Re: A Drugstore In Winter Cynthia Ozick Pdf 25
Genciana Haggins
The memoir I loved is Heather Havrilesky\u2019s funny, wise, warm meditation on marriage, Foreverland, which was very aggressively misread by a number of tabloid journalists and B-list celebrities with no sense of humor/irony. Havrilesky excels at hyperbole, and her book\u2019s subject is how prolonged intimacy inevitably gives rise to irritations\u2014irritations that she is at great pains to point out are not inconsistent with love but part and parcel of it. Predictably, the great literary sophisticates at The New York Post somehow came away from all comedic nuance this with the headline \u201CWife Calls Husband \u2018Insane,\u2019 Hates her Husband.\u201D Here\u2019s my attempt at a corrective in The New Yorker: -turner/heather-havrileskys-guide-to-enduring-married-life
The memoir I did not love is Rebecca Mead\u2019s Home/land, an account of her decision to move from New York to her native England in the wake of Trump\u2019s election. In brief, I thought the book was a bit insular. You can read what I wrote about it in the New York Times Book Review here: -land-rebecca-mead.html
Now comes a momentous occasion: the moment when I decide whether I am going to become one of those writers I\u2019ve always found so vicariously embarrassing\u2014writers who argue with reviewers who don\u2019t like their books, or who publicly correct very flagrant misreaders of their work. I removed myself from Twitter in part in hopes of achieving the sort of sublime serenity that allows a person to write X, see someone read them as having written not-X, and continue happily about their day, secure in the confidence that people who are competent at reading will get the message. Alas, I am (and no doubt will remain) a petty bitch who loves to luxuriate in a grudge, the way that healthy and wholesome people love to luxuriate in warm baths. In other words, I am simply not capable of suffering a blatant misreading. The rule I\u2019m making for myself is the following: I will not argue with people who dislike my writing, nor will I intervene when I feel I have been misread at some airy artistic or metaphorical level, but I will absolutely and unreptently gripe and kvetch to my heart\u2019s content when someone straightforwardly misunderstands what I\u2019m saying in the most basic way. In this case, what I said was: many people think memoir is an intrinsically self-indulgent genre, but I think that they are stupid; books are good or bad not in virtue of what they\u2019re about but in virtue of how they\u2019re constructed; of course not all memoirs are bad; I disliked Home/land not because I think all memoirs are self-indulgent, but because it happens to be self-indulgent. What I was taken by a random man, the current object of my pointless and procrastinatory ire, to be saying was: memoir is an intrinsically self-induldgent genre, and I hate all memoirs.
\u201CIn recent years, it has become fashionable to claim that a person needs special license to write about herself \u2014 that she must be extraordinarily famous, unusually rich or fantastically traumatized if she is to venture one of those embarrassing indulgences, a memoir. A person who insists on documenting an uneventful life is guilty of self-importance and so, accordingly, it has become fashionable to blame the defects of a book on the defects of its genre. Common wisdom has it that a work of autobiography is by nature doomed to insularity. In point of fact, a book is justified by its quality, not its subject. \u201CHome/Land,\u201D a new book by the New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, does not falter by virtue of belonging to the reviled species of memoir; rather, it flails because it is insufficiently interested in the external world\u2026.\u201CHome/Land\u201D is a casualty not of its genre but of its impregnable inwardness.\u201D
Like Havrilesky, I made the mistake of assuming that irony was legible not only to bullies on the literary playground (????)\u2014though I do love the image of myself beating writers up and taking their lunch money, I must say\u2014but to, you know, people who read books and reviews of them. One simply dispairs of the prospect of communication between two human souls when one is this explicit and yet is nonetheless so flagrantly and utterly misunderstood. In sum, it would be a pity if anyone besides Wayne of Portland, Oregon, came away from this piece believing that I hate all memoirs: I\u2019ve actually long meant to write something about how silly I think it is to dismiss all entries in a given genre, and how annoying I find fashionable tirades against personal writing. Surely no one reasonable could possibly find fault with Cynthia Ozick\u2019s beautiful essay, \u201CA Drugstore in Winter,\u201D simply because it is autobiographical. (Incidentally, it\u2019s probably my favorite essay ever. Here it is! -drugstore-in-winter.pdf). Anyway, I\u2019ll save what would surely be a more interesting essay on the silliness of dismissing all personal writing for a day when I have less of a brain-addling cold.
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But using literary devices can make things a bit easier for you. Now, the literary devices and figures of speech available to writers are too many to include in one blog, but I just wanted to give you a flavour of what they are.
Allegory is literally the oldest trick in the book! An allegory lets you say something while hinting at something else. An author can use this to tell a deep, compelling story about something, while hidden beyond it is an idea or a moral.
In a dramatic irony, the readers know a larger truth about the narrative that the characters are unaware of. Authors can use this to keep an underlying plot engaging as the characters in the book continue on their journeys without knowing any of this.
Humour is historically one of the most effective devices to get a message across to the readers. Not only does it make the reading more pleasing, it also makes it easier to address things that are uncomfortable, displeasing or difficult.
Authors can treat serious subjects like politics using humour, making it more effective in terms that readers enjoy the reading experience while also understanding serious things. But be careful with it as it can be a double edged sword.
An important job of a good writer is to help readers see what he/she is seeing. Imagery is the use of words to help the reader visualize the scene. Like this beautiful scene in A Drugstore In Winter by Cynthia Ozick.
"Mr. Jaffe, the salesman from McKesson & Robbins, arrives, trailing two mists: winter steaminess and the animal fog of his cigar, which melts into the coffee smell, the tarpaper smell, the eerie honeyed tangled drugstore smell."
When a writer uses symbolism, he/ she is employing an object or a concept to mean more than its literal meaning. An author can also use a symbol to convey a grander perspective based on a single instance.
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Page [unnumbered]EDITORIAL BOARDJohn W. Aldridge, ChairmanJoseph BlotnerEnoch BraterElizabeth DouvanMarvin EisenbergC. R. EisendrathRobert FeketySidney FineDavid A. HollingerDavid L. LewisAlfred S. SussmanJoseph ViningCharles WitkePublished with financial support from The Horace H. Rackham Schoolof Graduate StudiesCongratulationsSena Jeter NaslundWinner of the $500 Lawrence FoundationPrizefor the best MQR short story of 1988Madame Charpentier and her ChildrenFall 1988 IssueThe Lawrence Foundation Prize is awarded annually for the beststory published in Michigan Quarterly Review. Winners are chosenby the MQR Editorial Board. Persons associated with the journal, orthe foundation, are not eligible for the prize.
Page [unnumbered]CONTENTSUnspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-AmericanPresence in American Literature Toni MorrisonThe Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction Hazel V. CarbyThe Canon and American History Eric FonerAbstraction and Figuration inAfro-American Art Lizzetta LeFalle CollinsA Portfolio of Afro-American Art, GraphicsLimberlost, Fiction Ursula K. Le GuinWake Up; Letter, Poetry Raymond CarverFalling Asleep at the Wheel, Route 98 North;Sleepless in Heidelberg, Poetry Joyce Carol OatesAfter the Revolution: Bertolucci'sThe Last Emperor Robert ZallerA Kind of Thunder, Fiction Robert CohenAn Interview with A. R. Ammons William WalshLofty Calling; Obsession; Weightlessness,Poetry A. R. AmmonsMessage to My Neighbors on Seventh Street,Poetry Jan WorthCleansing My Doors of Perception Carl Djerassi1354450556371757994105118121123130143149[154]BOOKSThe New York Literary LeftThe Fortunes of John DrydenA Poetry of the HolocaustIndex for Volume XXVII, 1988Alan WaldSusan StavesAvraham BalabanCover: New Race Series, 1987-8By Barbara WardCollection of Boston YWCACourtesy California Afro-American Museum,Los Angeles
Page [unnumbered]CONTRIBUTORSA. R. AMMONS has published most recently The Selected Poems:Expanded Edition and Sumerian Vistas. See the headnote to theinterview in this issue for more information.AVRAHAM BALABAN is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. He has published several books of poetry, as wellas book-length studies of Natan Alterman and Amos Oz.HAZEL V. CARBY, Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University, has most recently published Reconstructing Womanhood:The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist fromOxford University Press.RAYMOND CARVER's last book of poems, A New Path to theWaterfall, will be published by Atlantic Monthly Press later thisyear, with a preface by Tess Gallagher. His final book of stories,Where I'm Calling From, appeared last Spring.ROBERT COHEN's novel The Organ Builder was published recentlyby Harper & Row. His stories have appeared in Paris Review,Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and other magazines, as well as thePushcart Prize and Editors Choice anthologies.LIZZETTA LeFALLE-COLLINS is the Curator of Visual Arts of theCalifornia Afro-American Museum, and developed there the exhibition "Emerging Artists: Figurative Abstraction," from which theportfolio in this issue is selected.CARL DJERASSI, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University,won the National Medal of Science for the synthesis of the first oralcontraceptive. "Cleansing My Doors of Perception" comes from anautobiographical work in progress; other excerpts will appear inforthcoming issues of The Hudson Review and Grand Street.ERIC FONER is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at ColumbiaUniversity. His most recent book, Reconstruction, America'sUnfinished Revolution 1863-1877 won the Los Angeles Times bookaward for history for 1988 and is a nominee for the National BookAward.URSULA K. LE GUIN, author of The Left Hand of Darkness, TheDispossessed, and other novels, has most recently published Buf
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