The Best American Nonrequired Reading

2010-08-17T17:01:00.001-07:00

Meeting 11/16/2009 (Michigan)

2009-11-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Opportunity Knocks,” by Paul Reyes, published in Virginia Quarterly Review.

In this nonfiction investigation of the American housing market, the author follows Max Rameau, a self-appointed “home liberator” who leads a crusade in Miami’s Little Haiti to move homeless families into vacated houses. Usually the result of foreclosures, the abandoned houses are the property of the bank and therefore not legally habitable; yet Max and his followers believe that houses should not be sitting empty when the demand for housing is so high.

After a face-off at the site of a bank seizure between a displaced family, a bank liaison, and a throng of activists and journalists, emotions are mixed from parties involved: the displaced family is relieved but unnerved, Max is satisfied but unfulfilled, the police and the bank are resigned but watchful. The author raises questions about the non-intuitive, non-humanist way that banks manage vacated properties, but also raises questions about the efficacy of street-level, grassroots methods of addressing the problem.]

Michelle: It’s sometimes aggravating to read a piece of journalism that doesn’t follow a logical chain of events, but I felt that by using Max’s story as a foundation, this piece was a lot easier to follow.

Elise: Nothing ever loses points with me if it’s “not journalistic enough.” If it’s too fact-driven, too numbers-driven, I’m not going to get into it, but since we get to see what’s going on in Max’s head, I don’t mind it.

[The students were asked if the author chose an angle that kept their interest.]

Elizabeth: Abandoned houses have a certain natural appeal. The idea of a place that has been vacated and what happens after that is really interesting.

Elise: The first scene where Max and the author are scouting out abandoned houses was a good decision. By approaching the subject from the angle of a person who is passionate about his goal, I was more receptive to the larger story, the reality of the current housing situation.

Emma: I’d never heard of liberating houses; I thought it was an interesting angle to take. It was a good way to point out the flaws of the foreclosing process and the injustice experienced by certain families.

Adam: I thought the events on the last page were the most interesting part of the story. Even though he was worn out from his constant struggling with banks, Max had a vision, a hope, and we got to see that. I wanted to hear what would happen with Max and his houses after the story ended.

[The students were asked if they thought Max’s method of confronting the housing problem was effective.]

Elise: He went into that issue a little. The author spoke about how small of an effort this was, and that even with the community’s support they didn’t seem to have the sway needed to bring about change.

Michelle: There’s this point in the article where the narrator asks the question, “What’s the point?” None of the logic used by the parties involved makes sense. Max sees that, and that’s what he’s acting on.

Meeting 11/9/2009 (Michigan)

2009-11-23T18:43:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Enquire Within Upon Everything,” by Richard Powers, published in The Paris Review.

This story is a hypothetical chronicle of a boy’s life in the shadow of the internet age. The protagonist, an unnamed boy, grows up in a time when social interactions are increasingly subsumed by rapidly advancing technologies. At first, many of the technologies the boy uses are familiar to us, but as the story progresses, the ways he exists and interacts with people become more synthetic and strange. Towards the end of his life, the boy ultimately becomes dependent upon his virtual life and social networks. The title of the story refers to a book published in 1856 that was meant to provide encyclopedic information on all aspects of civic life. The precursor to the World Wide Web, “ENQUIRE,” was reportedly named for this book.]

Stephanie: I thought it was cool that the protagonist didn’t have a name, like he could just be anybody. People can project themselves onto him, and that makes the story more real and more true.

Adam: By the end of the story, I had forgotten that it was one big conditional statement. It turns into a projection of how human life could be developing, and raises questions about what’s good or bad about these developments.

Barnaby: I don’t think this story really has anything to do with the future. I’m thinking about the part where the boy learns that another person lived exactly like he did, but one hundred and forty years earlier – it ends up being about the relationship between humankind and technology.

Elise: The ways that humans interact with technology, and the degree to which technology controls our lives – that’s an idea that really seems to interest people right now. This story articulates that concept really well.

[The students were asked to give their thoughts on the emotionless delivery of the story’s major events.]

Elise: He didn’t express emotions to the reader, but the story still evoked an emotional response. I wanted to know “What might he be thinking? What might he be doing?” I felt that he didn’t need to tell us how he felt because the wonder is what keeps readers engaged.

Rachel: I think the writing style works. It just gives us the facts, but that’s exactly what the Internet is – there’s no emotion, only facts.

Adam: When the boy’s son runs away, he describes the event with no emotion. To him, it was just another mechanical development. I thought that was interesting. He didn’t say that his son was disgruntled with technology or with his father – he just decided to leave, to drop off the grid, maybe simply to find out if it was possible.

Meeting 11/3/09 (San Francisco)

2009-11-09T17:15:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Held by the Taliban,” by David Rohde, published in the New York Times.

David Rohde is a New York Times journalist. He, his driver, and his interpreter were captured by the Taliban in late 2008 while Rohde was working on a story about Afghanistan. He was held for seven months and ten days before escaping one night by tossing a rope over a wall. This story is his account of what happened, from capture to escape. It was published in five installments in the New York Times.]

Joseph: I loved it. It flows so well. I’ve read similar pieces before, but nothing quite matched this. It gave you such a three-dimensional perspective. You felt for him, but it wasn’t just good guys versus bad guys. He actually ended up having a good relationship with his captors. And the story was so suspenseful!

Gina: The details were amazing. Like the way the Taliban guards gave him a Hannah Montana blanket… that’s such a great detail. It shows the paradox here. They hate America but they have all these American goods.

Dee: I liked the suspensefulness, too. The writing is simple, and then every so often, a detail jumps out. It’s a really good balance. This line was my favorite, from right after he’s captured: “I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.”

Joseph: Yeah, it’s suspenseful, but the writer’s not trying to sell you anything. He’s not trying to make you feel one way or another. He’s just telling the story. It’s not flowery.

Anita: I think he did that intentionally. The less flowery a nonfiction piece is, the more you’ll trust the writer. If it were flowery you would start doubting he was telling the truth. This way it’s just the story, with no embellishment.

Meeting 10/27/09 (San Francisco)

2009-11-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Tiger’s Wife,” by Téa Obreht, published in the New Yorker.

In this story, a tiger escapes a zoo in an eastern European city that’s being bombed during World War II. Bewildered, the tiger wanders until settling in a forest outside a provincial village. In the village lives a butcher married to a deaf-mute woman. The woman begins a mysterious, secret relationship with the tiger in her husband’s smokehouse. The villagers learn that the tiger has been creeping down to the smokehouse at night, though they don’t know what the butcher’s wife’s involvement is. The butcher leads a party of three men and two dogs to hunt down the tiger. The hunt is not successful – but the butcher finds some of his meat by where the tiger was spotted resting. The butcher is enraged when he realizes his wife has been feeding the tiger his meat. He beats her and ties her up in the smokehouse. After that no one’s really sure what happens. The butcher disappears, never to be heard from again. According to legend, the butcher’s wife escaped, killed her husband, and fed him to the tiger.]

Tenaya: This story was great because it just has so much stuff in it. It’s got so many layers. There are so many characters and themes.

Nick: I thought it was good, too. I like the imagery. The way the author described the smells and the mountains. And I like the changes in perspective from the tiger to the villagers to the butcher.

Dee: I wanted to keep reading this. I couldn’t put it down. It was weird, but it was really good and I couldn’t stop reading it.

Molly D: At first, I didn’t like it. But it grew on me. I liked that you didn’t really know what happened at the end. I think she probably killed her husband, or the tiger came and got him, or something. It was a good way to end the story, to leave it open-ended.

Will: What I liked about it was the way the story kept evolving and changing. I agree with Molly, the ambiguity at the end was a good move. The author leaves a lot to our imaginations. That ambiguity is satisfying.

Paolo: That’s what I enjoyed the most about it, too. And the way you get all these fragments and then you have to piece them together. I like stories like that. This story is dreamy, and it was fun to read. I like this line a lot: “People must have seen him, but in the wake of the bombardment he was anything but a tiger to them: a joke, an insanity, a religious hallucination.”

[The students were asked if they saw the ending coming.]

Marley: No. I’ve heard of this kind of story before, though. About a wild animal outside a village, scaring the villagers. But even though I feel like this is a familiar kind of story, I didn’t feel like the ending in this case was at all predictable.

Paolo: The crazy thing was the way the author sort of made you think the butcher’s wife might have become part-tiger. That wasn’t something I was expecting. I liked that twist.

Meeting 9/22/09 (San Francisco)

2009-10-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Village of Butterflies,” by Stephanie Dickinson, published in Green Mountains Review.

In this story, an elderly Vietnamese-American woman is stranded in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina. While Lake Ponchartrain floods the city, the woman finds herself stuck on the roof of a van otherwise submerged. Hours pass, then days, and she becomes badly dehydrated. Delirious, the woman hallucinates scenes from her younger days when she still lived in Vietnam. This was during the Vietnam War. Her sister’s lover had died in the violence and the old woman re-experiences the day they got the news. She and her sister see a monkey in the treetops and her sister decides this monkey is her lover reincarnated. The sisters are horrified, however, to watch a group of U.S. soldiers shoot it for sport. Then – and the story shifts back to New Orleans – a crate floats up to the woman’s van. In it is a monkey just like the one she and her sister saw killed years ago. The woman makes it her mission, while trying to survive herself, to save this monkey.]

Bianca: This story grabbed me. I liked that it was written from an old woman’s point of view and that there was this connection between where she was and her past, her history.

Nick: For me, this story was about her personal journey. She’s trying to work out some serious issues with her past. And the story is her going on that journey. By helping the monkey she helps her sister. That’s why she sees her sister swimming behind her at the end.

[The woman and the monkey are eventually rescued. At the end of the story, the woman sees the ghost of her long-dead sister swimming behind the rescue boat.]

Joseph: This story kind of sounded like it was a translation. There were all these short sentences, like on page 110: “I have the fish in my fingers. Silvery, darker on its belly. I feel its fright, its terrified eye meeting mine. Its lips are fleshy.” Her descriptiveness is amazing. I know it wasn’t translated, but the short sentences make it sound like it was.

Paolo: The short sentences worked really well, I thought. She’s stranded on this van after a huge disaster and she’s deprived of water. Her thoughts would be short. So having the sentences be really short, too, helped me feel what she was feeling. And I loved all the dreamy parts about life in Vietnam. That added a lot of depth. There’s so much going on. I felt a lot in this story. When they come to rescue her at the end and it looks for a moment like they won’t take the monkey, I was really upset! Then they let her take it along and I thought, YES!

John: I agree. This story touches you on personal level.

Tenaya: It made me really love this old woman.

[The students were asked if they needed to know the history of the Vietnam War to enjoy the story.]

John: Not really. We haven’t studied the Vietnam War much in history class, but I could figure out what was going on in this story without that.

Ellen: I loved this story. And I don’t think you need to know a lot about the Vietnam War, no. This was one of my favorite things we’ve read. I thought the narration went really well. And the short sentences felt honest. There was an honesty to the way she wrote it. It flowed well. There weren’t any tricks in the writing, or long sentences that make your head spin. I enjoyed the way it jumped between New Orleans and Vietnam. It made figuring out what was going on a puzzle, but a fun puzzle. That’s actually what I liked most about it—fitting the pieces together.

Meeting 5/12/09 (San Francisco)

2009-05-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Speaking in Tongues,” by Zadie Smith, published in The New York Review of Books and based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008.

In this piece, Zadie Smith argues that Obama’s potency as a president lies in his ability to move between seemingly disparate groups of people, to speak in many voices. By this she means, “Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, and bank tellers.” Because Obama is “a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices,” she believes and hopes he will not be able to help “but be aware of the contingency of culture.” Like William Shakespeare, suggests Smith, Obama represents “a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally.”]

Will: This is a great piece because this is one of the big issues that people have had and still have with Obama. Who is he? Even though he’s president, I still don’t really know who he is.

Fiona: I thought the writing was really excellent, too.

[But will anyone, the students were asked, be interested in this piece when the anthology comes out months from now, a year after the election?]

Fiona: I think so. The piece doesn’t start out with Obama, it starts out with her, and with things from her personal life. It only segues into Obama later.

Yael: I agree, and I like this one a lot, too. I don’t even think it’s that much about Obama. Sure, it’s about Obama in lots of ways, but what I mean is I think everybody’s going to find something they love about this. You don’t have to be biracial to relate to this. It’s basically about having different personalities and faces and everyone has that. It makes Obama more understandable, too.

Tanea: It really spoke to the fact that all people are hypocrites in a way. We all want to point out when someone’s not being consistent. At the same time, we aren’t that way ourselves. Everyone has different personalities in different settings.

Adrianne: And it relates to people more on a human level. It’s not such a historical piece. It’s just making one big point, that people have different voices in one self. I think this piece will fit in the book because it will relate to all people. It has universality.

Vicky: It was like listening to someone speak, which I liked. And I liked all the quotes from poems and from Shakespeare.

Eli: She brings her own original analysis to the whole thing, and it’s so impressive. The quote from Keats on page 7—about how Shakespeare was “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—fits Obama so well.

Molly: I agree with Adrianne. The whole piece has a very human tone. It’s introspective. It’s not really political. It looks more into why people are thinking this way or that about Obama. It gets into the origins of our obsession with him. We’re all trying to figure him out.

Will: Yeah, it seems like you can’t really know who Obama is—and it doesn’t really matter. But I think what Zadie Smith is saying is that he’s kind of the vehicle for all American thought. He can look at every different perspective.

[The students were asked if they noticed themselves, in their own lives, having to move back and forth between different identities.]

Vicky: I have to act differently when I visit family in Mexico. Not in big ways, but it’s different. They treat me differently, too, because I live here.

Yael: Definitely. My mom’s side of the family is really, really religiously Jewish. When we get together with them I have to put on a different face than when it’s just my immediate family. Or maybe it’s just that I say less around that side of the family. Anyway, I’m different around them versus how I am around my friends from suburbia, versus my friends from the city, or my family, or my teachers, or the kids I babysit. In life you have to please different people. And so you have to put on different faces. Zadie Smith is saying that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s human.

Meeting 5/5/09 (San Francisco)

2009-05-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Wild Berry Blue,” by Rivka Galchen, published in Open City.

In this story, the narrator—a girl in elementary school—falls in love with a cashier at McDonald's called Roy. Every Saturday morning she goes for cookies and milk with her dad. One day she notices Roy working. She describes seeing him for the first time: “In a trembling moment I shift my gaze up to the engraved nametag. There’s a yellow M emblem, then Roy.” She is overcome, she says, by “this beautiful feeling. I haven’t had it about a person before. Not in this way.” She spends the rest of the story trying to catch his eye, trying to make conversation, or pining over him, or searching for the perfect present for him—a wooden puppet from the medieval faire is what she settles on. In the end though, the puppet has a crack. She doesn’t give it to Roy. She realizes things aren’t going to work out. She tries to move on.]

Chloe: I have a weakness for really emotional stories like this, so I loved it. I love stories where it seems like the narrator is talking straight from her consciousness. And there are enough really interesting parts to this piece—the way the little girl introduces people in the story, the way she describes characters, like Roy with that Tattoo, or the ugly puppet stand vendor fiddling with his collar—to keep me really interested the whole time.

Roxie: I like it because she’s so serious. The author is fully in the fifth grade self. I totally hear this little girl talking when I read this story. The author shows us the pure emotion and the outburst of need a little girl can have inside her. I mean, this is the girl’s first love. It was convincing. This is how it felt to be a girl in fifth grade, I think.

Fiona: The writing was good. It all felt really real. That was important, I thought. That it felt real.

Yael: One of the things I thought was very real was the way she has this sense security with her dad. The girl feels dangerous for breaking out and liking this Roy character. That’s such a true, typical feeling for a daughter to have.

[The students were asked what the wooden puppet’s role in the story is.]

Bora: The doll is a physical representation of the mistake that she’s made in loving Roy. Once she notices that there’s a crack on the hand, she doesn’t want it. And she starts to notice that there’s a mistake in the way she’s looking at things with Roy. It can’t work out. The way the author uses a doll to convey this is so well done. I thought the writing in general was excellent. Her description of herself on page 80 reminds me of myself: “I was always that kind of kid who crawled into bed with her parents, who felt safe only with them.” Or her description of the McDonald's scene, it’s amazing the way she captures a child’s perspective. She makes dipping cookies in milk interesting to read about: “Sometimes, dipping my McDonaldland cookies—Fryguy, Grimace—I’d hold a cookie in the milk too long and it would saturate and crumble to the bottom of the carton. There, it was something mealy, vulgar. Horrible. I’d lose my appetite. Though the surface of the milk often remained pristine I could feel the cookie’s presence down below, lurking. Like some ancient bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side of his head.”

Roxie: I also like how, throughout the story, the girl connects things to the future. Like when she says at the end, “I never got over him. I never get over anyone.”

Charley: This girl is such a specific and whole person. She has little tics, like how she likes to wash herself in the sink, that round her out. Her very specific personal preferences like that make her come to life for us as we read.

Meeting 4/7/09 (San Francisco)

2009-04-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations,” by Ramona Ausubel, published in Green Mountains Review.

In the opening paragraphs of this story, the narrator—a young boy—watches his cat Houdini get hit by a car. The narrator, his parents, and a weird friend named Belbog debate whether to resuscitate the animal. In the end, they decide the cat is too old. Next they debate how to dispose of the cat, and the boy is angry with his parents for not being more heartbroken about his dead pet. Callously, his mother and father tell him this is just how life goes: “Welcome to your life,” they tell their son. Eventually, the family cremates Houdini. In the final scene, the narrator bursts into the room where is parents are making love. He throws the cat’s ashes into the air, covering their sweaty bodies, shouting “Welcome to your life!”]

Chloe: This story was very weird and that’s why I liked it. It’s visceral. It’s entertaining and kind of disturbing. It grabbed me and I can’t totally explain why. I had a good gut reaction to it. The characters are really good, and not predictable. I thought the parents were hilarious.

Bora: It’s just so twisted. Which is a good thing in this case. I mean, while they’re deciding what to do with the cat’s body they put it in the freezer. Who does that? And I agree, the interaction between the boy and his parents is really funny.

Chloe: I think it’s the dialogue that makes it good. And Belbog. His dialogue is so random and weird. Like when he explains what his name means, on page 31, he says, “My name means White God, did you know?” And then he randomly jumps to selling lemonade: “I hope we will be friends. Perhaps this summer you can come and together we can sell beverages on the side of the road?”

Sophia: I think the short sentences are really effective. Like when the father just says “You’re hot,” or the mother says, “He’s frozen,” on page 30. The short sentences leave a lot to the imagination.

Roxie: I thought the ending was perfect. The imagery there was really cool. The way his parents are so bewildered, it’s great. You don’t know why exactly he’s throwing the ashes in the air. Is he sad? Is he angry? He says, “Houdini is dead! I love you and I hate you! Welcome to your life!” It’s so full of emotion.

Sophia: Yeah, it’s interesting to wonder if he threw the ashes on his parents to spite them or whether it was some form of celebration.

[The students were asked the significance of the cat’s name, Houdini.]

Chloe: It’s because the cat performs a disappearing act. The cat is never alive in the whole story. At the beginning of the story Houdini can’t be found. And at the end Houdini is just a cloud of dust. This piece reminds me of a zombie story.

Will: Actually, I thought Houdini was going to show up alive at the end.

Adrianne: What I liked about this story is how it’s told through the eyes of a child. Things that might seem obvious to us as older people are really exciting and strange to this young boy. It’s a good point of view for a story.

Meeting 3/17/09 (San Francisco)

2009-03-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Further Notes on my Unfortunate Condition,” a self-published comic by Nick St. John.

This comic is a series of loosely connected vignettes. The drawings are black and white. The words and pictures convey simple, elegant narratives. In one, for instance, the narrator recalls how he and his sister were lying in their beds once when they were young. She woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Get up, we have to do something.” Because she was “perfect and infallible,” he followed without question. The older sister led her brother into the backyard to dig for “the lost corpse of our great uncle Xavier,” a sea captain, and a man who’d been buried with a treasure map in his pocket. In the next short story, however, the children are visited by a different uncle: the mischievous uncle Manta Ray, who declines to spend the night only because he doesn’t have pajamas that fit his odd body shape.

The students were asked for their general impressions of the comic.]

Fiona: I really liked the digging story. I liked how it was a memory, a letter to his sister years later.

Sophia: I loved the whole thing. The drawings remind you of other things that make you happy. The waves reminded me of being a kid. The beginning of it reminds me of The Road, which we’re reading in school now.

Charley: I really liked it. It was pure.

Vicky: I like the drawings a lot. It looks like they were done on scratchboard. We’re doing scratchboard stuff in art class at school right now.

[The students were asked if it’s unified enough, if the series of stories holds together as one piece.]

Charley: The stories are sort of related. They’re all surreal memories of things. They’re all dreamy.

Vicky: They are short but if you were to open the [BANR anthology] and see this comic, you could just stop on one of the stories or you could read them all. I think that’s cool.

Molly: I thought it held together. I loved the artwork, too. Those waves in the last story were great. I felt the drawings physically.

Chloe: And the writing’s so pretty.

Tanea: I agree, the writing is so good.

Adrianne: This piece felt really sincere, and sweet.

Bora: I like the title. And some of the characters were just hilarious. I loved uncle Manta Ray. Who would have thought of a “community uncle” who just happens to be manta ray? That cracked me up. And the manta ray said the best things. Like on page six he says, “I have been alive for a thousand years and I have more friends than Jesus.” The fact that he’s a manta ray and he’s comparing himself to Jesus is hilarious.

Sophia: And I love that the reason he can’t sleep over is that he doesn’t have PJs that fit.

Bora: The shapes of the faces are great. They’re long and thin and cartoony but not in a dumb way.

Molly: I love this piece so much, I just want to hug it.

Meeting 3/10/09 (San Francisco)

2009-03-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Good Word,” by Yannick Murphy, published in One Story.

While on vacation, the narrator of this story and her friend Iris, both American, meet a German named Jurgen. Jurgen goes on and on about an untranslatable German word meaning “a good feeling people have when they are together.” The next day, Jurgen and the two women travel to a beachside boarding house. There they encounter an old man who covets Iris and, seemingly inexplicably, despises Jurgen. The four keep uneasy company—they go swimming, they eat together, and they talk about the untranslatable German word. The narrator asks Jurgen if the “good feeling” was present in Germany when Hitler reigned. Jurgen admits it probably was. Sometime later, the old man’s son—called the Connector—shows up. He, too, wants Iris. In the end, the Connector and the old man get into a brawl and Jurgen and the two women leave them behind.]

Eli: I liked it. It was really succinct writing. It was very unique. It’s almost like a series of frames, taken one by one and then pieced together. The sentences are so matter-of-fact and simple.

Roxie: Yeah, I thought the writing style worked well. It was really good at building suspense. It didn’t tell too much. On page nine, when it says the old man “had Iris up against the wall and was pushing on her hard” and “her eyes were closed because of the pain,” I thought he was raping her. But it turns out that he was just helping her pop her dislocated shoulder into place. The style worked really well there and elsewhere to build suspense.

Vicky: I agree. The writing makes you jump to conclusions, but then when you read a little further, it doesn’t turn out the way you thought it was going to. I kept being surprised.

[The students were asked why the author’s simple sentence structure is so effective.]

Molly: It’s because she holds off until the very end. And then you really appreciate it when she changes the style a bit. Up until the end, though, she’s very objective. You’re supposed to interpret for yourself. But then she reveals how the narrator feels. When she does that she uses longer sentences that aren’t just descriptions of what’s happening. That’s when she touches on the meaning of the story.

[At the end of the piece, the narrator reveals her frustration with Iris. To the narrator, Iris is the embodiment of the German word. Everyone wants Iris, everyone wants to be around her, but at the same time, says the narrator, this creates tension and quarrelling—like between the old man and his son. In light of this, the students were asked what they thought the meaning of the story was.]

Molly: When you read this story, you think about the feeling of the word Jurgen keeps talking about. The story is about that feeling. It’s something that brings people together and also tears them apart. Iris is nice to everyone and she draws everyone to her, but she also drives people apart.

Roxie: Iris causes a problem because everyone wants to be with her but they can’t all have that. It doesn’t work out. I think the author mentions Nazi Germany to point out the fleetingness of the good feeling, and to show that there’s a difference between real love and this kind of fake good feeling that actually drives people apart or causes tension.

Eli: And the good feeling is a ubiquitous feeling. Throughout the story they all feel good together. But at the same time there are these tensions under the surface. They have this sexual tension. It escalates. It reaches a breaking point. The father and his son have their scuffle. The good feeling isn’t so good after all.

[The students were asked if the author is putting forth a dark view of humanity.]

Eli: No, just a realistic view. In Nazi Germany, for example, you like to think it was a different feeling they had. That it was different from anything we feel. You like to think they had some kind of pride in their malevolence. But that’s not true. They actually had a genuine feeling of pride in their nation. They could justify what they were doing. And in this story, all the characters could justify their actions, too. Their motivations made sense. You knew why they went here or there, or why the old man and the son got in a fight.

Will: I think the word is about reaching out to people and being happy together. Having good feelings with a bunch of people. Jurgen starts out telling them about it, but at the same time he wants to have sex with the women so I think he has corrupted motives. The same thing goes for everyone. Iris is reaching out to people. But Iris likes all the attention and so I think she has corrupted intentions as well.

[The students were asked if at any point in the story the characters are actually feeling the sense of fellowship or togetherness described by the German word.]

Roxie: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s the point. They can’t have this good feeling together. There is too much tension.

Will: I disagree. I think at the end, because they’re all thinking about the word and saying it and talking about it, they are really feeling it.

Meeting 2/24/09 (San Francisco)

2009-03-03T17:43:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Catching Earl,” by Ryan Stone, published in Natural Bridge.

In this story, a man named Ted participates in an anger management group at the local Methodist Church. Ted used to beat his wife, but these days he’s sadder and older and trying to keep things under control. Across the street from him live Earl and his wife, Susan. They are younger and Ted suspects Earl abuses Susan. Ted decides to make it his mission to get Earl to come to the anger management group.]

Adrianne: This story really stood out for me. I always find these kinds of group settings interesting. Support groups, “Hi, my name is Earl”—that kind of thing. I don’t know how to describe why I liked it so much. I guess because it was very straightforward. The language wasn’t hard. I just like looking at people and hearing their stories and their background. This story let me do that.

Molly: I liked getting to see inside Ted. To see his progression from being someone who beats his wife to being the sad old man in the neighborhood. That was interesting. He used to be really angry and then he just kind of retreated into himself. Except he reaches out to Earl.

Yael: I felt for Ted. Once he exhausted all his rage he just got really sad.

Fiona: I thought that the simplicity of the writing worked well in this story. I really felt for both of them. For Ted and Earl. And especially Earl because he’s a lot younger, and he’s having so much tension with his wife.

Bora: There were certain sentences I highlighted that were great. Like this one on page 77: “Steak offers him a hand, trying to preserve trust, but to no avail because when something bigger than you asks you to trust it, it’s just a little too damn heavy.”

[Steak is the nickname for another man in the group. Ted and Steak are partners in “the old fall-into-your-partners’-arms-game” during one session in the basement of the church.]

Virginia: This sentence on page 80 was my favorite: “The tree blooms once a year in spring, and when it flowers it smells wonderful, like sweet apple spice, and the blooms are light pink, the color of a baby’s cheek.”

Bora: Actually, I was wondering about all the tree references. There are lots of trees in this piece—pecan, crab apple, chestnut… Why is that?

Roxie: I thought that was connected to this whole thing about how trees age and give something back. Like how the tree in front of Ted’s house is the prettiest on the block but only for a couple weeks. It only blooms for that long. I think he thought of his mission with Earl that way—something he could give the world, even if it was a small thing.

Bora: It’s like The Giving Tree.

[Ted succeeds in convincing Earl to come to the anger management group. The students were asked what they thought of this: Is Ted trying to save himself by saving someone else? Is Earl beyond repair?]

Tanea: Yeah, I think Ted was trying to save himself by saving Earl.

Fiona: But I don’t think Earl is beyond repair. Ted wants to help him before it’s too late.

Bora: It seemed like Ted was just trying to be Earl’s father figure. He wanted to help Earl before Earl turned into a sad old man, too.

[In the story’s final scene, Ted and Earl are at the support group. They are partners. Ernie has again instructed everyone to play “the old fall-into-your-partners’-arms-game.” Earl falls into Ted’s arm but Ted can’t keep his footing. They both fall. The story ends. The students were asked what they made of this finish.]

Tanea: When they both fell—it says, “they tumble, both of them, to the ground”—I think it represents united struggle. It represents how they are connected. They go down together.

Yael: I took it differently. I saw it as a control thing. Ernie had said that this game was about control. Ted and Earl were both out of control. The author is saying that you can’t save someone else from being out of control if you’re out of control yourself.

Adrianne: I think it’s a good ending because it keeps you questioning.

Meeting 2/10/09 (San Francisco)

2009-02-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Hair Types,” a comic by Olivier Schrauwen, published in Mome.

In this sequence, the artist depicts a workroom of men drawing. They are dressed in suits and a couple wear mighty beards. It seems to be taking place circa 1900. One man draws a diagram of hair types—Docile, Rigid, Frivolous, Intrusive, Wild, Crazy—and the kind of head that each hair type sits on. Another man in the room—a man with blond, spiky hair—sees the diagram. He and the fellow who drew it get into an argument about what kind of hair type the blond man has. Others join in the debate. Soon everyone in the room is drawing hair diagrams and interpreting them. The supervisor hears the commotion and barges in. He wants to know what’s going on. He looks at the hair drawings. The supervisor is pleased with the industriousness of his drawing-men.

The students were asked if they followed the story.]

Will: It made sense to me. They’re all workers working and then the supervisor comes in.

Sophia: I think it’s not supposed to make that much sense but you can make a lot of sense out of it. [Laughs] Does that make sense?

Molly: I thought the drawings paired with the words this way were really funny, even if I didn’t understand all of it.

Sophia: Yeah, I thought the drawings were hilarious.

[The students were asked what the men were doing.]

Bora: I thought it was kind of a think-tank. I don’t know why. Maybe all the high-backed chairs? All the stern faces?

Roxie: I took it differently. I thought they just had some super normal desk job and they were messing around. I thought they were just goofing around. Bored at the office. And I think the drawing at the end is a drawing of their ideal women, how they each want their woman’s hair to look. I think this piece really stands out. I think it’s well drawn and it’s mysterious enough that you want to keep reading.

[The final drawing in the sequence is a diagram of women. Each one wears a different example of the hair types—Docile, Rigid, Frivolous, and so on.

Throughout the piece, the drawings are done with a charcoal-like pencil. The lines are sometimes smudged artfully.]

Sophia: I liked the blur effect. It made it like watching TV. But at the same time the facial hair wasn’t modern so it looks like it was some time way before TV.

Bora: The whole piece is just a little odd. In a good way, I think. And it’s an unusual length.

[The students were asked if someone reading the anthology would take the time to read the piece, even though it’s strange.]

Charley: I think there are a lot of good things to catch in this story, so yes, definitely. I mean, there are all these corresponding types of hair throughout the story to pay attention to. And there are words I didn’t know like “toxicomany.” There are lots of levels. It’s a puzzling piece but it’s really good.

Roxie: I think even if you were just flipping through the book, the drawings would be enough to stop you and make you want to read it.

Adrianne: I like that the piece has so few words. It’s a break from words.

[The very last frame of the piece is dots. It’s a frame of oversized pixels. The students were asked why the artist ended with this drawing.]

Yael: Maybe it’s hair follicles. It looks like a shaved head up close. A shaved head has little dots if you look closely.

Will: The artist does this elsewhere. It seems like he’s trying to create a different mood whenever he uses dots in a frame’s background. So I think he’s setting the mood he wants to end on.

Roxie: Or maybe he just had an extra panel and had to fill it.

Molly: Or maybe it’s like static on a television.

Meeting 10/28/08 (San Francisco)

2008-11-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

[Transcribed discussion of “I Am Michael Martone,” by Carl Peterson and Michael Martone, published in Notre Dame Review.

This piece zeroes in on the annual Associated Writing Programs conference. The conference gathers together students, professors, editors, authors, publishers, and literary agents for readings and parties and conversations. In the case of this article, the conference was being held in Austin, Texas. When Carl Peterson, a student of Michael Martone’s at the University of Alabama, goes to the nametag table for his nametag, they don’t have one ready. “Would it be under a different name?” they ask. “Michael Martone signed me up,” says Peterson. The registrar looks through a box and eventually offers him Michael Martone’s nametag. Peterson decides at that moment to become Michael Martone for the conference. The article is a record of his experience.]

Adrian: I enjoyed it. I liked reading the piece and then reading the teacher’s comments, too. It was enjoyable to see that exchange. It seemed like a joke on how teachers edit their students’ work.

[This piece uses footnotes to set up a conversation between Peterson and Martone. Peterson wrote the essay and Martone wrote footnotes responding, replying, arguing and joking with Peterson’s text.]

Vicky: Yeah, I found the back and forth really interesting. It wasn’t very long, but there was a lot going on because there was this conversation between the article and the footnotes.

[The students were asked whether the article’s subject matter—A.W.P.—was too inside-baseball.]

Roxie: I don’t know. I didn’t care who Michael Martone was. I had never heard of him. I don’t think that mattered, though. The form was really interesting. There were other things to engage my attention besides whether or not I knew who Michael Martone was. It’d probably be more interesting if I did know who he was. But it’s okay if I don’t.

Will: I don’t know anything about this conference, but I thought the article was really funny. I loved the footnotes. Martone had some ridiculously funny one-liners. Like number twenty: “I am afraid I do not.”

[Footnote number twenty comes in response to the following passage from the main text of the article, written by Carl Peterson: “One woman about my age said to me, “Hey, you’re Michael Martone! My old roommate, Sarah ______ interviewed you. Remember?”]

Vicky: I agree. I thought the footnotes were funny.

Bora: I read it twice. Once without the footnotes and once with the footnotes. It was interesting to see how different a read it was in each case. That’s pretty interesting—how there are really two pieces, or maybe three, written here, woven together. Reading one or the other or both together gives you a different experience in each case.

Meeting 10/14/08 (San Francisco)

2008-10-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Selected Correspondence to Address and Redress Events Related to the Recent Flood and Subsequent Damage to Certain Housing Units,” by Paul Maliszewski and Brian Evenson, published in American Letters and Commentary.

This story is told via letters sent back and forth between a distressed resident and a couple government bureaucrats. Ed Rogozhin lives in a part of town threatened by rising floodwaters. He is requesting assistance in relocating his family. Not only are his requests continually left hanging, but he is also subjected to the insulting tones of the bureaucrats. When he mentions the details of his situation, one of the government officials chastises him for “extraneous talk” and returns his letter with the “extraneous” parts exacto-knifed out. Also, Rogozhin’s request is accidentally sent to a good-natured but oblivious Sanitation Department official. This official repeatedly reminds Rogozhin, unhelpfully, that “we can all make a difference when it comes to trash.” Meanwhile, the waters rise. Rogozhin’s earnest demeanor gives way to indignation. He is forced finally to “take temporary residence in the spacious two-car garage” belonging to his aunt.]

Bora: I thought the form was great. It’s unusual. I was trying to think of stuff I’ve read that’s written in letters. The House on Mango Street comes to mind. And I heard Jane Austen wrote the first drafts of some of her books in epistolary form. The Boy Next Door is a novel written in emails. In terms of the subject matter, I really liked it because it seems relevant to things like Hurricane Katrina. It’s making fun of how bureaucratic the relief effort by FEMA was. I think the ending is really funny, too. The way he eventually has to move his family himself and the best he can find is a “spacious two-car garage.” That’s so sad and hilarious at the same time.

Marley: I liked this, too. It was funny and sarcastic. In another way it was also really sad. The fact that the one official can’t take the time to find this guy a home, but he can take the time to cut up his letter is amazing to me. It takes longer to not help someone, but that’s what he chooses to do. And I think that’s how it is sometimes. People go out of their way to be unhelpful, just to prove a point or something.

Vicky: I liked it, especially because it connects to my experience. My mom told me stories of how she grew up. She grew up near a lake in Guadalajara, Mexico. The water would rise and sometimes flood where she lived. And I think lots of people can relate to this story, especially after all the weird weather out there. When I can connect a story to my own life, I feel closer to the story.

[Mr. Rogozhin goes rifling through his neighbors’ trash looking for things to take to the salvage yard. He’s trying to save enough money to move his family to a hotel. He earns a pittance from this salvaging, but is nonetheless told by the Sanitation Department official to return the money and to cease picking through garbage cans.]

Bora: You just feel so bad for the guy. He digs through trash for money and then they have the gall to tell him to give back the few pennies he scrounges together. The Sanitation Department guy says, “I would suggest mailing the money to their old address adjacent to you,” in the hopes that “it will be forwarded to them.” God!

Yael: The way they treat him is so crappy. It feels like middle school. It’s so institutional and rigid. People acting like robots instead of listening to someone like a real person. No one is willing to cut corners for him.

Sophia: It reminded me that my pet peeve is people who are bad at their jobs. I really hate people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do. That bureaucrat was supposed to help him find a new house, not make things more difficult than they already were. So this article made me really angry. But I think that makes it successful, too. It got me riled up. In a good way, though, because it’s a story and it shows how things are sometimes.

Meeting 10/7/08 (San Francisco)

2008-10-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Loop,” by J. Malcolm Garcia, published in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

In this article, the author visits Jena, Louisiana. In September 2006, nooses were hung from a tree in the high-school courtyard in this small town. A few weeks after the nooses were hung, a black student was assaulted by white kids at a party. The white kids were let off without charges. A few weeks after that, six black kids beat up a white kid. The white student came away with a few bruises and a black eye. Nonetheless, the six were charged as adults with attempted second-degree murder. Their bonds were set between $70,000 and $138,000. A racially charged crisis exploded. Lawmakers, reporters, and protestors descended on the town. J. Malcolm Garcia’s report, however, is unique for its approach. Garcia interviewed people holding many different positions, including neo-Nazis advocating a race war, and then spliced together the multiple viewpoints.]

Eli: I loved this piece. I was worried it was going to be a standard, newsy article. I wasn’t sure how he was going to handle it. But the way he breaks it up is amazing. The different viewpoints offer such an excellent cross-section of the reality there. It educated me. It scared me. And he portrays people—like those guys who want a race war—without tainting the writing with his own personal biases. It didn’t feel preachy. That’s hard to pull off.

Bora: I loved it, too. But I disagree about the biases. I think he put his own opinions into it. But in a good way. He definitely wanted to say, “Look, racism is bad and still very much a problem.” He put that in so subtly, though, that you hardly notice. But it’s there.

Yael: It’s the kind of thing where if you found it in a textbook you would think it was biased. But that doesn’t matter. Textbooks are boring. As journalism, this is incredible. The writing is so good. It’s only biased the way good fiction is biased.

Will: I agree.

Bora: Right, it’s not preachy so it doesn’t feel like an unfair bias. The key is that he doesn’t ever come across as preachy.

[The students were asked why the article is called “The Loop.” The author explains that the loop is a circular route local youngsters use to cruise through town late at night.]

Tanea: He’s making a comment about the cycle of history. Whether it’s ‘64 or ’04, it’s the same town. The same racism is still there and alive.

Will: That really amazed me. At first, when I was reading, I thought this couldn’t be 2008. I actually hadn’t heard about any of this, about the Jena Six. So I thought it was something from twenty years ago. But this is modern-day. That blew me away.

[The students were asked how prominent racism is in their school environments.]

Bora: It’s a lot subtler now. I don’t want to say I’ve felt the kind of racism these kids in Jena felt. I don’t want to detract from that at all. But there is this kind of accidental racism around here that’s pretty common. Like there was once this community service project I was a part of and the teacher asked for someone who spoke Mandarin. And he looked over at me and asked if I spoke Mandarin. And I said, “Uh, no. I’m not Chinese.” He just assumed I was. That kind of thing happens a lot. But it’s not malicious. It’s by accident.

Eli: Racism now is less aggressive in general. In Jena it was pretty aggressive, I guess. But I don’t think it’s as strong in a certain way because there aren’t things like Jim Crow laws to keep it officially in practice. But it’s still there. Come to think of it, maybe it’s worse in a sense because it’s under the surface just waiting to erupt.

Meeting 9/15/08 (Michigan)

2008-09-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of "Amanuensis", by Stephen Tuttle, published in Hayden's Ferry Review.

This story is about Mr. Dumond. Mr. Dumond is one of his town’s most beloved residents, but one day he disappears into a snowstorm. Memories are, at first, fond: children who were enrolled in his eighth-grade earth science class recall that he would cancel class for the first snow of the year. But that fondness is thrown into doubt when some townspeople discover a scale-model replica of their town in Dumond's basement. Mr. Dumond was apparently using the model to keep track of his neighbors' personal lives. As a result, their opinion of Mr. Dumond – and of one another – begins to shift.

The students were asked why a respected man like Dumond would build such a model of his hometown.]

Adam: I don't think it was supposed to be explained. We don't know anything about his character except that he's a really good teacher who gets kids interested, and that he leaves a lot and isn't as involved in the town. But we don't know very much about his character, so the whole point of the story is that it's as much of a surprise to them who know him well as it is to us who don't know him at all. It's just out of place for him to be so intrusive.

Michelle: Maybe he does it to remember the things that he knows. If you teach, you like knowledge. So, I don't know, maybe he's craving for knowledge?

Elizabeth: He's almost like an omniscient figure.

Eva: But the people in the town were painting him as omniscient, before he even disappeared into the snow. The entire description of him is pretty much just –

Michelle: - how excellent he is –

Eva: - yeah, how much everyone believes he's perfect.

Elizabeth: And then there's suddenly this whole other side to him that they had no idea about.

Michelle: It's weird how everyone knows Dumond, but no one really knows him, and since no one actually knows him he can change. Very easily.

[The students were asked if they thought Mr. Dumond was trying to make a statement about the community, or if he just had a grossly invasive hobby.]

Eva: It seems like he's showing what it would do if everything everyone had all their secret things forced out into the open – how would that destroy a town?

Michelle: Or: who are you once you're not there anymore?

Eva: Yeah, what happens to you when, all of a sudden, you're gone and people have to then make their own impressions of you and you can't control that?

Elizabeth: Or even: how is a person's identity shaped by those around them? I mean, what is this guy really like? – we don't know. All we get is the perspective of the town.

Meeting 9/16/08 (San Francisco)

2008-09-30T02:13:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Nowtrends,” by Karl Taro Greenfeld, published in American Short Fiction.

In this story a journalist goes to Chengdu, China to interview a young pop star named Xiu Xi. He carries with him money that he may need to bribe the pop star’s manager. “We are at the stage in our great socialist experiment when we are no longer sure who should pay whom,” he says. En route to the interview, however, he learns that an old friend has been arrested for subversive political activity. The journalist uses the bribe money to pay off one of his friend’s guards. The guard then allows the journalist to visit his friend in jail. The rest of the story follows two interwoven tracks, one public and the other private. These are, first, the journalist’s strange interview with a dolled up pop star and, second, his secret efforts to save his friend.]

Sophia: The writing is really good. I kept forgetting it was fiction. Is this writer a journalist in real life?

Joseph: He is. I looked it up. Apparently he’s a well-respected journalist who writes about Asia and especially China. This stuff is real for him.

Bora: For a while I wasn’t sure if it was non-fiction or fiction, either. I liked that. I liked that you could forget whether you were reading journalism or a story. To me that’s a sign of good writing. He made things so real I forgot the story was made up.

Yael: And it was interesting. The part about having to bribe Xiu Xi to get an interview with her was funny to me. It’s a whole different system there.

Sophia: The writer does a really good job of giving us a factual portrait of modern China. It’s written like good journalism: short sentences, statements of fact, not too much speculation.

[Near the end of the story, the journalist’s friend is convicted of associating with a radical political organization and sentenced to death. His organs are to be harvested by the Chinese government.]

Will: Do they really do that? Harvest organs of people they execute? That seemed a little far-fetched to me.

Eli: I’ve read about that elsewhere. It really happens. It is hard to believe, though.

Will: It didn’t seem possible to me. It made me doubt the rest of the story. But if you’ve heard of that happening…Wow. That’s pretty scary.

Eli: Yeah I don’t think he made that up. That happens. I thought overall it was a really well written story, and I thought the writer did his homework. He did good research. He made everything plausible.

Meeting 9/9/08 (San Francisco)

2008-09-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Chameleon,” by David Grann, published in The New Yorker.

This article is about a European man named Frederic Bourdin. Bourdin has spent his life reinventing himself. Each time he does, he pretends to be an abused child. He’s taken on dozens of identities in fifteen countries. He speaks five languages. He’s a master at transforming his appearance—his face, his weight, his walk, his mannerisms—in order to pull the wool over everyone from schoolteachers to social workers. He has said, “I can become whatever I want.” This story focuses on his most daring ruse: In 1997, at the age of twenty-three, Bourdin stole the identity of a missing boy from Texas named Nicholas Barclay. He insinuated himself into Barclay’s bewildered family and was granted an American passport. Eventually the ploy was unraveled. Bourdin was arrested. Now, more than a decade later, he’s married and says he’s left the life of the imposter behind. But not even his mother believes him. She says that her son, a self-described professional liar, “will never change.”]

Philloria: This article grabbed me. It reminds me of something I’ve seen on TV. Like a crime show or a really good movie.

Bora: Don’t you think this guy needs help or something?

Will: Help for what? He’s not crazy. Every time they give him a psychiatric test he passes. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I don’t think it’s that easy to commit people these days.

Bora: Maybe he’s bipolar. Maybe his mental illness is just really subtle.

Will: I don’t think so. I think he knows what he’s doing. He does it for the thrill. I think it’s interesting that he ended up doing the one thing he said he wouldn’t do: He became a monster. When he took that boy’s identity from Texas, he blew it. He really led that family on. He even admits that was evil.

Joseph: Yeah, he blew it. The whole story about the boy’s family in Texas, how the family was kind of broken and messed up, that was really interesting too. In the last four or five pages the story really shifted its focus to that family. You kind of forget about Bourdin, because the story of Barclay’s family is even crazier.

[Nicholas’s mother struggled with drug abuse. His older brother was in and out of prison. The author suggests that Nicholas’s brother may have known what happened to the younger Barclay. But the older brother committed suicide shortly after Bourdin’s trick was found out.]

Will: I’m surprised the family didn’t press charges. They really got played around with. They just dropped it, and I think that’s because they might have known something about what happened to Nicholas. They didn’t want any more attention. The Barclay family really added another layer to this story. It was all so off the wall and bizarre. I think it’d be cool for everyone to read this article. It really engaged me.

Bora: This is good journalism. This reporter traveled all over the world for this story. He must have worked on this for a couple years. It’s hard to find good journalism like this.

Meeting 8/26/08 (San Francisco)

2008-09-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “Loonie and Me,” by Tim Winton, published in The Paris Review.

This story is from the perspective of a boy looking back on his childhood relationship with a Huckleberry Finn-like friend named Loonie. The narrator’s parents are prim and orderly people, and his father is afraid of water, even though their town is on an ocean coast. Loonie, on the other hand, is wild and spontaneous. He begins hanging around with the narrator and his parents, and the narrator’s parents begrudgingly accept him as their boy’s friend. Later, the narrator—against his father’s wishes—sneaks off to the ocean to swim with Loonie. There they see men surfing, and are instantly and for their lives enamored of “dancing on the water.”]

Eli: I liked his relationship with his Dad. That was very believable.

Joseph: I brought this story in because I liked how the language flowed. And the story seemed very real to me. It was written in this simple style, but every scene represented a lot to me. I had a friend like this at a young age. I remember how it goes. You just want to do something crazy, like surfing. When you’re young that kind of stuff seems amazing. And I like that he’s looking back on his life as an old man. He has arthritis, he can’t surf anymore. Loonie struck me as a really great character. He really wanted to make a connection to people. He was a joker. That prank he pulled on the beach was great.

[Early in the story, Loonie fools a woman and her daughters into thinking he’s drowning. He dives deep underwater, stays down for as long as possible, then comes up for a second, flailing, only to disappear again. When he at last comes up he shrieks, then starts laughing. The woman is so shocked she falls over.]

Eli: Do you think the author developed the story enough?

Joseph: Yeah, I do. Sometimes in life something dramatic doesn’t happen. Sometimes in life nothing happens. This story really captured that. Most of life isn’t dramatic.

Yael: Is that worth writing about?

Joseph: Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s a risk the author took to write about the everyday lives of two friends. And there’s some drama—like the prank and the trip to the ocean when they see the surfers. It’s not a lot of drama, but I think it took a lot of guts to write without tons of drama. I think he pulled it off well. He made it interesting.

Eli: He’s definitely a talented writer.

Joseph: When you’re young like this you think you’re invincible. You want to do anything exciting. That’s why he wanted to go swimming so badly. I think the author portrayed that wanting to go swimming in the sea well. When you’re that age you just want to do crazy stuff!

Meeting 8/19/08 (San Francisco)

2008-09-01T22:52:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Winner,” by Aaron Garretson, published in Opium.

In this story, a man named Geoff takes his daughter to Missy Silver’s birthday party. Missy Silver is the daughter of a billionaire named Charles Silver, and her party is at a skating rink in Central Park. There are thousands of pink balloons and flashing lights and a hundred or so twelve-year-old girls. Charles Silver spots Geoff in the bleachers and, though they barely know each other, strikes up a conversation. Geoff soon discovers that the wealthier man isn’t leading a happier life. Silver is getting divorced. He faces charges of fraud, insider trading, and tax evasion and he’s pretty sure he’ll be found guilty. Silver seems to enjoy Geoff’s company. Geoff, meanwhile, finds himself both repelled by Silver’s pathetic state of affairs and strangely sympathetic.]

Javier: I want it to go in. I really liked it.

Joseph: At first I thought Silver was just a huge jerk. But by the end I really liked him. I like it when your opinion of characters changes throughout a story.

Will: I liked it too. I thought the dialogue was really good. It was so quick. The conversations just kept going and going and it felt so natural. The author really kept it going so well—he doesn’t give you just a few snippets here or there, he really keeps it steady. Dialogue seems hard to me. The author handles it well.

Javier: Yeah, the dialogue was smooth. I thought the language was good in general in this story. And the ending was great.

Osvaldo: The first page was solid—a good beginning. It really drew me in right away. I think we should include this one in the book.

Joseph: The writer really stays focused throughout. He doesn’t go off on tangents. He stays with the story. It’s tight.

Javier: I agree. It was focused. But that didn’t mean it was boring. Everything that happened was unexpected.

Will: Yeah, I thought so too. There were lots of surprises. It felt like you just got swept along reading it.

Joseph: And it was all pretty believable. I can totally see an awkward conversation happening between some rich dude and an average guy at their daughters’ party.

Javier: I thought it was cool that he was facing trial. No one ever writes from the perspective of a guy who knows he’s going to jail. He knows he’s going to lose his case. I think that perspective is really interesting.

Joseph: Yeah, people try to write from that perspective, and they try to make the characters sympathetic, but it almost never works. The writer makes it work here, though.

Javier: By the end I was asking myself the question: Would I want to be Silver? And the answer is no way. His life is messed up, even though he’s so rich. I felt bad for him.

Meeting 8/12/08

2008-08-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Trolls Among Us,” by Mattathias Schwartz, published in The New York Times Magazine.

This article focuses on a burgeoning Internet subculture populated by people called trolls. “Troll” arose in the late 1980s as a description for anyone “who intentionally disrupts online communities.” Back then, writes Schwartz, trolling was innocuous, no more than the occasional asinine question posted on a message board. These days, however, trolls are craftier and more powerful. Schwartz opens the story with an example: after a seventh-grader named Mitchell Henderson shot himself, his friends created a MySpace page in his memory. The details of Henderson’s death eventually got posted on /b/, a message board known for its graphic and insulting posts. Henderson’s story then caught the attention of trolls who frequent the site. The boy’s face started appearing all over the net, even appended collage-style over actors’ faces in hardcore porn flicks. People took pictures at his gravesite and posted them online. Someone claiming to be “Mitchell’s ghost” prank called his parents. “The front door is locked,” the caller told Henderson’s dad. “Can you come down and let me in?”]

Joseph: I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening. Actually something like this happened to someone at my school. Someone hacked into his MySpace page and really messed with it.

Molly: You can do that?

Joseph: I think it’s pretty easy to do, actually.

Bora: At my school someone created a Facebook account for this one teacher we had. It made fun of him. This teacher was the kind of guy you did not want to mess with. There was this big meeting in the school auditorium and he stood up and said, “This is harassment,” and threatened to call the police. But they never found out who did it. That’s kind of troll-ish, isn’t it?

Joseph: I would say so. That’s why I found this article interesting. Because this stuff has happened to people I know. I’ve seen it happening.

Javier: Yeah, I liked this article a lot. But I had never heard of this. So I learned a lot from it.

[The students were asked whether they have any sympathy for the trolls]

Javier: Not at all.

Molly: No.

Joseph: I don’t, no. I’ve met some of these troll types—they just want power. They want to be recognized and respected in this screwed-up way. It gives them a feeling of power to make other people’s lives miserable online. Why else would they get into this stuff? There is some massively twisted thinking here, like that whole “the right of the superior to rule over the inferior”? That’s nuts!

[In the article, Schwartz quotes a troll who’d posted this statement on a message board: “There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.” The students were then asked whether troll behavior constitutes evil.]

Joseph: I don’t know if I’d call this evil…

Javier: Yeah, I would.

Molly: Yeah, I’d call it evil.

Bora: Maybe it’s just because I always want to see the good in people, but I don’t think they’re evil, I just feel bad for these people. Obviously they’ve gone through something really horrible that creates the need in them to lash out. Something’s gone wrong in their lives and it makes them feel that hurting people in an anonymous way is good or justified or somehow their right.

Joseph: I’m not saying they’re evil, but the reason these people do this is because you can get this excitement out of it. I think some of them are just doing it to prove that they can, and that they can get away with it. People have always done crazy things just to prove something to themselves. Here they do it anonymously so they can pull it off without suffering any consequences. And I think the author gives a really good introduction to all this. He really gets into the psychology of why people do this and what they’re thinking. He does it all pretty non-judgmentally, which is impressive. It’d be so easy to hate these people, but that would make it hard to portray them fairly as a writer. He does a good job of putting us in their shoes.

Bora: I liked the writing, and I also liked all the details he gave us. It was really thought-provoking. It grossed me out, but it made me think: Why would these people do all this mean stuff? Why would they need to behave like this?

Meeting 8/5/08

2008-08-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Eureka Hunt,” by Jonah Lehrer, published in The New Yorker.

Lehrer’s article explores how good ideas come to us. The author talks with neurologists and psychologists about the interplay between right- and left-brain, and about how brain-imaging techniques reveal the complex web of communication our gray matter uses to solve problems. For example, the writer explains why our good ideas so often come to us in the shower. Mental relaxation—as one might experience under warm water—can be more crucial to having an epiphany than brow-furrowing concentration.]

Javier: This was definitely interesting. It had a lot of depth. After I put it down, I was thinking about this stuff for the next few days. Any time an author does that to me it’s good.

Will: I liked that it wasn’t as hard to follow as some other science-related articles we’ve read. It’s tough to write about science for a non-scientist audience. He didn’t dive so deep that he lost us. But at the same time he really dug into his subject matter.

Javier: It made sense, too. It was true to my experience. My parents are always telling me to wake up early. They say the morning is the best time for thinking. [Lehrer] is saying that too—just after you wake up is the best time to do things that take a lot of mental energy. Like homework. Sometimes I have great ideas in the shower.

Will: Sometimes you’ll wake up and have something on your mind from the night before and it doesn’t click until morning, just like he says.

Javier: Although I will say I’m not always that sharp in the morning. But that’s probably because I go to bed too late. Another thing I was really into was the story about the fireman he used in the beginning.

[Lehrer introduces his essay with a story of a Montana fireman caught in a massive forest fire. The fire was advancing at a rate of seven hundred feet per minute. With no time to outrun it, the fireman lit a match and burned a patch of grass just large enough for him to lie down in. The fire jumped over the fireman as he lay there but killed thirteen other firefighters who couldn’t outrun it. Later, he couldn’t explain how he’d suddenly come to the idea of burning himself a small haven. It was an epiphany. All he could say was “it just seemed the logical thing to do.”]

Will: Yeah that story was perfect for this. The author was able to combine a story like that with an essay on brain science. So we get a little human narrative and some science to help us understand what’s happening in the narrative.

Javier: I agree. That introduction drew me in. And then he came back to it in the end nicely. It also fits well because the idea of Eureka! is that you kind of get struck by lightning. And this fire in Montana was started by a lightning strike.

Will: I noticed that while I was reading the story I started thinking about what was happening in my brain. It was making me conscious of my own insight process even while I was reading.

Meeting 7/22/08

2008-08-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

[Transcribed discussion of “The Briefcase,” by Rebecca Makkai, published in The New England Review.

This story takes place in an unnamed country in an unnamed time. The country has just had a revolution and the new government has rounded up the intellectuals. One man, a chef before the chaos, is on a chain gang of 200 prisoners. He escapes, and the soldiers decide to pick up the next free man they see, and substitute him for the chef. The free man they see, and nab, is a physics professor. The former chef—who sticks around to watch the professor’s arrest—decides to take on the identity of the professor. To do so, he uses the professor’s briefcase, which was left behind, and which is filled with the man’s papers and letters.]

Sophia: I liked how there were so many things to think about, how it was kind of mysterious, and I liked thinking about a revolution. I like learning about that kind of stuff in history class. And I liked the writing. She’s a good writer.

Will: It’s cool how nothing’s named, how this all could pretty much take place anywhere.

Sophia: Right, just like in the story, in a lot of revolutions they arrest the artists and intellectuals first.

Javier: And that’s the thing, this could be set during any revolution, in the future or in the past, because they’re always like this. And I like the ending of this story because it can be filled in, we don’t know what happens. What do you all think of how the names are marked out?

[In the story, all the names are given in this format: T——.]

Sophia: Maybe it’s kind of like censorship, sort of mirroring what’s happening in the story, you know?

Joseph: I like the whole idea of trying to figure out who the professor is, and who the chef was, or who anyone is, since their names are blacked out. It’s interesting to withhold that information. And the censorship of names helps put us in his shoes, to see what it’s like not to really know anything about anyone, not even names of his supposed friends.

[The “professor”—formerly the chef—tries to understand what it means for the earth to revolve around the sun. In the professor’s notebooks he finds that the professor’s been teaching a new theory: that the sun and stars revolve around the earth. The chef takes a lover in the city and tells her he’s a physics professor. He tries to convince her that the earth revolves around the sun.]

Will: One of my favorite scenes is where he’s talking to his lover about how the sun revolves around the earth.

Yael: I think she put that whole story line in there—about whether the earth revolves around the sun or not—because that discovery in science, about the way the earth and sun relate to each other, that was kind of a revolution in and of itself at its time.

Bora: It’s interesting here because in this case the professor who’s not really a professor is claiming something about science that we wouldn’t think is true. He’s rejecting a pretty widely held belief, the idea that the earth goes around the sun. So that’s kind of revolutionary I think the author’s making a point about thinking differently in a time when it’s probably not so cool to think differently.

Will: I think a lot of times the professor’s just struggling to believe. He’s struggling to believe he’s the professor, and he’s struggling to believe that where he is is the center of the universe. I think it’s kind of his own selfishness actually.

Bora: I didn’t see it as selfishness, but I did feel like the character was off—kind of odd, you know?—in an interesting way. Like when he tried to assume the role of the professor, I think he was off and I appreciated that. Made him intriguing.

Will: But isn’t it selfish to ask for money from a bunch of people who aren’t really his friends? I mean he’s playing with them.

[The former chef, acting in his new identity as professor, solicits money from the professor’s friends and colleagues to keep himself propped up financially while living in a distant city. He finds the addresses for these people in the briefcase that once belonged to the real professor.]

Bora: But I didn’t find that selfish. I think in his mind he thought he was the professor and he felt that that was something the professor would do.

Javier: You know, I think it was kind of a game for this guy. I like that, because it’s like he’s almost bored, he wants something beyond the life he already has. Switching identities with the arrested professor gets him that. That makes sense to me. He’s a product of the revolution. There is no moral compass and he can do anything he wants, so why not take on this new identity?

Sophia: But he wouldn’t be so desperate if he wasn’t in such a dire situation, if he wasn’t surrounded by a society that’s all messed up from revolution.

Will: It seems like he wasn’t that happy before the revolution anyway. He was a good student but his Mom made him drop out, and then he had to become a chef. He seemed to like being knowledgeable and being a good student, or at least being thought of that way. And I think that fits into why he thinks he can be the professor. It was an improvement for him. What’s weird is that he becomes an intellectual and the government was killing intellectuals. Why would he do that? Why would he make himself more of a target?

Joseph: It’s almost like he wanted excitement in his life, glory or something. I think he was almost jealous when he was talking about those people who were smoking in the coffee shop, those intellectuals. He maybe thought it would be exciting if the authorities might be coming for him, that he’d be one of the intellectuals.

Javier: It made him feel important. I don’t think, if there were no revolution, that he would have done anything about it, but now he has this opportunity for a better, happier life.

Joseph: That makes him pretty confusing as a character. He’s sympathetic in some ways but pathetic in other ways. Pathetic that he has to steal someone’s identity. It’s like he’s okay with making it himself, with surviving, even when his life comes totally at the expense of someone else’s.

Meeting 7/8/08

2008-07-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

…a transcribed discussion of Nicholson Baker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books.

[In a piece that’s more essay than book review, Baker probes the workings of Wikipedia and its implications for how we manage and interpret knowledge in the Internet age. Baker’s tone is lighthearted and earnest and he charts the lines delineating what’s to be considered worthy of inclusion (and what’s not) in the largest repository of information in the history of humankind.]

Joseph: I liked it. It was funny. I thought it had a lot of humor in it and I liked that, it was a nice touch. It didn’t take itself too seriously. And it kept me engaged, it kept me entertained. And Wikipedia’s something we’re all familiar with so I think it’s pretty relevant.

Sophia: Do you use Wikipedia?

Joseph: I usually go to Wikipedia for basic research and then check up on what Wikipedia’s saying. I’ve found some things on there that aren’t true. Our teachers discourage using it.

Elizabeth: Yeah ours just say don’t even go there, it’s not good enough to use.

Laura: Wow, that’s crazy. My school’s not so strict. My history teacher even encourages us to follow the references Wikipedia has. That’s what it’s best for I think. I think that’s what [Baker’s] saying about not throwing out articles so zealously. Why throw something away? You should just know it’s not gospel.

Elizabeth [shrugging]: For us [the teachers] pretty much discourage it in general.

Nina: But I heard this study that compared Encyclopedia Brittannica to Wikipedia and found that they’re wrong the same number of times. They’re not that different.

Joseph: And all the editing at Wikipedia’s so controlled. Maybe too controlled. Actually it’s kind of too bad how tight they manage things. I think that’s what he’s saying here: it’s not even that open anymore. It’s weird how you can’t necessarily get editing access even to an entry about yourself.

Will: He really explains that stuff well. I like this piece because the thing about Wikipedia is that it’s so huge, it’s such a big part of pop culture right now, but also it’s going to have a lasting impact on our society. I guess I just think this piece would be cool to have in because Wikipedia’s something that was obscure really recently but is so huge now. It’s kind of a turning point. People don’t really trust Wikipedia yet but it’s here to stay. So to have someone sit down and put some sense to it, and really think about it like Baker does, that’s cool.

Nina: I like how he talks about saving articles from the abyss.

Sophia: Yeah, I really liked that kind of stuff too.

Eli: And I mean, when else are you going to be able to write about Wikipedia except in a random book review? This is still something that could be written about and people could give a damn about later I think, even after the book he’s reviewing’s been forgotten. And the substance was interesting. I learned things. Like the Article Rescue Squadron. I was engaged with that. It’s crazy how open to abuse Wikipedia is, which is I guess why it has to be edited. It has to be closely regulated, anyone can do anything.

Sophia: The whole Internet’s that way.

Joseph: Yeah like on YouTube, anyone can say anything. These debates pop up and they’re usually on the most pointless topics. I’ve seen real death threats and stuff in the comments on YouTube. Or you’ll see people debating about World War II and Nazis. All from, say, a video of a cat walking down a staircase.

Nina: Yeah but the people in my life whose opinions I value aren’t posting YouTube comments. So I don’t think those comments sections are accurate portrayals of the general population.

Joseph: I guess it could be a small percentage of nutty people.

Sophia: People know they’re not accountable so they can say anything.

Nina: I’m most weirded out by people who are like “Today was a rough day, Jimmy just broke up with me.” People who have to write that online all over the place.

Eli: The way I was raised is, it’s like certain parts of the neighborhood, you just don’t go there. Just use common sense. I think that’s what [Baker’s] talking about here: just having common sense about believing or not what we read. Taking things with a grain of salt, but not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Not getting rid of what’s good about Wikipedia just because some people abuse it.

Meeting 7/1/08

2008-07-22T23:21:00.000-07:00

…a transcribed discussion of Stephen O’Connor’s "Man on the Moon," published in Conjunctions.

[O’Connor delves into the senselessness of stereotypes and the divisions they create. Like in Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches—where the Sneetches with stars on their bellies lord it over the Sneetches without stars on theirs—O’Connor crafts a world where segregation hinges on one seemingly irrelevant physical feature. In this case it’s the size of one’s head.]

Sophia: I loved it. I was trying to figure it out the whole time I was reading it and I don’t know if I ever did, but I think it has something to do with segregation. You really wanted to read it and figure it out, whereas with that other article we read I wasn’t interested in the plot or the setting or anything. But this one I really wanted to figure out.

Carmen: Honestly, I thought it was about aliens. I thought the big head was an astronaut and I thought at the end they were going to say something about humans on Mars or something…

Osvaldo: I didn’t pay attention to what it really meant, I just paid attention to what the author was saying. So I just liked the plot a lot, about the big head people and what was going to happen to them. Did they actually end up sleeping together?

Will: I think it’s implied that they did. But, actually, I think it doesn’t really matter whether he slept with her or not. The small head people think he did something inappropriate. Whether he did or not, their perception of what happened is enough to cause them to kill him.

Joseph: [Studying the article] Yeah—you know what—I don’t think they actually had sex. I think they were just in love. I mean, they’re just kids aren’t they?

Sophia: Yeah they’re like 13 or something. Also I think it’s about how people try to take down anyone who is smarter than they are. Seems like there are always masses of people out there who aren’t that brainy who resent anyone they perceive as too intellectual. Being smart—having a big head—isn’t cool. That’s why someone gets called a nerd in high school, or worse.

Meeting 6/3/08

2008-06-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

...a transcribed discussion of "The Ticking is the Bomb" by Nick Flynn, from Esquire...

Author of the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn delves into literary journalism in "The Ticking is the Bomb," a painful portrayal of torture within the realm of the war in Iraq. This piece was inspired in part by the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Flynn interposes his personal history with his 2007 visit to Istanbul, where he observed interviews with victims of torture who were imprisoned by American forces.

[We wonder what the BANR members think about the approach of this article: a writer is summoned to Istanbul (a bridge between the Western world and the Muslim world) to report on torture.]

Osvaldo: I liked the beginning, like how he compared and contrasted his life and the torture that happened in the war.

[The nature of literary journalism is that the author can intrude and intersperse his personal life throughout the piece. This type of essay seeks to make all these disparate puzzle pieces come together. In terms of the narrative jumping around, what did you think? Does it make sense?]

Naomi: I enjoyed reading it, and I thought it was all going to come together, even though at times some of the ideas felt convoluted to me.

Katie: What came together really well and what was powerful to me were the parts about the detainees' experience. Those parts combined so many elements: the detainees as real people, them talking about what happened to them...that was the best part for me.

Yael: I really liked it. I'm kinda really interested in this topic even though I thought the second-person narration used at the beginning was risky. Still, there was a lot going on, and it was easy to stay interested for me because there was a lot going on. It wasn't boring; it was the opposite.

Tanea: It kept my attention. It had a lot of things going on. When he stopped talking about himself and went on about other stuff, I was still interested. I wasn't lost.

[This could be considered a lyric essay; it incorporates creative nonfiction, personal observation and personal history, and then straight-up journalism. How did Flynn pull it off?]

Yael: It is kinda weird that he switches from second person to third person. Kinda weird and kinda cool. Different. A lot of his personal stories kept me interested. But it's not about him, in essence.

Eli: It never went off on a complete tangent. It felt like everything came back to the main subject: torture. Sometimes if I read a piece that is supposed to be about something else, the author is being verbose just for the sake of it. But this wasn't like that. It just worked; the transitions were smooth enough that it worked.

Naomi: I liked all the different pieces. I think that it's totally fine to have incongruous-seeming parts to a piece. But what were we supposed to take away from it?

[Does the use of personal history detract from the suffering of the detainees? Is it appropriate for the author to insert himself into the story?]

Yael: I think it was. Maybe the author was thinking it's been done, that torture has been written about so much, and other people didn't include their own story like how I now have the chance to do. This was a way to make it new and fresh again.

Eli: I feel like [war has] been a prevalent subject before, and I appreciated a personalized view of it. It could have been a more straightforward, expository piece about war, and it would have been valid even with an emotional distance. But it wouldn't have had the same oomph.

Meeting: 4/22/08

2008-04-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

...a transcribed discussion of "Neptune's Navy," by Raffi Khatchadourian, from The New Yorker...

[Paul Watson, the main focus of this piece of journalism, is an environmental pirate on a crusade to save the oceans and "protect the world's marine life from the destructive habits and the voracious appetites of humankind." He is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which is a vigilante organization that was founded thirty years ago, with one of its ships, the Farley Mowat, a trawler that has nearly sunk three times.]

Bora: I LOVED IT. Chasing these Japanese speed boats down, it's like fiction, but it has facts to back it up. It's crazy. And the way [Watson] manipulates the law, but doesn't do it illegally.

Josh: No, I think it's pretty illegal.

Bora: Personally, I agree with [his tactics].

Josh: Either way, it's a great piece, and I really liked it.

Terence: I liked it too because it brings up so many issues, like environmental issues.

Bora: Which I think is very 2007 and timeless.

Terence: It's global. We've been reading about a lot of environmental issues in 2007.

...a transcribed discussion of "The White Train," by J. Malcolm Garcia, from The Virginia Quarterly Review...

[Based in Buenos Aires, June 2007, this piece follows cartoneros, unemployed farmers and factory workers who take to the streets to scavenge for a living. The White Train carries them all over the city in the hunt for their livelihood.]

Terence: This tells about a human-rights crisis. It's well-written and has a lot of momentum.

Tanea: I liked it, especially how it started in the beginning; the writing warmed me up.

Osvaldo: I loved the beginning too. I wanted to read more, but we ran out of time.

Arianna: I loved the whole piece. It was a really cool way to talk about an interesting subject that I know nothing about. It changed writing styles too; that kept me going. It twists. So it's experimental with form and tells an interesting story. It's just what we've been looking for.

Meeting 3/18/08

2008-03-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

...a transcribed discussion of “A Circus at the Center of the World,” by Daniel Alarcón, from The Virginia Quarterly Review...

[The protagonist of this story is Elijah Manau, a thirty-year-old city man who must move to the jungle to embrace his career as a teacher because he scored low on his regional placement exams. The year is 1797. He had been “exiled” to the jungle for six months when soldiers came and changed everything.]

Arianna: I loved the writing. I loved a lot of the images. I liked the end because it added to the complexity of what he was trying to talk about. I really enjoyed the story; it had a good and interesting and important point.

Yael: What do you think was the point? It was so complex.

Arianna: I felt like he [the author] was talking about the transformation of the main character; at the beginning of the story he is one person, and then these other characters have such an effect on him. It was powerful.

Terence: Before he came into the jungle, he just did his work as a normal teacher. I think he originally came in for his family really, and he plans to go back to the city. But then in the end, he slowly tries to fit in more and feels like he might want to stay. It’s a transformation.

[We launch into a discussion about writing style. We all decide this is some of the best writing we've read thus far.]

Arianna: Can we talk about the thing about the “we” [a narrative styling of this piece]. There were two definitions…one that included you [the reader] and one that didn’t. That was so beautiful. With the way it was written, by the end, you can tell [the protagonist] has real respect for his place and the village; that’s a common story, but the way Daniel Alarcón tells it is complex and interesting and well-written.

[Here we talk about Alarcón’s past writings. His works include the novel Lost City Radio, the short-story collection War by Candlelight, and his piece in the ever-famous Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, with an introduction by Beck]

Nina: I read his short stories and liked them a lot because of the writing. I read a few for class and the one in BANR ’05.

Eli: Like some of his other stories, this story was quite dense [in writing and in theme]. I didn’t know what to make of it, although I enjoyed it.

Josh: It was definitely like you have to be in the right mood to read this. You have to get into it.

Arianna: But I don’t think that takes away from it; in the end, it is dense, but that adds to it.

Sophia: It gave me a good feeling in the end.

Carmen: It felt very green. When I think of it now, I think “green.” I think it was really good about creating a really visual image in your head.

Bora: I had to read it twice because the set-up was a little complex, but the second time I read it, I got really into it.

[We then discuss tackling somewhat hard-to-read pieces and how this factors into "making” our collection. One of the original tasks of the anthology is to introduce writing to a slightly younger readership and maybe to somebody who doesn’t have the same breadth of knowledge of contemporary literature. We are always trying to find stuff that is a few degrees immediately engaging. That “engaging” happens on a formal level and/or a subjective level.]

Arianna: I wonder if you get our book, you trust the whole committee who has put each piece in there. You should! After much considering [during our meetings], there is a reason why everything is in there.

Bora: I think that’s the best thing about the Best American, because it’s nonrequired; it’s such a widespread thing. Of course we’re not going to be a perfect score with every piece for every reader, but as long as we get a majority [of our selections] to reach every reader, we’ve succeeded, you know?

Meeting: 3/4/08

2008-03-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

…a transcribed discussion “Indian Red,” by Todd Schrenk, from theextrovert.net…

["Indian Red" is a personal narrative about Todd Schrenk's experiences at a protest in New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina. A grassroots group called the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition planned the protest to demand the "right of return" for all displaced residents. After reading this piece, we asked each other: How many people have protested something?]

Carmen [raising her hand]: I did. It made me feel better because I was like, “Look at all these people who agree with me.”

Iris: Did you skip school for it?

Carmen: Maybe, yeah. No comment. [Laughter] There is just this huge contingent of people who believe it’s worth it. But at the same time, is it really going to do anything? I hate to be cynical about it…

Katie: Sometimes protests are just glorified fights.

Arianna: I’m not sure they’re the most effective means of change, but what is the most effective means of change?

Sophia: I wrote an essay for school about how I thought it was an impractical way of [imposing change]. It doesn’t move you to their case to see a bunch of people sitting in a tree.

Arianna: Our generation is a little too cynical to protest on ideological terms.

[Some discussion about whether many protests become unfocused, with too many protesters bringing too many agendas to events]

Katie: Everyone has ADD.

Bora: I feel like “protest” has lost its meaning. “Protest” in its original and democratic form has really lost its meaning; now it’s “Grab some conga drums.”

Katie: Bongo drums?

Bora: Bongo drums.

[We begin to talk about how protesting can be successful...]

Terence: I think the smaller kinds [of protests] are relevant.

Bora: Those types of protest are effective because they’re not overly organized. Like the bus boycott for civil rights: do something so simple, and it’s effective. But now you need to have a band and concession stands…

Arianna: It’s indicative that people believe one person’s voice can’t say anything. It’s like you need to rent out an arena to say something. And get robot suits.

Bora: Like in Berkeley, there are naked women sitting in eucalyptus trees, which in the first place, must be incredibly uncomfortable.

[Here we discuss that in bringing attention to Darfur, protests keep the flame of an important issue alive. Through protesting, Americans have helped improve a terrible situation. We then wonder which Americans are more prone to contribute time/money. There is some discussion about how/why celebrities are often out in front on many issues.]

Bora: I’m comfortable with that, actually. It’s like Andrew Carnegie and the gospel of wealth.

Naomi: I think they should donate actually.

Arianna: [The problem is] pop culture covers celebrity events more than it would cover obscure philanthropic events like the recent Davos meeting, which is basically this conference where all the top world leaders, the commanding powers of international relations, get together and give speeches… And supposedly attempt to solve the world's problems. But we don’t hear much about it on the news, unless Angelina Jolie was there.

[By the end of the discussion, we all agree that it’s better to speak up because a citizen will never regret voicing one’s opinion.]

Good Meeting Today

2008-03-04T23:36:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the stories that we read today. Now, I cannot wait until tomorrow for it will be time to get to work on producing the book!
-Terence

Meeting: 2/26/08

2008-03-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

...a transcribed discussion of "Pearls for Breakfast," by Gene Weingarten from washingtonpost.com...

Eli: It's kinda cool and interesting. Famous violinist plays in a subway and nobody stops to listen.

Terence: If I were walking in a subway, I wouldn't have stopped. My mind would have been elsewhere.

Nina: Nobody's chillin' in the subway.

Josh: Yeah, nobody goes to the subway to listen to music.

Terence [sarcastically]: "Let's go see who's playing!"

Sophia: I like reading studies like this. What I thought was interesting was the violinist's perspective. He was probably hurt that nobody was paying a lot of money to see him.

Sayra: I felt sorry for the musician.

Katie: The subway is just not a good place to [be a famous violinist].

{Here Dave explains all the reasons he loves this article. Many students agree. Then we hit a tangent.}

Josh: My friend and I play ukulele together, and we play downtown [in San Francisco]. There is a career to be had in professional ukulele-ing. If you time it right and pick the right place to play...we did it during peak holiday shopping down by the trolley cars...we got the tourists. No tie-dye was necessary.

Arianna: When we were [touring] in Japan, our musical group [Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble] made, like, thirty or forty bucks in front of our hotel, just playing music.

Josh: I made, like, forty dollars sitting in front of Virgin Megastore, on the corner.

Sophia: That's like how much the guy [in the article] made. I don't know why people give pennies.

Josh: People just have pennies in their pockets, and they want to feel like they're giving something rather than nothing.

Tanea: I felt like the author was voicing this silent love of this person [Joshua Bell].

Sophia: He compares him to Donny Osmond.

Katie: Isn't he dead?

[Group]: No!!!

Katie: Oh, I'm thinking of the wrong person.

...a transcribed discussion of "Diary of the Living Dead or: Are You There God? It's Me. Also, a Bunch of Zombies," by Jake Swearingen, from Pindeldyboz...

Terence: I just thought this was awesome.

Sayra: The way he takes his anger out on everything is funny.

Josh: This piece reminded me of this commercial where they fight office supplies.

Terence: I was able to see the whole thing...I was able to play [the scene] in my head.

Sophia: It's like Shaun of the Dead meets The Office.

{So, Josh, list off some zombie movies.}

Josh: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and Diary of the Dead just came out in theaters.

Carmen: Fast zombies are not as scary as the slow ones.

{Spoiler alert below.}

Katie: Here's the twist in the story...[the narrator] wants to be a zombie. He's the real jerk.

Nina: Why do narrators always have to be nice? I wrote a short story for my English class, and the narrator wasn't likable, and my teacher made me change it. It's like when you go to a party, and you think you're going to be bored, and then you are.

Josh: You expect [the protagonist's] actions to reflect your actions and your attitudes, and when they don't, it creates tension for the readers.

Nina: You know what I would do if I was an author? For every book review, I'd write letters to the reviewers who are wrong.

Arianna: There was this really good interview that The New Yorker did with the guy who wrote The Homecoming [a two-act play written by 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter]; [Pinter] said we expect art to confirm what we already believe, and we walk out the same as when we came in.

{Doesn't anyone want to be surprised anymore?}

A Post with No Name

2008-02-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

I posted "November,1889." It was me; yes, I admit.

-Arianna

BANR's thoughts on Beck's Odelay - 10th Anniversary Release

2008-02-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

On the 10th anniversary of the release of Beck's Odelay, Dave Eggers interviewed members of The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee about their thoughts on the album and the artist. Beck wrote the introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 edition.

Sally Sarai Holden

Age 15, Balboa High School, San Francisco

Sally, what has Odelay meant to you?

What?

This album we're listening to.

I've never heard it.

You haven't?

Sorry.

Have you heard of Beck?

I think so. In a movie maybe.

In a movie? What movie?

It was called Beauty Shop, I think. I can't remember. Was he mentioned in that? Or maybe it was Bach.

Okay, let's start over. Odelay is ten years old now. Do you think this song we're listening to ["Where It's At"] sounds relevant now?

Yeah. I'd probably listen to it. I like listening to it. I like this song.

What kind of music do you usually listen to?

Rock, hip-hop, indie, soul. Anything.

Some would say this album contains a new kind of combination of all those things.

[Listening] Yeah, it's cool.

So do you think that if you'd heard this album when it came out ten years ago, your life would have been totally different?

I'm trying to think how old I am...Wait, I'm sixteen!

You told me a second ago that you're fifteen. When did you turn sixteen?

August.

So it hasn't sunk in yet.

Not quite.

So the effect Odelay would have had on your life if you'd heard it when it came out...

Okay, so I would have been six years old...I can't tell if my life would have been different. I don't think I was into music when I was six years old. I was into sports. I played a lot of football.

So when you were six it was either Beck or football.

Yeah. The decision had to be made.

Nina Moog

Age 17, Lick Wilmerding High School, San Francisco

You've heard this album.

Yes.

Where were you when you first heard it?

In my friend's room.

Which friend?

Celeste Haverkamp.

Celeste? Really? I thought you weren't friends with her.

What? I'm good friends with her. And Jordan Hollarsmith was there, too.

Jordan? Ugh. Don't you think Jordan's kind of a phony?

Yeah, totally!

Oops. I was just kidding.

I was too.

Oh. Touché!

Right. Touché.

So you listened to the album when it first came out?

What? I was like four years old. No, I heard it last year.

Where? From your parents?

No. My parents wouldn't play Beck. They only listen to Billy Joel and German polka music.

So do you see Beck as a contemporary musical artist, or someone who's maybe dead and lived in Vienna?

No, he's contemporary. I saw him at the Download Festival, and the audience was really young. But then when we got a ride home from my friend's dad and he was like 50 and he was listening to Beck. So it seemed older then. But he's pretty contemporary. One of my friends is in love with him. She has a picture of him.

Who?

Celeste.

Celeste has a picture of your friend's dad? Ew. I knew there was something funny about her...

No! She's not in love with my friend's dad. She's in love with Beck.

Oh. What does she love about him?

I don't know. He's kind of short I guess. And we all liked how he and the band ate their dinner onstage.

Katie Henry

Age 17, Berkeley High School, Berkeley

So what has Odelay meant to you?

Is that what's playing right now?

Yeah, that's the music. By Beck.

Is he Irish?

No. I don't think so.

It sort of sounds like something you'd trip on acid to.

Okay, wait a second. I have to make note for the jury that Katie Henry is currently wearing a pink Polo shirt and very clean, maybe even ironed, jeans. She doesn't look like someone--

Are you trying to convey that I haven't done acid? Because I haven't. I admit it.

So what is it about this song ["Derelict"] that sounds like acid-trip music?

I don't know. It sort of sounds like something you'd hear at the Himalayan Fair in Berkeley, when all of the white people try to pretend they're ethnic and have rhythm.

So clearly you like this song.

Yeah! I've lived in Berkeley all my life. I'm used to music like this.

Osvaldo Marquez-Gomez

Age 15, Gateway High School, San Francisco

Osvaldo, what has Odelay meant to you?

Well I haven't really heard it. I don't know what it means to me.

Can you believe it's been ten years since it came out?

No I can't. Or I can. I haven't heard it.

Now that you've heard some of it, what do you think?

Sounds like I might listen to it. It sounds relaxing, but it has a rhythm to it.

Does it sound like it was made ten years ago?

No, it sounds like it could have been made today.

So you're saying if you had heard it at a younger age, your life would have been different?

Huh? I don't think so. Are these really your questions?

Naomi Krupitski Wernham

Age 17, Berkeley High School, Berkeley

Do you remember when you first heard this album?

This album? I don't think I've heard this. Wait [listening to "Minus"]. I have heard this. My dad listens to this.

Is your dad hip with the music?

He loves music. He's not exactly contemporary, but he has everything done in the '70s.

What does he like about Beck?

I don't know. He has very strange taste in music.

Do you like it?

I like parts of it.

Do you know what Beck looks like?

Vaguely. I saw a video once...Isn't he a skinny white boy?

Does this song ["Sissyneck"] sound relevant to you?

In terms of something that can fit into what's being played today, sure. He sounds clever. He knows how to use sounds well.

Did you know that he won the Nobel Prize in 1998?

No, but that's pretty cool.

I was just kidding.

Oh.

He didn't win that year. It was '99.

Oh.

Eli Wolfe

Age 16, School of the Arts, San Francisco

When did you first hear Beck?

It was last year. My friend was playing him in his car.

Did it change your life?

No. But after I heard him, I went out to Amoeba [Records] to get a used Beck CD. And when I was getting that, I saw a Bob Marley CD and bought that. And that actually did change my life.

Which Beck CD did you buy?

I wound up not getting one.

Because you got the Marley instead.

Yeah.

You had a budget for just one CD.

Right.

Which Bob Marley album did you buy?

I think it was Living Legends.

Was it maybe just Legend?

Right. I played that over and over that day. Then I started writing while listening to music. Now I always listen to music when I write.

Could you write to this, what we're listening to?

Is this Beck?

It is.

Maybe. But it doesn't have a consistent enough beat. I could drive to this.

Where would you drive?

Probably by the beach. Around dusk. Stop at the Cliff House.

Why the beach?

I feel like I have to have some purpose when I drive around, but I can't be completely aware of it. So I drive toward the water and when I'm at the beach, I know I'm here.

And this would work for that?

I think so, yeah.

Carlos Cheung

Age 16, almost 17, Mission High School, San Francisco

Tell us about the day when Beck's album Odelay changed your life.

I've never heard of it...Or maybe I have. I'm not sure.

I assumed since you were sitting for this interview that--

What? You asked us to come into your office and do these interviews. Sally told me that I had to come up here next. I didn't--

Okay. Let's move on. Tell me, Carlos: What's the job of music?

I guess to help someone relax. To help put them back together.

I like that. What do you mean by that?

Sometimes people might be spread out too much. So music might help them calm down, figure out where they're at, what they're doing, what they want. To sort everything out.

Could this song ["Ramshackle"] do that for you?

[Listening] I think maybe it could.

Have you seen Beck?

No.

What do you think he looks like?

Is he classical?

Is he classical? You're the second person who's mistaken him for Bach.

Oh. Sorry.

I'm talking about the guy we're listening to. What do you think he looks like?

Maybe some Caucasian guy with curly hair?

How do you figure?

Because this kind of music reminds me of that kind of guy. He sounds Caucasian. Listening to this I wouldn't think he's some Chinese guy.

Tanea Lunsford

Age 16, School of the Arts, San Francisco

Do you remember when you first heard Beck?

You mean just now?

Even before now. Did you ever hear of him before sitting down just now?

No.

Have you heard of him?

I'm embarrassed to say I have not.

Now that you're hearing the music, do you like it?

I do like it.

This album was made ten years ago. Do you think it sounds relevant now?

It doesn't seem like it was done a long time ago. It's not like catchy '80s music. It doesn't sound like really calm music, but it also doesn't sound like I'm-going-to-drive-all-around-town-music. There's a happy medium.

Eli said it was drive around music.

Oh.

You guys are friends. Now you guys have some issues to work out.

I guess so.

I don't want it to turn into a big fight, though.

Okay.

Tell me it won't be a big fight. I don't want you two to fight.

We won't. I promise.

What do you listen to when you drive?

I only have my permit. But if I were to drive, I'm indecisive, so I'd just have to listen to a mix. Lots of different things.

Like what?

Stevie Wonder. And really bad, catchy songs.

Britney Spears?

No! Not that bad. I like John Legend. A lot of reggae. Maybe early Linkin Park.

What do you think of music that incorporates lots of styles?

I like it. It keeps you wondering. It's fulfilling.

You like music with lots of layers to it?

Yeah.

What kind of a guy do you think he is?

With a name like Beck? Beck would be about six-feet tall. Maybe blond hair. No facial hair. Maybe ripped jeans. He wouldn't wear socks.

You're right. Especially the ripped jeans. That's all he wears. Ripped jeans. Ripped all over.

See? I knew it.

Iris Zhang

Age 17, Mission High School, San Francisco

Tell us about the day when Beck changed your life.

What's that?

When you first heard Odelay and he--

I don't know about him at all.

Does this song ["Hotwax"] sound familiar?

No...

What sort of music do you listen to?

Pretty much anything. I like Keren Ann. I guess soft rock and indie-ish.

Do you think people over thirty should be allowed to make music?

Yeah. Why not?

How about over forty?

Sure.

Over fifty? Any limit?

No limits. Your style follows you. When you get older, the styles change, but it's still your style.

This album came out ten years ago. Does it still sound new?

I think so.

Now that you've heard it, would you buy it?

I would download it.

You mean you'd find a way to download it for free.

Yeah.

What does it take for you to spend money on music?

If it makes me feel relaxed. And if I can't find it anywhere online to get it for free.

Lost but not yet Found in McSweeney's

2008-02-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

I laid eyes on the free book fabric container, settling to sitting cross-legged in front of the treasure on a windy Wednesday night just minutes before the 2nd production meeting. Subconciously, I relaxed my grip on the current book I was reading, Life and Death in Shanghai, and removed books from the container like a kid digging a hole in the sandpit. -Sigh-

Two books caught my attention and I decided to take those. Both were just a collection of artwork and before I could think clearly, I was rushed to join the production meeting. Just like that, my library book was abadoned. Left on the carpet, forgotten. Even after two hours of intense lessons about InDesign, even after I boarded my mother's car to head home, even after taking out the content in my backpack to do homework, even after midnight, I did not realize that my book was gone. It was when I was about to read before going to sleep that I discovered it was missing.

I was devastated. Can you believe that? I spent a whole thirty minute looking in the kitchen, in the living room, in my room, in my backpack, in the car to no avail. Sitting down for 45 minutes, running through my labrynth of a mind, I finally saw what had happened. It was when I was savaging through the free book pile. Oh, how disappointed I am in myself for being able to forget that amazing book. My treatment of the book cannot be justified.
-Terence

InDesign Lesson Take ONE!

2008-02-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

Woah! Swear BANR meeting was yesterday, but of course, there is always more work to be done. There is always something to be improved and guess what? a large group (by Elissa's standards) of intellectuals gathered in the production room (the basement of McSweeny's) and within the timespan of one hundred and twenty minutes, each of the five grasshoppers learned from the master sensei of InDesign, Elissa herself. Through a prepared lesson about the basics of Adobe's book making software, printouts of shortcuts keys, and show & teach, her knowledge of the software was passed on.

I learned of the following: basic page layout, copy editing vs. editing vs. proofreading, orphans & widows, and many people have dreams dealing with vampires.

Things to keep in mind
+First graph (the first paragraph) is always FLUSHED LEFT
+Body text (all subsequent paragraphs after first) is always indented at the start of the paragraph
+Every page has a page # except the first page
+Every page has a header except the page containing the title of the selected piece
+No prepositions at linebreaks for titles

-Terence

Richard Howard's "November,1889"

2008-02-27T21:58:00.000-08:00

In response to our copious posts about dreaming...
"Curious symptoms withal/for migrane: patterns moving/over surfaces, faint/ most often, fine designs/that would come as a kind of cobweb/ cast iridescent upon the others, a net/ intervening between me and them./ Lord! the things one sees when a fever-lit mind/ grants no middle distance./Prolixity of the real!/ And just when we are grateful/ for the dark, when night resumes us/comes prolixity/of what is unreal/ the melting waxworks of our sleep/called dreams. I am against dreams/ not being one to trust/memory to itself./ In my delirium, then, I had/ conviction of divided identity/ never ceasing to be two persons who/ever thwarted and opposed one another." Richard Howard, "November, 1889"

Dreams

2008-02-27T18:55:00.000-08:00

We're all having vampire dreams.

2/19/08 Meeting

2008-02-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

a transcribed discussion of The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer, by Julian Dibbell, from The New York Times

Carlos: I liked reading this. I like games, and World of Warcraft is a big hit. Kids [gold farm in San Francisco] too. When I was in middle school, I sold virtual items for money. I was paid [a certain amount of] dollars for [a certain amount of] gold. It was pretty awesome. People give me the money, I transfer the item, and I give them the item. It helps [the gamers] experience a lot; they can feel richer, and I am richer in reality.

Katie: A lot of my male friends like [playing computer games].

Arianna: I think the article is really interesting, and the phenomenon is interesting. It kept my attention, for sure. This wasnt about characters, as were used to reading about.

Carmen: Ive heard about [gold farming] before. I think the most interesting thing about this subject is that its something you dont hear a lot about.

Terence: The articles talks about how Chinese gold farmers play twelve hours a day. For a job!

Carmen: Ill be babysitting an eight-year-old boy this weekend, and he has a [Nintendo] Wii, and Im so jealous. I cant wait to play.

Terence: Dont let that distract you from your babysitting duties.

{A brief discussion about babysitting ensues.}

a transcribed discussion of Methane and Politic by Anya Ulinich, from Zoetrope: All-Story

Eli: Its basically about this girl who has a strange relationship with her pseudo-uncle. For one thing, the languagewell, charming isnt the first thing I think of, but its what it comes down to when I think about it. The kind of haphazard life, and the fact that she has this uncleits funny.

Katie: The author is clearly Russian.

Oz: I liked it. It held my interest.

Sayra: I liked it too. I think it had a good balance between her little jokes and when she did get serious. I read the whole thing.

Katie: I enjoyed [the language] so much.

Arianna: I suppose the shifting between humor and seriousness added to the freshness of the piece.

Katie: I loved the ending. Just that last paragraph of how she thinks of words being like animals. Ive always imagined words as having animal or human qualities. It was just a good ending, and I hate all endings usually. I didnt see this ending coming, and that made me happy.

Carlos: I thought this was pretty good because it was mostly focused on someone trying to achieve the America dream, but not in the [typical] way of becoming successful by speaking English and earning money. This story was about a girl liking her uncle. It has a real twist in it, and its dramatic. She wants to be rich and successful and have everything, which is what a lot of people want, but she goes about it differently.

Katie: And shes not pretty. Shes a horrible little child.

Yael: I really liked her actually. I was rooting for her the whole time, and I think thats a really great thing, when the reader is rooting for the narrator.

{In our discussion of A Night Scavenger by Herbert Gold, from Michigan Quarterly Review, we continued to analyze characters. We wondered, when you read something, do you have to like the narrator or can you read and enjoy the piece for other reasons?}

Elizabeth: If I have a connection with the story, I dont have to like the narrator.

Carmen: I was thinking of some of Kurt Vonneguts characters, and even though they have personality flaws, youre still rooting for them. Most people arent the greatest person. Its exhausting to read a story where the character is perfect in every way. Its like, come on.

Yael [referring back to the young girl in Methane and Politic]: So you see, she doesnt seem like the type of person Id hang out with, but I was still rooting for her.

Vampire Allergic to Blood

2008-02-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

"I am a vampire, and I am allergic to blood. "

I dreamt of myself saying that at BANR last night.
Maybe I had too much fresh lemon juice.

-Iris

Things We're Saying

2008-02-20T16:41:00.001-08:00

Yael: If all great writers read self-help books, we wouldn’t have great literature.

An Ambiguous Ode to Blogging by Arianna

2008-02-20T15:48:00.001-08:00

In the effort to avoid everything I should be doing right now, I am venturing into the world of Blogland; with a hard hat. I’m not sure I agree with blogging to begin with. I don’t like the way that it promotes us all to have complete control over our own perception, and it’s like you can appear to be talking to someone when really your only companion in this solo expose is cyberspace, who, as far as my relationship with it has been, offers no real feedback. You can let loose, eat spicy pizza, wear the same jeans everyday- GO CRAZY! And no one knows, matter of fact, you can maintain a guise that is perfectly aligned with today’s standards of propriety while secretly sitting in your underwear eating a gallon of Ben and Jerry’s. It sets a double standard, you’ve found a loophole, you’ve wriggled yourself out of our boxes, damnit. And that, I guess, is kind of awesome.

-Arianna

>_<

2008-02-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

For the first time, I picked out a piece and was ready to make photocopies today. But a fever hit me, then the coughing came. So bummed about missing BANR.

Looking forward to Elissa's transcription.

-- Iris

About the BANR Committee Members

2008-02-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

Meet the committee members who are currently finding the best from 2008.

In San Francisco...

Adrianne is a senior in high school. Next year in college she will be studying finance and business while exploring her artistic aspirations of becoming a poet and/or lyricist. She loves chocolate. She also loves experiencing different cultures. She has traveled to Japan, Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, and Mexico and hopes to continue her travels while embracing the many walks of life.

Charley is a junior at Berkeley High School, where she enjoys writing faux-Republican opinion articles for the school newspaper and studying languages, dead or alive. She has acted in many plays at the American Conservatory Theater, where she specializes in playing little sisters. She also enjoys swings, hypothetical scenarios, and dessert. Her apple recommendations are Granny Smiths or Pink Ladies.

Yael is a senior in the Creative Writing department at School of the Arts. She enjoys sketch comedy and fiction, and hopes to one day write funny things.

Bora is a senior at Lick-Wilmerding (yes, that's its real name) High School. She enjoys eating candy and being in the sun. She also enjoys playing badminton, the viola, and taking care of her fern collection.

Marley is a junior at San Francisco's School for the Arts. She is currently left-handed, a vegetarian, enjoys squeaking, playing the bass guitar, and eating mangoes. She took on writing because her friends told her there was no future in speaking.

Tanea does not enjoy writing her own bios, but she enjoys watching movies with accurate translation subtitles and listening to music she can dig. She goes to church every Sunday (by choice) and loves it. She loves all people and hates when people refer to themselves in third person, so she will stop now.

Eli is an eighteen-year-old writer at San Francisco School of the Arts. He's been successfully unemployed for the last eighteen years and is very excited to see what unemployment opportunities await him after college.

Will is a junior at Crystal Springs High School. In his free time he enjoys reading, eating Ramen, and playing Ultimate Frisbee. He is also very pale, or so his friends claim.

Roxie is a senior at Albany High. Apart from reading and talking about stories, she enjoys writing stories, reading plays, and talking. She is a proud editor of Crosshatch Collective (a quarterly zine), and she loves vegan food. A lot.

Fiona is a senior in the Creative Writing department at the San Francisco School of the Arts. She has wanted a dog forever and feels that this year is the year.

Sophia is currently a senior at Redwood High School outside San Francisco. She writes for her school paper and aspires to be the next Woodward or Bernstein. She enjoys getting the New York Times on Sunday mornings and following the 2008 presidential election on the blogosphere. She likes everything except math.

Virginia is a junior at Unity High School in East Oakland.

Chloe is a kitty at International High School. She is currently making use of her 'sophomore slump' time by writing short stories about lions and keeps fit by struggling with a variety of instruments daily.

Molly is a junior at Castileja School. Likes include talking, eating, writing, driving, and painting things that are not paper (and also things that are paper). Dislikes include cough medicine and writing bibliographies. Her favorite character in The Lion King is Scar. A person in China recently told her that she was a "cool type" and that she looked like Tibby from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Molly has yet to respond to this comment.

And in Michigan...

Elizabeth is a homeschooled senior. A published writer, Elizabeth thinks BANR is the best thing since sliced bread, and quite possibly since unsliced bread. She’s passionate about her volunteer work at the Toledo Zoo, her family’s farm, writing, birds of prey (both the animals and the Klingon starships), and obscure British sci-fi TV shows.

Carlina is a sophomore at Pioneer High School. She has a passion for bright colors, and she craves creativity like mad. She is a staff writer for her school paper, and has high hopes for pursing a career in journalism in the future. But for now, she is content with just carrying the title of Herself.

Michelle is a sophomore at Community High School. She writes decently and draws horribly, and is cursed with a strange ability to mangle the language. This is why she speaks Spanish instead. She is, however, not Spanish, but English. This, and her casting as Lysander in A Midsummer's Night's Dream, should give you a basic idea about her.

Sam is a senior at Ypsilanti High School and represents Y-Town. He likes being funny and someday wants to get paid for it. He also needs to learn how to not waste days on the Internet.

Shelley is a sophomore at Pioneer High. She loves pasta, mango-melon flavored Starbursts, reading prose, and policy debate. She hopes to go to college and get a job that involves sunshine.

Eva is an 18-year-old writer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She spends her time reading cool books at a smoky diner. When she grows up (for real), she wants to get paid cash money to write sweet stories that make people cry happy tears.

Adam is a 16-year-old aspiring director from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He loves all movies, particularly spaghetti westerns. He spends his life planning to spend his life directing films.

Rachel is in a pickle. While living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she would much rather read and frolic in sunbeams, but fills this void by doing volunteer work and being on the BANR committee. She also enjoys long naps.

Meeting: 2/12/08

2008-02-18T17:06:00.000-08:00

...a transcribed discussion of "Letters from a Midwestern Superhero," by Patrick Crerand, from the Indiana Review

Naomi: Well basically, this is about a superhero that's kinda dysfunctional and never ends up saving the people he wants to save. He actually ends up writing letters to the victims of his arch-nemesis. Honestly, I just enjoyed reading it. I thought it was cleverly written. The author has a point in the end: there's this really profound argument of what's really good and what's really evil.

Terence: For a second, I thought [the villain] Jeff was a figment of his [the hero's] imagination.

Naomi: It reminds me of Fight Club, like how he says that we're really the same, and I'm gonna blame [all my misgivings] on you. I think it's debatable about whether Jeff exists. I think it's an interesting question if he exists or not.

Tanea: That's why I enjoyed it. It adds an entirely different dimension to [the story], not knowing who Jeff is. It's not unimportant.

{But, our committee wonders, who is Jeff?}

Iris: He reminds me of Mr. Incredible and IncrediBoy, [Mr. Incredible's] side kick [from the movie, The Incredibles].

Arianna: What about the interview at the beginning? You know, that kinda back-room talk of the superheros...

Arianna again [commenting on her own comment]: It's also a big stretch, like Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room; it's the structure that matters here. The point is the premise, which is: the superhero writing to these people he almost saved to say, "Oh, I'm sorry."

Tanea: A letter is something really, really personal. Today, we sit down and just send emails.

Arianna: It's also humanizing to write letters. It's not a superhero thing.

Bora: He's not a superhero; everyone he tried to save died. I thought it was really just supposed to be a humor piece. It goes from "cornstarch" to "SWAT suit." I thought it was going to be comical, amusing [the whole way through], but this poor guy, his conscience is so racked. For me, when it changed from him dialoguing with Jeff in letter form, when it went from letters to actual encounters and then it went back to letter-form, that's what I mean with structure.

Carmen: I saw it completely differently. I thought of this thirteen-year-old kid who's bored in this town and wants to become a superhero, and he's imagining this whole thing. The spandex is so ridiculous. This kid has his heart in the right place and wishes he could save people, but he's too busy with his cereal boxes.

Iris: I don't think the letters were even sent out. They were just found.

Carmen: Like a diary.

Bora: But he wasn't a superhero!

Naomi: When I was reading it, I thought it was funny, not wrenching and life-changing. This is about a superhero who fails. That's funny. And it provides balance with the other stuff we read.

Nina: I think the idea is a really good idea.

Thoughts by Terence

2008-02-17T06:47:00.001-08:00

I am going to continue bringing reading in. Hopefully I will get them photocopied in time, but after this week, wrestling season would end and I will have a bit more spare time before 6 pm to get reading material copied.

Let's see, make sure to make more than just 5 copies, at least 10 then.

See everyone on Tueday, 2/19/08 then.

Also, I looked at the prelim sketches and I cannot wait until something amazing happens and BAM, super attractive cover with lots of stuff in it.
-Terence

Meeting: 2/5/08

2008-02-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

...a transcribed discussion of Shena McAuliffe's "Benevolence," from Conjunctions

Bora: "I like how this story pits science against religion. The plot circles around Maria; she's pronounced 'benevolence,' even though she's committed murder and doesn't feel bad about it. She's a helper-lady at the prison, and it's basically her against this minister-chaplain man. Phrenology means certain bumps on a person's head can reveal character traits, like being a criminal, but it's completely undocumented. "

Naomi: "I really liked the subject, and I think it's interesting to talk about, science and religion. The idea of all that being in this woman's head, physically, is really cool."

Bora: "It's just a widely-written about topic. It's the way Jefferson said people institutionalized slavery. It's linked with eugenics."

Carmen: "It's that some people use eugenics to try to prove racial superiority."

Bora: "How do you measure benevolence? She has a big bump on her head, and that's supposed to mean benevolence?"

Meeting: 1/29/08

2008-01-31T20:00:00.000-08:00

...a transcribed discussion of "Y," by Marjorie Celona...

Naomi: "It was one of those stories, plain and simple, I enjoyed reading, and I felt it was a very complete portrait of what it attempted to depict. It told about childhood. It's a coming-of-age story, which bothers me generally, but this didn't bother me. When I talk about what it's about, I don't like the idea, but I liked reading this story. It changed my mind."

Sarya: "I liked it. Just the process; it has a lot of detail in the life process of a girl. It rang true to me."

Arianna: "But what about the tone? It starts out one way, and I was initially drawn to that, and then there was a jarring change."

Naomi: "It just wasn't so chronological because she's talking about it from her perspective, about certain things she couldn't remember."

Tanea: "If I had a bum-eye, I would describe it how other people would describe it."

Terence: "I think in the perspective of another person and how he would think about things about me. The way that I think would do justice to another's perception."

Carmen: [Says nothing and only shows a thumbs up.]

Yael: "You know how people on facebook write about themselves in their bios, like how they're really fake because they're trying to make themselves sound really cool?"

Bora: "I think part of it is that coming-of-age is an awkward process, so it's hard to write about it. It's hard to read about it too. You know when you're watching a movie, and you feel embarrassed for a character and it hurts for you too? I felt like that while reading this."

Here are some other coming-of-age books and movies the students believe got it right:

The Dead Poet's Society

Catcher in the Rye

The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys

Laurie Halse Anderson books

Here is one coming-of-age movie that Bora thought got it wrong:

Star Wars

Thoughts by Terence

2008-01-31T19:34:00.000-08:00

When is Tuesday going to come?
-Terence

Two Decisions a Day

2008-01-30T06:23:00.001-08:00

Whew! Another day at McSweeney's done. Honestly, I don't know how that hour of discussion (7-8pm) slips away so fast.
-Terence

Meeting: 1/22/08

2008-01-28T02:24:00.000-08:00

...a transcribed discussion of Ken Foster's "Feral Children"...

Tanea: "That was weird."

Naomi: "It made me think of a lot of different things...I thought there were a few different elements to it that had to do with society and how involved we get in each other's lives. It's set in a society where people have basically become animals. Sometimes we get so involved in things that don't matter that it escalates where we're not obsessing about the things that do matter."

Bora: "It made me think about the writer's perspective of how children are raised, and how children have gone from being your progeny and genetic line and things you're supposed to invest so much time into and now they're considered man's best friend. Like how people raise their children, it's not neglectful, but it's like getting children for the wrong reason. From what we've read in magazines and trashy gossip, it's really trendy to have a kid."

Arianna: "It's also how we raise our children, how nannies raise our children; it's like distance from the kids. It's at arms-length now."

Carlos: "Little boys are born like that, like wrestlers."

Tanea: "I thought it was a clash of generations. I also thought about the idea of pity, like is pity always good?"

Bora: "It's like if I bought my fish another fish to keep it company."

Nina: "What is interesting about this is the emotional reaction; it just rubs you raw."

What We Like

2008-01-28T00:05:00.000-08:00

Sophia loves "The Invasion from Outer Space," a recently published story by Steven Millhauser
If you're into graphic novels, Sophia suggests the following list as a good starting point for tracking down some of the best graphic fiction from 2008: http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2008/52771/

826 Valencia

2007-12-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

This is a fund-raising collection, with all the proceeds going to 826 Valencia, the pirate shop and student writing lab in San Francisco (www.826valencia.org; also check out www.826national.org). Most of our committee members have volunteered as tutors or as members of the Youth Advisory Board at 826 Valencia. And after our selections are made, all of the periodicals we receive throughout each year are made part of the growing 826 Valencia student library.