Response to NYT Magazine Essay: 02/05/12
For the past six years, I’ve been delighted and entertained by essays in the Sunday NYT Magazine, which I’ve consistently found to be compelling. These essays have long been my go-to for thoughtful, pithy writing, but I was frustrated by the lack of substance and purpose in Nancy Rommelmann’s “Dazed and Confused: How skipping school in late – ’70s New York became a lesson in the costs of dropping out” [link].
I expected to hear insight about life in the ’70s and some subsequent redemption, but there was none of it. As a teacher and writer of nonfiction, I expected to find moments of reflection or perhaps some kind of unequivocal “lesson” precipitated by the subtitle of this essay. What I found was an essay that read like a lost diary entry from a character in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985).
I became upset at this insular narrative and I thought I was overreacting. There are moments like the inconsequential concern, self-described as “Mother Conscience,” toward gay bashing that didn’t really serve any purpose other than to distract the reader from the apathetic and hackneyed depiction of Chico, the “wiry Puerto Rican kid.” Or Rommelmann’s escape from life in a public school full of “kids who have no options, kids with criminal records, kids with babies” that only serve as a reminder of her privileged life. Aside from the obvious distinction, she was “less freaky than the other kids,” of course, her classmate’s confession to her must have been “because I’m a girl or because I’m white.” The essay ends with the speaker asking her “parents if [she] can go back to [her] old school,” and with a phone call, “it’s done.” The speaker’s 1970s world is populated by marginalized Puerto Ricans and gays, but what of that?
Is the subjectivity of a white, upper middle-class, woman really worth a reader’s time when juxtaposed with the brief, yet unexplored element of her classmate “Chico in custody”? Or are readers today simply exhausted of hearing about the underachiever who ends up in jail or winds up dead? Has it become too predictable?
I’ll admit that I thought I was allowing my personal experience as a Latino who grew up in a poverty stricken neighborhood to influence my objectivity as a reader. But I’ve also learned about the craft and implications of a story. There are some major concerns in this essay that remain unexplored. Treating issues of culture and class in a parochial manner is irresponsible.
It’s clear from comments by online readers of this essay that my reaction was more common and less original than I’d first imagined:
“Ho hum another memoir of misspent youth. There seems to be an endless supply of them. It’s too bad the kids who walked the straight and narrow back in the day don’t get ink. I also wore halter tops, too short cut-offs and smoked Newports. But I also worked, studied, paid my way through college and had some (legal) fun along the way. Anyway —where were her parents when they weren’t do [sic] her biding?”
“Rich kid spends childhood in a nice neighborhood slumming with the bad kids and getting high. Rich kid gets in trouble with poorer stoners. Daddy gets rich kid out while everyone else rots in jail. Yawn.”
“Like other readers, I’m mystified by the point of the article. It’s honest, sort of, on the surface, but (at least in this excerpt) it comes across as shallow and self-absorbed because not only is there no attempt to get to the core issue that drove the author to her self-destructive circumstances, but it also does not seem to be aware that there are other categories besides ‘super privileged, messed up, smart, non-violent and white’ and ‘poor, messed up, not so smart, violent and non-white.’”
“This was something not available to many of the assorted characters who colored our world of privileged adventure. So in looking back on it all, as you have here, I can only arrive at one singular, unpleasant and undeniable common factor that riddles the literary landscape in which reflections such as ours dwell. You have to have money to think this way in the first place. “
I think I’m most upset that there seems to be an equivocation between being a drop out and being a killer. Does this essay attempt to equate to its reader that drop outs are homicidal killers or in some way irredeemable? What about the economic implications of the 1970s in America, especially on the Puerto Rican community of New York? I think this essayist is taking pleasure in presenting an incomplete picture. I understand that the truth in nonfiction writing may be subjective, but in a recent discussion with my students about truth, we heard from writer, Rebecca K. O’Connor, and I have to agree with her statement, “When you begin to gather stories, you start realizing that what happened is not nearly as important as the truth.”
I grew up with people like Chico, and while many of my former classmates ended up dropping out, there was hardly a pattern or even a likelihood that they were going to commit homicide. I understand that some neighborhoods are worse off than others, but what about the white, middle-class kids in jail for similar or less heinous crimes. Ultimately, this essay lacked balance and enough reflection to warrant its publication.
February 9, 2012 Leave a comment
Anticipated Books, 2011 – 2012
Over the last several years in preparation for the completion of my M.F.A. & Ph.D. degrees I’ve read a large number of books (at least 100 last year alone). The following list includes new and recent titles of poetry (P), nonfiction (N), and fiction (F) that I anticipate reading this year.
2011
Mule (2011), Shane McCrae (P)
November (2011), Sean O’Brien (P)
Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (2011), David Trinidad (P)
[sic]: A Memoir (2011), Joshua Cody (N)
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), Stephen Greenblatt (N)
Before the Revolution (2011), Daniel K. Richter (N)
The Sense of an Ending (2011), Julian Barnes (F)
Ayiti (2011), Roxane Gay (F)
We the Animals (2011), Justin Torres (F)
2012
Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (2012), Christian Wiman and Osip Mandelstam (P)
Secure the Shadow (2012), Claudia Emerson (P)
Maybe the Saddest Thing (2012), Marcus Wicker (P)
Mortality (2012), Christopher Hitchens (N)
You & Me (2012), Padgett Powell (F)
January 7, 2012 Leave a comment
Spring 2012 – Nonfiction Course Reading List
I’ll be teaching an introductory nonfiction reading course at Texas Tech this spring. Follow us @ttunonfiction. Here’s what we’ll be reading & discussing:
Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite),
Michel Foucault (Author), Richard McDougall (Translator).
The Confessions of St. Augustine: Unabridged,
St. Augustine (Author), Edward Bouverie Pusey (Translator).
Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World,
Catalina De Erauso (Author).
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,
Erik Larson (Author).
Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays,
Eula Biss (Author).
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction,
Lex Williford (Author, Editor), Michael Martone (Author, Editor).
November 28, 2011 Leave a comment