Monday, October 6: Christina 12:30; Stephanie 1:00 Cristal 4:30; Florie 5:00
Wednesday, October 8: Patricia 3:00; Briana 3:30; Holly 4:00
Things I Won't Write About List. We started class by making a list of stories you would never write about. After you had your lists, we talked about the "kinds of things" (categories) you wouldn't write about. This is more or less what we came up with:
done with it
shameful
conflict with identity
gross
sexuality
too scary
rather forget about it
victim
too private
not ready to write about
religious stories
not my story
not right (ownership or voyeuristic issues)
fear of cultural reprisals
As we talked through this list, we noticed that many of these categories (shameful, identity conflicts, sexuality, too scary, want to forget about, victim stories, private) actually correspond (in a general way) with the kinds of things CNF writers write about: personal, private, contested materials contemplated with the relentless interrogation described in Lott's essay. We also noted, (or at least I admitted), that reading "true" essays on this topic can be extremely valuable to readers - that writers who take on these topics perform a service in a very real sense.
I haven't really captured the complexity of this discussion - you raised considerations about audience and the problems that public writing encounters in terms of presenting a "self" to a broader range of people than your story might actually be directed toward (as with the religious stories), and you pointed out that in some sense decisions about what to write about often hang on whether or not you have something important to say on the topic - and whehter or not you feel it is "worth saying". So I am hoping that whatever you took away from this exercise is in your notebooks, and that you keep this list, and go back to it. Just in case there is material here worth contemplating.
We didn't make the "why do this exercies" that we usually do at the end of the opening prompts - mostly because we had already gone over the allotted by 15 minutes, so I will pose that question here. How might it be useful to you to reflect on materials you "won't consider" writing about? What might looking at the kinds of topics you put on this list tell you about yourself as a writer? In what ways might it help you re-consider ideas that otherwise would have remained out of bounds, and is this worthwhile?
This was a great discussion.
The Search for Marvin Gardens.
This discussion identified the three threads/narrative lines in McPhee's essay:1) playing the game Monopoly with comments on the strategies/practices/objects of play; 2) walking through Atlantic City, noticing the urban decay, on a search for Marvin Gardens; 3) historical commentaries on how Atlantic City was built (and by whom). These three strands were broken up into segments that were interspersed among one another.
You noted early in the discussion of what the essay was about that :
the competitive play took the fun out of the game
it was all about competition and winning
it tells the story of McPhee walking through Atlantic city - seeing poor parts of town/all broken down
he is "living" a monopoly game finding the real places from the board
And you pointed out that the juxtaposition and paralles in the focus of the segments imply connections among the game play, the condition of Atlantic City, and the city's history.
You spent about 15 more minutes looking at how McPhee built his essay. We noted that the points the three threads were contemplating were set up in the title, metaphorically - with Marvin Gardens standing in for the middle class (though we don't know that until he makes the connection in the very last sectdion). The essay is in many ways about the absence of a middle class and all three threads lead to a contemplation on the importance of economic and political and social structures associated with a middleclass. McPhee guides us in a contemplation of Monopoly (the game), monopoly (as it was practiced by the "robber barons" of industry at the turn of the last centuy) and monopoly (the consequences, as seen in Atlantic City). He does not preach at us or argue with us. Rather, he tells us stories that get us to "feel" or intuit his conclusion.
As pointed out at the end of the discussion, this essay was first published in the New Yorker, and the indirectness of the point may have made this argument more palatable to that magazine's readers.
I chose this essay as the reading for the day we did the "things I would never write about" prompt in the hopes that the way it presents its "subject" might be useful to you in exploring/articulating/presenting to an audience topics that might feel contested or uncomfortable. By making his points indirectly - through intertwining related stories - McPhee enlists his reader in creating (exploring) the takeaway for his essay => the reader has to come up with what the juxtapositions/parallel stories "mean". This allows for a less didactic, more open consideration of the subject material; and for topics we are not ready to write, or that we feel shamed by or fear cultural judgment about - this might be a possible way to open a conversation.
For next week:
Read: Cofer, p.54, Silent Dancing; "The Patch" by John McPhee (link sent through email)
Blog 5: plans for revising Long essay 1
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