This week, I focused on the “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” reading. I don’t want to say I liked it because I really do not enjoy hearing about the trauma that Black people endure in this country, but it did resonate with me. When George Floyd was murdered, my little brother was about a year old. I was scared because I knew that one day he would learn what it is to be a Black man in this country. I wasn’t just scared, I was angry. Black people do not have to prove their excellence in order to deserve to live. The reading touches on how the main character’s mother teaches him that the “antidote to being born a Black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times.” I think this is a really important point. It is never the responsibility of the oppressed to appease their oppressor. Black people often have to police themselves and hold themselves to a standard higher than others simply as a mechanism for survival. This is not a quality life to live nor a safe one. The reading talks about just how much damage one person can do to another. I think this is an important point to revisit. I recently watched a movie about WW2 and this was something I kept thinking about as one of the characters told a new soldier to watch what one man could do to another. This hurts all people, not just those that are oppressed.
I am intrigued by the piece “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard. I find the specific times the author chooses when to say names and when to not very beautiful. As we touched on in class the author never names her dogs specifically, she will name Chris’ dogs but never her own. She reserves the mention of specific names for people, except for her husband. I think this is done to get the story’s real meaning across because as much as it is about dogs, it is not ABOUT dogs. By doing this, the writer creates a story about the lives affected by these deaths and gives more power and personability to the people she lost. I think as a writer this can teach me the power of leaving out information as well as how much what I do and do not decide to include can really affect the way in which a story is perceived.
I really liked the essay “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Other in America” by Kiese Laymon. The first thing that struck me about the piece overall is it’s conversational tone — it sounds like he is telling you a story straight from his memories. However, I also noticed that although the tone is overall fairly informal, he actually employs a lot of different, very intentional stylistic choices that work to convey the complexity of the writing. One specific instance of this was on the second page when he says “…here comes the red, white and blue of the siren” when talking about a police car, which is an allusion to the colors of the American flag, and (I think) speaks to the extent to which the police system is deeply embedded in American society. He also uses punctuation in various ways in the essay, sometimes purposefully excluding it for nearly a whole paragraph, or sometimes using it much more frequently, which changes the pace of the essay. He is also very clever in his word choice, sometimes choosing to convey feelings through more abstract phrases (‘I’m a waste of writing’s time”) or sometimes being more outright in expressing feelings he is going through (“…I’m so sad…”). Overall, I think this was a very powerful piece, and I appreciated witnessing the author’s unique writing style.
“Eat, Memory” by David Wong Louie
When reading this story it reminded me of all the blessings I have in my life. The simple pleasures of existing can get stripped from you uncontrollably, and in this case, it was due to cancer. It was also eye-opening to read about how illness can change the relationships people have with their partners and the things they can do. This story touches on the social anxieties of struggling with an illness and how to learn how to live a new life. I think the examples of the things that the protagonist had lost reminded me of how much we don’t think about the abilities we have till they are gone. It comes down to things as simple as breathing once without thought but now it becomes the forefront of one’s mind or how there are people that will never share a meal with family in the same way again.
In the “Eat, Memory” essay by David Wong Louie immerses the reader throught succint language in what it feels to lose such an essential experience to human life. One of the ways that he does this is at the beginning of the essay as he narrates his last meal. He uses language “chasing the bolus like aspirin” that forces the reader to imagine the sensation as laborous and painful. When i was reading this I could imagine accidently swalling a pill without water and cringe at the pain. As his cancer progresses eating becomes a distant thing. He uses cutting phrases that show how much he valued the experience such as “Swallowing was king” and “Chewing was glorious”. Later at the end of the essay this passion is gone. Him identifying with the dog’s insatiable but empty need to fullfil himself put the readers in his mindset and feel in his loss
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance by Kiese Laymon
Throughout this essay, Laymon uses the deaths of other young Black folks as a way to mark time and remind the reader of what truly matters. Perhaps it serves as a reminder for himself too. This intrigues me as a writer because it creates a pattern that must be maintained. When it is broken it is at the end of the essay when Laymon is discussing his “late twenties and thirties.” Thus suggesting that the point of the pattern was to draw attention to the youth of the victims. It also supposes that Laymon himself has broken free of the fear of a “slow death” which strengthens his final two pages of writing on the matter. To not only name the names of the individuals but also provide a brief synopsis of their deaths adds depth to their mention throughout the essay. It acts as a documentation of sorts to track the ongoing social and political issues around race and gun violence. Which in the end adds to Laymon’s argument and reinforces the trauma that lingers in the mind and body following these deaths.
“I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.”
I’ve heard the word “quotability” as a prerequisite for good writing, and while I agree that something worth reading is oftentimes something worth quoting, there’s something to be said about the value of writing that doesn’t lend itself to separation from its context. What shines about “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance” is the straightforward prose, begun from the very first line (a hook if I’ve ever read one), and doesn’t let up until the very last sentence. The piece needs you to consider all of it, that’s why it’s a remembrance. What I’ve gleaned from this, is the value of the whole. I’m a purple prose lover, and getting lost in the contour of description is nothing new to me. But this piece is asking for an audience to consider its very existence. Which is a purpose that Laymon is careful not to let get lost in itself.
Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.
Exactly, he says.
Beard is successful in the way she jumps back and forth in time. This piece is a brilliant example of that. On page 9, Beard alludes that Bob is dead without giving any information as to why or what happened. She goes 3 more pages until she describes the event that caused Bob and several others to loose their lives. This whole piece feels like an illustration of grief. The details spent on her day-to-day, the squirrels, the voice messages, they feel like distractions from the pain. I especially like the ending because it feels somewhere in between an imaginary conversation and a memory she referred to earlier in the story. And this feels like a stage of grief and processing loss, the way your brain goes back to something, that you can be suspended in a moment, keeping it alive, until you come back to reality just like the fly, suspended in Amber.
“Eat, Memory” by David Wong Louie featured several moments that stood out to me in which expectations and hopes were created through the way in which he ordered and framed his writing that were then not met. This pattern begins as early as the first paragraph in which he concludes by describing in rich detail the delicacy of his wife’s lamb burger and claims: “I made a mental note that I wanted one of those, once I was cured.” Despite having been told as early as the first sentence that he had not eaten real food in years this line plants a seed of hope in a reader’s mind that he will, in fact, be cured one day up. Even though we already know the ending, we forget it and cling to a hope born of expectation, an expectation David Wong Louie himself might have had at the time. Later in the essay David Wong Louie details the medical test in which he would build up to eating a cookie, describing that “After swallowing the barium, I would graduate through a mise en scene of green water, applesauce, and cookies, set up on a tray nearby. I shook my head…I didn’t stand a chance against those Lorna Doones.” The wording of this line implies that while he may not succeed in eating the cookies, the final layer of the challenge, he was at least hopeful and expectant that he would succeed in consuming the water and applesauce. These hopes are dashed immediately, when the next line begins bluntly with “I never even got to the water.” The next example of expectations being created then dashed comes when David Wong Louie and us as readers are told “Putting a G-tube in, he said, was as easy as taking one out” immediately followed by a description of failure. A last shot at hope comes when we’re told that David Wong Louie had to choose between speaking and swallowing, after which he describes, “I can’t talk; I can’t whistle, moan, sigh”, suggesting that through the sacrifice of his speech hope finally paid off and he could swallow and eat once more. Once again, this expectation and hope was crushed shortly after with the simple, blunt mention of “I can’t eat either.” This repeated creation of expectations and planting of seeds of hope that ultimately bear no fruit lead me to have a greater emotional connection and impact with David Wong Louie’s story. Despite the repeated amount of times hopes are crushed I still expected things to turn out differently each time, only to be met with the same frustration and anguish. This writing choice allowed me to better understand and connect with the tumultuous journey that is David Wong Louie’s health.
The detail in David Wong Louie’s “Eat, Memory” struck me throughout the essay. Immediately off the bat, the narrator’s commentary on the faults of the sandwich and the bun not only describes the food but also draws the reader directly into Louie’s mindset about the food more efficiently than listing attributes would have. Impressively, this continues over the course of the essay: Louie uses detail to go beyond pulling the reader into the scene, instead pulling the reader into the narrator’s mindset. A second example of this is the note that “Each feeding lasted an episode and a half of Downton Abbey.” Instead of giving us a quantitative measurement in hours and minutes of how long it took to feed Louie, we get a sense of what he and his wife did while feeding the tube and how they tried to distract from the task. Louie’s specific and effective use of detail overwhelms the reader with the day-to-day gravities of his treatment battle.
I really admire Jo Ann Beard’s storytelling techniques in “The Fourth State of Matter.” The way she manipulates time, space, and perspective makes the piece almost surreal, but the resulting product is extremely true to a real person’s complicated sense of history and memory. The way the speaker steps into the perspective of others (narrating for Gang Lu: “Clint Eastwood, only smarter” and projecting onto the collie: “we’re breaking each other’s heart”) conveys real information about the subjects while also embedding Jo Ann’s lens. The way she alters the reader’s experience of chronological events to be nonlinear (“he’s going to kill himself” coming far before it actually happens, and ending with Chris’ dialogue in the present after he has died) also dives into the speaker’s fragmented yet hyper-connected recollection of these traumatic events as she narrates them. The way she attaches this state of disconnect to plasmapause is so poetic.
I felt extremely struck by the way Beard uses the impersonal voice in this essay. Since she is talking about multiple things that are happening to her, but are not about her, this choice advances the storytelling by placing us in that same space of numb impersonality. When she introduces, out of nowhere, Gang Lu’s suicide note, it is situated between her drawing of her dog, which first has X’s for eyes and then she replaces this symbol with actual eyes. Giving us this moment on “the last day of the first part of [her] life” summarizes her denial and her hope for things to get better, a common thread throughout the essay with her husband, her dog, and then Chris. This last moment, and the reassurance from Chris, carries much more emotional weight than simply stating how she feels about that day. When she continues to describe the shooting and the day that follows, her numbness grows and worsens. This reality creates a much more emotional and realistic depiction of this story.
At first, “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard confused me. I didn’t understand the storyline or why the dogs and the husband were not named. I got lost when I read of squirrels living among piles of cardboard boxes in an upstairs bedroom. However, I grew to embrace the style of writing. From the midnight moments with her dogs to feeling out of place in a room full of physicists, I became immersed in every aspect of Jo Ann’s story. When the character of Bob was first introduced, I met a mid-60s man, perhaps nearing his retirement, smoking a pipe that smelled atrocious. The following scene really caught my attention as an example of foreshadowing: “Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris, while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs.” My initial thought, after reading this, was that Bob would meet an unfortunate demise, but I didn’t anticipate the way in which this would happen. Without revealing too much detail, Beard introduced subtle hints to how the story would end. The plot twist that slowly emerged halfway through was completely unexpected and masterfully incorporated in this story. From the sensory details to the author’s stylistic choices, I thought this was a wonderfully crafted reading.
This week, I focused on the “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” reading. I don’t want to say I liked it because I really do not enjoy hearing about the trauma that Black people endure in this country, but it did resonate with me. When George Floyd was murdered, my little brother was about a year old. I was scared because I knew that one day he would learn what it is to be a Black man in this country. I wasn’t just scared, I was angry. Black people do not have to prove their excellence in order to deserve to live. The reading touches on how the main character’s mother teaches him that the “antidote to being born a Black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times.” I think this is a really important point. It is never the responsibility of the oppressed to appease their oppressor. Black people often have to police themselves and hold themselves to a standard higher than others simply as a mechanism for survival. This is not a quality life to live nor a safe one. The reading talks about just how much damage one person can do to another. I think this is an important point to revisit. I recently watched a movie about WW2 and this was something I kept thinking about as one of the characters told a new soldier to watch what one man could do to another. This hurts all people, not just those that are oppressed.
I am intrigued by the piece “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard. I find the specific times the author chooses when to say names and when to not very beautiful. As we touched on in class the author never names her dogs specifically, she will name Chris’ dogs but never her own. She reserves the mention of specific names for people, except for her husband. I think this is done to get the story’s real meaning across because as much as it is about dogs, it is not ABOUT dogs. By doing this, the writer creates a story about the lives affected by these deaths and gives more power and personability to the people she lost. I think as a writer this can teach me the power of leaving out information as well as how much what I do and do not decide to include can really affect the way in which a story is perceived.
I really liked the essay “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Other in America” by Kiese Laymon. The first thing that struck me about the piece overall is it’s conversational tone — it sounds like he is telling you a story straight from his memories. However, I also noticed that although the tone is overall fairly informal, he actually employs a lot of different, very intentional stylistic choices that work to convey the complexity of the writing. One specific instance of this was on the second page when he says “…here comes the red, white and blue of the siren” when talking about a police car, which is an allusion to the colors of the American flag, and (I think) speaks to the extent to which the police system is deeply embedded in American society. He also uses punctuation in various ways in the essay, sometimes purposefully excluding it for nearly a whole paragraph, or sometimes using it much more frequently, which changes the pace of the essay. He is also very clever in his word choice, sometimes choosing to convey feelings through more abstract phrases (‘I’m a waste of writing’s time”) or sometimes being more outright in expressing feelings he is going through (“…I’m so sad…”). Overall, I think this was a very powerful piece, and I appreciated witnessing the author’s unique writing style.
“Eat, Memory” by David Wong Louie
When reading this story it reminded me of all the blessings I have in my life. The simple pleasures of existing can get stripped from you uncontrollably, and in this case, it was due to cancer. It was also eye-opening to read about how illness can change the relationships people have with their partners and the things they can do. This story touches on the social anxieties of struggling with an illness and how to learn how to live a new life. I think the examples of the things that the protagonist had lost reminded me of how much we don’t think about the abilities we have till they are gone. It comes down to things as simple as breathing once without thought but now it becomes the forefront of one’s mind or how there are people that will never share a meal with family in the same way again.
In the “Eat, Memory” essay by David Wong Louie immerses the reader throught succint language in what it feels to lose such an essential experience to human life. One of the ways that he does this is at the beginning of the essay as he narrates his last meal. He uses language “chasing the bolus like aspirin” that forces the reader to imagine the sensation as laborous and painful. When i was reading this I could imagine accidently swalling a pill without water and cringe at the pain. As his cancer progresses eating becomes a distant thing. He uses cutting phrases that show how much he valued the experience such as “Swallowing was king” and “Chewing was glorious”. Later at the end of the essay this passion is gone. Him identifying with the dog’s insatiable but empty need to fullfil himself put the readers in his mindset and feel in his loss
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance by Kiese Laymon
Throughout this essay, Laymon uses the deaths of other young Black folks as a way to mark time and remind the reader of what truly matters. Perhaps it serves as a reminder for himself too. This intrigues me as a writer because it creates a pattern that must be maintained. When it is broken it is at the end of the essay when Laymon is discussing his “late twenties and thirties.” Thus suggesting that the point of the pattern was to draw attention to the youth of the victims. It also supposes that Laymon himself has broken free of the fear of a “slow death” which strengthens his final two pages of writing on the matter. To not only name the names of the individuals but also provide a brief synopsis of their deaths adds depth to their mention throughout the essay. It acts as a documentation of sorts to track the ongoing social and political issues around race and gun violence. Which in the end adds to Laymon’s argument and reinforces the trauma that lingers in the mind and body following these deaths.
“I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.”
I’ve heard the word “quotability” as a prerequisite for good writing, and while I agree that something worth reading is oftentimes something worth quoting, there’s something to be said about the value of writing that doesn’t lend itself to separation from its context. What shines about “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance” is the straightforward prose, begun from the very first line (a hook if I’ve ever read one), and doesn’t let up until the very last sentence. The piece needs you to consider all of it, that’s why it’s a remembrance. What I’ve gleaned from this, is the value of the whole. I’m a purple prose lover, and getting lost in the contour of description is nothing new to me. But this piece is asking for an audience to consider its very existence. Which is a purpose that Laymon is careful not to let get lost in itself.
Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.
Exactly, he says.
Beard is successful in the way she jumps back and forth in time. This piece is a brilliant example of that. On page 9, Beard alludes that Bob is dead without giving any information as to why or what happened. She goes 3 more pages until she describes the event that caused Bob and several others to loose their lives. This whole piece feels like an illustration of grief. The details spent on her day-to-day, the squirrels, the voice messages, they feel like distractions from the pain. I especially like the ending because it feels somewhere in between an imaginary conversation and a memory she referred to earlier in the story. And this feels like a stage of grief and processing loss, the way your brain goes back to something, that you can be suspended in a moment, keeping it alive, until you come back to reality just like the fly, suspended in Amber.
“Eat, Memory” by David Wong Louie featured several moments that stood out to me in which expectations and hopes were created through the way in which he ordered and framed his writing that were then not met. This pattern begins as early as the first paragraph in which he concludes by describing in rich detail the delicacy of his wife’s lamb burger and claims: “I made a mental note that I wanted one of those, once I was cured.” Despite having been told as early as the first sentence that he had not eaten real food in years this line plants a seed of hope in a reader’s mind that he will, in fact, be cured one day up. Even though we already know the ending, we forget it and cling to a hope born of expectation, an expectation David Wong Louie himself might have had at the time. Later in the essay David Wong Louie details the medical test in which he would build up to eating a cookie, describing that “After swallowing the barium, I would graduate through a mise en scene of green water, applesauce, and cookies, set up on a tray nearby. I shook my head…I didn’t stand a chance against those Lorna Doones.” The wording of this line implies that while he may not succeed in eating the cookies, the final layer of the challenge, he was at least hopeful and expectant that he would succeed in consuming the water and applesauce. These hopes are dashed immediately, when the next line begins bluntly with “I never even got to the water.” The next example of expectations being created then dashed comes when David Wong Louie and us as readers are told “Putting a G-tube in, he said, was as easy as taking one out” immediately followed by a description of failure. A last shot at hope comes when we’re told that David Wong Louie had to choose between speaking and swallowing, after which he describes, “I can’t talk; I can’t whistle, moan, sigh”, suggesting that through the sacrifice of his speech hope finally paid off and he could swallow and eat once more. Once again, this expectation and hope was crushed shortly after with the simple, blunt mention of “I can’t eat either.” This repeated creation of expectations and planting of seeds of hope that ultimately bear no fruit lead me to have a greater emotional connection and impact with David Wong Louie’s story. Despite the repeated amount of times hopes are crushed I still expected things to turn out differently each time, only to be met with the same frustration and anguish. This writing choice allowed me to better understand and connect with the tumultuous journey that is David Wong Louie’s health.
The detail in David Wong Louie’s “Eat, Memory” struck me throughout the essay. Immediately off the bat, the narrator’s commentary on the faults of the sandwich and the bun not only describes the food but also draws the reader directly into Louie’s mindset about the food more efficiently than listing attributes would have. Impressively, this continues over the course of the essay: Louie uses detail to go beyond pulling the reader into the scene, instead pulling the reader into the narrator’s mindset. A second example of this is the note that “Each feeding lasted an episode and a half of Downton Abbey.” Instead of giving us a quantitative measurement in hours and minutes of how long it took to feed Louie, we get a sense of what he and his wife did while feeding the tube and how they tried to distract from the task. Louie’s specific and effective use of detail overwhelms the reader with the day-to-day gravities of his treatment battle.
I really admire Jo Ann Beard’s storytelling techniques in “The Fourth State of Matter.” The way she manipulates time, space, and perspective makes the piece almost surreal, but the resulting product is extremely true to a real person’s complicated sense of history and memory. The way the speaker steps into the perspective of others (narrating for Gang Lu: “Clint Eastwood, only smarter” and projecting onto the collie: “we’re breaking each other’s heart”) conveys real information about the subjects while also embedding Jo Ann’s lens. The way she alters the reader’s experience of chronological events to be nonlinear (“he’s going to kill himself” coming far before it actually happens, and ending with Chris’ dialogue in the present after he has died) also dives into the speaker’s fragmented yet hyper-connected recollection of these traumatic events as she narrates them. The way she attaches this state of disconnect to plasmapause is so poetic.
I felt extremely struck by the way Beard uses the impersonal voice in this essay. Since she is talking about multiple things that are happening to her, but are not about her, this choice advances the storytelling by placing us in that same space of numb impersonality. When she introduces, out of nowhere, Gang Lu’s suicide note, it is situated between her drawing of her dog, which first has X’s for eyes and then she replaces this symbol with actual eyes. Giving us this moment on “the last day of the first part of [her] life” summarizes her denial and her hope for things to get better, a common thread throughout the essay with her husband, her dog, and then Chris. This last moment, and the reassurance from Chris, carries much more emotional weight than simply stating how she feels about that day. When she continues to describe the shooting and the day that follows, her numbness grows and worsens. This reality creates a much more emotional and realistic depiction of this story.
At first, “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard confused me. I didn’t understand the storyline or why the dogs and the husband were not named. I got lost when I read of squirrels living among piles of cardboard boxes in an upstairs bedroom. However, I grew to embrace the style of writing. From the midnight moments with her dogs to feeling out of place in a room full of physicists, I became immersed in every aspect of Jo Ann’s story. When the character of Bob was first introduced, I met a mid-60s man, perhaps nearing his retirement, smoking a pipe that smelled atrocious. The following scene really caught my attention as an example of foreshadowing: “Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris, while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs.” My initial thought, after reading this, was that Bob would meet an unfortunate demise, but I didn’t anticipate the way in which this would happen. Without revealing too much detail, Beard introduced subtle hints to how the story would end. The plot twist that slowly emerged halfway through was completely unexpected and masterfully incorporated in this story. From the sensory details to the author’s stylistic choices, I thought this was a wonderfully crafted reading.