...and now for something completely different


This week we will land back on earth to resume Gatsby and to explore Fitzgerald's friend and rival Ernest Hemingway, a very different, more basic, down-to-earth writer, who nonetheless possessed a sense of beauty and mystique in everything he wrote. The photo is Hemingway's home in Key West, where he would spend his final hours, but Hemingway was a world traveler, a man equally comfortable in the Ritz Carlton, Paris, or the bullrings of Madrid. No, reality was, Hemingway was much more at home with a shotgun in hand and a cheetah pelt in his knapsack.
Hemingway's beautiful "Hills Like White Elephants" is readily available online and I would suggest a preliminary reading, but we will read the [very short] story (nearly completely dialogue) together Wednesday. Analyze this deceivingly complex story in your journals.

I will be asking for volunteers/actors, to put together a short performance piece of one of the stories we read over the next week; "Hills", "The Swimmer" by John Cheever or "A Family Supper" by Kazuo Ishiguro. More on this as we go along.

As you may have noticed, we have not strictly followed the class syllabus. I have decided to intersperse more poetry and these short stories earlier in the semester. This has lengthened our reading of Gatsby and delayed our next novel The Aspern Papers. Our testing schedule therefore looks like this: this Friday, quiz on Gatsby and "Hills Like White Elephants." Next Friday Test on Gatsby, "The Swimmer" and "A Family Supper."

Remember your Poetry 180 projects are due February 20th!

Your homework for next week's journal entry is to analyze the following passage from the novel UnBlinking. Discuss voice and point of view and then, as we've been doing in class, create a similar first person account. It's all about voice, remember. Can I trust in your voice? I have edited this piece for appropriateness in an AP class, but you must use your best judgement (Remember the "Sh*t/Excrement" rule):

A six-year old magazine at the dentist’s had an article about teens and pills, a subject close to my heart because I loved pills as a teenager, simply loved them. Happily I was born before our obsession with healthy living. We were told that Pfizer would make life better, and it did.

“Mind if I sit here?” A woman motioned to my handbag although there was no one else in a room filled with empty chairs.

“I suppose not,” I said, disguising my frustration as best I could. She looked at me with unblinking eyes as she wriggled into the chair. And it wasn’t as if she wanted to talk, she never said another word. I brought the magazine up to my face so that I wouldn’t have to look at her, and tucked my handbag next to me in the chair.

During my formative years there were two cultures: the acid and pot hippie culture, and the prescription meds club (cocaine, of course, crossed the boundaries – it is, after all, the little black dress of controlled substances). Ah, the Garden of Earthly Delights, the pinks like nasturtiums, the blues, the extended release of those tiny time pills. What difference was there between the yellow ones and a sunset? I loved them because they were so Sharon Tate, so Valley of the Dolls. I was obsessed with upper-crust suburban life, at least as portrayed by Hollywood and Didion and Jacqueline Susann, and in order to live that life you needed at the very least:

1. diet pills
2. martinis
3. sleeping pills.

So I went about replicating that lifestyle in the junkie-infested, rat-infested East Village. We all did. Rent was cheap, 60s cocktail dresses were cheap, and so were peep-toed pumps. My girlfriends and I would sit about our slummy-but-chic apartments popping pills, mixing up brandy Alexanders and curling our lashes in preparation for the evening out. We favored opera length gloves and chandelier earrings. We smoked Tarrytons because of the girl in the ad with the black eye. By midnight, sluttily, slurrily, shakily unsteady but powdered, perfumed and red-lipsticked to the hilt, we’d do a line of coke and teeter out like Holly Golightly, glassy-eyed.

Did I mention the friend who in 1967 had the unfortunate luck to get a little too shit-faced outside Max’s Kansas City? (My spellchecker wants to change shit-faced to shitake.) She proceeded to taunt a teenaged gunman by a phrase delivered with le dernier cri of mockery, and the demeanor of a sponge. She said, “What, are you going to do, shoot us?” The nuance of her performance was unfortunately lost on the young man, who, misunderstanding her rhetoric for inquiry, promptly shot her dead. It was a bad night. I mention it because this was the spring of my content, yet there were indeed bad nights.

All I could think of at the time were the implications. All I could think of was this gal, this out-of-control future soccer-mom multitasker. I am amazed by the things that others do simultaneously: solving the Goldberg conjecture and baking a soufflé, volunteering for the homeless – all while doing Latin declensions in one’s head. I could see it so clearly in my mind, but it was not to be. I should have been the one. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to be, and I’m glad between the two of us it was her; nonetheless, she was just another girl with bad parents. I had luck and she had a big mouth. I would never do the things she could have done.

I was thirteen when I met a neighbor by the name of Jolene, a pretty blonde from a rough and tumble family out of place in Larchmont. She invited me over when her parents were having a party, and no one even acknowledged our presence. It was as if we didn’t exist, so we snuck a 40oz. out of the fridge and got drunk in her room listening to The Shangri-Las. We were never really close, but Jolene was a part of who I was. Jolene was the kind of girl you’d buy cigarettes with.

The point is that one of the perks of having dissolute and neglectful parents is that one is essentially left alone. No one checked my homework or made sure I brushed after meals. My parents had no idea what I was reading, which was fabulous because I tore through every sexually explicit book in the library by the time I was 15 years old. People with bad parents are self-created – a wonderful and horrible prospect.

A book I loved was Bonjour, Tristesse, incredibly appealing not only for its frank sexuality, but because the author was the chic and bohemian 19-year-old Françoise Sagan (No. 433). Though I lived nearer the Cote de Coney Island than the Cote d’Azur, I became a spoiled teenage Petit-bourgeoisie, bucking the status quo, perplexing most of my classmates, so many of whom were called Muffy or Dot.
Those were good days. There were bad times, but I was young and there weren’t all these toxins accumulated within me.

Françoise Sagan died on September 24th, I don’t remember the year, but not long ago, and her death caused me more than a pang of grief. She and Jean Seberg were instrumental in creating the character that ultimately became me, and now all my girls are dead or dying. Good morning, heartache.