After a couple days off, I am battling a small case of writer’s anxiety. This will be my first conscious effort to “write through it,” or to “write to make meaning.”
Gian Pagnucci opens the chapter “Telling Your Own Story” with a bit of his own story: his first comic book purchase. Comics serve as a repeating theme in the chapter, serving to tie together different periods of his life. Pagnucci alternates between his storyteller voice and his more professorial voice. Each time his revisits his own life, he tells another story related to comics: his love of reading as a child, his superhero moment climbing a wall in college, his decision to pass along his love of comics to the next generation. Rather than just explain how he gave a twenty dollar bill to an anonymous boy for a comic book box purchase, Pagnucci slowly builds up to that moment by using stories to reinforce how important comic books were in his life. The effect is that when readers come to the climax, they are emotionally invested in Pagnucci as a character. In a sense, they live the moment along with him.
Ondaatje’s piece was a bit harder to unravel. The most noticeable thing is that there are multiple genres at work here. The piece opens with a parenthetical note in italics, a sort of stage note for the rest of the work. Then, readers encounter a short poem from the perspective of Sallie Chisum about her house. It closes with Sallie’s admission that she was frightened the first time Billy the Kid came to visit. What follows is the account of another voice, this time in prose, presumably belonging to Billy the Kid. The voice seems erratic, as if the speaker has undergone some traumatic psychological event. On page 32, a hint: “After burning my legs in the fire and I came to their house…”
There are a lot of questions left by Ondaatje, and this white space creates mystery. The possibly “unreliable narrator” reminds me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper. The voice of the narrator observes an obsessive amount of detail, the detailed observations of the immobile or otherwise impaired. I can remember sick days, lying in bed and noticing the dust dancing in the strange angles of light, the places where the paint from the ceiling did not quite meet the paint from the walls. The idle mind, it seems, finds other ways to be occupied, and one way is though intense observation. The way Ondaatje writes this section gives me the impression of such an idle mind.
Gian Pagnucci opens the chapter “Telling Your Own Story” with a bit of his own story: his first comic book purchase. Comics serve as a repeating theme in the chapter, serving to tie together different periods of his life. Pagnucci alternates between his storyteller voice and his more professorial voice. Each time his revisits his own life, he tells another story related to comics: his love of reading as a child, his superhero moment climbing a wall in college, his decision to pass along his love of comics to the next generation. Rather than just explain how he gave a twenty dollar bill to an anonymous boy for a comic book box purchase, Pagnucci slowly builds up to that moment by using stories to reinforce how important comic books were in his life. The effect is that when readers come to the climax, they are emotionally invested in Pagnucci as a character. In a sense, they live the moment along with him.
Ondaatje’s piece was a bit harder to unravel. The most noticeable thing is that there are multiple genres at work here. The piece opens with a parenthetical note in italics, a sort of stage note for the rest of the work. Then, readers encounter a short poem from the perspective of Sallie Chisum about her house. It closes with Sallie’s admission that she was frightened the first time Billy the Kid came to visit. What follows is the account of another voice, this time in prose, presumably belonging to Billy the Kid. The voice seems erratic, as if the speaker has undergone some traumatic psychological event. On page 32, a hint: “After burning my legs in the fire and I came to their house…”
There are a lot of questions left by Ondaatje, and this white space creates mystery. The possibly “unreliable narrator” reminds me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper. The voice of the narrator observes an obsessive amount of detail, the detailed observations of the immobile or otherwise impaired. I can remember sick days, lying in bed and noticing the dust dancing in the strange angles of light, the places where the paint from the ceiling did not quite meet the paint from the walls. The idle mind, it seems, finds other ways to be occupied, and one way is though intense observation. The way Ondaatje writes this section gives me the impression of such an idle mind.
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