Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Carver intro rough

Beginning rough draft of an introduction:

I once asked a choreographer to explain a dance she had just performed. "What? Would you like me to do it again for you?" she asked. Raymond Carver's short stories are a bit like that. They are something close to poetry, and any attempt to analyze, summarize, or dissect seems to somehow fall short of the whole. Bedford refers to Carver's style as "brief and minimalist in style, plot, and setting" (288), so it seems that any trace of non-minimal description that makes its way into a Carver story must be there for a very good reason. That's the point of this little essay, to examine "Popular Mechanics," and pay particular attention to setting details and, most specifically, to light.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Fiction paper prewrite

You rarely get to look over the shoulder of a writer during the writing process, so I'm going to talk my way through the writing of this paper.

I'm working on Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics." I began with the whole minimalist idea, and took some notes (mainly from my memory, because I've read the story several times, and I assume that things I remember well will be important in some way).

Non-minimalist things

The story is so minimal (and Bedford's editor uses the "minimalist" label) that non minimal things might be pretty important, so I listed them:

• Cars "slushing" by
• All the description of the first few lines, with the dirty water, etc.
• The fascination with light: getting dark on the inside, turning off the light in the bedroom, the kitchen nearly dark
• Flowerpot crashing to the floor

Minimalist things

It's sort of an "argument from absence," but the whole story is very flat, lacking in even ordinary conversation conventions:

• No dialog blurbs
• Not even quotation marks
• No emotion words during the early part of the argument
• Lots more indications of "minimalist" writing

Little stuff with deep indications

• "getting dark on the inside too"
• "it" (this baby) not "he" or "George"
• grabbed an arm (how many does a baby have? doesn't even matter if it's left or right)
• the darkest time physically is the darkest time emotionally
  

Tension: The changing English language

Nobody likes stability more than I do. Emotionally, I'd love to be on the side of the Grammar Nazis who seem to think that Moses brought the comma rules of English down the mountain along with the Ten Commandments. I cringed when "alright" began showing up in dictionaries as an acceptable spelling. I grit my teeth that "hopefully" has come to mean "I hope it will happen."

Inconveniently, living languages change all the time, sometimes very quickly. English is probably the most living (and changing) language out there. We writers just have to accept that and attempt to keep up with current acceptable usage.

Here's a little item I wrote to a young friend in 2004. He was a high school student, taking a freshman English college course through an Ohio program called PSEO (Post Secondary Education Option). He had written a paper about PSEO students and pluralized the abbreviation as PSEOs. The teacher thought it needed an apostrophe: PSEO's. Because he used this PSEOs construction all through the paper, the teacher marked each one wrong and called the paper a failure. (Never mind the question whether doing the same small grammatical error repeatedly is one error or many—and the question whether a lot of PSEOs make a piece of writing a total failure.) He asked my opinion, and I wrote this response:

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Jon:

In answer to your question about using an apostrophe for pluralizing abbreviations (as, for example in pluralizing PSEO), I've done a bit of research:

• The Blair Handbook (3rd edition, 2000) is adamant: form the plural with apostrophe + s.


• The Little, Brown Handbook (8th edition, 2001) says the apostrophe is often optional when the abbreviations are unpunctuated, i.e. without the periods.


• Rules for Writers (5th edition, 2004) points out that either use is correct, but that you should be consistent.


• Keys for Writers (4th edition, 2005) [sic] says the apostrophe is "commonly used" and that MLA and APA prefer no apostrophe—but that it's acceptable if you are consistent.

I'd say we're in an evolutionary stage with this one. We seem to be moving away from the apostrophe, but either usage is acceptable if you are consistent. This is one of those style book issues. If your course style book is the Blair Handbook, I'd say you should use the apostrophe without fail. Otherwise, it appears to be writer's choice. If you are submitting a paper to a carefully-edited professional journal, however, I'd suggest leaving the apostrophe out.

Curt Allen

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Latest Development

Remember that Rules for Writers said in 2004 that either use was correct? By the 6th edition (2008), the book had changed its tune: "Do not use an apostrophe to pluralize an abbreviation" (page 301). Their example is "We collected only four IOUs out of forty." The Quick Access handbook (2007) doesn't even mention the possibility. Its only comment is that we use the apostrophe to pluralize single letters: "Printing w's is hard for some first graders" (page 483). (I'll bet that rule will vanish in the next decade too.)

What's a writer to do?

The French have something called the French Academy. This body decides what's correct French and what's not. When I was in high school, the Academy had been working for several years to decide the grammatical gender for "grapefruit," so I guess we just couldn't write about them until the decision came down. Things are sloppier but easier for English writers. You have to be aware of the usage of good writers and editors (the New Yorker magazine, for example), and keep a current dictionary at hand. And stay kind of loose in the saddle.

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.