The So-Called “Innocent Expression” of Jeannette Walls Family History as Memoir of Classroom Text
I am pretty much done with Jeannette Walls “The Glass Castle”. I’ve read the lion’s share, and have a sense of it – stylistically, factually, aesthetically – and feel justified in NOT delving any further into it. To do so, for an experience reader, is gratuitous and downright tortuous. In Scribner’s paper back edition from 2005, the text is a 288 page offering but I would argue that only sheep and lemmings would try to ingest more than say 144 pages. The lady doth protest too much. Central metaphor: glass castle, as in “glass houses” (don’t throw stones there, or shoot pistols), utopia, Thomas Wolfe “Look Homeward Angel”, maybe “Wizard of Oz” (by Baum) –it’s a mishmash of allusions. Maybe I’m a cynic; maybe I’m delusional — of course I have my own inner fallacies and helpful self-mythologizing, who doesn’t? –but it reminds me of the adage about how you have to smoke a bad cigar every once in a while to appreciate a good one. As someone who, for example, read “Education of Henry Adams”, “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”, Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and let us not forget Emerson and Thoreau and their large dollops, ideas, philosophies and morals caked like muddy boots removed from an early spring stroll around Occum Pond, as part of a bachelor’s program twenty five years ago, Walls seems frankly crass, puerile, desperate even. I can see why the project is lost in turnaround vis a vis Hollywood. You can fool some of the people – a couple million, apparently, have bought this book – -some of the time, et cetera. As I read I cannot help but generate a list of other much better works, fiction and nonfiction that cover the same ground much more eloquently and usefully: Tom Robbins “Still Life With Woodpecker “ – other Robbins, he has an uncanny ability to “feel” and describe women, especially in his earlier works, Marlo Morgan’s “Mutant Message Down Under” which was re-labeled “fiction” after initially causing a sensation as a memoir, my friend and former client Dao Strom, a Vietnamese refugee whose short story “Chickens” – about a family of newcomers trying to fit in to rural Northern California communities – won a student prize and then was included in Larry McMurtry’s collection of “Best Western Writings” (alongside, for example, Stegner and Kerouac) – Dao also won the Chicago Tribune’s “Horatio Alger” context –or was that “the Nelson Algren Award” – now you, Jeannette, have me doing it – mythologizing –substituting handy fictions for facts – I think also of the bad Shakespearians in Clemens “Adventures of Huck Fin” (I am referring to Mark Twain, or that’s how he wants us to refer to him, even 100 years after his parents named him Samuel Clemens). I mean “contest” not “context”, if you excuse my stetter.
(It’s like a stutter, and the word “stet” which is printer’s term for “leave it in” – and, as even Sarah Silverman knows, it’s not funny if you have to explain it).
Wow. I cannot imagine that 1,800 people have reviewed this for Amazon:
I have prima facie problems with Walls, so am not very forgiving about the texts itself. I truly do not care how much of this actually happened versus her inventing situations and embarrassing her family members to make a buck, or to try to heal herself somehow by exorcizing her demons in print. And there are numerous cases of people –it’s actually a cliché – -of people being offended by their author friends and family putting too much truth into fiction even. Stegner, my neighbor by the way, for about 20 years, if that lends me any of his authority – he would probably hate my loose, post-modern stylings – famously lost friends in borrowing their stories for some of his fictions. (Although when I met with him about the recently published “Crossing to Safety” he challenged my assertion that it was semi-autobiographical, a swan song – “Mary’s not crippled, clearly, you can see” as a tolendo tolens refutation of the comparison between his actual wife Mary Page Stegner, who was old, and the wheel-chair bound professor’s wife in the book. And I am pulling the pseudo Latin phrase-oid above from a 7th grade logic course I took at Terman Junior High in Palo Alto in about 1976 – I think it means you refute a small part of something and therefore claim to refute the larger part of something else related — I think that crosses through the Copernican arch of “TTGTF” if I cannot exactly quote which of the dreaded 44 boo-boos I for some reason cannot reference directly. I will cede those points ala Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Here are some notes I took from text:
Do the fallacies undermine or weaken the message of the text?
Are fallacies central to the understanding of its message?
Consider Walls, “The Desert” section, pp. 110-111.
Dad (Rex) had lost his job but said he could find more work where “they hadn’t spread lies about him”.
He was fired from three jobs, according to the narrator, and had resorted to doing “odd jobs and day work”. The family “once again…(was) scraping by.”
Jeannette told her teacher that she had forgotten her lunch money but was given lunch anyways when the teacher claimed that someone else had already paid for her. “I didn’t want to push my luck by asking too many questions”
Maureen meanwhile had imaginary friends. “One day she came home in tears, and when I asked her why she was crying, she said she’d gotten into a fight with Suzie Q., one of the imaginary friends.” (111)
The family resorted to shoplifting in order to send the girls to school in better clothes.
“Fourteen dollars for a child’s dress!” said said as we left the store. “It’s highway robbery.”
Rex’s “ingenious” way to make money, by I believe the term is “kiting” checks – he would have Rosemary withdraw from a drive-through window while he was simultaneously at a teller window inside.
Lori said it was “felonious” but Rex said that all he was doing was “outsmarting the fat-cat bank owners who shylocked the common man by charging usurious interest rates” (111). I would like to see the sequel to hear Rex Walls’ attitudes on mortgage derivitives
“Wear innocent expressions”
“wicked grin”
The other thing that “glass castle” provokes in me is my relationship to the sculptor Bruce Beasley, who Palo Alto will know soon enough for his 14-foot high, $200,000 carved granite arch that will grace the front of Mitchell Park library. My girlfriend Terry Acebo Davis, as Palo Alto arts commissioner was the lead negotiator for the tax payers in terms of bringing this masterful work to town – it’s a part of a “One Per Cent for Arts Program” , the library re-do is a $20 Million project, so there is $200,000 for art. I got to know Bruce Beasley during the process – we are both Dartmouth alums on top of that. It turns out that in addition to working in granite, steel (like in front of Stanford’s Kresge for many years, now at Green speaking of libraries), acrylic (in front of California Municipal buildings in Sacramento and Oakland museum) and bronze (a bench, behind Cantor Museum on campus), Beasley very early in his career, circa 1969, developed a glass “bathospeare” a unique and scientifically tempered glass object large enough for a man or woman to descend to the bottom of the ocean – his work was adopted by government research institutions in the United States. Meanwhile, as he nears the end of his memoir Bruce Beasley is donating his compound in West Oakland to the Oakland Museum – that’s more of a “Glass/Acryllic/Brick/Bronze Castle” than anything dreamt up by Jeannette Walls’ conception of her father’s psyche. I am also either aided or weighted by first-hard recollections of Augusten Burroughs another bestselling memoirist in league with Walls. Burroughs I recall –and I would never buy such a thing, I read parts of it – my lions-share notion, above – from a girlfriend’s copy – wrote something called “Running With Scissors” about his, sob, sob, really, really difficult, sob, sob, time finding himself, sniff, in the bid bag world. Before I became a 48-year-old part-time literature student at America’s top community college, I was briefly if not a fulltime then a freelance copywriter in San Francisco’s North Beach ad agency community – talk about your subculture of self-mythologizing Barbary coast hedonists!!!!!!!—overlapping with said Burroughs. His big ad was “Before and Afrin” about nasal relief. I meanwhile had something about “Turn Your Car Engine Into A Washing Machine”, about Chevron’s new additive. Actually Burroughs was a highly paid phenom and I was a wanna-be with a college degree. (Again, maybe I am self-rationalizing and spitting sour grapes…). I don’t think I met Augusten – if that’s his real name? – but I distinctly recall my former high school classmate Amy Quermann (that was her real name, sadly; before she married Frank Kull and had twins. Amy Kull if you will) saying what an unsufferable jerk he was. They were both at Ketchum. Mostly packaged goods. (but sadly, not Heinz Ketchup agency, accept maybe in my someday I will write a semi-real semi-tough, memoir about advertising and will take such “liberties”. I will have my Ketchup at Ketchum, just for yuck). She worked with him and her vehemence left its Mark on me.
This is probably beyond the pale but the reason I missed class on Friday was because I was driving a Mentawai anthropologist from Stanyan Park Hotel in San Francisco to Cantor Museum at Stanford and then on to SFO so that he could try to correct the official record about a carving that one of his fellow tribesman made, of a gibbons monkey, in wood; Stanford claims the piece was made in the 1930s but my friend – I call him Jun Tulious – had researched the case to learn that the actual carver made the piece in the 1980s. His work included a thesis that the market – capitalism, the art market and in this case, of Walls, the book world – felt pressure or emitted pressure which caused people to change their story to try to add value. Stanford paid more for this admittedly marvelous work of art, of human handicraft because a dealer told them it was older and more sacred. I felt the expediency and opportunity of fighting in real time the fallacy of curation of this Mentawai monkey reasonably displaced, with all due respect, the opportunity to read or argue with Walls’ words.
footies:
Nicholas
Copernicus the dude who thought sun was stationary ie the dude before Galileo. By extension I am saying a Copernican arch is bogus.
outtro my good friend John McCrea “Sheep Go To Heaven, Goats Go to Hell”
edit to add, two years later: I stumbled onto this as I was looking for more info about George Packer’s upcoming appearances in Bay Area, the teacher’s description of her unease with my presence in her class and the fact that I mention her six times in posts during that time plus this rant about the text itself; she may also be conflating some things I turned in in class with these posts. I also recall that one of the students I mention told me not to mention her again in my blog. This is pretty random, the way my ideas jump around, but I stand by it. Esteemed teacher:
My most pressing concern about blogs, however, has to do with the question of audience and voice. Benson and Reyman note that many students “reported that online writing is more like talking to a ‘best friend’ than talking to a public audience” (20). This point touches upon an experience I had a couple of years ago with a student who was an avid blogger. This startling experience effectually discouraged me from exploring blogs as a pedagogical tool until now. This student was a middle-aged man from Palo Alto, a political activist who maintained a blog to express his views of politics, literature, music, art, and other interests. He was taking my English 1B class because he was interested in the class theme of “Inequality and the American Dream,” but not because he needed credit for the class. As the class read Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle (http://www.amazon.com/The-Glass-Castle-A-Memoir/dp/074324754X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382390964&sr=8-1&keywords=the+glass+castle) –usually a popular book with students–, this student became enraged by what he saw as the immoral and fabricated story told by Walls, and he posted a rant on his blog about the memoir. The rant was not based on close textual analysis, but rather on the student’s speculations about Walls’ psychological condition, none of which could be corroborated by evidence in the text itself. Something about this text deeply irked the student, and he used his blog as a forum to air his many grievances.
While under other circumstances I would not be concerned with a students’ writing on his own blog, the fact that this post discussed me by name and revealed details of my course to the general public made me distinctly uncomfortable. I had a tense discussion with this student after reading the blog post (which he had voluntarily shared with me), and although he seemed to understand my concerns, he professed that he could write whatever he wanted on his own blog, and he would not delete this post. This experience exposed me to the murky and sometimes unclear boundaries between public and private writing, and between academic and personal viewpoints. It also showed me what might happen when a student discusses academic material in the informal space of the blogosphere, a space that this student used to express his views in an angry, unfiltered, and unrestrained way. So, as I keep this week’s readings about blogging in mind and prepare to assign a course blog in my own classes, I wonder how we as instructors should address those students who might use their writing on a class blog to create unruly, even angry posts based on speculation rather than textual analysis. How do we strike a balance between creativity and freedom on the one hand, and adherence to academic conventions and propriety on the other? How do we keep freedom of self-expression from devolving into uncritical ranting? I hope our discussion in class can shed light on these questions.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 