Something More Pleasant

My eyes were very much opened after watching Roz in action via video.

I think that sometimes we think that when we take the time to write something down, and give people more insight into our minds eye that that's all that's needed in order to understand us. I think that with this memoir especially, that notion really proved me wrong.

I guess I didn't think that with a memoir I could blind myself like I do with any other thing I read. I come up with ideas about the story that really are all my own--ideas that I project onto the writer.

When I watched the videos I saw a whole new Roz in my mind. She is insecure, quirky, and very into hobbies.

When I read the book all I could imagine of her in real life was someone who thought they were above and more adult than her parents. Someone who was independent and strong willed. Someone who never wanted to return to the place of her childhood because it was stuffy and limited.

But here she is--this odd creature. This woman who seems somewhat childlike, as if she never fully grew into adulthood. She really issues a wake up call in that there are many types of people out there.

She has formed her own culture. I feel like this is because she was often just stuffed into the one culture--her parents cohabited culture, where being a normal child was probably impossible, and if attempted most likely very awkward.

She formed her own culture...she does origami, she keeps pet birds, she paints odd little Easter eggs with wax. Roz sews quilts--with her father on them...

I feel like she would make for a very interesting psychology case study. How does having parents who are a generation older than standard parents affect a person's personality type.

Her story makes me take a whole new view on what it means to adapt, simply as a person. But I do wonder what it would have been different if she was replaced by a male.

Roz really stands out to me. She is a different kinds of person--a different kind of woman. 

Extra Credit

For my extra credit blog I chose to re watch a documentary that I actually mentioned in class!

The film is called "mortified" and it's about everyone!

Anyone and everyone who is brave enough to publicly read their diary that is.

In class we've read many memoirs and we've often questioned how real they are. They've been written about adolescence, adulthood, and childhood. But they've all been written during adulthood.

So how filtered are they? How embellished?

But what is more raw than a journal entry written in the heat of the moment from your freshman year of high school?

Granted, our views of things most likely aren't always clear, even in the moment...but at least in these instances we know what they truthfully and genuinely thought at that exact moment in their lives.

And I love the whole essence of this choice that these people have made. To get up and verbally read their lives.

It's easy for us to hide between the covers of a book labeled "memoir" and have people wonder about how we went through life...and even more so how we feel about it now after it's all done...

But to get up and read it in PERSON?! THAT is true bravery. And we get to see it all over their face--how they feel about it.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE literature in almost any form--but I believe real life it to be shared in person. That is how humans truly interact and connect.

Persepolis

I'd like to focus on how Marjane Sarrapi reflects on her novel for a moment

In class today we watched interviews with her and she says this:

That her story was not meant to be focused on that she was a woman growing up in middle eastern society...but that it's a human experience. More importantly it's her experience.

This speaks volumes to me that she feels this way. Especially with knowing how culture is for women in the middle east.

Now I'd like to focus on her relationship with God.

I mean...She wants to be a prophet at first. She wants to be a servant of God.

But God begins to disappear.

Is it perhaps because her faith in humanity also begins to disappear?

After her uncle is executed, she even tells God to "get out!"(70)

I feel as if after this instance that Marjane rejects God because to her she is like an imaginary friend. He is even represented as a visible figure in her graphic novel.

She could have had him present, just having several scenes in which she spoke to him in a prayer-like manner, but she chose to have him take a physical form.

It's interesting to think about how a child's mind might have been so vivid. I'm sure the decision to portray God as a physical being was a creative decision, though.

Once Marjane lets go of her "faith" in God, she seems to begin to look more within herself for comfort.

She becomes a strong spirit who projects her beliefs outwardly. She has expectations for the world around her.

It's interesting that despite the terror going on around her, how much she still claims her heritage.

And then she has to leave...her parents send her to Vienna.

I feel really bad for her in this moment, because she seems to feel so alone. Like there is always some barrier between her and content.

Redefining Realness

Reading Redefining Realness really opens up the genre, memoir, and takes it to a whole other level.

I've asked over and over what it means for anyone to be the opposite gender of what they are born.

If it's inappropriate to stereotype, then isn't it sexist to "convert" in the first place?

Dr. J wrote in our writing conversation today that Janet's decision to become a girl somehow empowers what being a woman means.

Why? I feel like that doesn't quite fit. I see where the thought comes from, but here's my rub: Don't those who understand and who are in the LGBTQ community believe that they are born the way they are?

Clarification: Don't they believe they were ALWAYS a girl? if they are a transwoman? At least in Mock's case, right? So it would be incorrect and inappropriate to suggest that because she technically began life as a male, that it was a compliment to females that "he" chose to become a female.

Right?

The book really frustrated me in this regard. To me it suggested that all it meant to be a woman was to wear dresses and own the pronoun "she"

"I spent hours in her room, playing with her cosmetics, plucking my eyebrows, trying on bras. The more time I spent with Wendi, the more comfortable I grew expressing myself as a female. By the end of my freshman year in high school, I was regularly wearing women's clothes to school."

I feel like there is so much more to being a woman than dressing the part and having a vagina. Reading this memoir I feel like Janet Mock only sees a woman's life as being glamorous.

Maybe as they spend their life as woman they will be able to understand more fully what it actually means. 

Life is like an onion. Blue Jay

My experience reading Blue Jay's dance has really led me to consider the following questions:

1. How can I step into her field of vision without having had her same experiences?

2. What is the goal of her memoir?

To answer the first question I've concluded that it's probably actually best that I don't have a personal relation to her topic. Because of this I can remain unbiased.

To answer the second question is more difficult. Everyone may have different intentions when writing a memoir. Which is labeled as non fiction. But it's about your own personal life.

I wonder if when one writes about their own life whether it's sometimes appropriate to remove ones self from certain situations when one writes about them?

It seems like Erdrich specifically picks situations in which it is more appropriate to keep herself involved. Everything is happening in her own personal thoughts, and thoughts are always our own, and can't be criticized when nobody else hears them aloud.

Her book is filled with observations, and dare I say, no dialogue.

I don't think her memoir should be criticized. I think how she writes is fair. While she makes statements about how motherhood is, I believe they are all only just personal to her.

Why does she publish them? It's only human to not want to in real time verbally express every detailed thought that we have, but at the same time want others to relate and know what we are thinking.

I love this about memoirs. They are made up of thoughts that have actually gone through our heads, thoughts that are structured the way humans think internally and are not edited.

Here is a wonderfully crafted example of a thought I'm sure all of us have had...

"I make a hieroglyph of my desires, assign grand meanings to my wishes, yet I'm miserably aware it's all brain chemicals, moth pheromones, cravings that can be undone with more east than i would like to allow." (79)

In a real life conversation I might say to someone else...Do  you ever think about how we feel things because of chemicals in our brain? But in my head, I'm actually thinking so rapidly and so detailed, just like a memoir.

It's interesting that so much of class has been focused around credibility...

When we read wild, this was a big issue for me, because it infuriated me to read such a story that felt so embellished to the point that it was like a scene from a movie...(It's ironic that it WAS made into a movie; she really laid the ground work for that one)

But with Blue Jay's Dance, how could you ever translate this to a dramatic screen interpretation? You couldn't. Not unless it was perhaps extremely unconventional. With nature scenes set to classical music.

This book is like life. There is a chapter for each thought, and each thought sparks new thoughts.

It is a piece of her. Many chapters titles reveal her love of animals, her relation to them. She juxtaposes wildlife to her domestic life. It has it's thrills and it's low points. Life is intertwined with other life.

To be honest, I'm not concerned with it's factual validity. I believe that with writing that it's impossible to come completely outside of yourself.

If her book is somewhat false and messy, it just brings more validity to it. Because validity doesn't always lie in the facts. 

Brown Girl Dreaming

One of the most sensitive issues in America today is this: Does racism really exist?

And of course it does, but then to what degree?

So reading Brown Girl Dreaming, really gets interesting, because "we" are allowed to gain perspective from little Jacqueline on what "their" experiences really are.

Excuse my quotations, I have a hard time with categories. And I'm conflicted over separating humans based on race, even if it is only concerning personal experience and culture. When does something become offensive?

Anyway, so far one of the coolest things for me is that the writing feels unbiased. And I think the reason is because it's been told so far through the eyes of a young child.

To her, all that comes with living is hope for happiness, home, and what it will mean to someday be Jacqueline.

In fact...she is fascinated with that aspect...of what it will mean to be her. "I don't know if these hands will become Malcolm's-raised and fisted, or Martin's-open and asking..."(26)

She comes up with several examples of who she could become. Diverse examples even, as we see the contrast between Malcolm and Martin. Malcolm being aggressive, and Martin being peaceful. She doesn't know how she will choose to make a difference...

But she wants to.

She has expectations for herself, but she doesn't know what she expects from herself yet.

She is already aware of racial issues.

She doesn't let it control her life...but isn't it amazing as she externally reflects on her infancy that she is already imagining for herself what part she will take in the social rights movement?

And she has even smaller issues to overcome it seems, at least before she might be given the right to even fight for her own people.

What about the fact that she is a female? Living in a time where they are even lesser than they are considered now?

But she seem's to be empowered. Even though her father seems less brave than her mother, he gives her this self-confidence that she has all ability to be a strong and persuasive individual.

"Name a girl Jack and people will look at her twice, my father said."(28)

Maybe for this time period this might be true. Others would view her differently, because just with her name she would already challenge social norms. And so before she could even speak a word she might already stand for something.

She may not have known that as an infant, but she wants that for herself now.

She is okay with Jacqueline though.

I feel very connected with this book so far. While the issue of race has nothing to do with it, I am very connected in how she has always felt like she wants to find some large purpose for herself. I connect with her very strong feelings of home as well. Home is enormously important to me, and as I go off into the world on my own, I wonder how I will take home with me, how will I adapt?

Wild

It's been quite the adventure reading Cheryl Strayed's, Wild.

At first, I felt annoyed reading it. I felt like she was extremely over dramatic. And it made me angry that she described her experience with so many internal details and adjectives.
"As if I were in a dream. My every though liquid slow, propelled by will rather than instinct"(30)
Like, come on. No one thinks this way through their daily motions. This is what happens with retrospect. She waited to write this novel, and now she see's it through rosy colored glasses and has a giant pity party for herself. AND she gets famous for it. 

I'm sorry, empathizing has never really been my strong suit.

The way Cheryl allows us to experience her experience feels like a well cut movie to me. Every sentence has flavor and thought, just like a film would. How can this be real? Everything moment that is supposed to feel the rawest screams embellishment to me. "As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true."(99) Honestly, I sincerely doubt she was thinking about the dark beauty of her situation when she was getting her divorce.

I could believe Cheryl's story so much more if she admitted it all as retrospect, and didn't try to emulate the situation as if it were currently happening. The fact that the whole memoir seems embellished just speaks to how her journey wasn't actually over after she finished her portion of the trail. In my opinion, I don't believe Cheryl actually experienced what she had experienced, until AFTER she had experienced it. She had to digest everything that happened to her from beginning to middle to end.

Reading this memoir really made me think about memoirs in general. I want to know how selfish it actually is to value what you went through so much, that you felt others should read about it. Isn't it conceited? What makes your experiences so worth knowing about? Wouldn't it be better to ask to write someone else? Fictional memoirs might even be okay. I don't know. Just a thought.

If I try to connect this book to gender studies, I'll admit I am at a loss. I feel like there are small examples, but for the most part I feel like anyone who has suffered an insurmountable loss could relate to this book. Or just anyone who has felt lost in general. I don't think that this is specific to women.

As a last thought, I can say I honestly love the ending of the memoir. Personally I feel like it's a lesson I know is there for me to learn, but that I haven't yet been forced into.

"I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough"(311)

You can make it though anything if you allow yourself to see the way out. That's what I got from this memoir.