Play it as it Lays
July 14, 2009
As I was reading this book, I was reminded of The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Didion’s book seems a kind of offspring of these other two books. It is as if West’s narrator tells the story of Rhys’s Sasha as if it were happening in West’s Hollywood not Paris.
Like Midnight, there is never any hope in Play it as it Lays. The tone is one flat line throughout. The isolation is obvious: “To hear her own voice she would sometimes talk to an attendant, ask advice on oil filters.”
The narrator is an unobtrusive close third person narrator who clearly sees the tragedy of Maria’s life. The storytelling is laden with ennui, yet the narrator seems to be presenting the reader with the facts of Maria’s life.
The structure of the novel is cinematic; unlike West, Didion does not rely on detailed narration. Instead, the novel moves from scene to scene. The reader is dropped into one moment of dialogue to another. Occasionally, the connection to film is more heavy handed. The narrator or Maria makes an explicit connection between life-as-lived and life-as-film: “Maria smiled and nodded. It did not require an answer: It was a cue for the actor, who waited a suitable instant then picked it up.”
Structurally, I am fascinated by the way this story gets told. Each chapter drops the reader into a scene that is immediately very visual: “She sat on the rattan chaise in the hot October twilight and watched BZ throw the ice cubes from his drink one by one into the swimming pool.” This sentence amazes me for its pure storytelling power. Every word conveys the listless energy throughout the novel. The sentence opens with she– the narrator doesn’t even bother to re-name the heroine. This implies her character’s weakness, her ability to be secondary to all the other character in all the scenes of the novel. “Rattan chaise” implies luxury, leisure, lounging. “Hot October twilight” is unexpected, uncomfortable. There’s a kind of restlessness with this description
How I opened my classes in September
October 8, 2008
I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.
I believe giving our brain the food it wants, honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all.
I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.
Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities.
I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets. I’m not original in this, but I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.
I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.
Because
I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit. I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.
I believe we are all powerful. Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.”
I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.
I believe we are all poets.
And I believe understanding a poem teaches us how to live.
I believe boredom is a symptom of fear. If we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small. Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small. With our boredom, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.
Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective. Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom. Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.
I believe one’s mind is like a big magnet. We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.
In short: We are what we read.
I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting. I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be.
I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment. And we create more paths by which we can travel.
This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control. You determine the story of your life, because as you are living it, you are telling it.
I believe writing teaches us our mysteries. It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory.
I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story. When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.
I believe writing is a necessary skill, but even more than teaching you how to write, I’d like us to become authors—people who live inside language, who use language to create worlds, and become world enough for themselves.
I believe English class is not important just because a box on a college application says so.
I believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature and art is a privilege everyone deserves.
We humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.
Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives.
I believe life gets better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test scores becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.
I believe in school rules. I believe if you chew gum in class someday someone other than yourself will have to scrape your gum off the bottom of a chair you did not buy or make.
I believe you deserve to cultivate an attention span not broken by the temptation of texting.
I believe food tastes better in the cafeteria.
I believe in taking hats off at the front door.
I believe music is amazing. I believe music is the keeper of memories we’d otherwise lose if they were not connected to a particular song. And I believe songwriters, even the bad ones, are the bards of our time…
So I am thankful for the innovation that has made thousands of songs portable, but I believe in unplugging ourselves from this world so that we don’t feed the beast of our boredom.
I believe, in a perfect world, grades would not exist. But I believe they satisfy the fears of people who are afraid that if left unchecked, nothing would happen in schools.
I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter.
I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?”
I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.
Here’s how I believe that happens: Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes. Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.
I believe journeys are spiritual and intellectual, not just physical. I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.
I believe a group of people can be a sacred space. When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.
And because of those spaces, we will never be the same.
This, I believe.
What else?…Sarah Palin
October 4, 2008
Sometimes in my most solipsistic moments I begin to see national or world events as some divinely provided symbol sent as commentary on life.
And so it happened that as I was going back to work, feeling pangs of motherly guilt, and crying about daycare drop-off in small out-of-the-way places at school, the world send me Sarah Palin.
Could the cultural myth of the Supermom, revised and burnished by the reluctant approval of the religious Right, be any more ironic?
But there she was iconicized in the form of the New York Times website, her biography perfectly dovetailing the profiles of undecided voters. Thrust forward were her credentials as a mom: five kids, mother of a special needs child, hockey mom, army mom. All of this while hunting moose, whistle-blowing, and cheering on her snowmobile-racing husband. Oh, and governing the state of Alaska.
Sarah Palin did not make me feel inferior as a mother. But, the heralding of Sarah Palin as mother underscored the cultural biases that, on some level, impact how I feel about my own parenting. (I wonder, was Hillary Clinton villainized as she was in ‘92 because she’d only had one child? Was her lack of productivity as a mother reason to doubt her ability to advise her husband? Was it reason to fear her stanch feminism?)
With the hullabaloo around SP, I saw the old trap for mothers that I and my mom-friends still feel the pinch of today. SP (with her red high heel sandals, up-do, and carcass of a grizzly slung across her couch) embodies the old perfume commercial whose jingle I can still hear in my head: “I can bring home the bacon…fry it up in a pan…and never let you forget you’re a man…’Cuz I’m a woman…” Ah, yes. Isn’t that what feminism is all about? Elevating the status of a woman by talking about how a woman can do all the things a man an do…and more?
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the history of how women’s bodies have been misunderstood. According to Aristotle I believe, women were incidental (convenient?) receptacles for sperm– the real source of humanity. Indeed, women’s bodies have been as much about what is seen as what is unseen…And perhaps eroticizing women’s bodies is compensation for all that is unseen and misunderstood.
It’s a leap, but Sarah Palin– for all her highlights, beauty contestant photos, and newscaster sheen– is another example of a myth thrust in front of women to tell them what they are. But who needs to have women explained for them, really? Sarah Palin is the latest in a long line of patriarchal fantasies. She is another fantasy of male cultural reproduction…She represents the fantasy of what a patriarchal world wants to believe it can produce. And ironically, this fantasy has been sold to women as the epitome of female power– of female choice!– and of feminism itself.
Of course, it’s not ironic that Sarah Palin is anti-choice. In order to keep the male patriarchal fantasy alive, the fantasy must reproduce. Therefore, women in this fantasy cannot have control over reproduction. Which is another way of saying sex, for a woman, must be about reproduction. Sex, for a man, can be about desire. Again, Sarah Palin embodies both. Sarah Palin is not a notch in the belt of feminism. She is another version of the old mold, slightly revised to co-opt the language of feminists.
And every morning, when I leave my little boy, I am happy to go work and sad not to stay at home with him. The choices are a blessing. But they are not without consequences, a reality the mythological, supermom, “cake and eat it too” example of Sarah Palin will never address.