Time, in its stealthy gliding, cheats us all without our notice.
—Ovid
On this hot, mid-August day, Lowe’s put all remaining gas grills on sale and rolled out this year’s line of snowblowers.
Author: John
Late Summer Blooms
Essay Camp: “Our Faith in Horses”
The next time you’re in a bookstore, ask the cashier where they keep their collections of five-paragraph essays. You’ll likely get quizzical looks. You might be asked if you’re looking for books on how to write a five-paragraph essay. You’ll answer, no, you’re looking for books filled with five-paragraph essays—you know, the kind children are taught to write in school.
Of course, there aren’t any. The form is too constricted to serve the type of investigations that merit being published as a book.
A five-paragraph essay is a useful structure for teaching basics like topic sentences, supporting evidence, linking sentences, and rudimentary arguments. But linger on them too long and they’ll seem confining. Almost nothing we read that makes any kind of sustained argument is so rudimentary in its form. Sure, some 800-word opinion pieces in newspapers clank out an introduction, three main points, and a conclusion, but any essay that appears in a magazine is bound to be more varied and complex. A magazine essay might involve two or three different stories lines. It might mix memoir with social commentary or political opinion. It might do any number of things—and that freedom is part of what makes essays so engaging and powerful as instruments of exploration.
Now, there are probably students in every middle school and high school struggling to master the basics of the five-paragraph essay, so the idea of writing something more open-ended might seem like an invitation for chaos, logorrhea, or worse. But other students might be ready to try their hands at longer, more free-formed compositions. And even if students are not ready to try writing something longer and more complex, it’s probably not too early to read such pieces, so they start to get a sense of the choices available to essay writers. Then they can begin considering, too, the choices they are making, consciously or not, in their own writing.
Our eight-grader is home this summer, and I’m asking her to read some real essays—articles from publications like Oxford American and The New Yorker. I’m also calling her attention to certain features in each of these essays and asking her thoughts about what the writer has done. It’s a kind of casual writing camp.
I thought I’d post this on my blog, in case anyone else finds this sort of exercise useful. I’m planning on selecting essays from magazines we have lying around our house, but when possible I’ll choose essays that are also freely available online.
The first essay is “Our Faith in Horses” by Jamie Allen from the Spring 2015 issue of Oxford American.
Themes
This essay is about horses, horse racing, the often overlooked cruelty of the horse-racing industry, and our problematic relationship with horses. But it isn’t just third-party reporting on the horse racing industry. The essay also includes personal recollections, as well, including the story of the author’s sister’s relationship with her rambunctious horse Chief, and the author’s troubled relationship with his abusive father.
How does adding this personal content enrich the essay? What contrast does the author draw between our relationship with horses and our relationship with one another? Find specific sentences that support your view.
Telling a Complete Story
The essay begins in medias res–in the middle of things, the action already under way. Chief and his rider come charging toward the barn.
In the course of the story, we learn the full story of Chief. We discover the occasion of his purchase, the difficulty of taming him, and the make-or-break session in which the author’s family decides whether or not to keep him.
Go back through the essay. Flag all the parts of the author’s family’s story. Note the order in which they’re told.
Do you think this order is effective? Why?
Direct vs. Indirect Dialog
One of the choices facing any writer of fiction or non-fiction who is reporting dialog is whether to quote words directly or to paraphrase them in summary. Quoting words directly—called direct dialog—has the advantage of being precise, but it can lead to longeurs if the dialog is not continuously engaging. Paraphrasing—called indirect dialog—has the advantage of brevity, but without an interleaving of direct quotations can sometimes make conversations seem remote and impersonal.
(In the paragraph below, the first sentence is indirect dialog and the second two are direct.
He gave us roundabout directions to the cemetery. “You’ll want to be careful going over that last bridge,” he told us. “It can be a bit rickety.”)
Most writers use a mix of direct and indirect dialog. Edith Wharton advised using direct dialog only for pivotal moments in narratives. She said: “Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.” (You can find other advice on writing dialog here.)
Read the passage below and pay attention to how Allen mixes direct and indirect dialog. Which things does he choose to paraphrase? Which does he quote directly? How do his choices heighten the drama of this passage?
In the winter of 2013, I visited Miami’s Gulfstream Park, one of the country’s premier tracks. It was a shiny South Florida Saturday and as I crossed the parking lot I could hear the announcer over the loudspeaker, the crowd. The horses were running. I hurried in, made my way along the rail toward the finish line. The pack was rounding the far turn in the fourth race of the day; the crowd stood and cheered lazily, and a winner pulled away. I snapped a photo with my phone as the lead horse, wearing 7, passed. The sky was radiant blue except for a few cotton puffs hanging over the palmy track. What a day.
“Oh, no no no.” An old man in a pageboy had moved up next to me on the rail. “Oh, no no no.” I figured he had lost money on the race, but I followed his squinted gaze and saw it: a horse down on the track. The jockey lay over his neck. The horse fought and rose, stumbled. It looked like a broken leg. The crowd moaned; some couldn’t look, others covered their mouths. They got him down again. A track ambulance arrived and workers unrolled a gray blind in front of the horse. I heard a mother telling her children to look at the seagulls overhead. Behind me, a drunk bettor chomping on a cigar shouted, “Next race!”
It happens all the time.
The Vocabulary of Mood
Read the passage above again. It presents two contrasting moods: a sunny, peaceful day at the track, and the horror of a horse being killed on the track.
Notice the descriptions in the first paragraph: a “premier” track, the crowd standing and cheering “lazily,” the author arriving just in time to take a picture of the winning horse then gazing up at the “radiant blue” sky over the “palmy track.”
The mood changes abruptly with the direct dialog at the beginning of the second paragraph. At first, like the author, we’re not sure what’s wrong. We, too, have to follow the old man’s squinty gaze to find the object of his apprehension at the end of the third sentence: “a horse down on the track.” The sentences and their structure force us to search for the center of the action; then, like the spectators in the stand, we find our attention is blocked and diverted. The horror is made hidden and routine. “They” (nobody described closely) “got him down again.” Workers unroll a gray blind, as they have countless time before.
How does Allen convey the heartlessness of the “drunk bettor?” (Notice the verbs: chomping, shouting.)
In your own writing, how might you use a mix of indirect and direct dialog to report such a scene?
Write an Essay
Try writing an essay that includes a personal story along with your analysis about an important trend, issue, or event.
Break your personal story into distinct episodes. Decide how to order them, and how to interleave them with the rest of your analysis.
Can you find a way to give your story more context–more sweep, as it were–while also giving analysis a personal touch?
What are the strengths of this two-track approach? What, if any, are the weaknesses?
Midsummer Ramblings, and a Line by Denise Levertov
Midsummer, the dog and I have a routine. She’s accustomed to having free run in our fields, but we can’t give her that freedom once the berry-pickers arrive, which they do some mornings at 8 a.m. So early, around 6:30 or 7, she and I will head out to the fields ourselves. I’ll usually bring along a colander for picking whatever might be ripe: blueberries, raspberries, or the wild black raspberries that favor our fields. She brings along just her own energy and attention, which is more than enough for these outings.
Denise Levertov once began a poem with these words:
Let’s go, much as that dog goes, intently haphazard.
I think that “intently haphazard” neatly captures the motion of most dogs off-leash in an open space. Not intentionally haphazard, not purposely random; no, just intently—”with earnest and eager attention”—swerving from one thing to the next as they appear.
There is a happy randomness our circuit on these mornings. The larger motion is more or less fixed: from the house to the blueberries, then backtracking and turning north past the old garden; perhaps stopping at the back edge of a plot there for black raspberries, and then over to field we plowed two summers ago to the row of raspberries. Perhaps then up the hill, but more likely—and especially if the colander is nearly full by now—back to the house.
But within this L-shapped circuit, there’s a carefree wandering. I’ll go to the blueberry aisles that seem most laden with ripe fruit. Our dog follows her nose, darting from aisle to aisle, before breaking free and enjoying the thrill of a wide-open sprint (and who am I, with limited human faculties, to judge the randomness of her attention when it comes to scents? though her interest in the visual, in stray objects or a darting squirrel, is plain enough). At any point, I might pause to marvel at the barn swallows and cardinals swooping about. A sunlit, dew-bedecked spiderweb might catch my attention next, prompting me to pause and fiddle with my camera, the colander pressed precariously against my chest. In the garden itself, new blooms might pull me to one side or another. An occasional turkey or fox might alter our plans. The air is usually filled with birdsong.
Chaos and order throughout, attention shifting from one thing to the next, a mix of intention and chance. A happy wandering.
We return to the house. I carry my pickings into the kitchen, and the dog collapses on a carpet, contented, tongue-lolling.
Yes, let’s go like that, and take that carefree rambling haphazard spirit with us through the rest of the long, hot day.
Prairie Sun Rudbeckia
Ross Douthat, Gay Marriage, and the Folly of Chalkboarding Happiness with Weak Data
As New York Times op-ed writer Ross Douthat sees it, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision recognizing the rights of gays to marry is a kind of fool’s gold. Marriage, you see, has become à rebours. While gays have been fighting for the freedom to marry, straights have been busy seeking a different freedom—namely, freedom from marriage. And the brave new world wrought by this freedom, along with no-fault divorce and other social dispensations, is a less happy place, in Douthat’s reckoning, that the patriarchal, gay-intolerant world we have left behind.
He writes:
Unfortunately I see little evidence that people are actually happier in the emerging dispensation, or that their children are better off, or that the cause of social justice is well-served, or that declining marriage rates and thinning family trees (plus legal pressure on religious communities that are exceptions to this rule) promise anything save greater loneliness for the majority, and stagnation overall.
Now this is a weird argument, because thinning family trees and declining marriage rates are a lot of social ills to lay on doorsteps that portion of the roughly less than 2.5% of America who are gay and who want to make a formal, life-long commitment to the people whom they love most in the world. After all, we’re talking about people who want to get married, who are trying to escape loneliness and build stable families, and who have suffered all kinds of discrimination, including job loss and harassment and even on occasion violence, to pursue that dream of commitment and stability.
(And it’s particularly weird of Douthat, in the middle of his lamentations, to link to a study about kids suffering when raised by single mothers, when the topic at hand is gay marriage. Gay marriage, like any kind of marriage, does not contribute to a rise in single mothers; on the contrary. And single-parent households have been rising in communities, such as many black communities, which has historically been opposed to gay marriage. If the country wants to lower the rate of single-parent families, perhaps we should probably be talking about lowering the incarceration of rate of young black men or providing better wages and more health benefits to low-income parents; but no, to Douthat, gay people getting married is in some mysterious way, clearly not involving empirical causality, a contributor to single-parent families. Go figure. Let’s blame gays for the Red Sox abysmal showing this year, while we’re at it.)
Speaking of happiness: Do you know who’s happy now? The gay couples I know who have finally be allowed to get married. Their happiness should count as much as anyone else’s. To Douthat, though, their happiness is negotiable—or perhaps negligible—as long as other social ills exist.
Douthat’s focus on happiness seems to be a red herring, anyway; that is, if we’re really considering happiness for everyone, not just for straight conservatives, because the pre-Obergefell status quo was hardly a universally happy society, and much of the unhappiness gays have felt derives from their treatment from the establishment now muttering about dispensations. Religious conservatives, including Catholics, have been hostile to gays for centuries and with no small amount of animus. And that animus remains ardent. Don’t just take my word for it. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Catholic author Father James Martin, SJ noted:
No issue brings out so much hatred from so many Catholics as homosexuality. Even after over 25 years as a Jesuit, the level of hatred around homosexuality is nearly unbelievable to me, especially when I think of all of the wonderful LGBT friends I have.
Posted by Fr. James Martin, SJ on Friday, June 26, 2015
Douthat’s message to gays seems to be: “Sure, you want to forge a solemn, life-long commitment with the love of your life, but you shouldn’t do that, because in some mysterious way your making this commitment weakens social commitments overall and leads to more loneliness. Take it from us, the conservatives, the people who have been treating you like criminals and child-molesters for decades.”
(As with many Douthat columns, I get the feeling the problem he’s trying to solve is not who gets to be happy, but rather who gets to decide who gets to be happy, and for Douthat the answer is always patriarchal Christians in positions of authority, not anyone else, regardless of the systematic injustices that prevailed under that earlier, largely white, Christian, male leadership.)
Here’s a different approach: If you want to strengthen social bonds and decrease loneliness, let people who love each get married, and while you’re at it, treat them like full human beings who have the maturity and wisdom to choose their life partners.
And if you want to understand why church attendance in declining, contributing in an empirical way to loss of community in America, take a closer look at the intolerance Father Martin was referring to. Because to Millenials and older Americans who are tired of this relentless demonizing, the Christian Right’s fulminating righteousness, however thrilling to the expounder, is just fool’s gold.
Mad Max: Fuzz-wah Road
In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the mechanized army of villain Immortan Joe is led by a truck loaded with loudspeakers and a heavy metal guitarist suspended in a harness. His anthemic thrashing spurs the army into battle.
The craziest driving I’ve ever seen is on the freeway between Austin and Dallas.
Now I’m picturing Texas blues guitarists suspended above the grill of every racing Cadillac and 18-wheeler, blasting “Love Struck Baby” at 85 mph. When dusk comes, and soft purple light settles over land, the vehicles slow, and the strumming becomes brooding and wistful. On a rural delivery road amid fields of cotton, one might even hear strains of “Pancho and Lefty,” lightly picked on a Martin 12-string.
Meanwhile in downtown San Francisco, Priuses dart past busses, pedestrians, and stalled UPS trucks, their Fair-Trade hemp-clothed musicians, beards trimmed and straw fedoras smartly askew, hunch on hoods, fleetly strumming ukuleles.
Clementa Pickney and the Way to Live
“The most irritating thing about Senator Pinckney,” said State Representative William K. Bowers, a Democrat from his district, “is that when you had a debate he would just come over and pat you on the back and say, ‘Maybe tomorrow you’ll be thinking right.’ He was full of love and full of respect.”
Proust Haiku
Madeleine in tea—
Sweet memories of mama!
Beaucoup de detail.
Why Can’t the Supreme Court Open Their Sessions This Way?
I’m reading Citizens, Simon Schama’s excellent chronicle of the French Revolution. Here’s how the French Parlements, which were regional courts, opened their sessions in the late 18th century:
And this sense of social solidarity between the robins—the judicial nobility of the “robe”—and their co-citizens was played out every November in the elaborate spectactles that greeted their return to sessions from country vacation. For this “red Mass” they would don scarlet robes in place of their habitual back; parade through the streets attended by militia and music; receive the benediction of the clergy for their new year; and only after more grave mummery, shuffling to and fro in the stylized obeisances (often known as the “dance of the Presidents”), would they finally take up their seats.