Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

The essay according to Heilker and Hohn

I have been gestating a post (for not quite nine months) based on two things I read at the beginning of the year: Paul Heilker's essay "Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts" in the December 2006 issue of CCC and an essay  by Donovan Hohn in the January 2007 issue of Harper's titled "Moby-Duck." I was especially happy to see Heilker's name in the CCC TOC. Though I've never met or communicated with him, I felt a personal connection of a sort: he had (unbeknownst to him) stood as an ally in my disastrous (in the mealy-mouthed Ivory-Tower sort of sense of the word) attempt to overthrow thesis-driven writing. Or at least to open up a dialogue, to question its bullying domination of FYC in my department, to argue for a more inclusive, baggier sort of definition of what we were looking for in the freshman "essay."

It was about four years ago, and I was still relatively new to the dept. I had been doing freelance editing at home for nearly fifteen years and was thrilled to be back in the middle of (what was to me a rather horrifying term but a welcome idea) the "academic discourse community." After a meeting in which one faculty member seemed to claim that the thesis was the sine qua non of FYC, I'd sketched out a tentative position paper, just a couple of pages long, arguing, in essence, that writing could be exploratory as well as argumentative. (The disastrous part involves that faculty member's response: my memo described as an "unsubstantiated diatribe" and my behavior as "totally lacking in professionalism and collegiality.") In my note I quoted from Heilker's book The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form:

The incredibly tight discursive structure of the thesis/support form makes the additional ideological claim that the complexities of the world's problems and issues are not problematic at all--not a complex web of interconnections that need to be addressed from multiple perspectives in a collaborative dialogue--but really rather neat, "slottable," and solvable in a very short space using a single point of view and formulaic thinking, a procedure which will leave one with no bothersome loose ends. (6)

Angell (and others) on baseball

Having just finished Roger Angell?s new book Let Me Finish (and in the middle of a Yankees-Red Sox series), I've been thinking the past few days about baseball. Though I've been a baseball fan of sorts for decades, I had never read Angell very carefully, just a semiannual skim (spring training and season recap) through his New Yorker pieces looking for a mention of the Red Sox. In the past few years, though, I read a couple beautifully written essays of his, "Andy" (centered of course on his step-father E. B. White) and "Here Below" (a meditation on graveyards and other sorts of memorials--but I'll save that for a later post), so I happily snatched up the new collection, which includes those two essays, and went back as well to dig out "Long Voyage Home," his account of the 2004 baseball season.

Let me start small, with a sentence that caught my attention from that last essay (New Yorker, Nov. 22, 2004):

On his off days, Pedro Martinez settled capless into his upper corner of the dugout, wearing only remainder bits of the Boston uniform, and delivered momlike nods and smiles toward the unbuttoned Manny as he ambled toward the bat rack again.

It?s hard for me to separate out my own knowledge of the players and the scene described, but the sentence seems to me packed with information, the visual image of the two as well as their characters and relationship, a sentence almost ambling itself and deceptively casual in its diction, with that final word ?again? setting the scene into the cinematic clich of flipping calendar pages.

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Red Sox fans: a study in details. In another of my perennial attempts to sell my students on the specific detail, that winter I read a few passages from the same article:

I didn?t think much about my Red Sox fan-friends until the World Series was over. Now they are triumphant, and their old pains and desperate attachments have become historic and quirky. They won?t need their amulets and game-watching rituals anymore?the stuff that was mentioned in so many of the TV news stories the day after, and in some New England newspaper feature stories. A copy of the Bangor Daily News mentioned a family in Old Town that mowed a "Go, Sox" pattern in the lawn, and a ninety-four-year-old lady in Lakeville, Massachusetts, who made herself a little ceramic Fenway Park each year, with porcelain nuns at play inside.

Doesn't that beat "Red Sox fans sure are a quirky bunch"? I tried to convince them. I asked them to what degree is your pleasure as a reader derived from such details. Where does a writer get this stuff?

Another passage suggests comparisons to movements of a camera (far shot, wide angle, pan, closeup):

The Sox came down to their last six outs, and the cameras, sweeping the first-base-side stands at gelid Fenway, brought us close-ups of a ten- or twelve-year-old kid peeking out from between his fingers, a grandmother in a rally cap, a couple of glum youngsters in Sox war paint, and a woman with stylish dark-red nail polish on her long fingers, which were clasped to the side of her face in imitation of "The Scream." Unbearable.

To back up a bit, the televised game, especially if it's an important one, often starts with the blimp-view of the tiny stadium, a distant glowing jewel or, to use John Updike's familiar phrase, "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." As game time closes in, the cameras on the ground pan the nearly bare field, the singular rump of the umpire bending to sweep off home plate. The camera slides across the hubbub of players in each dugout, the pitchers warming up in the bullpens, then passes in swoops through the crowds in the stands, a full house. The crowd at Fenway was tense with anticipation. Is that sufficient, or would you rather see a few of those devoted fans, the ones whose parents and grandparents have been brought so heartbreakingly close so many times? The camera stops in close-up: this is what it's like to be a Red Sox fan, and this, and this. The art is in the selection. But how many do we need to include, surely not every face in the crowd? How do we choose that sufficient representative sample? Those are central questions for any writer.

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Re: Donald Murray

In a Boston Globe column of a few weeks ago, carefully cut out and passed on to me by my mother, Don Murray imagines a housecall-visit from his long-dead doctor, the one who changed his life by telling Murray that he need not grow up to be his parents:

"If you're dead, you probably have a lot of time on your hands, Dr. Bartlett, do you know what a hospitalist is?"
"I don't think I want to."
"We've been doing some terrible things to the language since you've been gone. I've been called an expressivist. I think it's an insult or something. I think they mean I'm a writer who expresses his feelings, more heart than head."
Harrumph.
He always had a good harrumph, a Down East, part Indian harrumph.
"I just saw my hospital had hired a couple of hospitalists. Apparently general practitioners don't like to visit patients in hospitals, upsets their schedules, I guess. And young doctors don't like to be called in the middle of the night. Want an 8 to 5 schedule. So they become hospitalists, have a 9 to 5 schedule. No calls at night."
"Patients must cause a fuss."
"Don't think so. They are dealing with specialists."[...]
"They ever come to your home? See what's going on, what the life you lead is like?"
"Of course not. I go to their offices."
"How could they treat you without knowing you?"

This gentle answer to the critics of expressivism (an ugly term Murray clearly disavows), published to an audience not of academics but of fond readers long-familiar with his weekly chronicles of aging and remembering, losing and savoring, made me first smile, then stop for a bit to evaluate, consider, and remember. Though I have only nibbled a bit at the edges of rhet/comp scholarship, I sense that his influence is by now a multiply branched tree of considerable girth, despite his current lapse from favor. As Wendy Bishop puts it in her 1999 CCC article "Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition",

Elbow and Murray were made safe by transformation into figures, by relegation to expressivist categories. Then, as the field professionalized, there followed a progression of diminishment and tuckings-away, a little like the nouveau riche habit of sticking the money-earning but foolishly-dressed grandfather in the back study, not introducing him to high society company where he might embarrass. (24)

Lessons from Sedaris

David Sedaris's latest essay in the May 8 New Yorker offers a few lessons in the craft of writing (as well as a chuckle or two, as always).

• The first thing that struck me was this sentence:
  I stretch out in the bathtub, soaking in the fragrant oils while outside my window beggars are gathered like kittens upon the heating grates.
  It seems to me a tremendously rich sentence tonally, in the way, in part, that "stretched " and "fragrant oils" create the ironic distance between author and narrator that permeates much of Sedaris's writing. Consider the word kittens, as I move into lecture mode, and the difference in connotation and sound between kitten and cat. Why "are gathered" instead of the simpler "gather"? Is it the difference between passive and active, or the shift in rhythm? Did author or editor consider a comma after "oils"? (It might be interesting to dig out some examples of obsessive editorial punctuation-care, though, on second thought, perhaps not so helpful for those of my students who still struggle with sentence boundary issues.)
• Moving to structure, why start with the preamble-paragraphs about the whippet portrait? Think of some experience you've written about or considered writing about. Is there some backstory, related incident that might deepen your initial "essay-kernel"?

  The end of the essay brings up the issue of how writers create closure. I often try mentioning If You Give a Mouse a Cookie as an example of circular structure. The last part of this essay offers a fine example of the champagne-cork structure (twist-twist-twist-POP). Note to self: Try classifying and finding suitable metaphors (one of my favorite activities!) for varieties of essay structure.

• A few ideas for freewriting prompts:
  There are things that one enjoys buying, and things that one doesn't.

  And, from this passage, in a neat tie-in to my tools essay of this semester, what would the objects in your house say about you?:

  It's funny how certain objects convey a message--my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing something--my numbers is off the charts."
• Finally, something I noticed when I printed out Sedaris's essay from the computer: everything looks better on glossy paper, in three-column format, in the beloved typefont of the New Yorker. (Maybe I should suggest my students try that??) Also, more serious matters to think about, how the visual appearance of a text affects my assessment of it, and to what degree I am prejudiced toward the chunky paragraphs that I seem prone to in my own writing.

William Gass on the essay: in chocolate

In "Emerson and the Essay," Gass's homage to the earliest American master of the form, he posits several defining characteristics of the essay (I'll stay safely backstage for this one, to prevent any unflattering comparisons):

• the essay traces out the writer's thought processes
  It is raining....And then the sun comes through the clouds like a melon through a wet sack. The mechanics of the mind must not be allowed to show; yet where else, if not here, may they reveal themselves, for the hero of the essay is its author in the act of thinking things out, feeling and finding a way; it is the mind in the marvels and miseries of its making, in the work of the imagination, the search for form.