On this week's readings

So I'm posting late once again, and I had to skim some of the readings to catch up, but since we were invited to just post on the ones we connected most to, I'm going to start with the hybrid essay, which is by far my favorite. That might be an understatement--I was totally blown away by how weird and funny and profound and energetic this piece was. I love the boldness of the voice and the mixture of colloquial and formal diction and how paragraph endings like, "Friends, your best, most redemptive love won't change into a satyr," and "I can see it's hard to be a breeder" make this essay feel like literary gymnastics--it takes hairpin turns and then stops and starts again. One thing I noticed about this is that it could so easily have become repetitive--each paragraph obviously is devoted to the same premise but each is also for the most part the same length (except for the two longer paragraphs towards the middle). I think what keeps this essay fresh though is the quick pace and the way the content so completely defies expectation from moment to moment. The ending took my breath away.

I also really loved the hummingbird essay. The instruction in the first line immediately draws me in and I felt so heartbroken when I was asked, again, to consider the hummingbirds that die in the Americas. There was an aspect of this essay that felt like magical realism to me. I actually read this secretly while I was in the computer lab with my students and I was so moved by it I got choked up. Later the ending felt less convincing to me somehow, and I'm sad about that. I will go back to these two essays again and again, I think.

The last essay I wanted to mention was the Sasha Steensen essay, which I realized tonight I had read parts of last week. Like others have posted I had trouble getting through the entire thing but I also felt I wanted to linger with this essay a bit more, and that maybe I should not be reading it in one sitting. What I liked about it though was how exotic it felt and how fixated it becomes on the sentence diagrams, which are beautiful and strange and impossible and who does that? And some of the metaphors are so startlingly good, like calling William Gass's diagrams "more like the understory of a forest than erect trees." This content sparks my curiosity--the examples from old educational texts are so oddly cryptic--and it makes me want to read on. I also like how Steensen is using the page differently from what we've seen elsewhere so far, in that she does intersperse some line breaks and even visuals. I hope to return to this essay little by little to savor and finish it.