Not my best essay ever, but it's a part of my "body of work.":
"Pushing My Boundaries" href="http://witf.org/lifestyle/travel/1268-my-trip-to-ecuador"
This first appeared in June of '09 on the Travel section of witf.org. At the time I was an intern with Editorial, a fact-checking fool and compiling short sections of the magazine. This was one of my few moments of journalism, and again it's not my best since I did so many many months of academic writing. At the same time I see it as me slowly working back into the writing I enjoy. Let this be the first of many blog posts from here on out.
-Katie
PS--I'm not sure why it's not linking properly...cut and paste that http into your web browser. :)
Monday, December 7, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Summer Reading...
1.Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
2. My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani
3. Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
4. In the Woods by Tana French
(5. Glory by Vladimir Nabokov)
6. I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
7. Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott
8. Blonde by Joyce Carole Oates
9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
11. (The Truth by Terry Pratchett)
12. (Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy)
**Books in "()" are in the process of being read.
I finished TWO books today...Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.
Blonde is the novelistic recounting of Marilyn Monroe's life. JCO is known for her twisted novels, claiming sagely that the "truth is stranger than fiction." While I know she takes artistic license with the situations, she has written that many of her stories are based on people she has known or events she has read about. Marilyn Monroe's life is no exception.
I think it would have benefited me to have read a biography of MM's life first, though I wonder how that would have changed my opinion of the novel. Weighing in at 738 pages, I feel like the beginning chapters about her childhood could have been nixed, and we could have started with her first marriage. Interestingly enough, MM's childhood as told by JCO is reminiscent of White Oleander, but I think JCO's Norma Jeane Baker is a flat character compared to Astrid. It isn't until after Norma Jeane's first marriage, when she becomes MM, that she becomes a truly faceted character.
About two years ago a guy I was dating offered to switch a Playboy with me for a Cosmo, just to see what it was like. We did this mostly because he always said he read his step-dad's Playboys for the articles, and I told him he was full of shit. Anyway, he loaned me the edition that had reprinted an article about Lolita and Vladimir Nabokov, and it also had reprinted transcripts of Marilyn Monroe's tapes that she sent to a therapist. These transcripts were really riveting. She talked of course about her checkered sex life, but also about her desire to be considered a true actress, how she wanted more than anything to be a Shakespearean actor. JCO really captures this MM in the later part of her gargantuan novel. Even more than that, JCO captures how MM's split personalities were forced on her by the studio who only wanted to basically sell her for the sexual appeal. This novel became a great study in how women are and were treated in society, taken advantage of for trying to do what they think others want them to do.
Despite the long-windedness of this book (though I was expecting it, JCO is always the epic novel writer) I think it was a good read. Again, for anyone like me who knows nothing about MM, do research first. At least find out who key people were in her career, and have a general idea of who her co-stars were in films. Hardly any other Hollywood actors/directors/producers/etc. are mentioned by name, rather they are referred to by initials.
GILEAD was AWESOME. All of you should read it, and Judy, you should make it one of your reads for Contemporary Novel. So beautiful, so beautiful. It seriously almost made me cry. I was considering sharing it with a friend, passing it on so other people could enjoy, but I love it too much to let it go.
Robinson writes as the fictitious John Ames, a reverend in the Iowa town of Gilead. The year is 1956 and he is dying of a heart ailment, so he has decided to write his young son a long goodbye letter. This letter tells his son about the Ames family history, but it also is a gentle recounting of their time together as only a loving father could tell it. John Ames talks often about how "you and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes." It is clear that these are the mundane moments he loves.
At the same time there are beautiful passages that are sweeping generalizations, but I say that in the most loving way. They are poetic observations about the world about him, but they are the kinds of observations that cause you to look up from your reading and look at your own surroundings.
P. 28, "I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
There is a story interwoven that I won't go too far into. It's interesting though and it is what makes a story that could simply be about an old man recounting his life into a novel.
My favorite part was at the end, I read it twice and when I finished this book I hugged it. I wrapped it in my arms and thought about what it just said to me. It was a glorious moment. I hope we all can have books in our lives that make us do that.
Now I have moved on to The Truth by Terry Pratchett, at the behest of my boyfriend. So far it is amusing, though I have to admit I think I want to revel in the glow of Gilead for a little while longer. :)
2. My Life as a Traitor by Zarah Ghahramani
3. Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
4. In the Woods by Tana French
(5. Glory by Vladimir Nabokov)
6. I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
7. Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott
8. Blonde by Joyce Carole Oates
9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
11. (The Truth by Terry Pratchett)
12. (Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy)
**Books in "()" are in the process of being read.
I finished TWO books today...Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.
Blonde is the novelistic recounting of Marilyn Monroe's life. JCO is known for her twisted novels, claiming sagely that the "truth is stranger than fiction." While I know she takes artistic license with the situations, she has written that many of her stories are based on people she has known or events she has read about. Marilyn Monroe's life is no exception.
I think it would have benefited me to have read a biography of MM's life first, though I wonder how that would have changed my opinion of the novel. Weighing in at 738 pages, I feel like the beginning chapters about her childhood could have been nixed, and we could have started with her first marriage. Interestingly enough, MM's childhood as told by JCO is reminiscent of White Oleander, but I think JCO's Norma Jeane Baker is a flat character compared to Astrid. It isn't until after Norma Jeane's first marriage, when she becomes MM, that she becomes a truly faceted character.
About two years ago a guy I was dating offered to switch a Playboy with me for a Cosmo, just to see what it was like. We did this mostly because he always said he read his step-dad's Playboys for the articles, and I told him he was full of shit. Anyway, he loaned me the edition that had reprinted an article about Lolita and Vladimir Nabokov, and it also had reprinted transcripts of Marilyn Monroe's tapes that she sent to a therapist. These transcripts were really riveting. She talked of course about her checkered sex life, but also about her desire to be considered a true actress, how she wanted more than anything to be a Shakespearean actor. JCO really captures this MM in the later part of her gargantuan novel. Even more than that, JCO captures how MM's split personalities were forced on her by the studio who only wanted to basically sell her for the sexual appeal. This novel became a great study in how women are and were treated in society, taken advantage of for trying to do what they think others want them to do.
Despite the long-windedness of this book (though I was expecting it, JCO is always the epic novel writer) I think it was a good read. Again, for anyone like me who knows nothing about MM, do research first. At least find out who key people were in her career, and have a general idea of who her co-stars were in films. Hardly any other Hollywood actors/directors/producers/etc. are mentioned by name, rather they are referred to by initials.
GILEAD was AWESOME. All of you should read it, and Judy, you should make it one of your reads for Contemporary Novel. So beautiful, so beautiful. It seriously almost made me cry. I was considering sharing it with a friend, passing it on so other people could enjoy, but I love it too much to let it go.
Robinson writes as the fictitious John Ames, a reverend in the Iowa town of Gilead. The year is 1956 and he is dying of a heart ailment, so he has decided to write his young son a long goodbye letter. This letter tells his son about the Ames family history, but it also is a gentle recounting of their time together as only a loving father could tell it. John Ames talks often about how "you and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes." It is clear that these are the mundane moments he loves.
At the same time there are beautiful passages that are sweeping generalizations, but I say that in the most loving way. They are poetic observations about the world about him, but they are the kinds of observations that cause you to look up from your reading and look at your own surroundings.
P. 28, "I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
There is a story interwoven that I won't go too far into. It's interesting though and it is what makes a story that could simply be about an old man recounting his life into a novel.
My favorite part was at the end, I read it twice and when I finished this book I hugged it. I wrapped it in my arms and thought about what it just said to me. It was a glorious moment. I hope we all can have books in our lives that make us do that.
Now I have moved on to The Truth by Terry Pratchett, at the behest of my boyfriend. So far it is amusing, though I have to admit I think I want to revel in the glow of Gilead for a little while longer. :)
Friday, February 27, 2009
The Hours
It's human nature to know our lineage, as well as the lineages of others. We learn often about how vital family crests and histories were (and still are) in many cultures. We hear about Rockefellers and Carnegie-Mellons, about Sally Hemings and about scads of others who have begotten history. Human nature is to know your roots. The same can be said for books. We’ve discussed in other classes the lineage of some books, most recently Things Fall Apart giving birth to Purple Hibiscus, and how one novel picked up where the other left off.
Of course I understood that we were to look for parallels between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, because obviously you wouldn’t have one without the other. Even with the parental shadow of Mrs. Dalloway casting itself over The Hours I feel it is a separate from its mother. We talk often about the parallels between the two books, but I think that trying to tie The Hours too tightly to Mrs. Dalloway is almost unfair. It is a child respectful of its lineage, in full adoration of its mother, and yet the text is a child that knows itself well enough to have its own voice outside of its mother.
I was taken almost immediately by the Prologue with Virginia Woolf and her suicide, it is shocking and profound. The clear of the novel is to set an outright tone of sadness, of despair. These feelings seem to come slower with Mrs. Dalloway, only after some pages is the reader aware of the shocking feeling of swirling downward in a funnel. Using the direct image of Virginia Woolf putting the pig-head sized rock in her pocket, of walking into the river, is immediately a signal to the reader that this will not be a book like he or she has read before. I stand by the opinion that perhaps we sometimes try too hard to push The Hours into a place in which it will never fit, while it has undeniable traces of the preceding novel we are forgetting how much it is representative of Virginia Woolf. The Hours seems not so much a child of Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is a reminder of Woof, the true mother in this situation.
I am a great supporter of research. It is something I value and relish in, reading accounts of events and about the lives of people is intriguing. After a brief bit of research I found a collection of articles by I.M. Ingram, a psychiatrist in Glasgow who has put his research about Virginia Woolf’s psychiatric illness on the internet. In the article on her suicide he writes of what is now believed to be her bipolar disorder and creates an extensive, intense timeline leading up to her death. What is most interesting in reading this particular article is how her body was discovered. On April 18, 1941 her body was found in the river by children.
The section in the first part of this book that is most fascinating is when the Bell children find the dying thrush. It was compelling to me, the children’s innocence and Virginia’s fixation. I found myself thinking after about two or three pages that it was a gem that I hadn’t appraised properly. No author writes about the funeral of a dead bird for six pages without it having some special meaning. The soft bed of grass and the yellow roses in a oval around the small animal put me in the mind of Catholic medals, somehow I pictured it as some variation of a medal of the Blessed Mother. The children paid such close attention for a time, then sped so quickly onto the next moment. It was Virginia who kept going back, Cunningham shows her kindred spirit with the bird through their moments together.
Ingram’s writing about Woolf’s illness and suicide made the thrush funeral suddenly make sense. The Bells found the basically dead thrush, and I feel that the attention they pay to it is a beautiful juxtapositioning of childhood innocence next to death. Cunningham shows through the Bells the kind of reverence we should have for Virginia Woolf, we should lay her sweetly and gently into the grass bed and surround her with flowers, she deserved that respect if not more. Her writings and records of her death show us that even with her own tortures she was a woman of innocence in her own way, with a keen mind for the rights of everyone, with the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius. This book is not an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is an homage to Virginia Woolf, the thrush of a woman lying in the leaves of grass.
Of course I understood that we were to look for parallels between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, because obviously you wouldn’t have one without the other. Even with the parental shadow of Mrs. Dalloway casting itself over The Hours I feel it is a separate from its mother. We talk often about the parallels between the two books, but I think that trying to tie The Hours too tightly to Mrs. Dalloway is almost unfair. It is a child respectful of its lineage, in full adoration of its mother, and yet the text is a child that knows itself well enough to have its own voice outside of its mother.
I was taken almost immediately by the Prologue with Virginia Woolf and her suicide, it is shocking and profound. The clear of the novel is to set an outright tone of sadness, of despair. These feelings seem to come slower with Mrs. Dalloway, only after some pages is the reader aware of the shocking feeling of swirling downward in a funnel. Using the direct image of Virginia Woolf putting the pig-head sized rock in her pocket, of walking into the river, is immediately a signal to the reader that this will not be a book like he or she has read before. I stand by the opinion that perhaps we sometimes try too hard to push The Hours into a place in which it will never fit, while it has undeniable traces of the preceding novel we are forgetting how much it is representative of Virginia Woolf. The Hours seems not so much a child of Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is a reminder of Woof, the true mother in this situation.
I am a great supporter of research. It is something I value and relish in, reading accounts of events and about the lives of people is intriguing. After a brief bit of research I found a collection of articles by I.M. Ingram, a psychiatrist in Glasgow who has put his research about Virginia Woolf’s psychiatric illness on the internet. In the article on her suicide he writes of what is now believed to be her bipolar disorder and creates an extensive, intense timeline leading up to her death. What is most interesting in reading this particular article is how her body was discovered. On April 18, 1941 her body was found in the river by children.
The section in the first part of this book that is most fascinating is when the Bell children find the dying thrush. It was compelling to me, the children’s innocence and Virginia’s fixation. I found myself thinking after about two or three pages that it was a gem that I hadn’t appraised properly. No author writes about the funeral of a dead bird for six pages without it having some special meaning. The soft bed of grass and the yellow roses in a oval around the small animal put me in the mind of Catholic medals, somehow I pictured it as some variation of a medal of the Blessed Mother. The children paid such close attention for a time, then sped so quickly onto the next moment. It was Virginia who kept going back, Cunningham shows her kindred spirit with the bird through their moments together.
Ingram’s writing about Woolf’s illness and suicide made the thrush funeral suddenly make sense. The Bells found the basically dead thrush, and I feel that the attention they pay to it is a beautiful juxtapositioning of childhood innocence next to death. Cunningham shows through the Bells the kind of reverence we should have for Virginia Woolf, we should lay her sweetly and gently into the grass bed and surround her with flowers, she deserved that respect if not more. Her writings and records of her death show us that even with her own tortures she was a woman of innocence in her own way, with a keen mind for the rights of everyone, with the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius. This book is not an homage to Mrs. Dalloway, rather it is an homage to Virginia Woolf, the thrush of a woman lying in the leaves of grass.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tell My Horse, or Why I Love Zora
I've decided to use this website to do some mildly academic writing about literature. Below is an essay I wrote for my World Literature class at Juniata College, taught by Judy Katz. Feel free to discuss in comments!
************************
I remember reading Zora Neale Hurston’s novels for the first time many years ago, the first, obviously, Their Eyes Were Watching God and after that I read Seraph on the Suwanee. While reading Seraph I decided to do some research on Hurston because I didn’t know much about her other than Oprah loved her and that many scholars considered her one of the greatest writers of her time. What I was surprised to learn was that Zora led an astoundingly interesting yet somehow depressing life. Thinking about it now I know she would not appreciate the sympathy that seems to well up in my chest; she did not seem like that kind of woman.
She was born in Alabama in 1891, but it wasn’t long after that her family moved to Eatonville, Florida and that was the home she remembers and writes about in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” When her mother died in 1904 Zora and her siblings were split up, sent to live in boarding schools and when that money ran out they were sent to live with family. She didn’t get along with her stepmother, and it wasn’t long until Zora left for the north to get her high school education. She went to Barnard College, worked with Anthropology professor Franz Boaz, and became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was a strong willed woman who didn’t seem to care much about people’s opinions, and was not always a darling of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston and Langston Hughes wrote the play Mule Bone which became a point of contention, each author claimed rights to the script, and it ended their friendship. Richard Wright and other black writers criticized her work for not dealing more with racial issues, as well as her having white patrons like Charlotte Mason (who actually held the rights to Hurston’s work). At the end of her life Hurston was working as a maid and school teacher, dying poor and alone in a state home for the elderly. The biography on her official website said that a collection actually had to be taken up by the community to bury Hurston; her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker found it, lost among the weeds, and bought Hurston a proper headstone.
Hurston’s revival in the 1970s was what led me to believe she had been favored among her peers. It wasn’t until I had done the research that I had learned about how she was shunned by her peers for not wanting to engage the color issues of the times. With that in mind I thought it interesting that her short essay be placed next to Wright’s “The Library Card” in my World Literature course, it truly showed how different they were in mindset. Hurston’s essays completely exude her spunk and I think that she should be admired for not letting the racial tensions of her time hinder her love for life. Despite this I wonder if she is a caricature of herself at times, utilizing at times the “minstrel technique” that Wright accused her of. She talks in “How It Feels…” about her “gallery seat” of a front porch, and how she perched atop the front gate and talked to strangers. At one point she even acknowledges how the other people in her town didn’t appreciate her southern hospitality. “The colored people gave no dimes,” she wrote, “They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.” The same could be said for her place in Harlem: she sat atop the gate and while her peers didn’t encourage her antics, they couldn’t disown her completely.
It’s easy, after reading the articles on her, to dismiss Hurston as a suck-up, as a traitor to her race, a white-lover. In her essay she wrote: “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.” To me this proves that in Hurston’s eyes, race did not matter, it was the self that mattered. As a child she talked to anyone because she saw no color lines, and as an adult she was exactly the same. In Mary Crow Dog’s piece “Civilize Them With A Stick,” she wrote that “racism breeds racism in reverse,” racism breeds suspicion not only of others but of one another. Hurston embraced people, it seemed, no matter their color. She transcended the hate that hate breeds, while her peers fell into the pit. She loved life, no matter what the colors.
I’m torn apart by Zora Neale Hurston. On one hand, I crown her the Queen of Forward Motion. She wrote that “slavery was the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” At the same time I guess I can’t help but wonder how she can so easily shrug off her plight. That’s when I remind myself of her spirit. Wright wrote in “The Library Card” that reading got him down, that he “felt trapped,” and that feeling would halt his reading. I think we all understand this feeling, but it takes a special person to overcome that feeling, to take in what they read and then put it to use. Wright was obviously special, but I love Hurston more because she was able to move past the hard feelings and lead a life. She died poor but at least she made her life worth it.
Copyright Katie Cibort 2009
************************
I remember reading Zora Neale Hurston’s novels for the first time many years ago, the first, obviously, Their Eyes Were Watching God and after that I read Seraph on the Suwanee. While reading Seraph I decided to do some research on Hurston because I didn’t know much about her other than Oprah loved her and that many scholars considered her one of the greatest writers of her time. What I was surprised to learn was that Zora led an astoundingly interesting yet somehow depressing life. Thinking about it now I know she would not appreciate the sympathy that seems to well up in my chest; she did not seem like that kind of woman.
She was born in Alabama in 1891, but it wasn’t long after that her family moved to Eatonville, Florida and that was the home she remembers and writes about in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” When her mother died in 1904 Zora and her siblings were split up, sent to live in boarding schools and when that money ran out they were sent to live with family. She didn’t get along with her stepmother, and it wasn’t long until Zora left for the north to get her high school education. She went to Barnard College, worked with Anthropology professor Franz Boaz, and became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was a strong willed woman who didn’t seem to care much about people’s opinions, and was not always a darling of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston and Langston Hughes wrote the play Mule Bone which became a point of contention, each author claimed rights to the script, and it ended their friendship. Richard Wright and other black writers criticized her work for not dealing more with racial issues, as well as her having white patrons like Charlotte Mason (who actually held the rights to Hurston’s work). At the end of her life Hurston was working as a maid and school teacher, dying poor and alone in a state home for the elderly. The biography on her official website said that a collection actually had to be taken up by the community to bury Hurston; her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker found it, lost among the weeds, and bought Hurston a proper headstone.
Hurston’s revival in the 1970s was what led me to believe she had been favored among her peers. It wasn’t until I had done the research that I had learned about how she was shunned by her peers for not wanting to engage the color issues of the times. With that in mind I thought it interesting that her short essay be placed next to Wright’s “The Library Card” in my World Literature course, it truly showed how different they were in mindset. Hurston’s essays completely exude her spunk and I think that she should be admired for not letting the racial tensions of her time hinder her love for life. Despite this I wonder if she is a caricature of herself at times, utilizing at times the “minstrel technique” that Wright accused her of. She talks in “How It Feels…” about her “gallery seat” of a front porch, and how she perched atop the front gate and talked to strangers. At one point she even acknowledges how the other people in her town didn’t appreciate her southern hospitality. “The colored people gave no dimes,” she wrote, “They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.” The same could be said for her place in Harlem: she sat atop the gate and while her peers didn’t encourage her antics, they couldn’t disown her completely.
It’s easy, after reading the articles on her, to dismiss Hurston as a suck-up, as a traitor to her race, a white-lover. In her essay she wrote: “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.” To me this proves that in Hurston’s eyes, race did not matter, it was the self that mattered. As a child she talked to anyone because she saw no color lines, and as an adult she was exactly the same. In Mary Crow Dog’s piece “Civilize Them With A Stick,” she wrote that “racism breeds racism in reverse,” racism breeds suspicion not only of others but of one another. Hurston embraced people, it seemed, no matter their color. She transcended the hate that hate breeds, while her peers fell into the pit. She loved life, no matter what the colors.
I’m torn apart by Zora Neale Hurston. On one hand, I crown her the Queen of Forward Motion. She wrote that “slavery was the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” At the same time I guess I can’t help but wonder how she can so easily shrug off her plight. That’s when I remind myself of her spirit. Wright wrote in “The Library Card” that reading got him down, that he “felt trapped,” and that feeling would halt his reading. I think we all understand this feeling, but it takes a special person to overcome that feeling, to take in what they read and then put it to use. Wright was obviously special, but I love Hurston more because she was able to move past the hard feelings and lead a life. She died poor but at least she made her life worth it.
Copyright Katie Cibort 2009
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