Kate Simon's Bronx Primitive

Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive follows the story of Simon’s immigration to the United States from Warsaw, Poland and her adjustment to New York City. She first brings the reader into her memoir with her descriptions of her brother and how she felt about him. She talks about her jealously she has towards him saying, “I was jealous, felt abandoned, unloved, coldly shadowed while the full warm light that was mine now circled him” (40). This is just one of the examples of her great ability to introduce and describe the characters in her story. Her description of the slight man in brown is very well done as well. She adds some reflection from her current self by stating, “I searched for him for many years later”(42) after revealing that she had an adolescent crush on him. Her creation of these characters is very visual, emotional, and triggers senses that are not normally triggered through reading, such as the tasting of a Hershey’s chocolate bar after her description of seeing her father for the first time in New York City.

Simon’s scene creation is also very done. The first time Simon really digs into scene creation is her retelling of the ship, the Susquehanna, as almost like a dream. While the descriptions of the ship are not extremely visual the whole point of the scene is her showing the reader that her journey to America was a very long one. This was probably the stronger of the scene descriptions for me strictly on the merit that because most people forget what they dream about after they wake up, it shows the reader how long of a trip the journey to America was. However, when she describes actual scenes she creates a very visually fulfilling atmosphere. The one line that speaks for her overall description of America is, “Instead of a city of silver rivers and golden bridges, America turned out to be a Uncle David’s flat on Avenue C in which my father had first lived when he came to America”(43).  She later goes on to talk about how her vision of America was not what she had envisioned while in Warsaw. She hoped for it to be full of sacks of candy and cookies, but instead, “…was a stern man whose duty it was to cure us of being the cosseted spoiled little beasts our mother and her idiot sisters had allowed to flourish”(47).

The overall plot structure is very straightforward in terms of the events that she has gone through.  However, while these events can be said to be almost normal situations one must go through while immigrating to a new country, it’s what Simon discusses and reflects upon while discussing these events that really bring her memoir to life. An example of this is when she arrives at Ellis Island. She is given a new English name of Caroline. She describes this new name as a “barbed-wire fence that divided me from myself throughout my school years”(43). She does this to show what exactly she was feeling at the time. This adds a great deal of significance to the memoir because it’s not just a story of how she got her “school name” but it’s how she felt about it and how she hated it so much. Another example is the ending of the memoir in which her father more or less “taught them a lesson” about not walking down the street without him or their mother. She talks about making a “Domesday Book” of her father’s deeds, how he feared it, and how with that fear Simon, “…which I battened, the tears could not make me shed freezing as an icy wall between us”(48). Using this type of writing style adds a much larger dynamic to the story telling of the memoir. It’s no longer just the retelling of the events, but there’s a great deal of reflection and personal dialogue going on with Simon’s writing which makes the piece stand out. 

Russell Baker's Growing Up

Russell Baker's Growing Up follows his five-year-old self living in Newark, New Jersey with his mother during The Great Depression. The way he starts the first section immediately captures the reader’s attention with the use of ironic foreshadowing. Baker does so by making a reference to the sociopolitical state of the nation: “President Hoover refused to use the scare word ‘recession’ when speaking about the slump. It was merely ‘a depression’…Good times were just around the corner” (49). This paints the scene for everyone and sets up the reason for his departure to the house of his uncle, Allen.

It is interesting to note how he starts the section about Uncle Allen, which is the same as how he introduces each of the characters excluding his mother. He always uses some kind of phrase to capture the character’s personality quickly before jumping into more detail or using them to describe a new situation or setting. For instance Baker has Uncle Allen say, “Three can starve as cheap as two” (49) and Aunt Pat cry, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” (51). He uses these two characters to, first, show how he grew up and also how they impacted or inspired him. They represent Baker’s quirky, particular side and act as symbols for hope in spite of bad times. They are a large portion of his life and need to be mentioned since they offer him wisdom, particularly “streetwise” wisdom. And that seems to be a connecting element throughout this portion of Growing Up: always receiving some kind of knowledge, whether it’s streetwise or not, and learning ways to overcome life and its many obstacles (i.e. The Great Depression). A great lesson, and a way he reflects on his Uncle Allen, appears at the beginning: “Like my mother, Uncle Allen believed that with hard work, good character, and an honest nature a man could make something of himself in spite of bad times…” (50).

The “streetwise” section starts on page 53 with his encounter with the perversion of an adult female, and her attempt to molest him. This section also plays into another theme of ignorance and literally “growing up.” Baker almost puts one in the situation with him. His concrete nouns, and minimal usage of concrete, yet quite descriptive, adjectives, such as “authoritative maternal women” (53) and “timid five-year-old’s desire” (53) within the section, allows one to truly see his five-year-old self through the reflective style of Baker’s adult self: “I had the timid five-year-old’s desire to be agreeable…The passion that wakened in me was anger” (53). It is simple yet very effective in putting the reader in the physical and psychological settings that the rest of the selection will embody.

Another aspect of the story that keeps the coherence and cohesion intact are the spurts of literal depression followed by glimpses of hope: “While I was experiencing the routine miseries of childhood, my mother was discovering the Depression” (55), followed by “In December she found temporary holiday work…” (56) and “Of course there was always the chance she could marry again” (56). And then there is the introduction and explanation of Oluf, which is basically a large Depression-themed roller coaster of emotions.

Baker eloquently describes Oluf and then uses the last 10 pages of the selection quoting his letters to Miss Baker and showing how they affect her and the family’s personal lives. He writes: “Oluf’s work kept him on the road much of the time…The graceful flourish of his handwriting contrasted oddly with the fractured grammar and exotic spelling of his prose. Still, his discomfort with the mysteries of English did not diminish his power to make himself felt when he took up the pen” (57). Through these paraphrased, or possibly verbatim, letters Baker is able to portray how the Depression sent people on the aforementioned roller coaster of emotions and basically tore families and lives apart. The way he describes Oluf’s writing style is a symbol for his/his family’s search, and need, for meaning in such a dreary, apathetic age: “…comical spelling…eerie grammar…devil-may-care punctuation…distinctive voice…sweetness, despair, earnestness, love” (57).

Although the story does not end on a happy note, I ask: should anyone really expect a happy ending in a memoir based around The Depression? It turned people around him into hopeless cynics, and he must wonder how hope was even possible to ascertain after seeing his mother and Oluf crumble into dissolution. But Baker completes this selection, or chapter, perfectly by ending on a depressing note since it represents how most people ended up during those troubling times: “Oluf disappeared into the Depression.  My mother’s hopes for finding love and security vanished with him” (67).

Don Asher's Shoot the Piano Player

The first thing I noticed when reading Don Asher's entertaining memoir Shoot the Piano Player is the author's vivid, verbose writing style. I also noticed that before any serious reflection begins, Asher mostly just describes the bars and music clubs he plays when he's sixteen and the people who run, work at, and frequent them. The places he describes in the memoir - “waterfront dives, backstreet saloons, and turnpike toilets” - ultimately lead him to the “preeminent cabarets and ballrooms of Boston and San Fransisco” (205).

The first place Asher describes is Tiny's, a strip joint. There, he goes into detail about Tiny, the man who runs the bar, and the “Glamazons,” strippers that Asher accompanies on piano when they are performing. Though Asher says that playing at Tiny's was “the happiest time” he's "ever known," playing music becomes complicated for him after the bar closes. The more experience Asher gains, the more he is aware of the compromises being made to his talent and creativity.

 After Tiny's, Asher works at Vincent's, a seedy bar that is frequented by mobsters. Again, Asher gives the reader a good sense of time and place; he describes his surroundings and characters like the owner of Vincent's, Guido, Guido' sister, singer Amy Avallone, and the shady patrons. Asher also uses music lingo, which is a nice touch. But during this section, Asher begins reflecting on playing music for a living and the compromises he has to make to keep his job. Though Asher has to adapt to his surroundings to remain employed, it stifles some of his creativity and talent, and he has to pander not only to his employer's needs, but the audience's as well, an audience that wants him to play the songs straight because his technical playing leaves them confused and an audience that gives him money to play certain songs over and over.

 It gets worse for Asher during the next section of the memoir. Asher moves to Boston and begins studying jazz piano in college. To support himself, he joins Rudy Yellin's Society Orchestra, a “stable” of musicians that play country clubs, weddings, parties, catering halls, and hotels. Many of the musicians he plays with are older and have already compromised. Though they are able players, and Asher picks up useful tips and advice from them, these musicians have settled playing the popular songs of the day with little variation and under humiliating circumstances for money because they have wives and kids to support. In addition, many of Rudy's band leaders “vie for engagements by outfitting their musicians in exotic costumes to fit an ethnic or thematic occasion” (213). These “theme parties,” in Asher's opinion, are “the closet thing the professional musician comes to prostitution” (213). The reader can feel how frustrating it is for Asher as he plays for Rudy and has to deal with careless management that supply him warped pianos with missing keys while performing in a series of ludicrous get-ups and costumes. He experiences all of this at a young age, and it leaves him dispirited. The innocence he had when he was performing at Tiny's is lost. He realizes that “there is less real music to the society-band business than people think” (213).

 By the time of the “Chinatown” party, Asher has had it with Rudy's. He writes, “I thought, Another year of Rudy, collie hats, and assorted monkey suits, of moisture-sodden, rotten-tomato pianos, and I'd be reduced to a shadow of a man, devoid of talent, invention, and testicles. Might as well sew up duck's rectums in a meat market, or trade off with that waiter...at least he wasn't whoring, merely putting in hours. He was doing his own thing” (218). Though the Chinatown scene is humorous, it is also dispiriting, pathetic, and humiliating. Asher is doing what he loves, but it's costing him his dignity, talent, and pride. Though Asher becomes cynical at a young age, it doesn't necessarily drain him of his passion for music. After leaving Rudy's, he goes to San Fransisco. Though Asher doesn't explicitly say where he ends up, hopefully he goes to San Fransisco to perform at one of the “preeminent cabarets and ballrooms” he mentioned at the beginning of the memoir and not at some toga party at a country club.

Vivian Gornick from "Fierce Attachments"

Right off the bat Gornick grabs the reader in her first sentence “ A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore...” You immediately get this idea of Gornick's mother, that she is this feisty, outspoken woman (to put it nicely). Though we don't get much of a background or straight forward description of her, the reader gets an idea of her mother through her dialogue in the story. Before reading this story, I had expected the excerpt to have some sort of meaningful idea on mother-daughter relationships, but Gornick focuses a lot on Nettie in this passage. Through her comparison to Greta Garbo, Gornick lets you know that Nettie is very “Hollywood”. There is this glamour and allure to this woman that sets her apart from the other people in the apartment building and fascinates Gornick. 

We are very quickly taken through Nettie's story with her husband's return, his abusive behavior, his death, and then focusing on the male visitors Nettie has at her apartment. Gornick then goes into the male visitors Nettie has at her apartment and the scene of her bursting into Nettie’s apartment, after which the story seemed to be cut off and the switch to Gornick and her mother walking through the streets seems abrupt. The last scene we see with Nettie however, when Vivian walks in on her and a man sitting at the kitchen table, Gornick describes the look Nettie gave her "She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.." It would seem as though Nettie so apart of Gornick's family, that she had become concerned about the example she was setting for her, the way a parent would.

At first it felt like we had gotten different stories all mushed together into one passage, and I found myself wondering what is the connection here? Through the different stories she describes, the common thread I could see was her mother and how she acted throughout the chapter. Her mother seems to have this odd, complex relationship with Nettie, where she takes her under her wing and defends her yet I sensed that Gornack’s mother was intimidated of her in a way. There is a line in which they are describing the relationship between the two women after Rick’s death, “My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled” This connects back to the beginning of the story, when Nettie is praising Gornick’s mother for her domestic skills, and Gornick describes her mother as quietly envious of Nettie’s looks . Now that Nettie is widowed and vulnerable, there seems to come a balance in their relationship.

Where I felt connected most to Gornick is when she asking her mother begins telling her her what she thinks of the biography Vivian has given her. She describes herself getting angry and wanting to lash out at her mother over her opinion. I thought this frustration she describes with her mother and wanting to fight back against her domineering opinion was something that everyone has felt at some point or another with a parent or family member.

In a vulnerable moment at the end of  story, we get this revelation from Gornick’s mother, “I’m jealous,” my mother blurts out at me,”I’m jealous, she lived her life, I didn’t live mine” In this confession , it seemed to tie together everything about Gornick’s mother, in that although this woman put up a tough exterior, being able to battle through words, there was something missing from her own life. I think this is why there is this certain tension between her and Nettie and why she scoffs at the books Vivian gives her; they both remind her of what she doesn't have.

Overall I enjoyed the very straightforward style of the piece. I like that there was a lot of reflection from Gornick’s older self yet we are also put in her mindset as a young child and how she was observing things at the time of the story.

Survey Results

1. Here are some ideas floated to make the class discussions better. Have themed discussions. Do small group discussions and then have the groups report to the whole class. More emphasis in the discussions on how the readings connect to the papers. Also, have a discussion about the papers the class day before they are due. Make the discussions more question/answer. Go around the room and have people say what they find interesting about the reading. Do an exercise in class and then have a discussion about it.

Response: It sounds like you want the discussion to be more directed and organized with specific questions and themes. I can see you're point. It's hard to anticipate what might be provocative for folks in a particular reading. Concentrating on looking at the readings from a writer's perspective is not always so intuitive. My idea for having you blog about the readings before class doesn't seem to have generated the sort of in-class discussions I had hoped for. Maybe my own blogging is too demonstrative and not directive enough. I thought by blogging about an issue in the readings it would spur you do something similar but it seems to instead have deadened the space.

What if I instead ask questions in my initial blog posts for you to answer in your posts? Not specific questions per se but the sort of question I might ask after I quote a part of the text. In other words, I might quote a line and say how it works as memoir technique, as something from a writer's perspective, and then ask you to do something similar with a favorite or memorable line you like from the piece. I could do that. Also, it worked pretty well to have people show each other their writing and then have a discussion on what they saw and how what they are doing might help others. I'd like to do more of these types of discussions.  

2. Here are some ideas floated to make the writing assignments better: Do more exercises in class that help write the memoirs--similar to the Wolff exercise on The Mickey Mouse Club. More in-class workshops on our writing and opportunities to talk to peers and the professor about comments to papers. We could maybe do some writing in class and then share that writing. Do group work around the papers and then do a class share. More attention to what the assignments require of me as a writer. Do the Google docs review but then come to class and discuss the comments with each other and the professor.

Response: I would like to make the class more of a writing workshop. I think it is a golden opportunity to do this in a class of 14 students. You and I will rarely get this opportunity again and it is a shame to waste it. I don't personally like standing up in front of you and talking about writing. I would rather have you talk to each other and to me one-on-one or in small groups about your writing. I want to do more of this hands-on exchange of writing. It's just trying to finesse it in just an hour and fifteen minutes. But I'm game.

I asked you to bring your beginning draft of your graphic memoir to class next week and that I think will be a start. We could split up into groups of three, say, and have each person read/show their draft to the other two people. I could prepare this workshop by getting together a list of questions you might ask each other about your drafts so that you can see specifically what you need to concentrate on and then have others in the group comment on how you might reach those goals for the paper.

I think that the Bechdel paper is quite challenging but with the added graphical element it could reveal some interesting things about the memoir form as we've been studying it. I feel sometimes that the Bechdel paper is an interlude between more serious applications of the memoir but maybe I’m wrong to think that way. I do have trouble understanding what your capabilities and interests are when it comes to writing these papers. If I heard more about what interests you and challenges you about the memoir, I might be more able to address those issues. I guess it takes me asking you directly. Simple, but often coming up with the right questions is the hardest thing in teaching and learning. A good question is better than a "really good five-cent cigar" (Thomas Riley Marshall (1854-1925)) don't you think?

Estelle's post on Eiseley

In a complexity of vivid details and life questioning prose Loren Eiseley weaves a wonderful description of his time on the shores of Costabel Beach. I loved this memoir and I think that for me one of the biggest reasons why this was a successful narrative is the use of tone, and the tonal shift that occurs over the 16 page course of this essay. Specifically Eiseley’s focus on death and the dominance that it claims over the entirety of the world, “He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea. “I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.”” And then the way he begins to shift his attitudes towards life after he meets and ponders his run in with ‘The Star Thrower’.

The tonal shift is very gradual throughout the work and it isn’t until near the very end that Eiseley expresses his new outlook on the world, “I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. “I understand,” I said. “Call me another thrower.” Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer, After us there will be others.”

Another aspect of this work that I found to be very impactful was the repetition of certain themes and images. There were three major examples of this that I noted; one example of this to be used was the lifelessness of the beach and the hopelessness that was found on the shore for the marine life that was sentenced to death there. And the second was the Buddhist Skull and Eye, which Eiseley used to clear his mind so that he was able to focus on the specific scenes of reflection that were shared in the essay. The use of the skull and eye at first was described by Eiseley as being him looking at the word with an air of pessimism he felt on the shore. “Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.”

It was in a segment of the book that Eiseley was using the image of the Skull and Eye to reflect on his mother, and he mentions briefly the painful past that seemingly was the leading contributor to his negative view held at the beginning of the work. Eiseley uses the eye to seek out answers to questions that he mentions during the work and it is through these questions and reflections that he ultimately comes to realize that he appreciates life. “I had been unbelieving. I had walked away from the star thrower in the hardened indifference of maturity. But thought mediated by the eye is one of nature’s infinite disguises. Belatedly, I arose with a solitary mission. I set forth in an effort to find the star thrower.”

The third and, in my opinion, most powerful image that was used by Eiseley is, of course, the Star Thrower himself. This character represents many different themes for Eiseley and his life. Such as the contrast of life and death in the first scene on Costabel Beach where when all Eiseley and the “collectors” found or noticed on the beach was the death of creatures, the Star Thrower looked for life and tried to preserve it rather than accept demise. Another view that one can look at and compare the Star Thrower to is an almost God-appointed role, the way he considers it his given duty to find the life amongst the debris of death and save it.

 I also thought that along with the use of tone and repetition, Eiseley’s choice of breaking this moderately long block of text into sections was an interesting choice stylistically. It sort of reminded me of Poe’s “the Masque of the Red Death” and the way in that story the different stages of life and realization were symbolized in the different colored rooms; these sections represented the personal growth and maturing of Eiseley in the midst of his encounter with the Star Thrower. 

Bechdel's artist/autistic colony

Bechdel's chapter 5, "The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death", starts with images of radiance, the sunset and rise and her father sunbathing, and a meditation on why her father stayed in Beech Creek, a stifling, inhibiting place. On page 129 Bechdel starts to write and to draw or paint. Her child character writes a poem, her father adds lines to it, and she plunks down a "muddy watercolor sunset" to illustrate it. Bechdel adds other panels where we see her child’s art start to grow but always in the shadow of her parents' more consummate abilities.

On page 135, she inexplicably starts talking about her "obsessive-compulsive disorder". This after describing their house to be "like an artists' colony." The descriptions of her OCD go on for several panel/pages and then she discovers Dr. Spock and she starts to put it together. Bechdel uses her childhood OCD and Dr. Spock like she used the myth of Daedalus and Camus and later James Joyce: as an alternative narrative that is superimposed on her family life. You see this covertly in how she describes her OCD but then more overtly when she returns on page 139 to her parents. Her father has just come home late for dinner and her parents quarrel.

This missed-dinner drama happens inside the panels on the page while her child character is absorbed in reading Dr. Spock and it finishes up with her returning to the "artist colony" motif, a two page column panel (at the bottom of the page) of their home shown from the outside, and a revision of that characterization by referring to their house as an "autistic colony". This play on words arrives in perfect logical fashion by way of her own recollections of her OCD as a symptom of the dysfunctional family life and is demonstrated in miniature by the short scene of her father coming home late dinner and her mother's anger. We suddenly understand why she's been telling us about her OCD. It is reaction to her family life but she does not say it outright but shows it happening all around her while she is trying to discover its (the OCD) roots while at the same time (as writer) knowing all about it.

The writer/artist Bechdel is a character in her own memoir by being the puppet master leading us down paths where we are told to pay attention to one thing while she is subtly showing us something else. It's like she is a tour guide in a museum. We listen to her talk to us about the paintings but behind our backs the paintings are acting out a drama all their own. She knows this but doesn't let on. We are both captive of her narrative and privy to her narrative machinations.

How can we describe this technique for use in our own memoirs? Bechdel wants us to see how she gets to the idea that the house she grew up in was like an artists' colony. A benign sort of characterization that we might, if we were writing it, let stand. But she doesn't let it stand because it is more complicated than that. She knows that artists are motivated as much by compulsion as by inspiration. And that indeed, their inspiration often comes from their compulsions. So how to argue this without making an argument, by instead dramatizing it so we see what she is talking about. The best way is to show us the home as artist colony and then segue into the compulsion, work with what is going on with the compulsion and slowly bring the home as artist colony idea back in again but differently, as an autistic colony. That way, what was posited (home as artist colony) is now by way of an alternative narrative (OCD) transformed into something different (autistic colony): a result of considering the alternative narrative that at first appears out of the blue but slowly starts to make sense and is finally something that seems necessary in order to understand the deeper meaning of what home-as-artist-colony can be.

In its simplest form: She takes an idea, pushes it through an alternative narrative, and comes out with a more complicated picture of what that idea means. Try this technique; it will be revelatory for your own first impressions of what something means.