The following are "Reader's Journal" entries I wrote for Professor Goodman's Lit class. Early in the semester I suffered from writer's block and couldn't do much writing. Jerry did what he could to help me through but due to a very stressful ordeal I was going through at the time, I had to drop the class at mid-term. At one point, I blamed the Prof. for this. I realize now that this was unfair and unkind of me. I apologize Jerry. I wish I could have offered you more then these few pultry works.
These entries may seem a bit disjointed if you haven't read the works I attempted to describe. I would suggest you read the original works and see what you think, or better yet get Professor Goodman to read them for you, he's as familiar with these works as some of us are with the touch of a longtime lover. You were right Jerry, old Scratchy was standing right in front of me all the time. I was, until now, too blinded to see.
EN102 Section 220
Professor Jerry "The Grand Poo-Bah of Dusty Tomes" Goodman
Spring 2000
"Birches" by Robert Frost
Here we have another lament about the loss of childhood freedoms. Yet there is more here. Perhaps Frost was saying that some adults are still swingers of birches. A shame he seems to feel he isn't. I like to swing from my birches upside down and naked. As my arms grow weary, I let go at the height of a final swing. In landing, the breaking of the ice crackles beneath my feet. No winter can keep me from the joys of spring.
"April Inventory" by W.D.Snodgrass
This is a poem about me. "In one whole year I haven't learned a blessed thing they pay you for." Could be changed to, in my whole lifetime� "In thirty years I may not get younger, shrewder or out of debt." Speaks for itself, yup, that's me. "�I'd be substantial, presently." Is the ever-present belief my friends have expressed in me over the years. They seem to know that someday I'm going to do something great. Too bad I don't agree. "And one by one the solid scholars get the degrees, the jobs the dollars." The more conventional move on, as we nuts seem to stagnate. Of course, Snodgrass went on to win the Pulitzer. Gives me just a bit of hope, although my self-doubt is strong.
"Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
This short story is about a mans struggle to see the truth in his life and community through the fogged and scratched glasses of his religious indoctrination. It is a sad story and, in my opinion, a chilling warning against relying on the fruitless pursuit of an all-encompassing good as proclaimed by such purveyors of morality as "The Church". The deep sadness of the ruined life of Goodman Brown is in sharp contrast to the hopeful tone of the first few paragraphs. He had everything to look forward to in his life. He had a lovely wife and a family to raise. In the end, his greatest riches turned against him, his "Faith" both wife and religious were the instruments of his downfall. Even in death, he found no solace. If you live in a black and white world, you may find the black tends to smudge the white. Better to see the Grey areas for what they are then to wind up with a stained and smeared ruin.
"Araby" by James Joyce
At first blush this story is a rather formula "coming of age story", that is if one can refer to anything written by the deified Joyce as formula. Upon farther analysis, there is so much richness here that Joyce proved to me in the end that he was a literary God. It is with lines like "�shook music from the buckled harness" that I find the depth that is good writing to me. Joyce took a small moment of the past and described it to me in a way that made me hear and feel what it was like to live in a time long before my birth. His use of the fact that the boy in the story sits alone in a train car points to the loneliness of the journey to adulthood we all face in adolescence. It brought home the loneliness I now face as I enter middle age and the loneliness I will someday face as I enter the last phase of life. This story links youth and age in a special way for me. It is about a young man in the olden days. It was written in the olden days by a 32-year-old man on the cusp of middle age. I wonder if Joyce was feeling the loneliness of the transition to middle age and this is what lead him to remember his past adolescence and write this story.
"The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane
This story is about change. It begins with a man and a woman who have just changed their lives by becoming linked in marriage. It takes place at a time of great change in our country. At the end of the 18th century, the country was leaving its childhood as a pioneer society and entering into its adolescence as an industrialized nation. The train is a symbol of the link between the industrialized east and the pioneer west. The town of Yellow Sky still contains links to the old west as evidenced by Scratchy Wilson. When sober Scratchy understands that times have changed and comports himself within the framework of the new west. When drunk, he remembers the ways of the old west and acts the way he once did. At the end, faced with the personal change the marriage of the marshal symbolized, old Scratchy had to turn back into the civilized man the new world demanded him to be.
I find this story to be particularly timely because we are now going through a similar time at the beginning of the 21st century. Instead of a shift from pioneer to industrialized, we are going from industrialized to an information economy. Instead of a railroad linking a continent, we are using the Internet to link us globally. I can only wonder where are the Scratchy Wilsons. Where are the people who will show us the last vestiges of the old world?
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara
"Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?"
I don't have to imagine Miss Moore, I live in such a society and I think it sucks. 'Nuff said!
"Master Harold �and the boys by Athol Fugard
I've enjoyed reading this play so far and although I didn't finish it as I was instructed not to, I can't wait to get on with it. It starts slow but picks up speed. I have always enjoyed the type of conversation that starts, who was the greatest� or what is the best� Harold and the boys do this kind of argument justice. The fact that Harold mentions the scholastic failure of all the great men he mentions is exactly how I have always gone about this type of exercise. When someone mentions the imperfections of these otherwise great people, I feel we are better getting to the truth of their lives. It is not perfection that they personify, but greatness.
"A Clean, Well Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway
I didn't want to enjoy this story but I just couldn't help myself. It goes at a lively pace and does so smoothly. The impatience of the younger waiter is the perfect foil for the older waiter. We have, as in the other stories we've read in this class, the innocence of youth touched in some way by the experience of age. At first, it seems that the older waiter has the world figured out. That his grasp of the small pleasures of life such as "a clean well lighted place" will get him past the trap of the drunken old man. Hemingway then throws us a curve at the end by hinting at the older waiter's loneliness. Hemingway describes this loneliness with the empathy the older waiter shows toward the drunken old man. He sees himself in the drunken old man and perhaps his own future.
At the end of the story, we learn the older waiter lives in a "room". A place where "he would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep." Perhaps this is a metaphor for death. I'm left, in the end, with the hope that the old waiter will pass to sleep with the dignity of the old drunk. It may be an unsteady sleep but a sleep with dignity. My only other comment is in reference to Hemingway's paraphrase of the "Our Father." I'm sure that raised a few eyebrows back in 1933! Was Hemingway put on the banned book list by the Vatican? I hope someday to write something that's banned by the Vatican. "Nada y pues nada y pues nada." It is a nothing I know all too well also.
Read, Think, Speak, Write, Be!