 My first copy of Gatsby... I just finished going through The Great Gatsby with my “Craft of Fiction” class, and I’ve come to the conclusion—hey, call me a rebel, call me crazy—that it is the most perfectly punctuated book of all time. A few examples that I discussed in class yesterday….
“…They’re nice to have—a dog.” (27)
A bit of dialogue spoken by Myrtle Wilson. The em-dash there is heartbreaking, an indication of Myrtle’s selfishness and shallowness. The singular “dog” and plural “they’re” also give us a lot of information about Myrtle….
“I thought you inherited your money.”
“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war” (90)
Dialogue between Nick and Gatsby. The comma in “…did, old sport…” is perfect. But most of my students will not notice that. Very odd—students have tremendous difficulty punctuating dialogue, especially the comma after an introductory clause. Also the lovely “old sport,” which of course is totally pompous and condescending to whomever is being addressed.
“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”
“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute. Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.” (127)
Tom is addressing Gatsby, but Daisy intervenes. I suppose you could italicize the “old sport” here, but the single quotes work too and bring out an air of contempt in Tom’s question. Italics would have indicated greater contempt, more sneering, and might have been too much.
Nice comma before Tom, too. And Daisy’s use of “Tom” is interesting in itself. How many times do people actually use names when they address one another? Not too often, in my experience. Names in conversation are used to get the addressee’s attention and, sometimes, to assert control. That’s what’s happening here….
“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered, “Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?” (127)
Nice use of the em-dash—a little lurch of speech. Then calling out Tom again….
“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world.”
Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
“I’ve got something to tell you, old sport——” began Gatsby. But Daisy guessed at his intention.
“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go home. Why don’t we all go home?” (130)
Tom, Nick, Gatsby. Daisy. Again the lurching em-dash in “friends—in the modern world.” Tom sounds confused and stressed. Grasping at priggish straws.
Then Gatsby speaks with an unusual double em-dash! “...old sport——“ Really helps show Daisy’s interruption—Gatsby is left gasping. Then, Daisy’s “Please don’t” should logically be “Please, don’t” but the missing comma imposes a feeling of urgency to her words. “Please, let’s all go home” is a gentle plea. “Please let’s all go home” is a desperate plea. And, I try to convince the students, it is a deliberate missing comma, not a missing comma of ignorance….
“I’m going to drain the pool to-day, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon, and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.” (153)
Perhaps I obsess over properly-placed commas. But—I’ve read so many stories by beginning writers that I have become acutely aware of how hard it can be to see these things, how hard it is to read like a writer.
“Don’t do it to-day,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?” (153)
The “old sport” thing again. But creating that last sentence in the form of a question? Changes everything.
“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”
“Don’t belong to any.”
“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”
“That was a long time ago.” (157)
Michaelis is talking with George. No dialogue tags in this passage—we know who is speaking, and there’s no need for Fitzgerald to assert extra pacing. The constant use of “George” is there as Michaelis tries to get George’s attention is also very cool…..
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— (180)
A non-dialogue passage—a very famous passage, justly famous. But look look LOOK at that amazing double em-dash that leaves us dangling at the end of the book, setting us up for the beautiful last sentence! An ellipsis wouldn’t be as effective, nor a single em-dash. Doubling helps make this memorable and moving….
 This is how absent-minded I can be sometimes: I will buy a book, and enjoy it—love it, even!—and then lose it, or think I’ve lost it. And so I buy another copy.
And then I find the first copy hiding somewhere.
Of course.
This most recently happened with Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease, a book I’ve mentioned before—it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on writing.
And so, yesterday I was happy to find the older copy, the long-lost friend, and I leafed through it, looking at Flaherty’s words and my various marginal notations, and I came across a puzzling one:
The photo is sadly blurry. There is a wavy line around a paragraph, and above it a little sort-of circle with lines emerging
from it—a dandelion seed, maybe, or a bacteria. It took me a while, but then I realized, no—it’s the sun! For
next to it I wrote: “Sunshine!”
Here’s the passage I was commenting on:
I strain my nerves for the faintest sense of the feeling I should write, the feeling that my feet are starting to lift off the ground. Although I sit down to write every day at five in the morning, on the days when my muse has left me, I can no longer pretend to sit down because I am in control of the situation. I am not writing but doing penance for all the days when the muse spoke and I failed to listen (87).
Sunshine! Right?
I do like this passage. I’m not a muse-man, but sometimes writing does indeed feel like penance. I love this book.
 One of the best writing students I’ve ever had was an athlete, a young woman basketball player who was heading off for a career as a high school coach. I told her a quick path to publication might be to write about basketball—there always seems to be a demand for sports stories.
“Basketball stories are all the same,” she said. “Buzzer-beating shot wins the game.”
I said—Well, then, don’t write that story! Write about what it’s like to be a basketball player—the endless practices, the rivalries and relationships between the players, the intricate tangle of conflicts and desires that exists in the locker room and on the court….
I’m thinking back on this because I just finished reading George Dohrman’s Play Their Hearts Out, one of the best books I’ve ever read on sports—certainly the most disturbing. Dohrman spent eight years following a team of young basketball players, and the stories of these young men are heart-breaking and tragic and occasionally—incredibly, rising up through the corruption—inspiring. Always we have lives revealed through action.
Dohrman’s book just misses the mark of greatness, I think, because it lacks a strong narrative voice—it’s more a work of journalism (very high quality journalism) than a work of art. I often found myself wondering where the narrator was in certain scenes, and wondering too how complicit Dohrman was in the corruption he describes. (As an observer, does a reporter have a responsibility to step in and help out a kid in trouble? Or at least just address his or her complicity?)
Still, it’s totally worth reading… And it points to maybe the biggest task a young writer—any writer—faces: recognizing the incredible richness of the material that exists in this world—all the stories that surround all of us….
Buy Play Their Hearts Out….
George Dorhman’s website….
 Our semester at Texas A&M begins tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to getting started and meeting all the new Young Scholars. These are the books we’ll be reading in class….
For my two sections of composition:§ Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009.
§ Nathan, Rebekah. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. New York: Penguin, 2006.
§ Miller, Char. Fifty Years of the Texas Observer. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004.My experience as a composition student took place many years ago, but it continues to traumatize me. Our professor was an old fart whose pedagogy was based on reading the comp handbook out loud. Yeah. No kidding. Reading the handbook out loud. For the whole 50 minutes we would read aloud fascinating factoids about comma splices and sentence fragments. I hated that book, and I hated the class, and I hated the professor, and I go on hating them: every time I teach comp I have evil flashbacks, a sort of Post-Traumatic Comp Disorder. (I elaborated on this disaster of a class in an essay, “Comp: a Personal and Pedagogical Narrative,” which is scheduled to be published in an anthology at some point next year).
I guess that ancient class left me with some lingering disgust or distrust of composition books—I don’t even like thinking about them. Still, I’ve got to use something, I guess, and so I started looking around for a basic comp handbook. And then I was totally shocked and appalled—the prices! They’re ridiculous! I see no reason to force students to spend a fortune on a book that will be used as little more than a reference. (Really, does anyone actually buy these things for the exercises? Can’t you come up with your own?)
So I turned to the good ol’ MLA Handbook. It has most of the necessary information the Young Scholars need (anything else they can get off Purdue OWL), and at a more or less reasonable price.
My Freshman Year, by “Rebekah Nathan,” is a book I’m looking forward to teaching, even though I’ve never met anyone who actually likes it—including me. I read it through in pretty much a single sitting, and found it quite frustrating and annoying and depressing. At the same time I think the author does raise some interesting questions about the culture of students at a university, and I hope that the Scholars—who will probably dislike this book as much as me or anyone else—can use it as a starting point for reflecting on their own college experience. (Next semester I might add Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, another book I didn’t much care for, to the list to go along with Nathan. The YSs could then mount a defense of their generation and its use of technology).
We’ll also be using one book I like very much. Fifty Years of the Texas Observer, edited by Char Miller, is an excellent collection of well-written, short essays about the place we live. I always enjoy teaching this book, and it seems to go over pretty well.
For my multi-genre creative writing class, I chose the following books:
§ Addonizio, Kim. Ordinary Genius. New York: Norton, 2009.
§ Casares, Oscar. Brownsville. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2003.
§ Fountain, Carrie. Burn Lake. New York, Penguin, 2010.
§ Singleton, George. Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds. Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 2009.
§ White, Lowell Mick. Long Time Ago Good. College Station: Slough Press, 2009.Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius does a terrific job of de-mystifying poetry. It’s great—a generous and open discussion of how poems get made. I talked a bit with Kim last spring at AWP, and told her how I used her book. “That’s what the book is for,” she said. Well, yeah! I use it in my prison classes, too…I think the world of this book.
Oscar Casares’s Brownsville is a wonderful story collection set in an area of our state—our nation—that is often overlooked. It’s great when I get a Young Scholar from the Valley who says, “I didn’t know you could write about Brownsville!” It’s almost even better when a YS from the suburbs of Dallas says the same thing. It’s a book full of revelations.
Last spring I had my book order almost ready to send out—had everything except the poetry selection—when I went to Carrie Fountain’s reading in Austin. By the second poem I knew I wanted to teach her book, Burn Lake—a collection of very tight, well-observed poems about New Mexico. This is going to be fun.
George Singleton’s Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds is a cool collection of aphorisms about the writing process. It’s funny, too, with charming little drawings to illustrate the points he makes. The advice is good, the presentation effective. I’ve listed this as “Recommended” in semesters past, and have now kicked it up to “Required.”
Oh. Yeah. And we’re covering one of my books, too, Long Time Ago Good. At first I worried a little about the morality of requiring my own book, but I came to the conclusion that it was more or less okay. This is the second semester I’ve used it. I try to walk the Scholars through the stories, pointing out the decisions I made at different stages of composition. It works, I think. Stuff to look for:Kim Addonizio’s website. Oscar Casares’s websiteGeorge Singleton’s website
Purdue University Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL)—a great resource for teachers and students Carrie Fountain’s website
Links to a few things of interest….
Study shows that writing helps keep the brain healthy...Brain plasticity is a hot topic right now—no doubt a result of Nicholas Carr’s popular but disappointing book, The Shallows. So maybe I won’t get Alzheimer’s. One less thing to worry about.
Only Children Not So Lonely….I could have told the researchers this! The only children=lonely children concept is spread by people who grew up with siblings and cannot conceive of the pleasures of childhood solitude. Now we need to get busy and demolish the concept that only children=spoiled and selfish children.
James Dickey’s Deliverance turns 40….I’ve always liked this novel a lot—the movie, too. Though as a West Virginian I have several times been on the end (yes) of rude “hillbilly sodomite” comments—the ignorant commenters not realizing that the book is set in Georgia! Still, it’s a fine novel. Does anyone teach it?
Best Practices for Teaching with Twitter. I’m using social networking in my classes this fall—Twitter and Facebook both. I’m not certain how it will turn out, but it should prove interesting….
I think I said earlier how the Maude translation of War and Peace Anglicizes the names—which is kind of confusing. It also tones down and flattens the text, and makes it less interesting. As we see in this scene from Chapter XII, just before the battle of Austerlitz:
The voices were those of the orderlies who were packing up; one voice, probably a coachman's, was teasing Kutuzov's old cook whom Prince Andrew knew, and who was called Tit. He was saying, "Tit, I say, Tit!"
"Well?" returned the old man.
"Go, Tit, thresh a bit!" said the wag.
"Oh, go to the devil!" called out a voice, drowned by the laughter of the orderlies and servants
Okay, we get it. The soldiers are teasing a cook—and, perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but the cook, here and in the next chapter, comes off a bit effeminate. The “Tit, thresh a bit,” while clearly mocking, isn’t really that funny. I assumed it was some sort of untranslatable Russian joke. But Pevear and Volokhonsky handle it this way:
From Kutuzov’s yard came the voices of orderlies who were preparing to sleep; one voice, probably of a coachman who was teasing Kutuzov’s old cook, whom Prince Andrei knew and whose name was Titus, said: “Titus, hey, Titus?”
“Well?” replied the old man.
“Titus, don’t bite us,” said the joker.
“Pah, go to the devil,” a voice cried, drowned out by the guffawing of the orderlies and servants.
Okay, now it makes sense as a joke. A childish little taunting rhyme, the kind of stupid thing we used to say in the seventh grade or so, but a joke nonetheless. Titus, don’t bite us! Is it translated word-for-word from the Russian? I have no idea. But it makes more sense this way….
I first read War and Peace when I was 14 or so—my mother gave the Constance Garnet translation she’d read as a girl. I loved the book, of course—I fell straight into the lives of those characters and I never wanted leave them—Tolstoy’s overwhelming empathy towards people totally took over and captured me.
At the University of Texas I took a Tolstoy course, and for that class we read War and Peace and Anna K both (I tell my fellow teachers this today and they are stunned: they don’t believe undergraduates are capable of reading (or are willing to read) two large books in a semester—or even one large book). It was a wonderful class—one of the best I ever had.
But—we were reading the Norton Critical Editions, translated by Aylmer and Louise Maude. The translation bothered me: they anglicized most of the names. Andrei Bolkonsky became Andrew Bolkonsky—his sister Marie, Mary. Nikolai Rostov became Nicholas—but his sister Natasha stayed Natasha. Pierre also stayed Pierre. This bothered me a lot. It was confusing. And the prose seemed kind of dry and labored.
Still, I read this book over and over through the years—seven, eight, nine times, something like that—until the binding broke and it fell apart. Later, when I was driving a cab, I picked up a used copy of the Rosemary Edmonds translation, and I read that a time or two.
So, I have a history with this book. When the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky came out, I got a copy, hoping that I could convince someone in power to let me teach a Tolstoy class. (I didn’t). I read through some favorite sections, but I never got around to actually reading the new translation in its entirety, until now….
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