Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Sunday, May 5, 2013
sonnet 146
Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Enthrall'd to these rebel pow'rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
ruby tuesday, 18:44 (on genre)
i'm going back to titling my posts by the song playing when i write them.
I've always considered myself above memoirs, as a writer.
This is probably worth consideration, as I've only recently come to consider myself a Writer, but have, for as long as I can remember, considered myself above Memoirs.
All the great Writers we talk about when we talk about great Writing - not even just Literature, just Writing Well - are all men who wrote fiction. Make a list in your head of the greats, limit it to American greats for convenience - Hemingway, Melville, Faulkner, Cheever, D.F. Wallace - they're all writers of fiction.
So I have always read, and aspired to Write, fiction. I still do.
But I've been told by Readers I trust to read various memoirs because "you have a similar voice," and all of these memoirs were written by women. Well-written - incredibly-written - written on the level inhabited by all the men I just listed.
Maybe women are destined to shine in this much-belittled genre.
Maybe that's why it's much-belittled, often openly mocked.
In my family, the women weren't always the Story-tellers, but they were the Story-keepers. Sure, Papa was alway quickest to steer a conversation off it's tracks toward his recollections of his own lived history, but as soon as a misremembered name spilled from his lips Nana clicked onto his conversation - abandoning her own conversations or tasks or, later, silent and nearly comatose state - to correct him. He told his versions of their stories only when he could recount them to her standards. She was the real Keeper of our family's history; she just knew he liked to perform them. Without her, when she abandoned him to life without her, after 65 years of tying her life to his, he kept telling his stories. He performed them as dramatically as he ever did, but I noticed the little changes he made to the names in years. Stories about Rodney suddenly featured Robert, and they happen in 19941 instead of 1943. The facts that Nana used to anchor his stories to reality while they pulled him toward fantastic history slipped away.
I listened to it happen in his stories, and I'm looking now at reading lists for college fiction classes and seeing only male names, and I wonder if maybe I aspire to the wrong genre.
We minimize the memoir culturally because we minimize the work of women, and maybe women excel in this genre for a reason. Women invest themselves, their identities, with the truth of their experiences, the truths we've learned and witnessed, and we want to see those truths passed on that someone else may benefit from our education. We want to see the rugrat next generation whose very existence we modern feminists cannot fathom benefit from the trials we've endured.
So, like Nana, we leave the fantastical weaving of Great Fiction and History, those fabricated versions of truth, to men, and we quietly tell the truth in our small way. We adjust their details to Truth when we can adjust their telling of the past, because we carry the Truth in us, and thus excel in that ever-maligned genre, the memoir. The genre of reality as we know it. Memoir: from the fifteenth-century french/anglo-saxon, meaning "a story written, but kept in the mind."
I've always considered myself above memoirs, as a writer.
This is probably worth consideration, as I've only recently come to consider myself a Writer, but have, for as long as I can remember, considered myself above Memoirs.
All the great Writers we talk about when we talk about great Writing - not even just Literature, just Writing Well - are all men who wrote fiction. Make a list in your head of the greats, limit it to American greats for convenience - Hemingway, Melville, Faulkner, Cheever, D.F. Wallace - they're all writers of fiction.
So I have always read, and aspired to Write, fiction. I still do.
But I've been told by Readers I trust to read various memoirs because "you have a similar voice," and all of these memoirs were written by women. Well-written - incredibly-written - written on the level inhabited by all the men I just listed.
Maybe women are destined to shine in this much-belittled genre.
Maybe that's why it's much-belittled, often openly mocked.
In my family, the women weren't always the Story-tellers, but they were the Story-keepers. Sure, Papa was alway quickest to steer a conversation off it's tracks toward his recollections of his own lived history, but as soon as a misremembered name spilled from his lips Nana clicked onto his conversation - abandoning her own conversations or tasks or, later, silent and nearly comatose state - to correct him. He told his versions of their stories only when he could recount them to her standards. She was the real Keeper of our family's history; she just knew he liked to perform them. Without her, when she abandoned him to life without her, after 65 years of tying her life to his, he kept telling his stories. He performed them as dramatically as he ever did, but I noticed the little changes he made to the names in years. Stories about Rodney suddenly featured Robert, and they happen in 19941 instead of 1943. The facts that Nana used to anchor his stories to reality while they pulled him toward fantastic history slipped away.
I listened to it happen in his stories, and I'm looking now at reading lists for college fiction classes and seeing only male names, and I wonder if maybe I aspire to the wrong genre.
We minimize the memoir culturally because we minimize the work of women, and maybe women excel in this genre for a reason. Women invest themselves, their identities, with the truth of their experiences, the truths we've learned and witnessed, and we want to see those truths passed on that someone else may benefit from our education. We want to see the rugrat next generation whose very existence we modern feminists cannot fathom benefit from the trials we've endured.
So, like Nana, we leave the fantastical weaving of Great Fiction and History, those fabricated versions of truth, to men, and we quietly tell the truth in our small way. We adjust their details to Truth when we can adjust their telling of the past, because we carry the Truth in us, and thus excel in that ever-maligned genre, the memoir. The genre of reality as we know it. Memoir: from the fifteenth-century french/anglo-saxon, meaning "a story written, but kept in the mind."
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