In Praise of Ander Monson.

This essay made me LOL. Literally. In the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It was pretty embarrassring, but it was also proof that this essay is good. It was mostly the snide side arrow notes that got me, but the text itself had its moments, too. Sometimes I found myself getting lost on the page, and while normally this would seriously bother me, it didn’t in this case. Partially I was okay with it because everything still made sense, but also because it emphasized his point about the ridiculous abilities of various word processors. What made this essay really great though was that it revealed te unseen and reinterpreted the seen. Which is what we’ve talked about essays needing to do in class. And here I really saw that in action, and how it works. I mean, Monson made me see word processors, which I use everyday, in a totally new way. It had never occured to me before that something like Word vs. a notebook can affect your writing, but it really makes sense that it can. I’m writing my blog directly into WordPress rather than writing it in Word and then copy and pasting it for the first time because of that essay. And it’s different. While blowing my mind, Monson was also able to entertain me with his wit and tone. Really that’s all I can ask for in an essay. So yeah, well done, Mr. Monson.

I liked Moore

When I started reading Moore’s piece, I thought I was reading a piece defending fathers. I thought Moore was making an argument that they’re undervalued, that they’re important caregivers, too. The first two paragraphs latch onto Tim Allen and his missing father, and Moore follows this with a fact about how male carp are vital in protecting their babies. But then he starts talking about the tragic life of the man who played the father in Father Knows Best, and of his own father, and the dad in Leave It to Beaver, and vasectomies, and wolves, emperor penguins, and Y chromosomes. And when he’s talking about these things, he isn’t always making the same point, that these fathers are essential and underappreciated. The form also invited me to expect that Moore would be making a clear point. One by one, I thought, he’d go down the alphabet, conveying messages that all begin with the same letter and that support the same argument. This pattern actually does carry through for a while, A through E all being points that made me more appreciative, or at least more sympathetic, of fathers. But the Father Knows Best piece, about the guy who attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, and then the following paragraph, about the geneticists trying to track down Ireland’s forefathers, started to mess up the flow of ideas I had expected. And that’s what I liked most about the work. It felt like a real meditation. I began to no longer think of Moore using the alphabet as a means of organizing his thoughts. Instead, I started to feel that he was letting the letters pull his feelings in various directions, and he seemed willing to explore the different thoughts about fatherhood that came to his mind.

In Praise of Moore

I really enjoyed “Son of Mr. Green Jeans.”  In my opinion, the essay’s greatest strength is the way in which it manages to be both profound and irreverent.  Rather than wallowing in self-pity about his relationship with his alcoholic father, the essay contains a playful tone which runs throughout the piece.  By including subjects like quizzes, cartoons, and toilets, to the childlike ABC structure, to the final joking line, “too bad,” the essay is never weighed down by its serious topic of “a meditation on missing fathers.”  The “formal” structure of the alphabetical heading actually seems to facilitate this combination.  The need for a topic to begin with a particular letter lets the essay casually flow into subjects that initially seem like off-topic pieces of trivia.  The fact that these tidbits about television shows and animals initially seem like random but interesting digressions makes it all the more powerful when their deeper thematic significance is later revealed.

I Guess I’m an “Average” Reader

This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. This. Essay. Essay. Essay. Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay.Essay. Essay. Essay. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. Was. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good *

Thank you,
Monsence (for this) Nonsense

I knew
your essay
was going to be good
when it began with
5 hundred twenT sevN instances of
ME.
Thank you,
Monson
for showing us all
that
I N N O V A T I ON
for I N N O V A T I O N ‘ S sake is……………. not interesting.

I knew
your essay
was going to be good
when it reminded me that
Work equals FORCE times D I S T A N C E

Thank you,
Monson
for doing poorly
what David Foster Wallace
does effectively **

Form influences content? Who knew? (Drew knew did you?)

Genius.

Thank you,
Monson
for completely alienating
your reader

Now
I can go sit in a room
alone
by myself
and think about
how shallow i am
for not understanding you

I hope that one day
one day…
If I play my cards right
and alienate enough people…

No one will understand me.

And that’s when I’ll know.
THAT’s when I’ll know
that I have finally become…

an artist.

love,

your biggest fan

* a n d b y g o o d i m e a n p r e t e n t i o u s
** footnotes, I mean

In Praise of Moore

I enjoyed Moore’s piece.  It certainly displayed well the role of absentee/obsolete/missing fathers (like Tim Allen’s story, his subsequent Esquire interview, and Moore’s own life) in the characters he presents.  I liked the use of the alphabetically ordered glossary as a formal device; as Simon points out, it’s a great way to allow a multitude of stories to show through.  The play between a rigid structure, and the fact that glossaries often involve one, highly specific, cut-and-dry topic (as opposed to a “meditation” on a slightly more abstract idea) makes the piece much stronger than it would be with, say, line breaks every few paragraphs.

But what I liked most about the piece was its irony.  Simon touches on it when he talks about Moore seeing his own father in these stories.  That’s something I hadn’t even thought about; I reacted more generally to the complicated notion of missing fathers.  The premise of the essay, and even the first two entries, suggest the title is appropriate.  But immediately after that, the essay quickly becomes a study in irony, and complicate the notion of supportive fathers.  The emperor penguins, his own relationship to Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver as well as the lives of the characters within the shows, and his own family life are themes he returns to within this context of missing fathers. Each one contains varying degrees of sympathy.  And, his almost nostalgic recollection of his father’s singing voice, the description of the male emperor penguin’s sacrifice, and the particularly compelling story from the University of Arizona psychologist seem to garner more sympathy for the fathers in question than they do incriminate them.

Especially interesting is his own story.  He reveals to us first, after listing a few selfless acts of fathers of the animal kingdom, that he flatly rejected his wife’s desire to have a child (running scared from the thought, quite literally).  He later goes into his dealing with drugs (a decades’ worth), and the fact that he has a vasectomy, before admitting the change of heart after “many years of considerable prodding.”  He discusses xenogenesis right before that; until then, we see him as critical of absent and cruel fathers (fish that eat their young; model TV daughters whose interactions with father figuers turn them to drigs prostitution), while also running scared from the idea of being a father himself, morally and physiologically.  He makes no effort to hide the fact that he’s not exactly the role model he desires, until the very end when he cites xenogenesis as a way to move beyond it.  At least while I was reading, I was waiting for the condemnation of absentee fathers, and it never came–like Simon mentioned, it might have been something he couldn’t will himself to write without qualifying it.

It’s a shame–I suppose it’s pretty obvious that there should be some kind of conflict in a work like this–and my reading seems like I assumed there wasn’t going to be any.  But the point stands.  The most important device he used, in my eyes, wasn’t the structure of the piece–it was the complicated relationship between its title and what was written beneath it.

——–

I apologize for these highly irrelevant images–I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy and thinking of a company that didn’t exist.

Also, additional irony comes from his own writings on his name, apparently based on a comic book character–the quote comes from a book of his:

“[W]hy in heaven’s name would a woman knowingly name her son after a comic strip whose chief activity was luring respectable fellows out of their homes to drink beer and play cards? Especially given the fact that her husband stayed out night after night, drinking beer and playing cards. There’s an odd one for you.”

In Praise of Ander Monson

Perhaps I should be praising Monson for the broad risks he takes in his form. The footnotes, the arrows, that whole page of “Me”, his use of font sizes, arrangement of text…all that jazz. Really though, I want to praise him for using the language of today. Perhaps it’s only me, but does it seem that everything we have read since middle school is old, sounds old, feels old. We spend a lot of time learning about the past, how things were, why things were, what were the results and consequences of these things, how are these things reflected today… If you are an English major, you spend time dissecting the political allegories of Spenser or Swift, you look up symbolic colors and political parties of Britain from hundreds of years ago.

Well, I think that I’ve finally found a piece that 50 years from now, I am going to know exactly what everything means and the future generations are going to be the ones looking this stuff up. I know about things like Word, Helvetica, autocorrect, CD’s, DVD’s, InDesign, PhotoShop, GIF, JPEG, and on and on. These are things we talk about all the time, especially as college kids, yet there never seems to be any creative academic representation (unless you take computer science or a class the specifically uses these things) of this, or someone sitting back and reflecting on society and saying, “Hey…everyone is using this stuff to create…I am going to write about it.” Perhaps I am not seeking our the right stuff, but I would love to read stories where people text, Google things, and download silly apps on their IPhone. Perhaps it is an inherent bias many people have as scholars, to discount the present and proclaim the past as the pinnacle. Much like many people view classic rock and the Beatles as the pinnacle of music. They may or may not be right, but I supremely enjoy the direction in which Monson is going…props.

In praise of Moore

Moore does a little thing here which could have easily been labeled as a gimmick and tossed aside. He arranges his entire essay by the alphabet. Each letter corresponds to a different word, phrase, or name, and is then followed by a paragraph relevant to the subject. He succeeds in my opinion because, unlike the alphabet books you read as a child, this device does not dictate the entire work. First off, it’s used as a form of irony. The whole concept of an alphabetical listing implies a certain innocence or childishness, much like shows like Captain Kangaroo. But when it comes down to the content, what Moore writes is both vulnerable and mature. This is evident from the first paragraph, where he takes Tim Allen, somebody associated with light-hearted laughter, and chooses instead to talk about the death of the comedian’s father.

He also uses this alphabetical device as an instrument, a method of meditation, one that guides the reader across various different worlds in television, in nature, in Hollywood, in different time periods, and in the author’s own life. He can smoothly transition the reader from scene to scene mainly because the shifts aren’t surprising. With each new letter, each new word, the reader expects something different.

But here also is where Moore once again departs from expectation. Throughout the whole piece, there is a string that seems to connect all his paragraphs. The theme of “missing fathers” is obvious from the title, but beyond that, I can sense the author’s own dissatisfaction running through each section. Moore’s father was a drunk, plain and simple, and while Moore hints that there was more to him than that (how he could”muster a stunning , honey-rich Irish baritone”), it is ultimately the “embarrassment” that Moore remembers when he thinks of his father. And so when Moore writes about figures like Mr. Green Jeans, who is “kind, funny, and extremely reliable,” or a penguin father, who sings an “ecstatic” song after seeing proof of offspring in the form of an egg, what seems to be really going is that Moore is reflecting on his own father, and how he compares. This is not to say he doesn’t mention other bad fathers either—there’s a part on guppy fathers, who eat their offspring, and there’s Hugh Beaumont, who played a caring father but in actuality despised children. Nevertheless, in each case I could sense a tension, that in writing about all these fathers, Moore is really trying to explore his own experience—both as a son and as a father.

In Praise of Monson (somewhat grudgingly)

I have to admit, I didn’t really like this essay that much. All the little sidenotes were too cutesy for me (my high school English teacher always used to say, “If it’s in a footnote, why not just put it in the paper itself? If you can’t put it in the paper, then it’s not that important, is it?”). The whole thing was a bit smart-alecky. But I’m praising it, so I guess I better get on with it.

What I did like about this essay was all the questioning about method. People write in different ways–in notebooks, on laptops, with different programs–so does how you write affect what the writing means? I never really thought about it before. Form clearly matters; I’ve written whole papers about that. Everyone agrees that poetry is different from journalism or an analytical essay in a way that matters because of the form. Monson was clearly trying to make a point by using an unusual form. But I think his point about method is much more salient.

For example, the fact that it took Monson about thirty seconds to complete the first page of text, when it would have taken ten with a typewriter and probably all day with a quill and a piece of parchment. Does his method of writing change the meaning of the work? I really sat and thought about that for a while, and I think it does. I don’t want to say that using a computer cheapens work or makes it less valuable, but when you think about the time that goes into it, it kind of does. I think that’s why blogs have such a reputation for being less worthy sources, because people know that they can be dashed off in a second and don’t really respect  their content as a result. If someone had to lay type for a paper, then damn, you know they really put a lot of time into what they were saying. But with a blog, it’s like whatever comes to mind. Like Twitter. (Useless, right?)

I also really liked all Monson’s commentary on working with text in InDesign. I spent a lot of my high school years futzing with InDesign for my school paper, letting it control me, really, messing with line breaks and text wrapping and all the things that it does for you. But I never really thought about the ways that the program might change the meaning of what I was writing, other than the choice of font. I was, and still am, a little bit font obsessed. I can generally name most fonts from a few words of text, and I would spend hours choosing the right fonts for the things I was designing. Something about the right font made the work right too. But I never thought about all the other effects like typing on a path or a curve. Like Monson says, does that change the words and make them something different? I have to sit and think about that for a while. And maybe play with the fonts in InDesign too.

In Praise of Monson

            If nothing else, Ander Monson’s essay can be said to be very unique and risky.  Well, perhaps not risky in the traditional sense, because it was originally posted on his website, a website maintained by a published author because people who enjoy his work want to learn about him on the internet.  In a way, he had nothing to risk in terms of material goods or reputation by posting it on the internet…at worst, no one would read it (and that is a risk for an author, who thrives on people reading his work).  It’s an entirely (self-acknowledgedly) self-centered essay.  It rambles.  It does not read in a linear fashion.  Without even considering the content, those are factors that would alienate most average readers.

            Ander Monson, however, doesn’t seem to be addressing the average reader, but someone who is willing to put up with this kind of solipsistic rambling in order to appreciate the greater issues that Monson is raising.  The very existence of this essay raises a question that Monson directly states in his essay, which is whether the very tradition of paper and printing pressing affects the way we think about, write, and read works of literature.  He, in the tradition of great thinkers in the arts, poses many questions and offers very few answers. 

            Monson was certainly not the first person to ever think of such questions, even if it is probably true that he posed them in his own unique words.  He, like many writers, treats the subject as though he is bringing something novel, perhaps even revolutionary, to the table, which is the sort of audacious attitude that actually does create genre-challenging and genre-changing works.

Brave, brave man

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but here it is anyways: I’m very interested in how a male gynecologist handles the delicate task of examining a woman’s reproductive system. Now, understandably they’re professionals, and they do this every day. It’s the patients that must be more anxious, coming into an enclosed room and spreading their legs for a stranger (one of the opposite sex, no less). But when your job consists everyday of a potentially awkward moment, there’s got to be something to be said of your own internal psyche. What’s going on in a male gynecologist’s mind? How do they help patients deal with the potential awkwardness? How do they themselves deal with it? And what about their life outside of work? How does a significant other handle it? What about their children? (Tommy, what does your dad do? He looks at vaginas! ). Honestly, it takes a certain person to be a gynecologist, especially if they’re male. It’s no easy task. And I’m sure they have a story (or stories) to tell. The only thing I need to do now is find one…

Obama

Following the trend of the uninterviewable subject, I’m curious about the personal life of the one person in our country who has the least amount of personal life of all. What does Obama do in his free time? Does he have free time? Does he ever just stall and read a magazine after he goes number two just to have a little bit of alone time? I wouldn’t blame him. Just knowing that the second he walks out of the bathroom he has to become “Obama”, the first black president in the history of the United States, the leader of the most powerful country in the world and the most hyped up politician since JFK. Talk about pressure. I wonder if he will ever be able to think about just himself over the course of the next 4 years. With the economic crisis and the War in Iraq going on, I guess he would feel pretty guilty just coming home, crashing on the couch, drinking a beer and watching Sportscenter.

The Three Dancers

I grew up admiring art. My mother took classes at the Minneapolis Art Institute and lugged posters and recreations of artwork to my elementary school to teach us everything she had learned. Once, she brought in a dead fish, slathered it in paint, then slapped it down on construction paper for her discussion of Paul Klee’s “Golden Fish.” She took me to training at the Art Institute, and by age ten I was a trained youth docent for the Institute’s Clementine Hunter exhibit. Anytime we went anywhere, overseas, other cities, we had to go to the Art Museums, and we would stand in front of one painting for hours, ooo-ing and ahh-ing together.

“The Three Dancers” by Pablo Picasso is violent, beautiful and provocative. It is, arguably, my favorite painting of all time. It was painted around the same time as the turmoil of his crumbling marriage to Olga Koklova, and the emotion evoked by the bodies of the dancers reflects this underlying tension. Two of the dancers are plainly visible, facing out, their arms thrown up with the motion. They are not smiling. The third dancer is obscured by the shadows cascading from the window. This black profile exudes a kind of pain, the kind only expressed through art. For some reason, when I saw the third dancer, it stuck with me. Maybe, under the shadows, the third dancer was smiling. Maybe, the third dancer was enjoying the dance, rather than moving through it out of obligation like the other two. Or maybe, the third dancer was disappearing slowly and was really not dancing at all. That scared me the most.

The visible faces terrified me. They held a certain complacency that I hope never to truly comprehend, however, to a point, I can understand. Don’t we all have something that we dance through, faking it, making it seem like it is okay, when in actuality it is only the motion that keeps us going? A friendship gone bad that we can’t seem to get out of? Writers block? That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you lie to your mother? But we move through it, we stick with the friend, the lie, the story that is going nowhere, because we are so caught up in the dance that we can’t even tell that we have stopped smiling.

I think that Picasso had it right. Art should be scary, and beautiful, and thought-provoking. And it should make you reflect on your own life through the lens of the painting.

Meetings

I’ve never taken much stock in a person’s profession defining them. So it’s hard for me to pick a type of person I want to interview; what people do has never directly correlated into who they are for me. Or at least, not the most interesting bits of who they are. If I had the opportunity to talk to one person and try to pick apart their brain I’d speak with Barack Obama. Not because I want to be a groupie to his rock-star image, but because I want to see if there’s anything behind his act.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I know that all public figures have a persona that they present in order to popularize themselves. But Obama’s is so overpoweringly popular that I’d like to dig deeper and see if there are parts of him that aren’t so poised. As a wildly intelligent fellow, I’m sure that he has formidable defences to people prodding his inner workings. What must it feel like to have the expectations of millions of people riding on him? Or does he even feel it, really… is it too overwhelming a circumstance to endure that he must generalize and diffuse it into intellectualization? I feel like I would be sick to my stomach if I were in his position, with people alternatively falling all over me and reviling my very existence. Underneath his polished exterior there is a heart that beats and other things, not dissimilar to my own. It’s cheesy. I’d still like to see if there really is anything else there besides the eternally proper, collected, and revered exterior.

Self-Control

If there is one thing I am lacking, it is self-control. I have an addictive personality. I watch one television show and I am hooked and end up renting every season of the show ever and watching them late into the night. I crave weird food like sushi all the time, and if I have one bite, I want a thousand more. Then I want rice because there was rice on the sushi. Then I want pasta because in some twisted way rice reminds me of pasta. Then I want garlic bread because that goes well with pasta. If I have a long phone conversation with a friend from home, I start wondering about another friend, and before you know it I have been on the phone for several hours with several different people. And I love to talk. And I love being around friends. I love making connections.

So, because I can’t seem to wrap my head around being separated from people, or being unable to talk to others, or to build tangible connections and relationships, I am curious about monks and nuns that live in monasteries. I am curious how they have the strength to denounce worldly pursuits, passions and possessions. Maybe, it is because I have never been very religious, and I have had an entirely different experience from them, that makes it so hard for me to comprehend their life. Even so, I can’t imagine giving up a life of freedom (at least what I consider to be my freedom), even if it was in the name of something I loved dearly. I admire their self-control , the intensity of their love.

I stayed in a Monastery in Venice, Italy as a student ambassador and every hour of the day was a quiet hour. If we wanted to talk, we had to go out into the courtyard. Even at mealtimes, we were completely silent. Obviously, this was difficult for a group of rowdy high school students from across the country. I remember feeling guilty whispering to my roommate late at night. I remember wearing thick sweaters to cover my skin even in the summer heat so that I wouldn’t offend anyone, and I remember the hum of their prayers. I’m not entirely sure why they allowed us to stay with them, but I wish I could have asked them why they decided to leave everything behind. If there had been some extraordinary experience that had changed their life so entirely.

I find their ability to control their passions, their desires, their needs so entirely, to be fascinating and admirable. But mostly, I think, I admire their silence. Silence, for me, would be the most difficult thing to accept. I know that their self-control comes from a place buried deep within, and I wish, just for a moment, I could see it and understand it, so that maybe, I could implement some self-control in my own life.

psychiatrists and rape counselors

So, I’m guessing someone in our class is actually a psych major. I may be deathly afraid of you, heads up.

Growing up I had a few best friends, two of which were the daughters of psychiatrists. One of them introduced me to psychedelics at a young age, passed notes to me in between class on darkly things and broken glass, and absolutely hated her mother. The other listened solely to nature sounds while beating her fists on her walls, insisted I call her beautiful, and definitely hated her father. I used to want to be a psychiatrist. I was really into chatting with the quiet folk on AIM, dishing out “panaceas” and advice based on nothing I had experienced outside of the movies. However, when I became a sophomore in high school, I recognized that having fucked up, hateful kids was not a goal of mine, and my fucked up friends convinced me to pursue a different career.
Really, I’m too emotional and I don’t want to be constantly aware of the science of my mind. It’s supposed to be a mystery up there. Right? I don’t want to know I’m not really in love, just suffering a chemical imbalance, or have access to artificial medicines that could so easily change who I am. Anyhow it amazes me how some people are able to sit there for hours, listen to people’s horrific lives, and prescribe them pills to…make them better. Wax paper? I am a sponge. The same goes for rape crisis counselors. I don’t know how they do it!

I volunteered at a domestic violence center on a Navajo reservation over spring break, and was amazed at how the workers functioned. They joked around the entire time singing “Woolly Bully” and playing pranks on one another. At the same time single mothers my age with their possibly tainted children stumbled up the steps of the makeshift trailer, seeking shelter. I know over time, optimism is the only way to survive constant strife, and I want to make a difference in the lives of those who seek it, but I can’t disconnect myself from people so easily and I really don’t want fucked up kids.

The Blue Religion

I’ve always been interested in The Blue Religion. In Los Angeles, or where I live, it’s impossible to go a day without seeing an LAPD squad car or hearing its sirens. It’s rare  to go a night with out hearing el moscarron, helicopter, or seeing it beam its light down onto the streets in search of its prey. My relationship with the LAPD, or police and general has always been a very strange one.  Although it was ages ago, I remember the Rodney King riots and the orange glow that emanated from Downtown Los Angeles.  I remember seeing the video on the news and wondering as a child why the police, people who I was supposed to respect and admire, could beat up a person so mercilessly. At the time, I didn’t understand that Rodney King was actually running from the cops and had outstanding warrants on him, but he still didn’t deserve the beating. Los Angeles county is massive, and it’s known for having too little cops for just a wide area. They sometimes arrive hours late or never at all. And there are always the jokes that when a White person calls they get there in a second, but when a Latino calls they never show up, jokes that have an ounce of truth to them.  I remember being at a Quince and all of a sudden two cop cars rolled up, cops got out, and yelled at us to shut down our celebration, even when my uncle had done everything the city required to have a party. Or when a family friend was stopped by the police for riding in a new car and being asked if he stole it, when he had finally bought himself a new car. Or the night when the cops banged on our front door and asked us if we were selling drugs, but they had the wrong address. They then made my mom open the gate, that they jumped to get in, so that they could leave. But with all these things, there is respect that I have for them. At NU, I took a class about Local Justice and how the biggest part of a police job is personal discretion. These men and women are given weapons and a badge that practically lets them do anything, but they are trusted with the idea that they won’t use violence unless absolutely necessary. They put themselves in danger every day and night, and there’s always a chance that they might not return. Officers killed in simple patrol stops, or yelled at because they have to uphold the law.

I’ve always been interested in what compels someone to become a police officer. Wether it’s a calling, or just out of necessity. Hopefully, I can find a way to either interview an Evanston police officer or a Chicago Police Officer, and hopefully get a glimpse of The Blue Religion

The money man

To add to the ranks of people who we could never actually interview, the person that I’m most curious about is Bill Gates. I have to admit that a lot of this curiosity stems from growing up in Seattle–you can take boat tours where you cruise right past his giant estate, and he’s always in the newsapapers–but I think I’d be curious about him even if I didn’t live there. I’m not sure if he’s the world’s wealthiest person at the moment (this title seems to fluctuate with the economy), but he’s definitely up there, and I’ve always been curious about the ways that wealthy people spend their money.

Consider it this way: Bill Gates could buy anything he wanted. Bill Gates could have giant mansions in every country, or probably even buy his own country if he really wanted to. The other Microsoft millionaire in the area, Paul Allen, has bought multiple sports teams, one of the world’s largest yachts, and funded random museums about things like Jimi Hendrix and science fiction. But what does Bill Gates do with his money? With a few minor exceptions, he gives it all away. Seriously, all of it. He’s said he doesn’t want to leave large sums to his kids (although I think the assests alone would set them up pretty well). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the largest private philanthropic organizations in the world, and it’s known for taking on serious healthcare problems in innovative ways.

I have to go on a random tangent here to describe Bill Gates’ one indulgence: his house. It’s a huge estate on Lake Washington with multiple buildings and parking garages, and yet most of the house is actually underground. As you would expect, it’s full of cutting-edge technology: every occupant and regular visitor wears a pin that automatically adjusts the lighting and temperature conditions in each room, and the digital artwork adjusts to your preferences. However, it’s also full of some really random things, like the trampoline room. Yeah, Bill Gates has a trampoline room. It’s the only room in the house that doesn’t have a window or a skylight.

So, to recap: the guy’s a genius, makes a shitload of money off it, and then decides to give most of it away (except to finance a trampoline room). I’m not sure I’d actually want to interview him–apparently he is really rude and gives one word answers unless the interviewer adequately demonstrates a high level of intelligence–but I’m still curious about what goes on inside his head. I’ve always wondered if he really wanted to give all that money away or if public pressure convinced him to do it. Maybe he just has so much money that he can do anything he ever wanted and still give most of it away, I don’t know, but I sure wish I could get behind the publicity statements and find out. Too bad his entire house is covered in video cameras, floor sensors, and laser detection networks–I’d say his private life is pretty well out of the picture.

What kind of a man is a priest?

The trouble with my fascination with the lifestyle of priests is that, if I were to interview one, all the stuff I’m curious about would sound offensive in the form of a question. I want to learn about a specific type of preist, the Catholic type, which is the one, I think, that cannot marry and have a  family or anything like that. More than everything else, I want to know how he feels about never having, and never being allowed to even hope to have, sex. But the wording of the question I would have to ask to get him to speak on this matter without offending him eludes me. Still, there are plenty of other curious topics that I could try to have a priest talk about, though these are less interesting to me (but, at the same time, make for more harmless questions). I know that only men can be Catholic priests. How does this translate into a priest’s views about gender roles and womanhood? Does he feel dominant as a man? Does he feel that the Catholic rule preventing women from being priests is proper or just? Are his general views about gender more traditional? Who prepares all his meals? A woman? Do priests ever go to baseball games? If yes, do they feel different amidst the crowds, blessed vessels of God’s holiness and wisdom among mere beer-drinking mortals? What do they do all day? What are their goals and concerns? Do they workout? Read the paper? Do they ever slip up and make mistakes, and if so, what does this mean to them (is it a graver sin to use god’s name in vain than to tell a lie)? There are lots of questions I would like to ask a priest, most of them centering around the curiosity of how similar to or unlike “normal” people they are. But I’m guessing it wouldn’t be so easy to get one to open up.

Perez Hilton

Choosing just one person that I am curious about is incredibly hard for me. I’m kind of generally curious about people how aren’t me, mostly because I think I am incredibly boring.  This means that I spend a lot of time following the lives of famous people on-line, because that information is there. Lately though I’ve been logging on to one sleazy gossip website or another and seeing some picture of someone’s private moment with their girlfriend or daughter or whatever, and instead of feeling the thrill of getting a glimpse at someone else’s life, I’ve started wondering about the person that took that picture. Not just what their motivation is, because I understand the concept of money, but also where they set the boundary for themselves.

In that vein I’ve also been thinking about the bloggers themselves (or the tabloid editors or whatever). So often they’re posts are riddled with moral judgements about the choices of the celebrities. I can’t help but want to ask them, what they do with their lives that makes them the authority on how to live an acceptable life. I know this is unfair, because everyone that pays attention to celebrity culture, which I do, passes judegement even if they don’t want to, but I wonder what, other than money, motivates these people to share these judgements with the world.

I don’t think this is very feasible for my essay or anything, its just something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

The Playboy Professor

I’ll admit I’m not taking a particularly huge leap of faith when I choose this guy–maybe “Harvard Works Because We Do” will inspire me to think beyond the ivory towers–but I’ve been interested in the history of Medill Professor David Standish’s life ever since he came to talk to us in class.

When he lectured us in McCormick Tribune Forum, for what was basically a Medill-sponsored pep talk on why you shouldn’t run screaming from the field of journalism, he didn’t approach the lectern as most other professors do. He sat on the edge of the stage, and without much of an introduction began telling the narrative of his life, from his college years to where he is now.

He seemed to fall accidentally into the role of a journalism teacher, and the fall was a particularly interesting one. He started a satirical newspaper in college with a couple of friends (something I admittedly was thinking of doing around the time he spoke to us…damn you, the Shmaily). From there, he moved to Chicago “Chasing after a girl…after all, what better reason is there to do anything in life?” He got a job as Playboy’s first “party jokes” editor, which consisted of reading through a sea of reader-submitted quips, most of them not entirely funny. He eventually earned his way up to the position of Staff Writer, and that’s where his story gets more interesting.

One of the first assignments they sent him on was to review an early Cream concert (I believe that involved interviewing Eric Clapton as well), as well as the then-unheard-of opener, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He continued to cover bands emerging in the early 1970s (I’m a huge fan of the era, musically speaking). I can’t remember all the details of his speech, but the highlights involved riding with Willie Nelson on his tour bus (which probably made for some high times), hanging out with and covering KISS as they toured through South America, and other musical experiences (I think the Grateful Dead were in there, too) that would leave any music fan who lived during the time period jealous. It just leaves me wishing I had been born a few decades earlier.

He also said he met and spoke to Kurt Vonnegut, a personal favorite writer of mine, as well as witnessed Hunter S. Thompson light one of his friends on fire at a party they both attended. I feel like he’s the silent observer of the New Journalism movement, and all the associated craziness that ensued. I’ve been wanting to interview him for a while for a story…but I feel like letting him retell these anecdotes (and editing them into a longer essay for this class) will do him much more service than my words in a feature article ever would. There’s a chance I may get him as a professor next year, but something tells me I won’t be able to get all these stories out of him at once like I would be if I approached him for this next essay.

You would never know any of this at first glance though. That might be another way to take it–how he nonchalantly recounts meeting many of the biggest names of the 60s and 70s as if it was easy enough for anyone to do. Also, he wrote for friggin’ Playboy, and is employed by a journalism school that takes itself very (read: way too) seriously. I’m sure there’s something there.

Also, someone just saw me writing this in the library and said “Sounds like ‘Almost Famous’” as I finished explaining it to them. Interviewing a journalistically qualified rock groupie, if you will. Should make for an entertaining read. Anyway, he fits the discription of the blog post prompt—about his life, I am “most curious.”

Whose Life I’m curious about, even if I can’t use them for this project

If I don’t want to be laughed at, I should probably say that the person whose life I am really curious about is J.K.Rowling’s, since she has basically achieve the pinnacle of success in the career that I hope to have for myself one day and it would only be logical for me to be curious about her life.

            To be quite honest, however, I am more curious about the life of a rock star who has often graced the tabloids, Pete Wentz.  He’s the bassist from the wildly popular but often derided band Fall Out Boy, started his own clothing company and record label, wrote a children’s book, opened a bar, hosted some ridiculous MTV show, married a fellow ridiculous music star of dubious talent (Ashlee Simpson), and is perhaps most famous for the time when photos he took of himself naked in his mother’s bathroom leaked on the internet.  I really shouldn’t care about his life, but I really do enjoy Fall Out Boy’s music, and, as their lyricist, Pete Wentz has shaped what their music was and is.  The lyrics speak about being depressed and unsure of yourself, and there is something very powerful and raw behind them.  Many people have said that it must all be an act, however, or that no one should have to listen to the complaints of an obscenely wealthy rock star who grew up in the affluent North Shore suburb of Wilmette with a Northwestern Law School professor for a father.

            Some part of me really wants to believe that Pete Wentz, despite all the money that controversy must be making him, really is genuine.  Something makes me want to believe that he really is just a lonely, bipolar individual who wants some attention so he doesn’t feel so down.  Something makes me want to believe that his art means a lot more to him than just another ridiculously large paycheck.  He quit college a quarter short of graduation in order to pursue music, and I really want to believe that the kind of drive and motivation that he had then was not lost when he became famous/infamous.  I know a lot of people who have been in the dark places that Fall Out Boy’s music, especially their early music, describes, and knowing that those emotional lyrics come from someone who’s really been there and is just trying to share his experience, rather than someone who was seeking to make a quick buck off emo teenybopper high school girls, would help just a little in restoring my faith in humanity.

Didion’s Argument

I’m fairly certain there is no argument here. Joan Didion is not trying to persuade the masses that coping mechanisms are a way of clouding growth and life understanding. She plays fifteen memories, disconnected, and numbered like the tracks of an album. I enjoyed getting little blips of her view of the world, set in Hollywood during an era of hippies and love. The way I see it, Didion simply contemplates if it is necessary to strive for meaning in existence. After breaking her rib when she is a young adult, Didion remembers for an instance what it will be like to be old. She is able to grasp the concept of aging, forms an understanding, and then forgets only to be confronted with MS later in life. It seems we come to vague understandings of reality that may keep us secure for a while, but in the long run, it is just a way to avoid how little we know.

Wet Black Bough

If I had to place it, I’d say Joan Dideon’s purpose is something of a modernist one. I was tipped off to this by her quotes of Pound and (indirectly) Eliot, and they might be 0ver-influencing my reading but I think it fits. She presents her life as this series of obsessions, events, spectacles and experiences. She repeatedly insists that the people involved in them do not know the meaning of what they are doing.

 

For her this mass of experience and movement is all a play of some sort. There are things constantly occurring in the periphery of her vision, and sending ripples across to other people and histories. She mentions that she is always improvising. I’m not entirely sure that this essay is an attempt to make sense of the disparate events and string them into one narrative but instead to try and encompass them and give the genuine impression of them. Because she so consistently avoids of any sort of deeper meaning or symbolism to the events she witnesses, I think it’s more about their inherent meaning… not the one ascribed to them by a careless observer but one who can penetrate the quick conclusions to arrive at some truth about humanity or society arising from the period she is sketching out.

White Album

Joan Didion seems to think that life is not shaped so much by what happens nor by how we perceive it. Rather, there is no shape, and life will go on running along its aimless path, without some underlying consistency or reason, no matter what we think about it. Looking for some sense of order, purpose, or an inherent truth in life will lead nowhere because none of these things exist. How could they? The Sixties she describes is filled with incongruency and absurdity of events. Musicians like Jim Morrison and his bandmates talk in incoherency and lack of direction, making Didion “unsure in whose favor the dialogue had been resolved, or if it had been resolved at all” (25). And yet none of The Doors see this as unusual or unacceptable. After noticing that everything Huey Newton said “had the ring of being a ‘quotation’” (31), Didion considers the fact that people are “expendable” in revolutionary politics and wonders if “Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way” (31). This suggests that someone can successfully be at the center of a movement, like Newton, without really even knowing precisely why, or in what way, they’re playing their role. So life goes on, and things happen, regardless of whether people think about or plan or reason out what they’re doing. Didion tries to make the Sixties into a narrative so that she can pretend there is some order to things, but she knows that this is only to help her deal with her experiences, to make them seem manageable or understandable in some way.

Didion

For me, Didion’s argument is presented on pages 18 and 45. “Everything was to teach us something”. I believe that Didion feels that important things happen in our lives and although we don’t always know 100% why they happen, we always learn something from them. Most of the writing happens during the tail end of the flower era, and she is trying to deal with “revolutions” in a very structured Hollywood and Los Angeles. The parts of Los Angeles that she talks about are parts of LA that I am not personally connected to, but I know them and although they seem beautiful on the outside, they have their dark secrets on the inside. All of things that she experienced, “revolts”, the Doors, visiting prison – it all made her who she is. And maybe she doesn’t know how or why, but somehow she knows that her experiences shaped her.

“Everything was to teach us something.”

Didion’s Argument

I feel like Didion, as a writer, is constantly searching for a story. But Didion, as a human being, is trying to tell us in “The White Album” that these stories don’t always exist. She writes about the 60s, about the colorful characters like Jim Morrison and the radical events like the student strike at San Francisco State. She writes herself into these scenes, so that what we see is what she sees. She writes without “the imposition of a narrative line,” but rather presents everything as flashes, separated by numbers. In doing all these things, Didion is making a statement about what essentially makes us human: we perceive, we feel, but we don’t necessarily need to interpret everything that happens in our lives.

Yet, I am sitting here typing my “interpretation” of Didion’s piece, so I guess it seems a little counterproductive. It’s probably okay, though. I’m not interpreting life; I’m interpreting literature. And literature is not life. Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” A story helps us to live, but it doesn’t make us living human beings. It is merely what we do to make sense of things. Didion sees a “naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor,” and she wants to be interested in her. She searches for the story—and the life—within the woman. But by the end of the essay, Didion loses that interest. She “was interested only in the picture… her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge.” In the end, Didion wrote an experience, not a story.