As mentioned in the email I sent you last week, Junot Diaz will be giving a reading at Miami University on Thursday, April 2nd. He is appearing as part of their Translating Cultures: Latina/o and Latin American Writers Festival.Diaz's reading will be at 8pm in the Heritage Room of the Shriver Center at Miami. If you're free on Thursday during the day, he is also participating in a panel on Contemporary Latino/a Fiction alongside writers Angie Cruz and Alex Espinoza at the Leonard Theater, Peabody Hall from 3-3:45 p.m.
Here's some more infomation about the Festival.
I thought that the Diaz reading was terrific: smart, funny, and moving. What’s more, I knew the story from which Diaz read from an old Best American anthology, the one edited by Amy Tan, I believe, but I didn’t put two and two together until the reading that both story and novel are narrated by the seemingly ubiquitous Yunior.
ReplyDeleteI liked a lot of what Diaz had to say, especially in regard to literature/art and the appreciation and study of literature/art. I thought that he handled the high schooler’s question deftly, not criticizing her for asking a simplistic question (“What does the novel mean, and what is its message?”), but blaming a lack of funding for arts education in America as the source of her question. Okay, so maybe it’s a bit of a leap, but schools do tend to simplify the teaching of literature to middle and high school students in public education (I know: I taught English in Atlanta for four years to high school sophomores and juniors) in a way that can fundamentally damage their understanding of literature and its purpose. Diaz made the great point that the “meaning” of good literature should be, ultimately, ambiguous, that literature should not be didactic, and that its only message should be in teaching the reader to exercise “compassion.” It’s not a new argument. Michael Curtis had an essay along these lines a few years back, and I’m sure it came up long before then, but I still embrace the idea. I also loved Diaz’s observation that, when reading, you are at all times either an outsider looking in or an insider who is in on the secret, and that “both positions are equally thrilling.” Getting back to teaching high school, I was often dismayed that administration wanted us to go out of our way to teach texts that “spoke to the students and their ways of life.” This insular thinking led to lots of The Outsiders and Catcher in the Rye and little world literature, as though stories from around the world can’t teach us about our own humanity.
I was disappointed that Diaz dodged Jana’s question on the footnotes. He seems like a smart guy, and I’d wager that he knew exactly what he was doing when he put them in the book. I understand what he was getting at about the unconscious taking over when one composes fiction, but the conscious mind must take over to some extent in revision, and certainly in forming a novel’s structure and overlying principles. Because he wasn’t keen to answer that one, I kept my own question to myself, but it was this: Why did he use the footnotes to illuminate Dominican culture but not to illuminate “nerd” culture? If he was worried about the reader being left in the dark regarding Dominican history and customs, why wasn’t he equally worried about the reader not getting references to Star Trek or Star Wars? It’s a question that I hope we’ll explore tomorrow in class.
I thought the reading was wonderful (wondrous?), and I especially liked Diaz's Q&A responses. One of my favorites was his answer to the question "Who was your audience?", to which Diaz responded that he picked 6 of his friends, all very different people, and wrote to them. Diaz's explanation for writing to these 6 diverse people was that when a mass audience read the book, he wanted each reader a) sometimes as if the author was whispering to her, that the book was talking about some obscure little secret that only she knew, and b) other times as if she was overhearing a secret, something the author was telling someone else. "Both experiences are exhilerating," said Diaz. As far as my own Oscar reading experience goes, I'd liken a & b as follows: a) some of the poetry quotes (of which I probably missed as many as I got) and b) comic book quotes. So, I thought I'd post a W.B. Yeats poem Diaz references (the quote is "A terrible beauty is born")... which probably everyone knows anyway, and I can't really figure out a good thesis for what it means for the book, but the poem might be nice to read again anyway.
ReplyDeleteEaster, 1916
I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
II
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
His comments about the novel, and about being a reader before being a writer, were great (you can imagine why, as an English prof, this response might appeal to me). I also loved his idea about how ethnic groups are affected by not seeing their own reflection in the larger culture--using the trope of monstrosity as he does to such effect in Oscar Wao. I'm glad you both enjoyed the Diaz reading, and I'll look forward to class tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteI appreciated the way he read- he made bland statements funny just by inflection, which I think it takes a skilled reader to manage. As you said in class today- huuuuge contrast to the guy who introduced him!
ReplyDelete