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September 05, 2005
insight in strange places
OK, a quick confession: I'm reading a book,Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Just a small defense: only reading it in bed at night, when I would be worthless to read anything for exams.
So, I'm reading this book, which I picked up at our library because I liked the cover and because Wally Lamb wrote a glowing blurb for the back cover, and it catalogues a midwestern girl's 4 years through an elite prep school in New England. It has been OK. I'm still reading, anyway. I'm not getting as much gritty social commentary as I am kind of liking the characters and etc.
But the real reason I'm blogging this book is the nearly obvious insight it offered me (why hadn't I really thought of this before, smack-yourself-on-the-forehead kind of duh) in this scene:
The protagonist sits in English class, and the popular rich girls pass her a rubric for her to rate the teacher's dress, makeup, and shoes.
I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes there were things I didn't like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn't Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment. (147)
I think Lee (protagonist) feels trapped in other ways; for instance, she feels required to contribute to the rubric in order to be accepted. But this is a theme of the book: the tension between shaping one's identity to fit in and preserving oneself at the cost of being in with the community. For Lee to NOT write in the rubric would have been just as damning as if she were to write in it and were to get caught.
It's this kind of choice, the choice between the person and the people, that writers make. Delicately. Writers write because it's in them to do so. But so much of what is in us is hurtfully honest, or jarring, or scary, or something that people might not want to look at. A thin line. A kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't.
Gah. I could go on, I suppose, about the implications between the spoken and written word (just from this quote). Like, the spoken word is "deniable," and somehow more prone to things like deceit, while the written word, though "incriminating," is unflinching, concrete, static, and therefore closer to truth. A reach, I know.
Right. Whatever, I'll stop my Lit 101 essay now. But the cool thing, then, is that blogs are both written and not-written. It can exist and then disappear. It can grow and change. ?
Here's where, while writing that Lit 101 essay, I'd get up and get some Doritos, 'cause now I'm not sure what I'm saying anymore.
Posted by mryonker at September 5, 2005 11:51 PM
Comments
Good stuff, M. I think you're right, and I think it extends all the way to authorship and power. Could be that it's part of the rift we feel when trying to explain the provisional, experimental, iterative and and informal qualities of networked writing/blogging to folks who "don't get it" (I.Tribbel's or whoever else). Should we be cautionary? I'd go along with that (thinking about your entry from yesterday, too). But should we write as if the vultures are waiting to swoop down as soon as we click "publish," maybe not. To do so would be to concede something valuable--potentially powerful. And of course the immediate circulation makes some folks uneasy (i.e. the school administrators who forbid blogging because it confronts them with all of school's underlife, leaks the autoethnographies of adolescent activity beyond the school walls...yikes!). That it's discoverable is what gives rise to all of the firings and repurcussion; so maybe one question is about the ways in which the weblog formalizes/materializes the previously "kept-to-oneself" episodes of critique.
Posted by: Derek at September 6, 2005 09:51 AM
can i bring these threads together, the high-school belonging/rebellion clash of urges & the to-tell-or-not-to-tell authorial public-defining blogger questions? b/c i'm having flashbacks to _pump up the volume_ & christian slater (in his slick night-time persona of happy harry hard-on) slithering across the radio telling all the being-duped suburban teens in town how the truth was a virus that just needed to be spread around...
there's a lot to lose by saying too much. there's a lot of "think about what you're saying, & to whom, & why HERE" that needs to go on, certainly. i didn't learn my lesson well enough last year. but there's also the possibility derek brings up, that there's a lot of good might come of of those critiques & concerns BEING voiced somewhere where they'll be spread around. we found out more about NO, & faster, from bloggers than we found out from the media. incidental but also illustrative--the virus-function can be productive as well as endangering.
Posted by: tyratae at September 6, 2005 02:27 PM
You were not, by any chance, reading this on the Metro North train from New Haven going to Grand Central yesterday (Sunday), the train that arrived at about 12:12? Someone was reading it near me!
Posted by: Nels at September 6, 2005 07:33 PM
No, Nels, it wasn't me. Too funny! I almost wish it had been. Sounds so cosmo to be on a train from CT to NYC. Nope. This book *does not* leave my nightstand. :)
Posted by: madeline at September 6, 2005 08:52 PM
I read it too.
Posted by: Academic Coach at September 7, 2005 10:45 PM
coach: what did you think?
Posted by: madeline at September 7, 2005 10:52 PM