris Rose’s frame? How does his life in Uptown versus the more devastated parts of New Orleans? His family is safe and secure in upscale suburban Maryland, his house is intact, his journalist job is still there, and the tragedies of post-Katrina life in the Gulf leave him seemingly unscathed for the most part. How would a man who lost his wife and children, his home, his job, feel about these columns?

How would Thomas Coleman at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in the 8^th Ward feel? It seems to me, Chris Rose had it easy.

Two columns that alternatively caught my breath and made me laugh were “Despair” dated 12/6/05 and “The Cat Lady” dated 9/29/05.

“Despair” follows the unfortunate/tragic events of an unnamed New Orleanean girl displaced from home. “She had a nice house in Old Metairie, a nice car, a great job, a good man who loved her, and a wedding date in October. A good life.” The girl fled to Atlanta with her fiancé when the hurricane hit, but came back to rebuild her life in the devastated city. She had lost everything and she eventually lost her fiancé when he committed suicide. I gasped aloud when I read about their suicide pact. But she stayed and willed on. I think it speaks a lot to the resilience of the city and its people. Having lost everything, all anyone would be expected to do is leave the pieces and move on. But not this girl, certainly not a New Orleanean girl.

The column “The Cat Lady” …well, I think the title pretty is self-explanatory. It follows the kooky character Ellen Montgomery and her “babies”: that is, 34 cats. She paints abstracts and floral landscapes. She reads The Journal of Beatrix Potter. She drinks coffee in the morning. Her house is falling into disarray and her 30-something cats were prowling around her house. She has been hiding out from the National Guard for weeks. “I felt like a Confederate spy in enemy territory,” she says. A “Gone-With-the-Wind” belle if I ever heard of one.

I think these two women really embody the resilience we talked about in class. The resilience of the city and it’s people. Scarlett O’Hara ain’t got nothing on these ladies.

Hello, ENGL 745!

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast." -1966


It's a quote from Ernest Hemingway's memoir, "A Moveable Feast" which records his early years living in Paris during the twenties, sitting in cafe circles with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Papa Hemingway, besides being an established writer in the classic American literary canon (and one of my personal favorites), was truly a man of his time. He was a man of the Lost Generation. He was recruited as an ambulance driver during World War I, which inspired A Farewell to Arms. He went on safari in East Africa, inspiring Green Hills of Africa and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He fished on the Cuban coast, inspiring The Old Man and the Sea. He used the happenings of his everyday life and the world at large to cultivate stories. For Hemingway, life was a moveable feast. Life was something to be gobbled up and digested, and what produced were his stories.

Something we started discussing in class is this idea: that a person is a reflection of the time period he or she lives in, how literature and time are a reflection of each other. Its that idea of how life imitates art and vice-versa. And authors are still doing this fifty years after Hemingway's time, now, today in the twenty-first century.

This is a blog meant to record my thoughts, questions, and impressions of the required readings for the UNH course English 745 "Contemporary American Literature." Our readings, which span the 21st century are a reflection of the people, places, and politics of our time.

I hope to get to know all of you better in class!

And, as Papa Hemingway would, partake in your moveable feast!