With Christmas just a few days away, I found a list of the “10 best Autobiographies to inspire you” if you want to keep reading great books about life writing.
Give yourselves (or a loved one) the magical gift of a book of this genre to expand the knowledge we have achieved during this semester.
http://www.amazon.com/10-Best-Autobiographies-inspire-you/lm/R729QH07VH9L2
Hope you find here something you like.
Donald Henry Gaskins, a serial murderer, let Wilton Earle, and author and journalist, into his deepest thoughts of conceiving and materializing the killings of innocent girls just because he thought he had an inner voice that used to tell him that was the way to go. With a graphic description of the crimes, Earle put together the book “Final Truth, the Autobiography of a Serial Killer”, telling the story with Gaskins own words. Gaskins was convicted and later, executed in the electrical chair, to only confess, hours before, that he killed almost 110 girls until he entered jail.
His passionate explanations and lack of remorse, has made this book appealing not only for its forensic side but for the narrative of the events, that Gaskins told Earle to shape his story and later his autobiography. By the end of the book, Gaskins not only is not ashamed by his actions but he is also proud of what he has achieved. The reason he accepted to be part of Earle’s project was to let the readers know that he wasn’t asking for forgiveness but for understanding, which lead me to start my research by these hypothesis: Do the readers of these books feel empathetic with serial killers? Is there any way that this autobiography can change the feeling about a murder?
In The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing we see great societal efforts both intellectual and coarse through the eyes of a child who is a functional tool in those efforts. Octavian is pure object, existing solely for the advancement of a greater good he has no voice in defining. Using Octavian’s perspective brings this nightmare world into the reader’s present moment.
An earlier example of a society served by the suffering of a child is Ursula Le Guin’s 1973 short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, sourced here online from the San Diego State University. The brevity of Le Guin’s piece adds to its impact as the awareness and complicity of the citizens is revealed and justified. This is not life writing as we have defined it so far, but rather place writing. With no intention of trashing anyone’s holiday spirits, I highly recommend The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. You will not be able to read it without reflecting on the hidden suffering that makes our standard of life possible.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is also available in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
“A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ by Marjorie G. Perloff
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/perloff.html
Perloff analyzes the The Bell Jar while focusing on Plath’s choices for developing the character of Ester Greenwood. She discusses Esther’s struggle for identity as one that struggles between the “inner self” and the “false-self” as termed by R.D Laing in The Divided Self. Perloff discusses how Plath’s protagonist embodies the struggles we face daily in life, the struggle to become one’s own self rather than what others expect.
Heaven’s Coast is the perfect example of the writer’s (Mark Doty) desire of putting in words all his sentiments in a certain period of time. In this case, from the moment Wally, his partner, is diagnosed as an HIV Positive and later as a patient with AIDS, the reading is a mixture of feelings and his book, presented as a memoir, displays not only love, but also compassion, rage, sadness and impotency as the days goes by with a clear, but not imminent outcome: death.
As this subject is very hard to handle, Doty puts reality and romanticism in his words to approach it. He achieves the difficult task to make the reader feel his sorrow and loss, plenty enough to show how it is so difficult to let a loved one go, but to survive with almost any energy and a little will to live without the reason he lived for in the first place. With this in mind, is Doty evidencing his tiredness and almost necessity to this hard situation to end? Did he already make his mind around with the idea of being without Wally after the last months that were hard and unbearable?
The ‘refuges’ as Doty calls the houses/apartments where they lived, are the essence of the couple’s closeness and profound love for each other. Each of them had a different style and was described by Doty with enormous detail to let the reader feel through his words why they were so important in Mark and Wally’s relationship. But as the memoir develops, Doty takes a different approach in every one of them. Does this mean that his memories are changed by grief before and after Wally died? Does the change of scenery was needed to replenish the couple’s faith of avoiding the reality and surpass death?
As Doty presents the importance of taking advantage of every day since Wally was diagnosed, he asks what they would do with this time life has given to them. The memories he described, felt, as they were not only precious but also as normal as possible. In the memoir, Doty insists that he made Wally’s almost unaware of his concern of losing him which leads to an extreme isolation when he was out for work. Does the memoir represent the feelings of Marc Doty when he was away, two days a week, when Wally was decaying? Does his heart and mind needed to be strengthen (with his alone time) to be there for Wally physically and emotionally when he was back?
The importance of the moment of detachment, when Wally dies and he is cremated with only the quilt Mark Doty had sewed is a message of how the two of them were bonded forever. He describes how difficult was for him to let his partner go but it is how he describes the arrival of his ashes, in a cold box, when the reader realizes how difficult and somber this moment was for him. Doty tries to explain his desolation to the reader using common language and even asking questions, as he was looking for an answer from the reader. This memoir was written a few weeks after Wally’s death, which means that Doty’s feelings were still fresh and grieve was becoming relief. It’s Doty trying to release his inner sentiments by writing this memoir? Was it to soon? Or it was imperative to present to the world the difficult time an AIDS patient (partners, family and friends) goes through to achieve awareness and consciousness by society?
Mark Doty expressed: “Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are”. These words represent the main goal of Doty’s memoir. Wally’s death was not necessary but it helped Doty to really appreciate the relationship he had with him and over all, he met a different Wally in each of the stages of his illness and after all the suffering and misery, they loved each other no matter what. Is this work a way to present a common situation, the loss of a loved one, as authentic as possible, with memories that can be shared but not felt?
We value truth and authenticity in the stories we hear and in the stories that are told about us. We celebrate an ever more connected world, and point to the millions of people participating in online social networks worldwide as proof of our innate desire for community. But it isn’t real. The “friends” I have on Facebook are not the flesh and blood people I talk to, have meals with, confide in. Scrolling through my newsfeed is like reading a never-ending Christmas letter from that cousin with the perfect family. I see pictures of fabulous vacations, adorable pets, and joyous gatherings. I read a
stream of witty comments and assume they flowed from the keyboard in an unedited series of clicks. I’m left feeling slightly boring and unenthusiastic. So, after much agonizing over how it will be received and by whom, I post a status update and check compulsively to see if and how often it is “liked.” It’s exhausting and unsatisfying. And yet, I am compelled to keep going back. Similarly to parallel play by babies who don’t know how to interact yet – I build my tower of status updates over here and you build your tower over there. It’s all performance and voyeurism, not communication, and most certainly not community.
Why, then, the insistence on the label? Is feeling part of a communal whole so important that we will fight to keep up appearances? Are we really members of the communities we claim? What does that mean? Does getting on a mailing list make one a member of a community? Is it when you go to a meeting? What if you don’t volunteer for anything? Are we, by virtue of our identities, members of certain communities, or does membership require interaction? And what does this mean for life writing? Do we tell our stories differently online than we do in person or on paper? These are the questions I’m considering for my final paper.
I’m reading Alone Together, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT as background material, and what I’m coming to believe is that our embrace of the digital as real is a frightening departure from human interaction that has grown apace with technology’s ability to provide us with a digital escape. In her discussion of robotics, Sherry Turkle writes that even the most primitive 1980’s Tamagochi was able to lead children to think of it as a creature in pain rather than a broken toy “…not because of [the toys’] sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they invoke.” (44)
As a parent I was frequently warned that loss of creativity goes hand in hand with a decrease in imaginative play, but I wonder now if the problem is not even more corrosive to our human relationships. Turkle is primarily interested in the Robotic Moment and our human readiness to replace human interaction with time spent with companion robots. I believe that diminished value given to the authentic, the living, prepares us for online deception, which impacts the stories we tell online about ourselves and others and the way we tell them.
Additionally, Turkle’s study of children’s interaction with robotic toys and pets shows that the children incorporate the robots into their family narrative, identifying the My Real Baby toy as a sibling,
and experiencing anxiety and rivalries similar to real life families. Is it too big a leap to envision a time when biographies and autobiographies include “relationships” with robots as a matter of course, and to see “Facebook friends” as a step along the way?
It only dawned on me, as I opened my backpack and saw my tattered copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, that it would be immensely fitting that I blog on the text I have become so familiar with over the last couple of months. As a 7th grade reading and writing teacher, I have chosen to add Maus this year to my curriculum this year.
Maus is a Holocaust memoir written by Art Spiegelman in the form of a graphic novel. Being a graphic novel, it has a great a
ppeal to my students. It has also fostered their curiosity in learning that a memoir can be read in the form of graphic novel. The lines that separate genre have become blurred to them, and they are left very puzzled and asking very poignant questions (I love it).
Maus serves a vehicle for Spiegelman to unfold his father’s story of being a Polish POW who was later sent to Auschwitz with the rest of Spiegelman’s family. At the same time there is a second storyline, as Spiegelman tells in own story, pictured throughout the chapters interviewing his father. Spiegelman broaches the topic of the mental breakdown he suffered as a young adult, derived from the issues associated with growing up a child of Holocaust survivors. The same depression inherited from his mother, that causes her to take her own life.
What makes Maus even more engaging is Spiegelman’s use of anthropomorphism. It has been speculated by some critics that Spiegelman’s own inability to comprehend the events was the inspiration for this method. Being natural sworn enemies, Spiegelman depicts the Nazi’s as cats and the Jews as mice (Maus being mouse in German).
It is an engaging page-turner that displays the horrors of the Holocaust through a new lens. At a later time I will follow up my post with my students own critqiues on the novel as they dive in to their studies.
from outsmartmagazine.com
One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, Keep Your Wives Away from Them is an anthology of queer Jewish women’s writing about their personal journeys with Judaism and queerness. One of my best friend’s sisters wrote a piece for this work, which is how I heard about it. Therein lies one of the things that’s so magical about a lot of community-specific life writing: you learn about it through your community and it comes to validate so much of your or your chosen family’s lives.
Too often, narrative space is dominated by straight cis men, and too often in queer communities – perhaps especially Jewish queer communities, of which I am a part – gay cis men dominate both narrative space and social space. Keep Your Wives Away from Them – a bone-chillingly powerful title for anyone whose family’s (or whose chosen families’ non-chosen families) have heard this warning from rabbis and listened – breaks open an opportunity for queer Jewish women to, for once, occupy the fore in the narrative.
Because of my position in life, I can’t know for sure if reading this would be accessible to people without intimate knowledge of queer Jewish worlds, though everything in it is incredibly written. However, I imagine that the strength of the writing alone can open proverbial doors to Shabbos meals and first hugs even for people whose life experiences don’t include an understanding of the power of these things.
