Something about writing

I took the long weekend off, leaving my GuiltBag in a drawer at work and resolving to relax, to clear my mind after a couple of very intense weeks. In between cleaning, commerce (I bought a vacuum cleaner, a bed frame, and one of those Ikea Poang chairs that are so comfortable you never want to stand up again–thanks, Craigslist!), and catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in ages, I read.

A lot.

First, I finished Atonement (which, appropriately enough, I began reading on Yom Kippur afternoon). I read my first Ian McEwan novel, On Chesil Beach, this summer in Scotland on a recommendation from Allyson, my writing tutor. She had me read it because it’s a great example of how to create tension from literally nothing happening. What kept me reading, though, and made me want to read more McEwan, was his writing style. McEwan’s an old-fashioned writery writer, relying on sumptuous and sensual description to carry the weight of his stories, which, from what I can tell so far, mostly take place in his characters’ internal lives. Check this out, from Atonement:

She went indoors, quickly crossed the black and white tiled hall–how familiar her echoing steps, how annoying–and paused to catch her breath in the doorway of the drawing room. Dripping coolly onto her sandaled feet, the untidy bunch of rosebay willow herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The vase she was looking for was on an American cherry-wood table by the French windows which were slightly ajar. Their southeast aspect had permitted parallelograms of morning sunlights to advance across the powder-blue carpet. Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene–by the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely restrained by and orange and blue tasseled rope, framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks. A set of steps led down to the lawn on whose border Robbie still worked, and which extended to the Triton fountain fifty yards away.

I love how McEwan writes so heavily and softly–the wood, textiles, and herbs are almost smellable in this scene. And the colors–don’t even get me started on the colors. This is writing that is a feast for the reader. I usually tear through novels, but I took my time with Atonement, even though it’s relatively short. I just couldn’t read huge chunks of it at a time without feeling like I’d just eaten a very big meal.

So I just said I’m a fast reader, and I think I proved it by swallowing all of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road yesterday. Literally. I was up at dawn–my sister spent Saturday night at my apartment, and I gave her my bed, leaving me with first the too-small couch, then the floor–so I just started reading, waiting until it wouldn’t be rude for me to make a lot of noise. The Road is definitely McCarthy’s fastest-paced book, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy read–the premise itself is tough enough (a man and his young son travel across postapocalyptic America), and there are some scenes (cannibalism figures heavily in this book) that are going to haunt me for a while. But McCarthy’s style just moves in this one. While he’s been known to indulge in Faulknerian rhapsodies to candleflame and horses, McCarthy here is at his most taut:

He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last. The snow orange and quivering. A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.

So these two books are amazing, and totally different, and that leaves me in an interesting place as a writing teacher–for that’s what I’m beginning to consider myself, more than anything else. It wasn’t a slip-up that I told the ENG212 parents on Thursday night that the class is a writing class where we happen to read some books. But what do we do, when teaching writing, about style? Is it appropriate to teach a specific formal writing style when students are writing analytically? Is there such thing as one formal writing style? And what, pray, do I do about my Creative Writing students? Do I have a responsibility to show them examples of different writing styles, or will that just confuse them?

I got the final-ish draft of my short story from this summer, with Allyson’s comment, in Saturday’s mail. I haven’t looked at it yet, but all of this reading and thinking about writing makes me want to. I am not sure if I’m going to keep working on the story in the foreseeable future, but I’d kind of like to see it finished. If that’s possible.

Filed under: Matters Literary

I Might Be Wrong

I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, and I honestly have no idea where this post is going to go, so I’ll understand if nobody (including me) makes it to the end. Still, I think it’s worth a shot.

Thing 1 is the fact that 17/45 of my sophomores are going to receive Fs on their progress reports, which went out on Friday. This doesn’t mean that most, if any, of them will fail on their 1st quarter report cards, but as of Friday, I hadn’t received their first exploratory essays. They’ll hand something in, get minimal (but some) credit, strike a deal with me w/r/t their IEP-mandated extra time, and everyone’ll be happyish. That’s not the issue here.

What worries me is that these 17 students are doing exactly what I did from 6th-10th grade (especially 7th-9th). I basically refused to do homework, justifying my decision by declaring, vocally and silently, that I was bored silly with the way school was “done.” I found very little of any relevance in the experiences my teachers provided, so why encourage them? What, then, do I make of the grades and general low production levels in my sophomore sections? My writing students are crankin’ along–the essay writers are halfway through their third essays of the quarter, and the creative writers are starting their major stories. What’s up with the sophomores, then? Is it The Scottish Play? Is it the writing? Is it me?

Which brings me to Thing 2. Evan and I have a ton of interdisciplinary activities planned for these guys. One we’ve already started (the current events blog, which would be going better if learnerblogs weren’t hiccuping), but the others are on hold for the time being. I think we’re concerned that since the students have a hard time producing what we need them to do on paper (his failure rate is very close to mine, and for the same reasons), introducing usernames, passwords, and online procedures might make things even more unwieldy (less wieldy?).

So there’s tension there, tension between the frustration of dealing with a bunch of students who (despite being nice, kind, and intelligent enough in class) have opted out of doing the work I’ve assigned, and wanting to do what’s right for them by inviting them to use some new tools that they probably understand better than I do.

This morning, once our school’s internet connection finally stopped trying to rival Tom Glavine for reliability under pressure, I sat in a Learning Center into which no kids had been scheduled (I know, I was amazed too) and read Clarence Fisher’s post called “Tools At Work.” In this post, Clarence gets into all the ways in which technology helps him with his daily routine.

I won’t quote the post, because you can read the whole thing, but the essence of it comes with the last line: “This is what these tools are about.” They’re not ends in themselves; they’re means to an end. And what’s that end? Collaboration, communication, entertainment, reflection. The things that make us human and social. Do Facebook and email replace face-to-face conversations or the sheer pleasure of pen-on-paper writing? No. They augment them. The world doesn’t need Twitter, but since we live in a time when people want to know what their friends are up to, and are used to hearing about such minutiae as whether the President is clearing brush from his lawn or who designed the expensive dress some starlet’s wearing on the red carpet before yet another contrived awards show, who’s to stop the information flow? Your own resistance to social networking, assuming you’re resistant to it, isn’t a brave act of defiance in the face of humanity’s increasing mechanization; rather, it’s a misguided use of your anti-machine rage. Rather than fighting the culture of triviality and dehumanization by questioning the structure of society itself, you’re cutting yourself out of that culture’s still-human means of connecting people to people. It is fascinating to me that no matter what other apps people add to their Facebook pages, everyone still has a picture. The Wall, though silly, keeps people in touch. Fight it if you want, but I don’t really want to hear about it.

Thing 3, which I can’t figure out how to work in, but wanted to mention, is that the new Radiohead album comes out next week. What’s newsworthy isn’t that there’s (finally) a new Radiohead album, even though I stand by my claim that they’re frighteningly brilliant (even more so when you realize that, if they stay together as long as the Rolling Stones have, probably 30-40 years of this stuff ahead of them–they’re really just getting started), but the way the album’s being sold. Radiohead don’t have a record deal at the moment, so they’ve decided to sell the album themselves. If you can wait until December and have a lot of money, they’ll send you a box with a couple of CDs and some other treats. But if you’re impatient, like me, you can purchase the album in electronic format. How much will it cost to download the album legally from Radiohead? They haven’t set a price–you set it yourself. It’s up to you, the customer, to decide what you want to pay. Seriously. And if you can’t figure out why this is a major shift, give it another think.

So where does this all fit together? I don’t know. But something big’s happening–I keep getting the feeling that pieces of my life and my cultural space are intersecting in some odd ways. At last night’s Bob Dylan concert, Dylan’s band basically did live remixes of his classic songs, and Dylan himself turned even the most familiar classics (“It Ain’t Me, Babe,” for example) into unrecognizable growled assaults. Is he getting bored with singing his own songs every night? Or is he challenging the audience (“being Dylanesque,” as my concert companion put it) to think about the songs they grew up with in a new context? Is there a metaphor there, or did getting home really late do something regrettable to my mind?

Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Metaphysical & Philosophical, Matters Musical & Artistic