Lou > Books: non-fiction‎ (27)

“We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write toward that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Be bold in the face of the blank sheet.”

“So you go back and begin again. Open elegantly. Open fiercely. Open delicately. Open with surprise. Open with everything at stake. This, of course, is a bit like being told to walk a tightrope. Go ahead, then, walk the tightrope! Relax yourself into the tension of the wire. The first line, like the first step, is only the first of many, yet it sets the shape of what is to come. Try walking a foot off the ground, then two feet, then three. Eventually you might go a quarter mile in the sky. Then again, you might stumble and fall. No matter. It is, after all, a work of the imagination. You won’t die trying. At least not yet.”

“DON’T WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, WRITE toward what you want to know. Step out of your skin. Risk yourself. This opens up the world. Go to another place. Investigate what lies beyond your curtains, beyond the wall, beyond the corner, beyond your town, beyond the edges of your own known country.”

“DON’T LET THE TERROR OF THE WHITE page shrink-wrap your mind. The excuse that you have writer’s block is far too easy. You have to show up for work. You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t abandon the room. Don’t go off to pay the bills. Don’t wash the dishes. Don’t check the sports pages. Don’t open the mail. Don’t distract yourself in any way until you feel you have fought and tried. You have to put in the time. If you are not there, the words will not appear. Simple as that.”

"A more immediate worry was the cold. They had no heat, no light, no stove. They had no
sleeping bags, no heavy clothing, no Arctic survival gear. A few seconds outside would coat a man's face with frost. In minutes, blood would rush from his extremities to his core. Exposed skin would die. In the sky, the men on a B-17 were warriors. On the ground, they were frozen sardines in a busted-open can."

"The war would wait, but freezing American airmen wouldn't."

"In a world where size generally matters, Greenland's doesn't. The island is globally overlooked despite being enormous: more than sixteen hundred miles from north to south, and eight hundred miles at its widest point. Greenland could swallow Texas and California
and still have room for a dessert of New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and all of New England. It's three times the size of France, and it occupies more than twice the area of the planet's second-largest island, New Guinea.
Yet Greenland is the world's loneliest place. With fifty-eight thousand residents, it has the lowest population density of any country or dependent territory. Only Antarctica, with no permanent residents, makes Greenland seem crowded. If Manhattan had the same population density as Greenland, its population would be two."

"To fight cabin fever, they played word games. They named all the countries, rivers, capitals, islands, and every other geographical feature they could think of. They told and retold their life stories and talked about whatever came to mind. Still they ran out of things to say, so they spent long periods in silence. The isolation, the wind, the moving glacier beneath their feet, and the relentless cold preyed on their nerves. They seemed to take turns breaking down, wishing their ordeal were over, one way or another. Each time, the other two would comfort the crying man. When the cycle unraveled, all three sank into despair at the same time. They hatched a suicide pact."

“She made a funny face and against my will, I smiled. She kissed me on my lips and started to cry. “That’s the first time I have seen your smile. It is a beautiful smile. Mother’s beautiful daughter can smile.”
I was not used to being called beautiful.
That day, I learned that I could be a giver simply by bringing a smile to another person. The ensuing years have taught me that a kind word or a vote of support can be charitable gift. I can move over and make another place for another to sit. I can turn my music up if it pleases, or down if it is annoying.
I may never be known as a philanthropist, but I certainly want to be known as charitable.”

“If pessimism insists on occupying my thoughts, I remember there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed.”

“I had a physical response to art. I breathed deeply and was relieved. For the first time in my life art seemed to have a tonal quality. I could almost hear the art as if it were a great chord of a symphonic piece.”

“This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.”

“You’ve been a hard worker-white, black, Asian, and Latino women ship out of the San Francisco port because of you. You have been a shipfitter, a nurse, a real estate broker, and a barber. Many men and-if my memory serves me right-a few women risked their lives to love you. You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.”(Maya Angelou said to her mother)

“Of all the stories Wilson told, however, none fascinated the boy more than the story of the njena. The creature was shrouded in obscurity, spoken of by the locals as if it were a mythical monster, not a real animal. The njena was a mystery just waiting to be solved.”

“Audubon himself shot most of the birds he drew-a necessary compromise that inspired generations to refine their own appreciations of nature and, in some cases, to work to protect such species from endangerment. In twentieth century, that compromise became unnecessary. Hunting lost whatever scientific, academic, and artistic authority it once claimed. But in the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists felt little moral pressure pushing them away from hunting. If anything, they were pushed toward it by scientists and academic institutions with a wolfish demand for specimens.”

“While he waited in Olenda, the pox continued to tear through the community.”Not a day passed without its victims,” he later wrote, “each fresh death being announced by the firing of guns, a sound which each time pierced through me with a pang of sorrow. From morning to night, in my solitude, I could hear the cries of wailing, and the mournful songs which were raised by the relatives round the corpses of the dead.”

“When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably th

“When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Appalachian paper mill town, I had a lot of dreams for a girl with limited opportunity. Probably the biggest of all my dreams was just to get away from where I was.”

“My own life journey, from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard educated writer, teacher, and social advocate is one message of hope. But then so are the stories of seven determined girls who were every bit as gifted and promising as I once was. Each different, but all steadfast in their desire for a better life than the one they had inherited. These daughters and granddaughters of southern Appalachian workers have grit and resolve, but they need much more if they are to succeed in our new unforgiving economy. The stories that follow provide a chronicle of one teacher’s odyssey in poor America, and of the pitfalls and possibilities that arose along a road carved out of simple materials: literature, reading and stories of childhood dreams.”

“The parts of the story jammed against one another: a young girl, Stephen King, horror. This want what I had in mind when I had created my literature class for girls.”

“In their improbable way, I was learning, that horror stories offered hope. Hapless heroines could outwit sinister spirits and crazies. Even stories of Rose Madder could find the inner strength to defeat the horrifying monster that Norman had become. Spirits such as Blair’s Ghost Rose could speak out in angry voices, letting others know how trapped and alone they felt. I too was trying to create hope around the only form of transcendence I knew: an education rich in literature and reading.”

“The young girls in my reading class were not alone. Horror fiction had become rampant in popular culture, so much so that parents and teachers had begun to voice concern about images of maiming and psychopathic mayhem flooding the popular book and movie market. These movies- Final Destination, The House of 1,000 corpses, Slash, 13 Ghosts-were geared to a ravenous audience of horror fans, many of them still in their teens. Such trends had led to a flurry of writing about the subject by literary and film critics, cultural scholars, and even psychoanalysts.
One explanation offered for the feeling that my girls experienced when reading scary books is the notion of a psychic safety valve. Fans of horror and ghost stories can experience a thrilling read, and yet know that in the end they will be safe. This can be cathartic-like screaming bloody murder on a roller coaster ride, then walking off with tears of laughter streaming down your face.
But this wasn’t the only explanation for the strange appeal of horror. Every reader of fiction searches for the threads that can connect her life to the landscape she inherits. And these threads of connections need not be real-or not something you can see or touch in the everyday world. Fiction’s special appeal is that it can take us out of this world and help us connect with what can only be seen through the imagination’s inner eye. Part of the beauty of ghost stories was that they were not real. Crazy, weird, and Elizabeth’s favourite word, boring-this is how my students felt about reading a realistic novel.
Elizabeth wasn’t yet ready for novel about a girl who was “just like her.” Could I bring myself to enjoy the kind of book that she loved?”

‘ “What is it about Stephen King’s books that you really enjoy?” I asked.
“The parts when scary things happen,” said Blair. “And I like to read long books.” Rose Madder was 420 pages long.

This story of one precocious young girl, her Stephen King book, and a hopelessly idealistic teacher helps to shed light on a big dilemma. How can education open doors for girls such as Blair, the daughter of poor whites, and a girl with dreams as big as any girl in America? Her small but important life story is part of a larger American narrative. She is the young heir to a labour history, a slice of our national life that is disappearing. The courageous southern migrants who fled Appalachian poverty had come to Midwest cities in search of manufacturing jobs and a better future for their children. Now young Blair had inherited a forgotten landscape, tormented by job loss and a growing street-drug problem. Dropout rates were high too, reflecting an intergenerational history-the earlier workers of Blair’s neighbourhood could find jobs without high school diploma-but also a sense of detachment from school. What Blair most needed was a first-rate education that would allow her to create a new kind of future, leading her away from the streets and their torments and toward he life her Grandma Lilly envisioned for her.
But when I set out to become an educational agent for hope and change for Blair, I discovered that the single thing that could have made the biggest difference in her life-public education-was itself part of the problem. In spite of the intentions of individuals at Blair’s school, who were as hardworking as they were big-hearted, she was caught up in the same two-tiered system of schooling I had lived through. Its like John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant who moved to inner-city Chicago in the 1950s, remarked: “A poor kid don’t get the same teachin’ that a rich kid gets.” '

“For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands-our prairies and plains- turning it into canned meat, churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of swift, the kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the dis-assembly line. Chicago-how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down.
On summer nights, when the wind blew off the lake, the stench of death and dung hung over the whole city. My grandmother told me that some nights in her bed, she’d be awakened by what she called “the sad groaning”-beasts in the dark, all those miles away. Chicago.”

“My father was the Night Slot Man. Thats a newspaper term. From the time he is a young boy of six or seven in Dust Bowl Nebraska, back in the depression, all he wants is to work in newspapers. All he wants is to escape, to get to Chicago and be a newspapermen, just like his bother.”

“She begins to see there is a world beyond the world she knows. A world of smart, knowing men. A world at the center of the world. A world that knows whats happening. A world where things happen.”


“All through her childhood, whenever you ask her a question about her life or what she is doing or where she is going, she will fix you in her gaze and say to you, her son: “Don't ask me about my business.”
Omerta.”

“Omerta.
After he died, silence descends. Silence and fear. My twin poles: my binary back holes. I live in fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my fathers name. I believe that even by saying his name, I might kill her. Or, she might kill me.
Three of us remained. Three atoms that retreat to the outer edges of our chamber. A nuclear family flawed, reduced. We drift apart. Unable to bond. Not knowing how. Survivors who stagger into a shelter or a bombed-out ruin, each eyeing the others from our shadowy corner. Wondering. Calculating.
He died and we never spoke again about him. Every once in a while, id find the courage to ask about him. Every once in a while, the questions nagging in my head-How did he die?-would become too much and id forget the rules and ask.”

“I understand you now, those of you who build your roadside shrines.
Your frail white cross, lashed to the guard-rail. Two wooden garden stakes bound with rusted wire. Your son”s name, stencilled. Or your wife's. A plastic bouquet. Faded flag. We see your shrine as we speed by, rounding a curve. A glint of colour catches our eye. Maybe remnants of that weathered teddy bear. All of it marking that place where someone loved left the road.
The sod black and torn. The gap in the guardrail. The tree trunk, shorn.
It is our need to mark. To witness. Our need to create scared ground.
“History happened here,” guidebooks like to say.
No, we say-personal history ended here.”

“To this day, still, I scavenge for scraps in the hearts and minds of men I meet. Forever searching, believing the answers are out there. Somewhere.
Because we without fathers must out of necessity create ourselves. Its true that “necessity is the mother of invention.” But for those of us without fathers, there is a deeper truth-necessity is the mother of self-invention.”