12/22/99. It’s my eighteenth birthday. I’m a scrappy, melancholy goth-girl who is sure she isn't going to see her high school graduation. On 1/1/00, either Jesus is coming, or the computers will transport us all back to 1900. In hindsight, oh well…there would have been plenty of dark lace and Victorian velveteen for my wardrobe, and I thought I was still innocent enough that Jesus might swoop me up onto that white horse, black nail polish and all.
Not much happened.Now I’m within two semesters of receiving the next degree that I should have gotten a timely eight years ago. There are new Armageddon options.
The first few emergency texts from the University on my phone were bizarre, anecdotal. By the time I had missed three classes due to evacuations, two of them in a row, one of them after I had already paid a $10.00 parking fee, bizarre turned into bullshit.
It’s an hour into the Cathedral of Learning evacuation, approximately 11:30am, 4/5/12. I sit down in a benched quadrant on the opposite side of Forbes, in Schneley Plaza, just as a bulldog-jowled security officer comes by, peeking briefly into a black garbage can. Directly to my right, a gray-haired professor in corduroy sports coat is sitting on a wooden chair he must have borrowed from the food kiosk area, holding an impromptu class; he is addressing half a dozen students, his dress shoes hooked around the metal chair legs, his words carried away by the breeze. His students are catching and holding down flapping pages of their notebooks. Over my left shoulder, another small group of students are giving presentations. A thin girl stands poised, her right leg planted in the sandy substrate in front of her, reading from her notes about healthy BMIs.
Blinds are dangling out of a half-open window on approximately the sixteenth floor of the emptied Cathedral. On the vacant lawn, an island of red and yellow tulips looks as still as a landscape painting. On the corner, University service workers have gathered, stretching and moaning in blue uniform pants and clouds of cigarette smoke, trying to stay limber.
“Music building? There’s ‘bout three people that work in that building!” one of the guys scoffs. To my left there is limpid applause for a decent presentation.
A pigeon is slipping down one of the Cathedral’s neo-gothic cornices, flitting its slate-green wings to catch its fall.
A whistle blows, twice. The service workers return towards the mouth of the loading dock. A member of security personnel has just detached one end of the yellow caution tape, letting it go casually, as it lulls to the left behind him, like a kite tail.
4/10/11, 10:45ish am, my first time in the Cathedral security check line. I hold nothing but my ID, parking ticket, and debit card. The shuffling line stretches out into the intersection. The crowded island of tulips is swaying, blown open, the petals about to fall away.
Exiting after class, I pass a girl at the front of the line, dropping her book bag on the examination table like an anvil. “No lions, tigers, or bears here” she announces, with great confidence in her own humor. Behind me I hear the security officer respond,
“Nooooo? No gazelles, no lemurs…?”
Oh my. Everyone’s sooooo clever at the University level.
Mark Lee Krangle was the first publicized, possible suspect. Krangle’s incomplete manifesto, Revolution or Evolution, self-published on Authonomy,http://www.authonomy.com/books/28290/revolution-or-extinction/read-book/?chapterid=272959 details his belief that he has channeled prophetic knowledge about the fall of America in the new millennia. His first mentor was a Mafioso teenager, “Frankie”, who foretold the mortgage crisis and 9/11 to the then 5 year old Krangle in 1951. The pinnacle of Krangle’s life was his supposed meeting with Jimmy Carter at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel, “on/or about April 11, 1976.” Krangle claims to have then discussed his 1972 doctoral thesis, “A Framework for Freedom of Speech”, applying it as a model for Middle Eastern Peace and other policy matters.
His thesis centered on a conceptual model based on Harold Lasswell’s Question of Communication Theory, “Who says what to whom through what channel with what effect?” Krangle posits:
“Who can say what to whom through what channel with what effect?”
He bragged endlessly to then current Pitt Professors and Chairmen, insisting on the gravity of that meeting’s dialogue. Krangle calls his eventual termination in January, 1977 from his teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh his “sour grapes.”
According to NBC affiliate WPXI, Krangle was escorted off a plane in Pittsburgh and charged with harassment and terroristic threats involving recent emails to Pitt professors. He also claims to have met the person(s) responsible for the recent bomb threats. He was detained at 1:30PM, April 11, 2012, exactly 36 years after the Carter exchange.http://www.wpxi.com/news/local/someone-connected-to-the-bomb-threat/nMXR
In chapter 7, Krangle outlines his belief that he is a victim of “brain-programming” by US government operatives/cooperatives, some of whom he thinks are also faculty and administrative members of the University of Pittsburgh. According to his unidentified government sources, high school massacres such as Columbine are often a direct result of “brain programming” by federal agencies eager to institute martial law.
So, impetuous acts of the brain dead aside, I should have that diploma, right around my birthday. Oh, yeah, but then there’s this issue of the Mayan Calendar stopping the day before my birthday. The world could end then. On a more banal note, the Mesoamericans also anticipated that earthly existence may halt anytime 2 of their 3 cyclical calendars coincided, which is every 52 years.http://survive2012.com/index.php/mayan-calendar.html
Krangle’s first Doomsday mentor, “Frankie”, told Krangle that the human species was only capable of planning fifty years in advance, max. Krangle’s chapter 11, “Utopia or Oblivion”, is one of many in revision.
Why worry. If it is the end, I’ll wish I would have tip-toed through those tulips on the Cathedral lawn more. And wherever I have to go, I hope that place is devoid of the seemingly eternal vibrato of ENS.
Heinz’s “Death of a Racehorse” and Jones’ “The Things That Carried Him” are quite different in structure. The former is a story told in real-time action, with an ironic twist on the element of suspense. The later narrative is grouped in snapshots of action, laid out to beckon a lingering, expansive reflective mood.
In Heinz’s work, the horse “Air Lift” is part of a structure set within the larger narrative structure: his lineage, the champion bloodline of winners of by-gone races designates his presence as one of importance and expectation. “Air Lift” was onward-and-upward bound in every sense at the start of this, his very first race, especially in the imaginations of the racing community. He was until he became “a horse stopping”, as quickly as it all began.
There is very little use of scene here, or physical/personality descriptors of any man or horse involved. “Air Lift” is teeming with potentiality, then he is nothing more than a casualty. The only stalling of narrative pace is found in the thin-strung dialogue after the injury, between stable hands and veterinarians and owners and trainers. A reader thinks there may, indeed, still be hope. There is foggy indecision, a reluctance to accept the hopeful’s terrible fate; in the imaginations, again, the horse’s prospects momentarily outran the reality of his injury.
Thunder and lightning appear as the natural forbearers of solemnity that they often stand for. The downpours upon “Air Lift’s” still body conclude the sorrow, along with the eerie, ringing reminder of where and who he came from.
Jones’ article, by contrast, is laboriously dense with detail. The narrative’s structure is broken into a trilogy, each section crawling backwards in a reverse chronology. Jones hooks a reader slowly, layering vivid and intimate character portraits throughout, enlivening them through their own actions and reactions, until the reader is almost unconsciously invested in that character’s future.
Pacing is often intentionally agonizingly slow, as in the long procession down the highway, or the flag folding, or the work of the pallbearers. Charged, slowed moments make up the greater long, long journey of Sergeant Montgomery back home.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
"The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll" Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Hersey weaves his individually collected narrative threads in Hiroshima to form a vivid patchwork of the first hand accounts of atrocities suffered during, and long after, the bombing.
The character sketches and brief personal introductions each begin separately, and urgently, just before the explosion. Despite their terse nature, dominant personality traits are offered immediately as a foundation to build upon; a struggling widowed mother, a young idealistic medical student, a seasoned physician on the brink of retirement, two morally conscientious priests (one Japanese, one German), and a young female factory worker. In this narrative, if not in actuality, their lives become intertwined at the poignant moment of atomic impact; this turning point is a marked private memory for each, which then propels them into the paths of each other.
The vantage point of each character is unique from the outset. Each persons individual position and distance from the impact site is different; however scattered, they soon become part of an anonymous crowd of agony and desperation. For Mrs. Nakamura, “everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen”, for Dr. Fujii, the flash was a “brilliant yellow”, for Father Kleinsorge it was reminiscent of a meteor impact, and so on. That one traumatic starting point marked a particular, peculiarly personal moment in time when the lines between organized private and public selves and functions were annihilated.
Certain characters embody the chaos differently. Reverend Tanimoto represents action; he is panic in motion; even his visual perspective above and throughout the city on foot build the scene in its necessary scope. The two women and children are buried; one can free herself, the other cannot. The horror of hidden immobility is Miss Sasaki’s, the representative voice of the thousand others trapped and helpless in their own desperate circumstances, overlooked. Dr. Fujii flails in the river water, which will claim many others unable to move to safety. Father Kleinsorge finds himself alone and nearly naked in a garden in an ironic biblical twist. Dr. Sasaki is a prisoner within his own hospital, held captive by both critically ill patients and corpses alike.
In the midst, they meet, most at Asano Park, some as acquaintances-come-refugees. Later Miss Sasaki becomes the forlorn patient of Dr. Sasaki, and is later consoled by Father Kleinsorge, who wrestled with his own complications from radiation sickness.
As a collective, these individuals are emblematic of the greater Japanese culture; they are compassionate, steadfast, and stoic individuals of remarkable endurance. People afflicted with the most disfiguring burns and wounds maintain social graces of extreme gratitude and concern for their family and neighbors to a staggering degree of humility. As an American reading these accounts, the sense of inherited responsibility is marked.
Then, the knot of close-kit threaded stories begins to separate again, unraveling back into more obscure private lives. The mundane day-to-day is always marred by scars and sickness physical/psychological. The spiritual is a constant though, also, especially in the convert Miss Sasaki’s case. Lives trail off into newspaper headlines about new nuclear experiments, ominous stitches stretching into the future, building on and bleeding away from the survivors of the past.
Rearrangement. The inevitable fade of even color-fast fibers overtime, tamped down, subdued by familiarity. Impressions left by furniture’s burdens, the cavernous cistern outside always hiding some stage of emptiness or fulfillment.
We are sitting in the room which used to be my teenaged father’s bedroom. It has been a living room as long as I can remember however, from the times of my childhood when the carpet was a short, sheared green, and multi-colored woven rugs, soft as old t-shirts, rested in front of my grandparents’ recliners.
“Does October 19th mean nothing to you?” my father asthmatically wheezes, glaring ahead at the TV screen, swaddled in his housecoat.
“Well…” my mother scoffs at his dead-pan condescension, tucking her straightened auburn hair behind her ear “she wants to know the first time we met…that’s not the first time.”
She and her family had moved in next to my father and his parents in 1972. Separated only by young Maple saplings and the winding gravel driveway, her family soon sauntered over for a visit. They sat in what is now the dining room on that Sunday afternoon in August, my mother nervous because she had brought the family dog along, a wily Scottish terrier named Elfie. My paternal grandmother did most of the talking; my father had to be coaxed out of his adjoining bedroom, being marginally sociable for only twenty minutes or so.
My mother looks over her shoulder into the room. She volunteers, pointing, that there may have been a loveseat there; maybe there were slip covers; maybe the carpeting was the same as the archaic remnant still in the hall closet, olive green and blue and yellow, splotched by geometric shapes. My father squints, square-jowled, not moved to contribution or even correction.
He mutters something about the time they first saw each other, pre-formal introduction, if she remembered that. She does.
It was May, 1972. My mother was standing at the bottom of her parents’ driveway, waiting for her friend Maria to pick her up for high school commencement rehearsal. It was pouring down rain. My mother was wearing a neutral knit cap with a brim, protecting her brown locks that she had curled around empty orange juice cans the night before. Then my father came speeding by.
He was driving the 1954 two-toned green Chevy, baring patches of primer paint in spots where his handiwork was incomplete. He craned his neck, tugging the wheel in a double-take. He said she had a sweet, innocent look, and he said, that’s the one for me.
“But you need more than that to make a story, don’t you?” my mother winced, adjusting her legs folded beneath her on the brushed blue couch.
October 19th, my maternal grandmother nudged both my mother and Elfie through the orange-crowned Maple trees onto my paternal grandparents’ property, where my dad was cruising along on the riding mower. She pretended Elfie had gotten loose; she needed my father to catch him. That’s when the real conversation began.
Two other sources:
"TALK; The Money Trail", 11/21/10, New York Times via Byliner
"Travis the Chimp: The Wild One" 12/23/09, New York Times via Byliner
Michael Paterniti's stylistic strength seems to come from his haunting double-take of particular scenes of importance. The quaint, fog enveloped shoreline near the plane crash featured in "The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy"pulsates with the green, electrical surge of the lighthouse eye and presumptuous dread in the opening; by the end of the work, it is a place more imbued by mystery and sixth sense than before.
In Paterniti's brief summation of the tragedy of Travis the Chimp, the incident of bloodshed is rushed through, head-long (and no pun intended, but just like the plane crash of the aforementioned article), a torrent of action after which the real reflection and impossible task of reckoning may begin. Paterniti writes "Afterward, the ghost of Travis appeared everywhere", much like the billowing white clothes on the line where the souls of the crash survivors still seemed to hover. The inescapable scene that seeps into witnesses consciousness and refuses to leave here is inside the home of Travis and his "mother": "The silence was like a primal thrum, the eerie frangibility of everything -- the window curtains, the reflection in the mirror -- hung in the balance."
Paterniti's "chosen" voices, or voices of his choice, are authoritative, formal, fringe elements who are at once distant from the story, and gradually become saturated by it. The degree and rate of saturation seems to progress with the reader's level of continued immersion and involvement with the story. In the esquire piece, these characters continue straining through emotional torment, as the story sums them up in tiny, incomplete blurbs; "The Father", "The Medical Examiner", and even "A Split-Boulder Monument." This ending emphasizes, without melodrama, that the stories of broken people are unresolved, and no reporter can bandage them together. Travis is described by the chief detective as a criminal, whose motives and reactions could climax in unfathomable possibilities.
The author is inclined structurally towards lists, altered and amended to fit the mood of the particular piece. In "TALK; The Money Trail", lists of ski-trail types, luxury car models, and celebrity names outline a resort in the French Alps. A hilarious aside of listed "douche" options Paterniti imagines are whisperingly recommended to him by God herself shows a delightful sense of humor (and that Paterniti is not merely a philosophical ghost hunter). These lists are in sharp contrast to the quickly unraveling and unnerving affect the mental checklists of the plane pilots have as they dissolve, a last grappling, before impact.
Paterniti's reporting is based on keen sensory observation. Objects are found within objects; bones are forced into coins; personal articles become artifacts, even if their retrieval is denied by family members. Things exist, even if they are not present at this moment. The sense of the fleeting is permanent for Paterniti.
The Kopchak family had lived in this same spot for many years; the road was named after them. This Kopchak, a retired grade-school science teacher, admitted that his knowledge of lion behavior was limited to warnings: don't look them in the eye, don't run from them. He considered the quick step that he and Red assumed as his only compromise. When he turned to look back, the lion was standing statuesque along the fence, frozen with potential threat.
The five of them were then called to the southern edge of the property, where more cats prowled. Their first target was an african lion crouched in Terry's junkyard of rusted vehicles. Riding high from the trucks vantage point, they fired multiple shots upon another group of big cats slinking down a hillside. Kanavel's target was always the head, and when this did not bring immediate results, his scope stretched on along the length of each animal's body. "I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn't ask to be there," he says. "And, you know, I'm a cat person."
"Dolores"
Mrs. Kopchak answered the 991 operator with trepidation, realizing that the seriousness of the situation did not call for her oft used nickname, "Dolly." She thought of her son, who just then stood peering out of the barn window, watching wild animals loping across his field of vision.
Marquez took advantage of what he calls Luis Alejandro Velasco’s “exceptional instinct for the art of narrative”, along with his inherent humility, lending him the unembellished voice and tone of the anti-hero.
Velasco’s chronological telling of his escapade directly launches into a structural and tonal pattern of persistence. Blunt, simple sentences often introduce or conclude a tightly bound paragraph, interspersed with several compound and complex sentences that add a reflective sense of depth. A sentence with one comma is followed by another with two, and then the pattern will repeat again, returning quickly to intense, bare-boned simplicity.
Marquez strictly avoids any impetus to philosophize (and unnecessarily distort) Velasco’s point of view. The plethora of shipmate personalities and common recreational pleasures of land and society are delivered up in immense detail compared to the lonely, single perspective that will follow after the shipwreck.
Marquez is faced with the challenge of drawing out Velasco’s mainly monotonous floating voyage in order to truly represent the agony of that long, isolated, death-defying entrapment, without losing the reader who may be rushing towards climactic relief. Short sections sum up days and nights in the patterns we come to expect; physical pain ebbs and flows, emotional stresses peak and decline, animals hover and lurk according to their routines, and the horizon shows unchanging resolve to be its ubiquitous self devoid of end points.
Marquez seems to employ the colon, and to a lesser degree the semicolon, to emphasize Velasco’s faltering capacities and general dumbfoundedness when he is constantly forced to consider his fate. In sentences like “If I found myself in the same predicament today, I would die of hopelessness: I now know that no ship travels the course on which my raft was bound”, and “For several reasons, that day was very different from the previous days: the sea was dark and calm; the sun, warm and tranquil, hugged by body; a gentle breeze guided the raft along; even my sunburn felt a bit better”, retrospection takes on elemental importance.
The colon is a forced pause and a gathering of strength as Velasco faces the most formidable subtleties of nature, including his own body. “Instantly I realized what was happening: the raft had overturned completely” makes moments of life and death hover, suspended in time as Velasco’s entire ordeal is. Raw, emotive revelations of dread and hopelessness are followed by the harsh validations of reality. This stylistic structure continuously re-leads the reader to the edge, propelled overboard once again.
In the end, that colon-induced propulsion into the sea becomes a heave towards land, and hope: “But ahead of the raft, in the half-light of dawn, I could make out a long, heavy shadow: against the bright sky I could see the outlines of coconut palms”. Something about the colon implies the conscious choice of holding one’s breath, and the weightiness of time.
Marquez achieves balance in his sentence and paragraph structure by sustaining a cyclical sense of routine amidst the reality of aimless drifting.
Years ago, I befriended the owner of a small floral shop, named for the street corner it sprouted up on. I believe she part pitied, part envied my young, single life in a nearby basement apartment. When I visited, she would scrounge about the display cooler, and handpick a free “blown” bouquet for me (in florist’s-speak, that means flowers that have reached or surpassed their peak bloom, and are now on the downtick towards decay, but will look perfectly breathtaking for at least the next 12 hours). During those months, I had fresh clove-scented stems of carnations or the ubiquitous button chrysanthemum in every room of that apartment at all times. Okay, there were only three rooms, but still, it was resplendent luxury.
Times have changed, and for the time being, I’ve rationalized that there are a few advantages to faux ferns and fabric petaled sunflowers.
Hobby Lobby in Robinson Township is the newest pseudo craft superstore to hit this area in the past year. I say pseudo because the center of the humungous floor plan is jammed with tacky, varnished dressers and armoires and picture frames, something reminiscent of a Marshall’s, Supersized. The good news is, us serious crafters (or scrap bookers; a class totally separate from crafters, and don’t you forget it) can swoop to the left upon entry and tip-toe through wide, white, airy aisles of faux floral stems, kept obsessive-compulsively neat and sorted in a long system of white panels with equally spaced recesses from which the bunches stand at full attention. Realism is the overall theme here; you may even, occasionally, find a stem or leaf, purposely painted and manipulated to just barely mimic natural decomposition or “withering”.
Hobby Lobby even has a small section I would like to refer to, although it may be a little over exuberant, as the Enchanted Forest. Here you can route through brown wired branches, clutching them and comparing them as though you were about to kindle a bonfire of beauty. Tall faux tree branches, terminating in a wide array of fruit, flowers, catkins and cones are a bit rare; here, all seasons coexist.
The most notable disappointment at Hobby Lobby is their lack of support systems; and by that I mean foam, dried vine, or wire wreath forms. There is an endless, transparent line of glass vases along the back wall, but who doesn’t already have sixteen of those?
It’s the gardener’s February fix; the tightly amassed collection of tropicals, stretching towards the sliding glass patio door languidly, stubborn green hues soaking up late winter’s toneless light.
The palm bows out slightly at the back corner of the laminate table, dual thin dry trunks crooning over the edge as their ancestors must have on the sandbars of some island. Narrow ribbon-like spears radiate symmetrically from the scaly trunks halfway up, chartreuse ribbed in hot pink. Old, woody roots peek out of the potting soil, giving some sense of time, grip, and erosion. The pot is a bit too small, disproportionate to the palm’s crown; its cream colored, stucco texture smudges when wet, and it’s lip is scalloped, painted a glossy cocoa brown.
A rescued zygote (aka Christmas cactus) cascades out of a tiny blue ceramic pot in the dappled shadow of the palm. Scooped up from the grocery store bargain bin in early January 2011, she bloomed once before Thanksgiving and has buds again now, a week before Valentine’s Day, caring not for our calendar. Strange fuchsia, tubular flowers peel back and flake like pastry dough, ending in golden pollen tips. Gorgeousness cost $0.99, and is much more sensually appealing than poinsettia tea-towels.
Ah, on to the Amaryllis bulbs, the drama queens of the kitchen table. Five separate pots, five separate habits. The first flower stalk came from the largest bulb which filled out it’s ten-inch terracotta pot; it shot up taller than the palm before opening huge pelican beaks of floriferousness, sparkling white like five-petaled snowflakes, a neat square of four flowers back to back, each a good eight inches in diameter. It was an arresting sight each time you might enter to get a can of diet coke or crack open a can of cat food.
The first site that appears following a Google search of Rebecca Skloot is Rebecca Skloot.com. The site is geared towards being interactive; besides a standard bio and book reviews, the sidebar options encourage engagement that goes beyond blandly cruising her website. Additional PDFs are available for book club and academic situations; "bonus" photos not included in the book of the Lacks family and Skloot are easily browsed, as well as archival scientific photos. Video footage of interviews and other productions, such as a BBC documentary pertinent to Skloot's work, is also available. "The HeLa Forum" attempts to unite the perspectives of all participants, asking for input and opinion from reading groups, general readers, and the scientific community. Lastly, a prominent link will redirect interested readers to The Henrietta Lacks Foundation, expanding involvement and aid inspired by her work into real-time.
All of these components make Skloot seem very accessible as an author; the level of feedback encouragement is apparent at every turn. And, I would agree with a character in the book, that Skloot does exude a warm, humanistic aura in the many photos and videos of her on the site, signing books and answering questions. The last few tidbits of her bio page entry solidifies her as a real person; I won't soon forget that she is an avid knitter (as is her mother) and, best of all, she attracts and keeps stray animals.
Comparing Skloot to Tracy Kidder, author of Strength in What Remains, both authors have a humanistic bent, promoting the nonprofit organizations they have formed or helped to form on their websites. This initiative seems slightly stronger with Kidder; while some videos, a movie trailer, and one measly interview with the author are offered, they are more obscure within the structure of the website, tracykidder.com. Links to health organizations Partners in Health and Village Health Works are found under several headings. All of Kidder's books are neatly iconized under the heading "Books" with short reviews, but few additional links or multimedia feeds accompanying them. Unlike Skloot, Kidder's bio reads as a checklist form of accomplishments, mainly academic, and is cold and distant in comparison to the level of interaction and compassion found in his actual works. Lastly, Kidder seems oddly distant again in terms of reaching out to his readership when, upon clicking on the "Appearances" tab, we are only told to check back later for updates, and left with disappointing blank space.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Voices, Micro and Macro, in Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Skloot creates a clear distinction between her overarching, naïve and inquisitive authorial voice, and the weary, suspicious, superstitious, yet still faithful voice of the Lack’s family.
Skloot presents her authorial perspective as someone captivated by the image of Henrietta, her hidden identity as a person, and the abstract concept of her body continuing to perpetuate itself in tiny pieces across the globe. Sloot’s idealistic mission is a rotation between the body, the personality, and the lasting implications of personality on/in bodily remnants. She portrays her journey as one of persistence, embarked upon by others previously but always falling short of fulfilling her specific vantage point, always skirting the true access points. Skloot finds herself literally driving in circles around social circles that she is apart from, until someone reaches out, opens up to her, ever so slightly, growing Henrietta’s identity, bit by bit, like cell by cell.
“Deborah’s Voice” is our first introduction to Henrietta’s real lasting legacy and influence in the world. Italicized, marked as both authorial and authoritative, rising above it’s marginalization, Deborah’s voice is a starting point, in a place of honor/dedication, reserved for her anger and loss. Deborah and Rebecca share the goal of discovering who Henrietta was, although their emotional motivations are degrees apart.
Certain local diction patterns which are found in the Lacks family’s conversational speech, repeated as they are throughout the book, could come to be interpreted as figurative language. The unique usage (or grammatically correct mis-usage) of words begins to carry its own meaning in the context of the narrative. There is a consistent lack of possessive noun usage, especially in reference to Henrietta; Deborah refers to her mother’s shoes and clothes as her “mother shoes” and “mother clothes.” David Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, deals with inquisitions into what he terms his “wife cells” as opposed to his “wife’s cells.” In a sense, this seems to be symbolic of all the myriad, larger issues at hand throughout the entire work. What were Henrietta’s ultimate possessions? Did she have any functioning rights when it came to the treatment of her body, living or dead? Do her cells function as part of her identity? Do they somehow lay a claim to her identity? What are the implications in Henrietta’s cells now being labeled as “mother” and “wife” cells? What does it matter that to the scientific community they are merely a semi-personalized acronym?
Sadly and ironically, all elements of Henrietta’s own cancer and treatment put the wholeness of her body on the fast track of death, while all efforts were made to indiscriminately maintain the life and reproduction of her cells after that untimely death. Henrietta had an awareness of the demise of her body which she summarized in simple terms; her tumor was “a knot”, her harsh chemical treatments a “spreading blackness.” To Henrietta, palpability was paramount, as was perpetuation in terms of her children, her own flesh and blood, not the strange spreading of her invisible cells. That her body could not produce another body was a real tragedy to her.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Die-hard Writing Habits
I love a deep, usually somewhat dank, embedded, swallow-a-story-up-and-spit-it-back-out metaphor. This is why I think I may have found my niche in creative nonfiction; I can find themes and subjects in the outside world that keep (at least some elements) of my writing grounded in reality and logical structure, while incorporating the more lyrical, figurative language I write in order to indulge in. Whether it’s the all-consuming metaphor that shifts to suit all the minutia of the story, or brief baby metaphors that stream throughout the story, like carbonation from the bottom of a champagne glass, almost every writing project has to have one form or the other for me.
In terms of methodology, I’ve always been an Outliner, albeit a loose outliner. To another reader/writer, they would probably seem unintelligible/illegible. There are usually Roman numerals and lower case letters; ideas are chopped into headings followed by key trigger words that are very often imagist, so that I can see the form that key narratives will take when supported with more conceptual, or scenic, portions that I could become too wrapped up in without any discretion. Loop-de-loops and dual-pointed arrows abound, and as the outline gets fervent, ideas are chicken scratched sideways, or squeezed between existing entries. The best outlines have a lifespan of 3-5 days, and some of the meatiest input is produced while I am halfway engaged in something else: listening to a lecture in class, or an author reading their own work is especially productive for me.
How old was I when I heard The Sound? Or, how old was I when I imagined the sound, and reinforced the trembling phantasm of that sound, recording it in my psyche out of such desire to hear it, and fear it?
The day was clouded, but bright, a sky of general whiteness. I was seated at my grandparent’s laminate kitchen table, rimmed in tarnished brass grooves. In front of me could have been any miasma of meals my grandmother prepared for me as a child; simple, crisp things, like cucumber and onion salads, or buttered egg noodles. I faced the window, staring past the rolling lawn to the tree line, like up-ended black roots silhouetting the sky, the borderline where the wild things hung on.
Then the sound. The rasp. There was no echo; there was instead a ricochet, an auditory after-shock. The throatiness, the wheezing expulsion knew no proper metaphor in my mind, then or now.
I remember the presence of my grandparents in the kitchen; both standing, my grandfather walking about, somewhere in the peripheral. Did he have the shotgun? Did he step outside? I remember him astute, and assured, as always. Maybe it was my grandmother who answered that guttural call with the recognition, under her breath.
“Cougar.”
Miniature Uproar, for sure…
I had the dusty red lead wrapped in my grasp, holding it close to the silver ring of the halter. His nostrils began to flare and contract dramatically, like a fish’s mouth at the water’s surface. He was an Arabian horse, and those nostrils had served an ancient hot bloodline of some sheik’s steeds, suffering valiantly through sandstorms, sucking copious amounts of air in, shutting stinging sand out.
There was certainly no blowing sand or even fowl weather that evening outside of the Burgettstown stables. The snuffling was a fright (and subsequently flight) response from Sattann. That is pronounced “sa” “tawn”, an Arabic name whose meaning I don’t think I ever discovered. Most people were put off by it, looking as it did like a typo version of Satan, penned in thick black calligraphy on his registration papers. He was a dream come true to 11 year old me; oh, how many chores and years of riding lessons I had to have under my belt before we culled Sattann from the herd as my own.
While there was nothing Satanic about Sattann, he and I were not a match made in equestrian heaven either. Since he had arrived at the stable where I was to board him, Sattann’s ears were permanently pinned back; in horse language, like a perpetual “fuck you, I don’t like it here and I don’t like you so much either”. Beyond generally orneriness, we discovered Sattann had an intense phobia. Sattann was terrified to enter the door to his stall. He would freeze up, plant his hooves in the mud, try to back away. With more encouragement, he would begin to rear up, side step (often meaning 900 lbs plopping on my own foot), and commence an overall snorting, eye-rolling frenzy.
Did I mention yet that his stall overlooked an embankment and the footpath to said stall was barely wide enough for Sattann (who, while of a lithe, 15.1 hands in height, was still a 900 lb. horse) and my scrawny 11 year old self?
On this particular evening, I led Sattann from the dark, soft peat surfaced arena to the outside world, towards that precipice and the walk of terror. My father was there, tight-lipped, supervising as usual, finding it hard not to interfere. How far we were in that short walk I cannot recollect, when there was another sound.
Eerie, and right there, right over the lip of that hillside. Higher pitched, not quite as drawn, but oh so vicious still. Mean, mean meow.
Did we look to Sattann? Did we dare? I know we were plunged into dread, all three (or four) of us. I believe my father took the lead, literally; but while we both expected total ballistics from Sattann, falling to an awful fate finally, eaten even…he walked placidly into his stall. Perhaps that was his reaction to an all too realistic threat.
Down below, deep in the steaming pits where manure from twenty-some horses was always pitched, a bobcat lurked. My father identified it as such, but I can’t remember if he really peered down to see it with his own eyes.
Friday, January 13, 2012
"Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested...ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centers of stillness" William Carlos Williams
In due time, I will come to inherit a 10 acre plus patchwork of flora and fauna, at some stage in its unnaturally accelerated disruption and flux. I will be the 4th generation family property owner to adore its stands of sapling oak and sugar maple, tangles of invasive wild rose bushes, and uncommon gems like blue eyed grass and pileated woodpeckers. The greater part of the property is a steep ravine, which I slid down and scaled again in my childhood with effort akin to conquering Everest. Back then, I could capture upwards of 50 salamanders spanning 4 different species in a single May afternoon in the creek bed at the bottom of that hill. Now there are most likely more tires dotting the trickling waterway than spotted salamanders. That creek has slipped right under the heavy traffic of Interstate 79 since the 1960s, like a native Copperhead, squeezing past the obstacles of construction, desperate to escape the talons of development.
The immediate and long term environmental effects of the laying of I-79 are legendary in both spiritual and scientific realms, and these realms often overlap, from the ominous disruption of Native American burial grounds, to the final banishment of the secretive Eastern Mountain Lion. Just how much impact does a 2 lane highway, running North and South through two states, have on a historically rugged natural terrain?
This is a topic I've wanted to research for a while now...I think the history and scientific studies could be interwoven with my personal and familial input in a meaningful way. I can begin to envision a form something like a winding road, with clearly marked "Exits" that highlight the ecological/emotional impacts of the project.
2. Raccoon vs. Oil Tycoon: The future of Raccoon State Park
For this project I would consider taking a more journalistic/memoir-like approach. I would keep a strict birdwatching schedule and log (one of my favorite hobbies), and integrate a larger environmental issue the park is facing with my own acute observations of what the park has to offer in avian respects.
Raccoon Creek State Park is 7,572 acres including the 101 acre Raccoon Lake. It is a 20 minute drive from the hotel I work at, and many of my co-workers have lived adjacent to the park their entire lives. The fiance of a good long time friend of mine also grew up in that area, and is very concerned about environmental issues. Doug, who is a graduate from the Pitt writing program and Emerson college has had several articles published in the PPG addressing the subject of Marcellus Shale oil drilling. The area is currently teeming with oil company competition, and the rush to drill is rampant.
I'm hoping to work together with Doug, as we pursue our own separate projects, yet share resources and connections. Access to the perspective of my co-workers would also be a unique advantage and an opportunity to explore the tension between economic opportunities and environmental hazards that are implicit with the drilling operations.
