A Bone to Pick

We have an extensive paper coming up in my English class on the book Winter's Bone that I have been blogging about recently. Following is my draft thesis paragraph for this assignment.

G. Whittaker 3-2012

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell is a complex story that delves into the world of small town methamphetamine use and gives the reader a view from inside the situation.  Through the story of Ree Dolly, readers learn about Woodrell’s own life growing up in the Ozarks.  A picture is painted of the situation through the eyes of someone who is fighting to survive in that world, and who is deeply affected by methamphetamine, but who is not a user.  The tale of survival may be a fictional one, but the themes included in the book relate deeply to Woodrell's experience, and to the very real epidemic of small town meth use.

Methland, USA

Methland by Nick Reding is a book covering the history of Meth and the effects it has had on the world, but most specifically, small town America.  For our class, we were given the prologue and second chapter to read.  In this portion of the book, Reding discusses a general history of methamphetamine  from it's initial synthesis by a Japanese chemist, to the widespread use of it at a prescription drug for decades.  But Reding seeks not just to give a concise history of the drug, his intent is much greater.  Reding brings the meth epidemic home, sharing the stories of those in small town America who are affected by it's use.  Users are not the only ones affected, so too are their families, and the police officers who are charged with putting them behind bars.  the effects of meth are far reaching, and touch every aspect of a community.  Through his story, Reding seeks to explain why methamphetamine use has become so prevalent, both because of it's historical prescription use, and because of what the drug itself has to offer.  Meth seems, at first, to complement the American ideal of hard work, and offers users a way to work harder, longer.  But this industriousness comes at a price.

G. Whittaker 7-2009

America is still rooted in the small town.  They are filled with a sense of nostalgia, and an attitude that bad things can't possibly happen there.  But bad things do, meth does, and meth is killing small town America.  As people are struggling in an increasingly difficult economy to survive, they come to the crossroads of Main Street America and Methamphetamine  and the choice isn't always as clear as we imagine.  

At first I was really not looking forward to reading the provided excerpt from Methland.  I grew up in a big city where drug usage was something that you could find easily if you looked for it.  We learned about the negative effects of various illegal drugs in school from at least middle school onward.  I have never had any interest in what I thought of as a counterculture.  But Methland explodes that view.  Methamphetamine isn't just an inner-city, counterculture problem, it is a wide spread cancer that is eating away at the American dream.  Meth culture has become a subculture, a way of life for those who have been drawn in by it.  And not just for users, but for everyone in their lives.  It touches all of us.  After living in the big city while growing up, I moved to semi-rural Ohio.  This is the small town world that Reding seeks to put on the map, the world that is being forgotten, and a world in which meth use is very real, and devastating.  Between there and living where I do now, I live in Navajo county Arizona, which at the time (2005-6) was considered the county with the highest per capita meth use in the country.  Reding struck a chord with me when he wrote of meth seeming to follow him, but that he discovered that it was actually already everywhere.

G. Whittaker 7-2009

We have an upcoming paper for my class regarding the book Winter's Bone about which I recently posted.  The book Methland will be a great resource for this paper because of the perspective it provides.  While Winter's Bone seeks to tell some of the same kind of tale, it doesn't go into the kind of depth that Reding's work does.  The descriptions he gives of the meth experience.  How Methamphetamine affect the body, how they are made, and what that high is like, are all elements of Reding's book that add a completely new level of understanding to Winter's Bone and the characters.  Through Reding's graphic description of how a man he spent time with was melted in a meth lab fire, we understand the character Teardrop better.  We get a better understanding for how truly gripping the addiction is when this man, despite immense physical disfiguring and resulting handicap, manages to still smoke methamphetamine.  Reding discusses how his eyes were opened to the presence of meth in his hometown, but for Ree Dolly meth has always been there.  Just like with an other culture, understanding more of the depth of what is going on helps to contextualize and understand more detailed elements of the experience.  Reding's work thus, provides a level of understanding not only for the context of Winter's Bone itself, but for Woodrell's own life, and how he used that in writing his fictional work.

Works Cited:

Reding, Nick. Methland. New York: Bloomsbury. 2009. Print.

Woodrell, Daniel. Winter's Bone. New York: Back Bay Books.2006. Print.

Winter's Bone

I guess I should put a "Spoiler Alert" just in case.  I read the entire book Winter's Bone a little while ago now, so I don't completely remember what things happened before and after the assigned reading to this point...

If you're interested in the film it can be viewed here free if you have an Amazon Prime account, but as is the case most of the time, I found the book to be much better.  But a comparison between the two is for a different post!

I actually really enjoyed the book Winter's Bone.  At first I didn't feel like I could relate to the main character Ree Dolly in very many ways.  I looked for ways in which I could, and was eventually really drawn in by the challenges she was facing locating her father.  I was interested to see what it was that she was going to have to undertake to be able to find him in time for her family to not have their land taken for his failure to make a court appearance.  As she struggles to locate him, it seems like her family does nothing but get in her way.  Mother nature herself seems to be trying to hamper Ree's efforts.  These struggles were such an important part of the novel to me, they helped inspire this creative work:

G. Whittaker 2012

Nothing new
Second hand wardrobe
Second hand problems
Bitter winter averts her gaze
Glaring eyes see everything
Judge every action
Going it alone
Walking miles in that vein
In vain
Chapped skin
Unfeeling kin
Cold to the bone

Midterm Check-In

Dear Professor Cline,

This semester has been quite the interesting one so far.  It has been quite a while since I completed English 101, so the kind of writing that has been required for the compositions for this class was somewhat out of practice for me.  I did take a creative writing class, and have of course had writing assignments in the mean time, but they are quite different from literary analysis.  There are elements of literary analysis that play into the other types of writing of course as well.  While writing history papers, I was required to use primary sources as support, which requires that those sources be analyzed for their intended audience, purpose etc.  Pure literary analysis is different though, and through this class we have be able to use it for interpreting fiction and satire as well as the more factual types of work where it is applied in other disciplines.

One of my biggest challenges has been keeping up with all my classmates blogs.  They have such interesting things to say, and reading their blogs weekly to comment for class is rewarding, but I often don't get around to it until the end of the week.  Sometimes it's very hard to schedule time for school assignments around the lives and schedules of four kids!  I feel that my biggest success however has been my own blog.  I took the summer off from school this year, and spent a lot of time doing something that I hadn't had time to for awhile, reading books that I wanted to read.  Through the blog for this class I have found a way to share not only my assignments, but also the other things that I have been reading, and my thoughts on them.

We have read a great variety of work thus far this semester.  I have really enjoyed the things that we have read.  There is so much that we can take in from reading works from the past as we have been doing.  It's a great way to see how people looked at and understood the world in which they were living in at the time, and to see how they looked at and felt about the issues facing people then.  I tend to like a historical and cultural approach to the reading I do, so I think I really look for this, and have enjoyed that aspect of the reading we have done.  Another really interesting thing about reading historical commentaries is that they can be so applicable to life today as well.  Though we are separated by time, the human condition is often not much different.  Perhaps some of the views and suggestions of the past still hold true, and could be used to help understand or address modern day issues.

My hope is that I continue with this semester that I can keep up the level of work that I have been doing on my blog posts, and that I can improve my composition writing.  Essays are a place where there is always room for improvement.  Even the greatest of writers have editors.  I want to be able to produce work of which I can be proud, and to finish out the semester well!

Persepolis, Ancient City, Modern Understanding

I feel that there is a huge importance to reading work by authors who have a different background and point of view from your own.  When I took Pop Culture last spring, one of the topics we discussed was comics and graphic novels.  Immediately this conjures mental images of Peanuts strips, Archie books, the classic super hero comic books, and collections such a Dilbert and The Far Side.  We think of them as fun and funny, full of action, or heroics.  But there is a lot more depth to the genre.

One of the examples of more serious illustrated works that was included was titled Embroideries, and was penned by Marjane Satrapi.  The description of the book caused quite a stir in the class, and one male student decried the work as on par with "the real housewives," saying that no one should want to read that kind of garbage.  Some of us were intrigued however, and I searched out Starapi's work.

I have now read not only Embroideries, but also her other books Persepolis, Persepolis II, Chicken with Plums and The Sigh.  All except The Sigh are memoirs in the from of graphic novels.  I feel like there is a real reason for doing this, and that it is an important medium.  Graphic novels are an engaging format, and they reach readers who might not otherwise approach the material.  Satrapi's works give a historical view into the lives of real Iranians.  They give us an idea of their perspective and what was really going on in their country at that time.  But I think most importantly, they reach the reader in a way that we can all relate to.  They humanize a group of people who have all too often become lumped together and stereotyped.

Satrapi's work is available for purchase here.

In 2007 a film based on the books was produced.  I have yet to see it, but am including the trailer below to help illustrate what I feel is really the point of her work.

My Modest Proposal

From Wikipedia.com

Our assignment this week for my class is to post the opening draft paragraph for a paper on "A Modest Proposal."  I am posting just that, but look for a post later on including the entire text of my essay if you are interested. (I actually wrote some of this as the intro to my video last week because I felt it might need some support and couldn't simply stand alone without some extra written framework to support it, so some of this may sound familiar.)  I modestly propose this opening to my paper:

"A Modest Proposal" is a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift to address "preventing the children of poor people from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick" in 1729 Ireland.  His unique, satirical approach to the situation alludes to how the issue was being approached from a primarily monetary perspective.  He attempts to persuade his wealthy Irish audience to attended to the issue with more compassion and addressed the human issues instead.  Swift's plan as he outlines it appeals to the logos, and seemingly fits with the mode for dealing with issue of overpopulation of poor Irish, however it goes to an extreme that effectively engages the audience's ethos and helps them to see the issue as what it is, a human one.

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to try to bring a new understanding to African colonialism and how it transformed the lives of those who had lived there at the time.  His main character is someone who epitomizes the highest ideals of the traditional ways and believes in his culture whole-heartedly.  Okonkwo is always ready to go to the fullest extent to support and defend his people's traditions and way of life.  But the story is much more complicated.  As the Christians arrive as set up their missions, the children of this same cultural heritage, and indeed, of Okonkwo himself, convert, and start to see the world in a new way.  Achebe wrote the book to help contextualize the changes the people underwent.  When two cultures meet, both are changed forever.  Achebe grew up in a period after this, in a world where these two cultures had already collided.  He was educated in English, and read writing about Africa that either painted it's pre-colonial peoples as savages or as nobles.  Through this book, he sought to present them as people.  People, who just like any other people lived, loved, and died.  He also hesitates to paint Christian missionaries as either saviors or condemners of those people.  He instead seeks to show what happened, and how the interactions and evolutions were very human, and provide a feeling for what the people were like before, and how these interactions influences and changed them, and the culture forever.

An excellent short film discussing this book and it's significance can be viewed here.

Kola nuts (photo from http://www.goodlife.com.ng),
the staple of the kola nut ceremony to welcome guests.

Okonkwo reaches greatness within his culture by being successful.  He proves himself strong as a wrestler, fearless as a warrior, and skilled as a farmer.  Prestige within the clan could come from several different sources, but Okonkwo seemed to believe that only by being strong and "manly" could he achieve the highest status.  Being a skilled farmer was really one of the most determining factors of a man's wealth and status.  If he was successful in growing his yams and had extra,  he could sell them for cowries which he could use to purchase everything, including to pay bride price.  Family is not seen as a burden to these people, but is instead wealth in and of itself.  More wives means more hands to do work.  When Okonkwo is returning form exile he hopes to marry an additional two wives to help increase his status (he already has three).  Extra yams can also be given out to sharecroppers.  Okonkwo has a large barn that is annually filled with yams, three wives, and many children, but Okonkwo's greatest fear sometimes stands in his way.  His greatest fear is that he may be seen as weak an unworthy.  Okonkwo is afraid of failure   This weakness of his makes him very relatable to readers.  Who of us has never been afraid to fail?  But Okonkow turns this fear into unbridled ambition.  He will do whatever it takes to achieve his ideal, and to achieve greatness, even if it leads him to seemingly unsavory events.  Okonkwo believes that whatever is necessary, is warranted  and that the trade off is worth it, no matter what the cost.  He sees failure of any kind so poorly, that to him, anything approaching failure is unacceptable and, in his mind, would lead to a view of his as weak by the other men of his clan.

Global Literacy Project

When the Christian missionaries come into the story, they are portrayed as the Igbo have been all along, as people.  Achebe's story discusses how those who didn't fit well into the Igbo culture were among the first converts.  It makes sense that those who have been ostracized from their culture would be the ones who would be most open to a different way of thinking and living.  These people turn to Christianity as a possible place to find acceptance.  The first head of the mission is Mr. Brown, who seeks to understand the Igbo, to ease cultural tensions between the two groups and to provide a safe haven for those who are interested in Christianity, while his successor, Mr. Smith is full of fire and brimstone.  This really gives us both kinds of missionaries to look at, and helps the reader to understand the kinds of human dynamics that play such a huge role in these sorts of things.

I don't want to spoil the end of the book for anyone reading this who has not read the book, but I found it to be tragic, and necessary to the story.  This book is a lesson about people, about humanity, ambition, colonialism, and cultural centrism.  There is so much that can be learned about this book, not only about the Ibo, but about all people.  We can take away from this much about how we view ourselves and other cultures, and about who we are and how acculturation affects our views of the world.

One of my favorite things about reading texts like this one is the detail about the daily lives of people in another culture.  It is wonderful to be taken on that journey and to learn about the daily lives of other people.  For me the most interesting aspects of this are not only the religious and cultural beliefs, but also the costume and cuisine of a a group.  One of the foods that is mentioned over and over again in the book, and is not included in the glossary is a dish called foo-foo.  Something that I really like to do is to immerse myself in a culture in as many ways as possible while I am studying it.  For this reason I pulled out an African cookbook that I had in hopes of finding a recipe for foo-foo to both satisfy my curiosity and my palette.  I found one, and though I have yet to try making it, I look forward to doing so soon!

Making Fufu, by Alain Le Foll from the Black Africa Cookbook

Fufu
(Americanized version of West African cassava Fufu)

Peel and boil 8 white potatoes until tender.  Drain, mash and add 1/2 tablespoon of rice flour (can be bought in Oriental markets) per potato.  Sift flour in, beating all the time with a wooden spoon.  Continue to beat until mixture is smooth.  Serve in a mound in a warm dish.

Yam or Sweet Potato Fufu can be made the same way, except it is better to steam, not boil, these vegetables until tender.  Let them cool slightly before mashing and beating.

Bayley, Monica. Black Africa Cook Book. 1977. Determined Productions Inc. Print.


Note: I have also been studying some of the African myths that are included in the book, and have been reading them with my children.  I am still waiting on a copy of one from the local library, so I will post about those in a subsequent blog. :)