it's the final countdown

In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep/ I write conclusions, and MLA bibliographies

Obstacles were surmounted. Ideas were comprehended. Hearts were possessed.

Enjoy.

reference maven

For the past five months, I have worked at the Humanities Reference Desk on the fifth floor of the library. I am uniquely qualified to find general reference works, because I am supposed to help other people find them.

From the library home page, I went to the drop-down subject guides, and selected English Literatures.

From there, under References, I selected American Literature. I clicked on Gale's Literature Resource Center for Contemporary Authors. I put in Wallace Stegner (shocking, I know) and got a rather extensive biography of him.

I knew most the biographical stuff, and could find that on Wikipedia, frankly. It was the critical analysis which I found more useful. I searched for "ism"  and got environmentalism and individualism. I was able to organically incorporate this quotation about his overall work:

Although admitting that Stegner's fiction is "almost invariably set in the western United States," Richard H. Simpson of the Dictionary of Literary Biography believed that his "main region is the human spirit... Each [novel] explores a question central in Stegner's life and in American culture: How does one achieve a sense of identity, permanence, and civilization--a sense of home-- in a place where rootlessness and discontinuity dominate?"

I am glad that I can use what I teach others to do. The subject guides are well-designed, and Robert Means, the subject librarian, is an affable fellow.

lit coma: Crossing to Safety (a review)

selfies in the computer lab

I spent the weekend in a kind of novel-reading coma. I was deeply offended that my copy of Crossing to Safety was two days late. So, rather than waiting til the plane ride to Wisconsin, as I had intended, I jumped into this thing like a chocoholic does into a See's store.

Aaaaaaagh this book is so good. There is my inarticulate, primal response. It just blindsides me with its ... language. Its imagery. Its believability. And its characters!

Charity Lang is not only one of my favorite characters in literature, she is perhaps the one I most relate to. Some may think that this is not particularly flattering to myself; however, it is true. She is beautiful and bossy, intelligent and controlling, idealistic and yet power-hungry. I am all of these things. Her need to acknowledge what a fun time she is having, in order to have fun? Yep. Her attempts to shape her husband into what she wants him to be? Indeed. Even her childrearing theories are remarkably like my own (untested) ones.

Not only was reading this book an unparalleled pleasure for me; not only did I make a new friend in my new locale who I think will pretty much become Larry Morgan to my Charity (a close, platonic relationship between two married couples) due to commenting on his review on Goodreads; I also found evidence for my argument!

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life. p. 254

Ding. Ding. Ding. Thank you for writing my paper for me. ;)

Whichever work you have chosen to analyze, I highly recommend reading other works by the same author. Not only is it fun, it can help you understand the author a lot better.

Searching for a Good Title

In case you can't tell, I enjoy creative, provocative titles. At the risk of being obscure or pretentious, a good, eye-catching title can really "sell" your story or essay.

I like my titles to either be clever, explanatory, or (ideally) both. Looking at the printouts of our blog posts (which I was sure to gather in because I wanted to read people's comments!), I have settled on

Surmounted, Comprehended, Possessed

I like this title because it is a direct allusion to Stegner's essay "At Home in the Fields of the Lord," and I think it also provides a good outline for my paper. I've been wrestling with the ideas of author as observer or builder, the neurological underpinnings of memory, and the text of Recapitulation itself. These are nice punchy verbs which really encapsulate these ideas of three ways Wallace Stegner, his avatar Bruce Mason, and we, as readers, interact with text.

1. We surmount it. We get up above it: in my sketch, I drew the reader in the Salt Lake foothills with a telescope. Literature broadens our horizons.
2. We comprehend it. I have absolutely loved reading essays about how we interact with literature, from Borges to William James to Oscar Wilde (a post on the latter soon, as his ideas are important to this essay, although it's hard to imagine two men more unlike each other than Stegner and Wilde. ;-) ).
3. We possess it. This is that personal connection Dr. Burton's always hounding us about. The idea that great literature does, indeed, make us better: or at the very minimum, shape who we are.

I will spend roughly two pages on each concept. About a page of textual exposition, and another page proving the point argumentatively. Embedded in all three claims is a Cause/Effect argument. 

I'm more excited to draft this thing, the last paper of my college career. And it all began with a good title!

fêted artiste

This is my attempt to engage with the following Stegner quotation:

Salt Lake City is an easy town to know. You can see it all. Lying in a great bowl valley, it can be surmounted and comprehended and possessed wholly as few cities can. … The streets are marked by a system so logical that you can instantly tell not merely where you are but exactly how far you are from anywhere else … Looking into the blank walls of cities … breeds things in people that eventually have to be lanced.

Do you agree with me that the reader is the observer? Or do you think the author is the observer? Weigh in in the comments!

my quote bank

Reading Salt Lake City with Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City, Robert C. Steensma, available in the HBLL

At Home in the Fields of the Lord
A Gentile in New Jerusalem: certainly I was. Salt Lake City is a divided concept, a complex idea. To the devout it is more than a place, it is a way of life, a corner of the materially realizable heaven; its soil is held together by the roots of the family and the cornerstones of the temple.¹

Salt Lake City is an easy town to know. You can see it all. Lying in a great bowl valley, it can be surmounted and comprehended and possessed wholly as few cities can. … The streets are marked by a system so logical that you can instantly tell not merely where you are but exactly how far you are from anywhere else … Looking into the blank walls of cities … breeds things in people that eventually have to be lanced.²

In Salt Lake I wrote my first short story and my first novel. In Salt Lake I fell in love for the first time and was rudely jilted for the first time and recovered for the first time.³

Because I believe in the influence of places on personalities, I think it somehow important that certain songs we sang as high school or college students in the twenties still mean particular and personal things. “I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover” is all tied up with the late-dusk smell of October on Second South and Twelfth East. … “Exactly Like You” means the carpet, the mezzanine, the very look and texture and smell, of the Temple Square Hotel.⁴

Recapitulation
Progress had been at work on it. Old buildings had been replaced by newer, taller ones, and something drastic had happened to Main Street. Its sidewalks had been widened well out into the former traffic lanes, and the streets narrowed to half its width. … The effect was like the Soviet exhibit at a World’s Fair, something created by Heroic Workers. Merely human activites would be diminished on such a street.⁵

It Is the Love of Books I Owe Them
I am coming along Thirteenth East on my way to an eight o’clock class. It is a marvelous morning – it is always a marvelous morning, whether the air is hazy with autumn and the oakbrush on the Wasatch has gone bronze and gold, or whether the chestnut trees along the street are coned with blossoms … I am enveloped in a universal friendliness. I turn at the drugstore on Second South and start uphill toward the Park Building at the head of the U drive.^6
1p. 62
² 63-64
³ 66
⁴ 68
⁵ 12
⁶ 16

Can he give her up, or postpone her, perhaps for years? Can he cut himself away from everything familiar and secure—friends, job, tennis, Sundays when the whole hard week uncoils and stretches?
The answer is that he probably can, for he is tacitly planning to. But September is a long way off. Decision, though he has to sign his name to it within a few days, will not produce its consequences for three months. 
Recapitulation, p. 166

"Do not speak ill of society ... only people who can't get in do that."

I got a total of 13 comments over four posts on my thesis.

"S.A.M." said

5. Cause + Effect - As a pitch for an article to be published in Salt Lake magazine, find real locations/businesses that match Stegner's false but plausible locations, and compare the real life story of that location/business. That would be interesting reading, and ultimately advertisable.

I love this idea, and have concluded that I will ultimately have to pursue two parallel papers, one more formal and analytic, the other more crafted to sell papes.

I posted a link to "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?," and got two responses:

Courtesy of Following Day by Day

Rachel said,

staking my claim

Phase Two of The Pitch is here! We've convened around our newsroom table, bounced ideas off fellow intrepid reporters like Kirsten over at the drama desk, and we're up against deadlines set by our tough, but fair editor, Mr. Burton.

"I want to see your story ideas, and I want to see them yesterday!"

Just add glasses.

All right, all right, here are my five Stegnerian claims. (Thanks to my cubicle-mate Dawn for giving me a good template to draw from: though I may be a prodigious note-taker, I rely primarily on my great memory, whether that's at trivia night, to impress first dates, or recall obscure rhetorical terms. My favorite scene in Earnest was Algernon taking one look at the bills and ripping them up. I've been known to do the same. I sometimes want to do it with my stacks of notebooks.)

pitching a story

I'd like to approach crafting a thesis the way I'd approach pitching a magazine story. I've written for websites, school newspapers, and school magazines. Typically, when you have an idea for a story, you brainstorm ideas, scrap the bad ones, and then dump your thoughts about the best two or three. After outlining what you want to say, then you can fill in the material with quotations from interviews, photography, and typeset it, and you're good to go!

Additionally, I have been contemplating a project to submit to Salt Lake magazine for a few months now, so if it's good enough, I may pitch it for real.

The post which I most want to elaborate is that on "Stegner & Setting." Right now, my ideas range from the macro to the micro. Here they are, in very rough form:

• retracing the steps Stegner describes both in his fiction and his essays. Using the framework of Philippe Hamon (private link) to talk about how we interact with the city
• adding the previous idea to the idea of memory (using the Sonnet 122 idea of "tables within the brain")
• Going even more specific: looking at one passage (maybe "something drastic had happened to Main Street"?), and relating that to urban planning and cultural memory of today (City Creek Mall, anyone?)
• one of my favorite ideas—the idea of created space. The funeral parlor in Recapitulation doesn't exist, and as far as I can tell, never did, although he gives a very specific address for it and it's easy to believe it could exist
• could always frame it as a travel writing piece—but isn't that more of a so-called staycation?

I like all these ideas, nebulous though they are. And honestly, this project started out as one part literary pilgrimage, one part excuse to eat doughnuts on South Temple. Gotta start somewhere!

All literary pilgrimages should involve petit fours.

(Once I move to Madison, I will be making a Crossing to Safety pilgrimage for sure.)