LISTS

There are a number of the essays we're looking at in our Creative Writing class whose forms share certain characteristics with lists. For example, "Door No. Five" presents what sound like chapters from a book (or, perhaps numerous books): the first paragraph is composed of concepts/objects/places/sentient beings whose names begin with the letter "M". The next paragraph concerns ideas that begin with the letter "N", then "O", and, finally, a section of "P" groupings. The author of "NOTES TOWARD THE MAKING OF A WHOLE HUMAN BEING" also organizes the information within the essay into one long list of actions, events, and places (in the form of a complete sentence). "Things To Do Today" is also literally a list of actions, some of which are more abstract than others. As I mentioned in a previous post, the versatility of the essay is, for me, one of the most attractive qualities of this form: it can take many different shapes, the list being only of them.

One Person's Party is Another's Cannibal Blood Festival

One aspect of the essay that I've always enjoyed is the versatility of the form. Within the essay packet that we're using this semester, one can find several different types of essays - some that read like short stories ("Red: An Invocation", "Mint Snowball") or monologues ("Sunday"), while others ("Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird") have the feeling of a scholarly research paper. These, in and of themselves, are only a sampling of the various elements that span the form. Other types of essays include political manifestos, literary criticisms, and different examples of argumentative writing. An essay may take the form of prose or verse; it is flexible in many respects.

"Red: An Invocation" involves a series of recollections situated around a disparate allusion to Donner Pass, the infamous route through the northern Sierra Nevada mountains which is named after a party of 81 Californian-bound emigrates who, according to some reports, resorted to cannibalism after they were stranded by a snow storm for some months. This is, at times, a playful piece - the narrator is constantly correcting their own choice of vocabulary as they meditate on the cyclic nature of life and death via a scene involving a fox and a hawk.

In "Sunday" the narrator uses the context of food to examine race relations in the United States. The essay itself gives the impression of a monologue; the language is somewhat colloquial and the the lack of indentation or quotation marks when dialogue is used add to this effect. It is a beautifully written piece with lots of sensory details (the descriptions of the food are especially visceral) and descriptive passages that lead amazing to an incredibly poignant and powerful conclusion.

The title of "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird" gives the impression that the piece will be, in some part, didactic. It is, in fact, not, but it is an informative piece, full of information pertaining to hummingbirds. Diane Ackerman writes of their history and various behaviors before exploring an anecdote concerning the novelist Jeanne Mackin. Ackerman goes on to explain some of the relationships between hummingbirds and vanilla bean cultivation, and attempts to perhaps explore larger ideas of the relationships between various entities that co-exist in nature.

While these essays may present information in different ways, each is similar in that it is trying to present information that is intended to make the reader contemplate their relationship to the world around them.

on TRANSLATION & NO THRU STREET

Renee Gladman's collection, Juice, consists of four short stories (or prose poems, depending on who you ask). The two that will be discussed and compared in this blog entry are "Translation" and "No Through Street."

Both stories address leaving a geographical location and returning to it to find said location changed in very remarkable ways - the narrator of Translation returns to their hometown to find it abandoned, the narrator in No Through Street returns to a city they have a close association with to find it transformed by the fame that their sister attracted by painting street signs. While the tale of someone leaving an area, transforming in some way, and returning is one of the oldest archetypal stories we know, these tales have a very unique feel that is largely a result of the author's style of storytelling. There is a very ethereal quality to this type of writing, which leaves the reader (or at least this reader) with the notion that these stories are dealing more with the subconscious level of our existence than the conscious realm. Indeed, there is a surreal quality to these tales that leads me to suspect that they are, indeed, explorations of much larger issues of culture and identity than the simple telling of stories. Perhaps much of this sensation is due to the fact that the narrators of the stories themselves are struggling to make sense of the changes that have occurred in regards to their proximity to the cultures they identify with: the narrator in “Translation” cannot recollect where they went to when everyone disappeared; in “No Through Street” the narrator wakes up outside of a hotel one year after leaving her hometown with “only water where memory should be.”

One of the very remarkable qualities that both of these stories share is that there is no evidence to suggest that any of the action that is described by the respective narrator of each tale has ever actually taken place (in the context of the stories themselves). While this may apply to any narrative that we don't witness ourselves in the physical world, it rings especially true in these stories. In the second paragraph of "Translation" the narrator states that "Most people have not heard of my town; even those with imagination will deny it." On the last page of “No Through Street” the narrator remarks that they have “given up the long-awaited homecoming;” whether the narrator is actually asserting that they never returned to the town or whether they are speaking to the fact that the woman who is alleged to be their sister claims to have never heard of them is unclear.

There is an interesting passage in “No Through Street” where the narrator talks about how a couple who were long-time neighbors of hers moved out after the “consuming crowds” that followed her sister’s fame arrived in town. The narrator states that the couple “left behind them an emptiness that caused panic in those remaining.” This feels somewhat comparable to the emptiness that the narrator from “Translation”, who survives on “sex and leaves,” must deal with. While both of these stories concern characters who have become separated from their families and culture, the narrator from "Translation" is attempting to preserve the aspects of their community that they find agreeable as opposed to the narrator from "No Through Street" who, by the end of the story, has abandoned the town once again (or perhaps never returned at all). They refer to the train as being "smart" for moving with "so many destinations that it essentially has none." There is also a great deal of emphasis placed on movement in the two pieces. After the narrator of “No Through Street” reads about the media frenzy engulfing her hometown, they are unable to move east and west for a number of days. Indeed, they are “unable to board a train in any direction.” In “Translation” the narrator is waiting for the return of their peers, unwilling to move as they are certain of the return of the society to which they belong.

To write only about the conceptual aspects of these pieces would be a huge disservice to the aesthetic qualities of the work. My feeling is that both of these pieces function as well as they do thanks heavily to the striking minimalism and the ethereal tone (mentioned earlier) that the author invokes. The space between ideas or moments in these stories serves them well as the narrators in each piece struggle with the emptiness around them (the abandoned city, the trains where the narrator can only view other people's lives). In my opinion, the form of these stories (or prose poems) are as important as the content.