my life 2008

Diana,

It sounds like a moving story to me. (grin)

I’ve never read Hemingway, at least not to my knowledge. But if this is an example, it feels to me like the way most people seem to think - observing their surroundings and reacting to them, but not really thinking about it. Alcohol plays an important role in that kind of existence. Stumbling through life, trying hard to remain blissfully ignorant. No drive, no ambition, just some vague wishes and hopes.

I get the feeling I wouldn’t like Hemingway. I have a hard enough time caring about people I don’t know. If this is a fair example (and I’ll leave the definition of “fair” to better educated people) then I find no reason why I should care.

Just my gut feelings.

Dave

I’m going to say “you” here in the sense of the narrator of our little piece of writing – not you specifically.

The dead leaves represent the fallen dreams of your life – led up to by the cleaning of the house (a chore that no one enjoys).
The filthy windows represent the alcoholic blur through which you view your life (the clouds representing the events in your life).

The polysendeton in the first line slows down the reader and forces us to focus on the mundane activities that fill your life.

Now, the real trick would be to rewrite the same scene and make it representative of a great life full of meaning and activity (you could leave in the drinking, if it fit). :)

Very nice, Lynne! And I just learned a new word. Thanks! :)

Good start. Now. If I took out the drinking references, it would lose an important Hemingwayesque component. By the same token, nothing representative of a great life full of meaning would even hint at Hemingway, so that’s right out, too.

Let’s play with the objective correlatives, shall we? Very Hemmy.

d

Dave,

Nicely done! You’re dead on with this comment: “But if this is an example, it feels to me like the way most people seem to think - observing their surroundings and reacting to them, but not really thinking about it. Alcohol plays an important role in that kind of existence. Stumbling through life, trying hard to remain blissfully ignorant. No drive, no ambition, just some vague wishes and hopes.”

Hemmy (or should I call him Ernie?) represented the Lost Generation (thanks to Gertie Stein for that label), the people who lived through The Forgotten War and lost their faith in everything and bungled on through life in a blur (and judging from his writing, it was largely an alcoholic blur, at that). I think they’d lost all meaningful wishes and hopes and had thus become unrooted, like dandelion fluff. They no longer had a place they called home. They sought something to bring them meaning and failing at that, sought escape.

Hemingway writing is full of unstated despair, the way I read him. That’s another reason I can’t get excited about it, I suppose.

d

Nice work, Joel!

(They aren’t run-on sentences, by the way. This is a run-on sentence:

“I kicked the dog the dog bit me.”

A “run-on” sentence is two independent clauses which have been separated by nothing. I think what you’re referring to is the use of polysendeton–the word Lynne just taught me–which is grammatically correct.)

I like the way you incorporated the measurement difference, even and pet fur, even. Can the narrator be suicidal if he doesn’t know “how bad things are,” though?

Maybe I’ll take it to my students this morning to see what they make of it….:)

d

Diana,

“Can the narrator be suicidal if he doesn’t know ‘how bad things are,’ though?”

I submit that he can. Drinking oneself to death in apathy or leaping from a bridge in despair - it’s all the same result in the end. The only difference is how much ambition the victim has.

I heard a speaker once dispute the notion that suicides hate themselves. If a person truly hated himself, he’d insist that he be made to suffer for as long as possible. At the time I thought that nobody would do that, but as I get older and find more reasons for despair I also recognize people who are doing just that - making themselves suffer.

Dave

Ah. Passive versus active suicide. Gotcha. Point well made. :)

So I made good on my threat, see. I took the piece to my students to see what they made of it. I placed a brief explanation of objective correlative and symbolism at the beginning, then asked them to get into groups and discuss what was going on, how the narrator feels, etc for about 10 minutes.

The result? They made believers of me. They could note and defend contextually the apathy, the despondency, the loneliness, the numbness. They pointed out that the narrator shows no emotion, even in the argument. One noticed that the narrator seemed nostalgic and a bit overwhelmed. The person was upset; his life was in disarray. There was more, but–as I’ve trained them well–they all gave specific bits of the text to back up their judgments.

After this brief exercise, I confessed what had given rise to it, and that the piece was about two hours of my life on Saturday. Kermit is building a deck; I’m cleaning out the old place and I don’t want to do it. Their judgments about how I feel right now were quite accurate, even though I never said exactly how I felt. We talked about how our moods, attitudes, and what’s important to us determine how we remember events and details. I didn’t write this intending to denote anything. I simply wrote what I remembered, Hemingway-style.

And it worked.

So we looked at a random paragraph in the book we’re reading which is seemingly meaningless, dove in, and decided what it told us about the narrator, and why Hemingway included it.

It was a most excellent class.

d

Diana, you did a good impersonation of Hemingway. I’ve read several of his books, and you hit him on the nose. (I, unlike most people, actually enjoyed him! Maybe that’s because my mind sometimes seems to follow those same types of patterns; I don’t know.)

Anyway, sounds as if you have done a good job not only emulating Hemingway, but in getting your students involved in learning and reading for meaning. I salute you!

Am I the only one who wasn’t completely fooled? I’ve never had any inclination to even pick up a Hemmingway book, that I can remember, so my vision wasn’t blurred by that. It just seemed as I read that it had to be something you had written as an experiment, or some such. Only thing is, I was bored, so i don’t think I couuld or would enjoy hemmingway. No, I’m not so smart that I can see through this. Just familiar enough with you and your writing, I suppose.