English 450b                        Daily Themes Week 3 Assignments            January 29, 2013

 1)  Style involves a way of doing or saying things that ends up expressing aspects of the self.  There are all sorts of styles, and anything we do or say is likely to convey a specific sense of style.  Write a theme about a style you admire or, at least, find interesting and worthy of description and reflection.  It could be a way of talking or dressing, of singing or cooking, of dancing or painting.  Focus on one person’s way of doing that thing.  Be aware of the style your own theme conveys.  In other words, write in a way that resonates with the style you are describing.  It can be a version of the style you choose as your subject, or it may be very different and contrast with your subject (possibly for ironic effect).

Dervilla enters a room like a spring breeze. First, you hear the hum of a classic Simon and Garfunkel tune growing louder and louder as she nears, the click-clacking of heels conducting each verse, her honey-rich voice a delicious score for conversation. Then, the smell, reminiscent of dewy four-leaf clovers in the sunrise. You cannot help but be reminded of dizzy days of youth spent rolling down grassy knolls, returning home touting grass stains with pride. You might not even notice her when she slinks in, hips swaying to the beat of her song, lids drawn lazily low. The flow of her raggedy peach dress reminds you of a documentary on the 60’s you watched with your friends while high the other night. The curvature of her lithe limbs disappear and reappear with every billowing movement. You realize you’re staring and make an effort to study your cocktail.

She picks and chooses her company with care, but you wouldn’t know it. She lands before you as if by accident. When she talks to you, the discussion rambles without aim. This scares you. She doesn’t seem to notice your nervous laugh. She’s too busy thinking about the beautiful lilt of your voice, the particular shape of your pupils, the way you wag your eyebrows to punctuate every sentence. She tells you this. You don’t know what to say. She smiles, all teeth, and turns, her loose waves soaring gloriously behind her. She wanders on to the next unsuspecting partygoer, and you stare, wondering blandly what has just happened.

2)  Find a passage of prose from some academic book.  Replace all the nouns and verbs with whatever you would like that isn’t academic prose—words drawn from daily experiences.  Replace whatever adjectives or modifiers you would like. All the rest—articles, prepositions, etc—keep the same.  Also, keep the order of the parts of the speech consistent.

This dwarf leopard enjoyed a hermetic lifestyle, demonstrating its thoughtful demeanor and utter disinterest in companionship. Few ocelots ventured through the lush forest floor that was his home, but the odd adventurer (not from around this neck of the woods) happened upon his territory from time to time. He never allowed them to stay for long. If the booby traps he had set up didn’t deter the intruder, a hard swipe to the face usually worked. There were a number of dwarf leopards with the tell-tale scar, always across the left cheek, roaming the dense thickets of South America.

He had been the only kitten in his litter. He was smaller than most ocelot kittens. His mother, even more disinterested in having company than he was, limped away from the runt as soon as she could. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want to spend time with her, either.

There was one companion. She did not last long. He courted her for nearly two weeks before she relented. He set up a rocky bluff for her to deliver her litter, packing it with dense leaves and delicious game. One day, bird in maw, he returned to their humble home to find her missing. She never returned. He heard she ran off with a huskier ocelot. He wasn’t very fond of her anyway.

Tonight, he rests beneath the dewy foliage. He licks his lips. Sleep looms near. But then he hears the rustle of leaves, not too far away. Readying his claws, he lopes off into the distance, looking forward to terrorizing yet another hapless stranger.

3) Take a look at the excerpt from Hemingway’s “End of Something.”  Using the present tense, depict an exchange (observed or invented) between two people who have different ways of talking.  You might make the difference glaring or subtle or somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.  What are the features of their respective verbal styles?   What do those styles imply about their different perspectives and experiences?  What do and don’t they understand in what each other is saying? What if any adjustments to each other’s way of talking do they make in the course of conversation?  Make the conversation a dramatic encounter not only between two people, but two styles.  It’s also an opportunity to use narrative and dialogue analytically. Restriction: don’t make this a conversation between romantic partners or between a parent and child.

            “Thank you for your time, Rosa. We greatly appreciate the time and effort it must have taken for you to navigate. We are a ways away, and during rush hour, for heaven’s sake! And in this rain! I apologize, Rosa, I really do.”

            “No. Ah…not a problem.”

            “In any case. Now then. Remind me, what brings you here today?”

            “Er, ah, the card.”

            “The card?”

            “I, um, was walking down the Houstown Street yesterday and, ahm, excuse me, hm,  um, well, you see, then, you know, the card.”

            “Would you mind elaborating? I apologize. You see, it is quite early, and I am having a bit of trouble following your story.”

            “Well, hm. I was, ah, walking down the street. Right? And, and, and,  I saw the card. You know, ah, on, on, on, the ground. Well, actually, er, I stepped. Um. I stepped on it. And, ah, I kept walking. But, then, ah, then. Seconds later, for some, ah, for some reason, I, ah, turned.”

            “You turned?’           

            “Yes. I, ah, I turned around. You know, to see – to see, what it was. That I had, ah, that I had stepped on.”

            “I see.”

            “So, er, ah. I picked it up. And I saw, I saw the address. To, you see, to the house. My house. I had, er, just left. But then I remembered, ah, that I had, erm, forgotten a book at the, ah, house.”

            “Interesting. A book?”

            “Oh, ah, I was going to a, ah, erm, a meeting. Yes, a meeting. For, ah, my book, my book club. And I needed the book.”

            “Hm. What book?”

“Ah…Hemingwow. Catch-23.”

“I adore that book. Why did you turn around?”

            “But, ah, I needed to go back.”

            “That must have taken quite some time.”

            “Just an hour. Of, ah, walking. I didn’t want to, to, to, waste money on a cab. You know how, ah, how, well, how much they can, er, ah, cost.”

            “What did you find in the house?”

            “The body.”

            “Where was it?”

            “Sitting in, ah, the chair. You know, er, the living room chair. She was, erm, reading, my ah, book. But er, there was, ah, blood. On my book. So, ah, I needed to leave. Er. The bookstore. I, ah, went to the bookstore.”

            “Strange reaction.”

            “I was, ah, frightened.”

            “But the ladies tell me you made it to the book club.”

            “Ah, yes.”

            “And you had a wonderful evening together, you ladies.”

            “Er.”

            “Rosa, you can stop now. We know that you are lying. We have it on tape. There was no card. But there was a video. And we have you on security tape. You strangled her. You murdered Mrs. Gluck at approximately four-forty-five P.M. on October 27^th, 1997. It is time to go now, Rosa. You’re under arrest. ”           

4) Using plain, ordinary words, write a theme about someone or something you love passionately.  Use the tension between strength (and possibly complexity) of feeling and simplicity of expression.  Let particularity, precision, understatement, and implication convey emotional power.   

He might not have done it very well, but Clark Kent was brilliant to keep his superhuman identity a secret. Superpowers can be dangerous. All you have to do is look at our forgotten superpower. It’s something that we do without thinking. It is pretty miraculous. The ability to create music is one of the biggest bonuses of being human. This is, at least, what I was taught in third grade, and how I have since regarded my capacity to generate ribbons of sound. You can make the ribbons bold, soft, subtle, monotonous, repetitive, erratic…whatever you feel, you can do it. You can invent and distribute noises that no human before you has dared share before. You can change other people’s lives with music, and without ever having to meet them. Wilco will never know how many days they turned around for me. The anonymity is the best part. To be in a sea of humans at a concert, hearing the same ribbons, wrapping your own sounds around the ribbons in an abandoned collective. 

The funniest part is the money. It is sad and absurd that humans monetize the simplest, sweetest things about life. Like singing. It has become a business – celebrities invent entire personas and backgrounds in order to thrive in the music-making business. I like to think of the Beyonce’s and the Mariah Carey’s as they were at age five or six. They started singing in their room, alone. Perhaps on a piano bench, plucking out random keys. They started alone. Singing to themselves, they felt a rush of energy, the activation of their superpower. Eventually, someone overheard them and rushed to share their superpowers with the rest of the world. And make money. Lots and lots of money. The five-year-old music lover disappeared, replaced by a world-renowned diva with a penchant for globetrotting. The innocent love of singing sucked dry. I bet they can’t even sing for fun anymore, at least without thinking of where their singles are climbing on the charts.

Sometimes it is better to keep your superpowers a secret.

5) The French writer Raymond Queneau wrote a book entitled Exercises in Style in which he represented the same basic event in ninety-nine different ways.  Here is the anecdote:

On the S bus, at rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with it.  People getting off.  The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him.  He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past.  A sniveling tone which is meant to be aggressive.  When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour of Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.

Write the event in two different ways—once as a comedy and once as a tragedy (even perhaps operatic in its scope).

            He glances around the S bus anxiously. Everyone is anxious. It is rush hour, after all. But this chap, mid-twenties, looks especially anxious. He repeatedly removes and examines his felt hat, running a hand along the cord, before putting it back on again. The neck is cartoonishly elongated. A young man – uniformed, Hemingway under his arm, he looks as if he is late to class – studies the anxious fellow. His palms appear to be sweating. Are his shoulders shaking? Before he can investigate further, the anxious-seeming man wishes the scholar haste to his grave. He punctuates the threat with a grin. The young man’s jaw drops, and he rushes away to a vacant seat.

            The anxious man leaves a package on the bus at the next stop, and hurries along. There are sweat stains in the armpits of his grey cotton T-shirt. The bus did not make it past the next block.

            Two hours later, he meets his boss in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He feels accomplished. He gestures to the extra button on his overcoat, demonstrating how he hid the device without drawing suspicion. “You ought t get an extra button in your overcoat,” he encourages his boss. His boss does not seem convinced.

...

            I’m late to work. I got on the wrong bus, the S bus. I thought it was the T, or maybe the P. Either would have worked fine. Just fine. But, thinking about that deliverable I need to make up for on account of the leather-mining fiasco in Antigua that got in the way yesterday, I got on the wrong bus. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

            I picked up the wrong hat. Off the hook, I mean. I went into the Starbucks, put my hat down. And picked up this ridiculous felt hat with a cord. This is what happens without your morning coffee, I suppose. I need to start injecting myself with caffeine in the morning.

            People walk on and off the bus. I’m on the aisle seat, the worst seat. People always bump into my legs. They are too long. Like a grasshopper’s. This one guy keeps knocking into my legs. Normally I can ignore it, but today is not the day. After about the twentieth time he steps on my newly-shined shoes, I turn to him and tell him to back off.  I have a cold. My voice sounds especially nasal today. The man scurries away. Good riddance.

            Two hours later, I’ve given up. I meet my boyfriend in the Cour of Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat,” I declare. “It’s what all the dames in Paris are doing these days. It’s haute, haute, haute. Trust me, you’ll be more stylish than any of those hobnobs at the office.”