Ooops, i hit "publish post" before noon today and immediately walked out the front door & went to lunch, just got back to my house and realized the page didn't load. My apologies.. luckily it was saved!
Sitting at my usual spot in our oversized leather armchair in our living room, wrapped cozily in blankets, I read "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" with Sinatra simultaneously crooning a jazzy melody "There is nothing for me but to lovvvee you..... and the way you look tonight..." out of the surround sound speakers. I couldn't help but to feel like an insider in the late singer's close circle of luxurious confidantes while reading this piece. Sipping cranberry juice from one of our thrice used plastic cups, I imagined I was actually sipping Cabernet Sauvignon from an Austrian crystal wine glass at a jazz bar listening to Old Blue Eyes performing live.
Gay Talese wrote this piece so well, without ever having even talked to Sinatra. The sensory details were so delicious to read, and he revealed Sinatra's character to such an extent that I feel like i know him personally. I really like the writer's account of all the people that were lined up outside of the bar just to catch a glimpse of him "to pay their respects," As well as the scene where he's singing the song about his daughter Nancy, and is portrayed to be an emotional and sentimental person. It was a nice contrast after hearing about how big of an asshole he can be when he's in one of his moods.
I really like the angle the writer took on this piece. He was very much absent in the piece, an invisible observer. I liked that it wasn't a paparazzi account of Frank being rude and causing a scene in public every once in a while, or showing how nice of a guy he is to his house guests and friends, it captured so many sides of him, his relationship with his daughter, his ex-wife, his parents, his manager, and his closest friends. Like I said before it made me feel like I really knew him. Everyone gets colds and is miserable when they have a cold, but no one stops to think how much worse it would be to have a cold when you're a singer. And not just any singer, but Frank fucking Sinatra. His career is on the line, millions of dollars and other peoples jobs are on the line.... it's a pretty big deal when Frank Sinatra can't sing because he has a cold.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Rewrite of personal essay
i want a better title. help?
Redemption
I can see it from my mother’s eyes: the wretched little bitch I was becoming. At age seven I was already coming home past my curfew every day after staying at the park playing Cowboys and Indians or riding my bike all over town with the other neighborhood kids when it was time to practice violin or piano.
One summer evening I came home at six thirty – five hours after the time Mom told me to be home. She grabbed my wrists way too hard and pushed me into a corner so that the back of my head had a bump later and she yelled in my face lots of words that Moms should never say. I remember she was so close to my face that I felt her spit spatter my face when she yelled. Her eyebrows furrowed together so that she looked like a real live wicked witch. She spanked me hard and sent me to my room without letting me eat anything. “Don’t you DARE come out until you’ve practiced your entire lesson perfectly for one hour. Every mistake is five extra minutes!” This was cruel and unjustified torture. “…I’ll get you my pretty! And your little dog too!”
Six years later, I still never wanted to practice violin or piano, ever. Every day there was a fight. I had to practice for hours each day if I wanted to see my friends again. And let me tell you, making friends and keeping them was not easy in seventh grade. Never once did I feel proud after winning an award or the position as concertmaster in whatever orchestral audition I was dragged to. It was never my accomplishment, it was Moms’. I sure as hell didn’t want to be wasting my weekends and summers flying all over the country and sometimes even
For years I’d concealed the anguish that swept through our house like a fever from my friends and even from my Dad. He had some idea that I was suffering, but he didn’t want to undermine Mom’s authority, and anytime I approached him for help he would be too busy reading the paper in his armchair or filling out paperwork at his desk or playing basketball with the neighbors. On the rare occasion that he wasn’t too busy doing these things and found a few minutes he could spare to hear me out, he scolded me for whining or lying or disobeying my mother and it usually ended up in another screaming match. My friends asked me why I had to practice all the time since I was already so good, and when I tried to explain myself, they refused to believe that Gail Scarlett had a single mean bone in her body. I didn’t bother trying to convince them and excused myself every day when I was supposed to go home to avoid any humiliating scenes that would surely be the result of my defiance.
One day, after a particularly brutal battle, sobbing myself into delirium and feeling particularly resentful about my deteriorating social life and unsatisfactory parents, I did something that Mom never saw coming.
The violins hollow body made the most delicious cracking noise I’d ever heard when it hit the ground. Its smooth shape lay fractured and helpless in the middle of the room, like an injured antelope awaiting its inevitable doom. I’d died and gone to heaven, the joy of every kid wearing Mickey ears that day in Disney World combined was inferior to my own. My heart exploded with bliss while I destroyed pages and pages covered in thousands of black dots on lines and shredded my lesson books into snow. “I’m king of the jungle, hear me roar!”
I leapt across the field that was my room abandoning my prey to let it suffer in silence, and bounded down the stairs towards the front door with no destination in mind and no intentions of ever returning home. With the door handle just barely within my grasp, mom grabbed me by the back of the neck, whirled me around in a blur of kicking and punching and scratching, and pulled me to the ground by my ponytail. Kneeling on my stomach, she smacked both sides of my face with superhuman strength, shrieking the very words she made me scrub off the wall in my closet last Christmas, and forcing her eyebrows into that unmistakably satanic arch.
Although the violin was repaired, because I was forced to continue mastering a variety of musical endeavors in my high school years, the emotional gap between my mother and I was never bridged. Not having a relationship with my mom was one of the many factors contributing to my angsty adolescent era, but when my emotional instability consumed my life and my ability to function socially and academically, school counselors recommended me to a number of psychologists that could provide some assistance to get my life back in order. My mom, who had never before shown any detectable concern for my well-being, was supportive of meeting with my therapist and I upon the therapists request.
To my surprise, with each session she attended my mom gradually opened up about her experience as a child with parents who were far more abusive than she, and because it was how she was raised, she felt that pushing me to be the best was good parenting. “I was never as good as you are, and my parents hated me for it.” Tears welled in her eyes, and for the first time ever, I saw my mom as a troubled person with her own emotional issues as opposed to a heartless monster who enjoyed making me miserable. “I wanted you to be able to take advantage of all the opportunities that I never had… I couldn’t understand how you could hate it so much, when it’s everything I strived for growing up.” To me, it made sense. I’d been waiting for the moment when I had a reasonable cause for forgiving my mom, and could let myself pop the cork out of my heart and let the love I’ve always wanted to give her erupt and drench her to the bone.
My mom finally let go of her dream that I would become a distinguished musician. I wasn’t happy playing violin, I was passionate about other subjects, and she admitted to always having known I would be successful in whichever direction I chose to steer my life. After a few more years of therapy, the trust between us strengthened tremendously. I’m really proud of the person she’s become, and every time she apologizes to me or professes her guilt and regret, I hug her and remind her “You’re only human mom, we all make mistakes.”
From Telling True Stories
Isabel Wilkersons section "Interviewing: Accelerated Intimacy" hit very close to home for how i felt as a student community organizer in our very own Building Blocks program two years ago. I remember knocking on many doors in my assigned neighborhood and after only one or two sentences of my introduction and explanation to the residents, many of them slammed the door in my face simply because they saw me as an intruder.
Although I wasn't interviewing the residents to write an article, the idea of myself, a perfect stranger, wanting to talk to them about their community and their views was understandably a little unsettling at first. After the third or fourth time the residents saw me walking up and down their block or talking with their neighbors, they became a little bit more comfortable with me and the idea that i was just a college student promoting a program that was more beneficial to them more than to me.
I intentionally held off with a few of the residents, only asking basic introductory questions about their families, hoping to find something in common i could latch on to in order to make a deeper and more personal connection - or as wilkinson put it "making a connection with the person to accelerate getting to know them" (32).
All of the phases of this "accelerated intimacy" are pretty much exactly what i had to do to accomplish my goal as a student community organizer. My only qualm with Wilkinson's advice is that at the end of the interview, the relationship is pretty much dead. As soon as you reach "the center of the onion" as a reporter, you've got what you wanted, the subject knows nothing about you, and your work there is done.
This makes me incredibly uncomfortable simply because I believe in cultivating mutual relationships in order to get a fuller picture of inside the subjects life and mind. Building Blocks taught me that the more you share about yourself and the more you can empathize with the subject, the more they trust you and are willing to tell you their experiences.
While Wilkinson provides a good feel for how to initiate an interview, I don't believe I myself could ever judge and report someone else's life without sharing a little bit about myself in exchange. That is of course, only if the subject had an interest in me and my motives for writing their experiences. Is this something I need to get over in order to successfully write Narrative Journalism?
Isabel Wilkersons section "Interviewing: Accelerated Intimacy" hit very close to home for how i felt as a student community organizer in our very own Building Blocks program two years ago. I remember knocking on many doors in my assigned neighborhood and after only one or two sentences of my introduction and explanation to the residents, many of them slammed the door in my face simply because they saw me as an intruder.
Although I wasn't interviewing the residents to write an article, the idea of myself, a perfect stranger, wanting to talk to them about their community and their views was understandably a little unsettling at first. After the third or fourth time the residents saw me walking up and down their block or talking with their neighbors, they became a little bit more comfortable with me and the idea that i was just a college student promoting a program that was more beneficial to them more than to me.
I intentionally held off with a few of the residents, only asking basic introductory questions about their families, hoping to find something in common i could latch on to in order to make a deeper and more personal connection - or as wilkinson put it "making a connection with the person to accelerate getting to know them" (32).
All of the phases of this "accelerated intimacy" are pretty much exactly what i had to do to accomplish my goal as a student community organizer. My only qualm with Wilkinson's advice is that at the end of the interview, the relationship is pretty much dead. As soon as you reach "the center of the onion" as a reporter, you've got what you wanted, the subject knows nothing about you, and your work there is done.
This makes me incredibly uncomfortable simply because I believe in cultivating mutual relationships in order to get a fuller picture of inside the subjects life and mind. Building Blocks taught me that the more you share about yourself and the more you can empathize with the subject, the more they trust you and are willing to tell you their experiences.
While Wilkinson provides a good feel for how to initiate an interview, I don't believe I myself could ever judge and report someone else's life without sharing a little bit about myself in exchange. That is of course, only if the subject had an interest in me and my motives for writing their experiences. Is this something I need to get over in order to successfully write Narrative Journalism?
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
reading response for week 3
In Jon Franklins chapter "The Outline" in Writing for Story, he provides an outstanding analogy of a story not being "a line of dominoes, but a web, and tugging on any filaments causes the whole thing to vibrate" (p. 113). This stood out to me particularly because of problems I've had with my own writing, and frequently experiencing the feeling that some of the pieces I've written, even if they do have smooth transitions, aren't quite cohesive as a whole.
And I too, had a phobia of outlines. In fact, one could even go as far as saying I was prejudiced against outlines, considering them as too technical, rigid or "science-y," not allowing writers to "think outside the box" with writing style, and being incapable of capturing any poetic elements in the writing itself. Kind of like a research paper: "Thesis, supporting evidence, more supporting evidence, even more supporting evidence, conclusion."
However, the way Franklin presents successful writing outlines as needing to be "as simple as possible," really does leave enough room for creativity and style. His advice in outlining in the non-traditional way gives me hope for attaining clarity in the ideas I attempt to express and avoiding the mistakes that have hindered my writing from fulfilling its potential in the future.
And I too, had a phobia of outlines. In fact, one could even go as far as saying I was prejudiced against outlines, considering them as too technical, rigid or "science-y," not allowing writers to "think outside the box" with writing style, and being incapable of capturing any poetic elements in the writing itself. Kind of like a research paper: "Thesis, supporting evidence, more supporting evidence, even more supporting evidence, conclusion."
However, the way Franklin presents successful writing outlines as needing to be "as simple as possible," really does leave enough room for creativity and style. His advice in outlining in the non-traditional way gives me hope for attaining clarity in the ideas I attempt to express and avoiding the mistakes that have hindered my writing from fulfilling its potential in the future.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Karma
Okay guys, this one's a little bit longer than 900 words.... If anyone has any suggestions about how to shorten it without killing it that would be great! Thanks
-Linds
-Linds
Karma
I can see it from my mothers’ eyes: the wretched little bitch I was becoming. At age seven I was already coming home past my curfew every day after staying at the park playing Cowboys and Indians or riding my bike all over town with the other neighborhood kids when it was time to practice violin or piano.
One summer evening I came home at six thirty – five hours after the time Mom told me to be home. She grabbed my wrists way too hard and pushed me into a corner so that the back of my head had a bump later and she yelled in my face lots of words that Moms should never say. I remember she was so close to my face that I felt her spit spatter my face when she yelled. Her eyebrows furrowed together so that she looked like a real live wicked witch. She spanked me hard and sent me to my room without letting me eat anything. “Don’t you DARE come out until you’ve practiced your entire lesson perfectly for one hour. Every mistake is five extra minutes!” This was cruel and unjustified torture. “…I’ll get you my pretty! And your little dog too!”
Well. I’d rather starve. Being alone in my room was dull, and Mommy dearest would have to pay the cost of this grave mistreatment. Gasping for air filled the gaps between my convulsive sobs. I gathered enough strength to scream at the top of my lungs for an exhausting amount of time about how I would do anything to have any other Mom in the world. “I want a Mom who isn’t a wicked bitch and who doesn’t make me practice these stupid fucking instruments… and… and and has things to do besides making her daughters lives miserable!” I stammered. What a mouth I had! More sobs. Deep breath “…Just because you were a loser and didn’t have friends to play with when you were a kid and just because your mom kept you trapped inside all day long doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it to me! …And as soon as I’m old enough I’m selling that violin and keeping the money and not giving you any of it! I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME YOU HORRIBLE WITCH! …I’m calling child services if you don’t stop hurting me and making me play these instruments!” I screamed just for screamings sake, knocked over bookshelves, kicked dents in my closet door, (“Go to hell you awful bitch!”) and stomped on a tube of dark gray paint so it would splatter all over the carpet and the walls. That’ll show her.
Unfortunately, she didn’t learn a damned thing. The cat-and-mouse games she insisted on playing and emotionally draining tantrums I would throw to protect myself became a daily occurrence while Dad was at work. Sure I overreacted at times, and sure there were probably worse mothers in the world somewhere (maybe?), but that was beside the point. I truly was a miserable little girl, and fulfilling my mothers’ wishes of having a musical child prodigy for a daughter was not something that I wouldn’t let happen without a fight. Many hot tears were spilled, and many cuss words and childish insults were shouted at high enough volumes for any happy couples who might walk through our neighborhood to hear on a pleasant summer evening if the windows were open. These episodes were the ‘slightly cloudy’ days in the Scarlett household compared to the ensuing hurricanes and earthquakes of my later years.
I still didn’t want to practice violin or piano, ever. Every day there was a fight. I had to practice for hours each day if I ever wanted to see my friends again. And let me tell you, making friends and keeping them was not easy in seventh grade. Never once did I feel proud after winning an award or the position as concertmaster in whatever orchestral audition I was dragged to. Never once did I harbor any sort of smug satisfaction when the high school kids in the surrounding districts knew my name and whispered to each other and shot me envious glances while waiting in line at 7-11. It wasn’t my accomplishment, it was Gails’. I sure as hell didn’t want to be wasting my weekends and summers flying all over the country and sometimes even
For years I’d concealed the anguish that swept through our house like a fever from my friends and even from my Dad. He had some idea that I was suffering, but he didn’t want to undermine Mom’s authority, and anytime I approached him for help he would be too busy reading the paper in his armchair or filling out paperwork at his desk or playing basketball with the neighbors. On the rare occasion that he wasn’t too busy doing these things and found a few minutes he could spare to hear me out, he would scold me for whining or lying or disobeying my mother and it usually ended up in another screaming match. My friends always asked me why I had to practice all the time since I was already so good, and when I tried to explain myself, they refused to believe that Gail Scarlett had a single mean bone in her body. I didn’t bother trying to convince them and excused myself every day when I was supposed to go home to avoid any humiliating scenes that would surely be the result of my defiance.
If classifying Mom’s neurotic expectations and behavior as child abuse was an overstatement then, the exaggeration became the truth when I was thirteen. I never did have the guts to sell the violin. But one day, after sobbing myself into delirium and feeling particularly resentful about my deteriorating social life and unsatisfactory parents, I did something that she never saw coming.
The violins hollow body made the most delicious cracking noise I’d ever heard when it hit the ground. Its smooth shape lay fractured and helpless in the middle of the room, like an injured antelope awaiting its inevitable doom. I’d died and gone to heaven, the joy of every kid wearing Mickey ears that day in Disney World combined was inferior to my own. My heart exploded with bliss while I destroyed pages and pages covered in thousands of black dots on lines and shredded my lesson books into snow. “I’m king of the jungle, hear me roar!”
I leapt across the field that was my room abandoning my prey to let it suffer in silence, and bounded down the stairs towards the front door with no destination in mind and no intentions of ever returning home. With the door handle just barely within my grasp, mom grabbed me by the back of the neck, whirled me around in a blur of kicking and punching and scratching, and pulled me to the ground by my ponytail. Kneeling on my stomach, she smacked both sides of my face with superhuman strength, shrieking the very words she made me scrub off the wall in my closet last Christmas, and forcing her eyebrows into that unmistakably satanic arch.
A look of horror blossomed on her face when I grinned, opened my eyes, grew ten feet taller, and let a lifetime of revenge take its course.
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