"Book Club" Readings, Week 8

This week for class, we are doing a kind of "book club." We paired up and picked brief readings we wanted to share with the class, and will be discussing them in a book club format during the class period.


"For Comfort and Posterity, Digital Archives Gather Crowds." Jennifer Howard. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nov. 18, 2013. 

This article was so interesting! It was about a digital archive called Our Marathon which was set up in the days following the Boston Marathon bombing. Being such a recent traumatic event, it's still very fresh in my mind. The article talks about how the Our Marathon archive was set up, and that it became apparent to the founder, a professor at Northeastern University, that everyone in the city had a story to tell, whether they had seen anything or not, knew someone who was hurt or not. The archive is open to the community at large to contribute to, and consists entirely of digital-born content. The author stressed the importance of collecting this material as immediately as possible, because with digital content so much can be lost very quickly. 

The archive receives much of its funding and technical support from Northeastern University and from their campus library, which is great. I'm so glad that the university and the library have undertaken this archive and see the value in its existence and support. They also get a lot of volunteers from the nearby Simmons College's Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, which makes me glad to know that LIS students are being involved in the digital curation of this collection. 

Finally, they mention that other similar projects which were created in "the early days" such as the 9/11 archive are really struggling to stay afloat because of infrastructure issues. They claim to have learned from such projects and are making efforts to make a better site. 


"Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood.

I first want to say that I have been told a million times to read Margaret Atwood and to my embarrassment I never have. So when I saw this short story listed for the book club readings, I was very excited to read some Margaret Atwood at last! I'm not really sure what I was expecting, since the people who tell me to read Margaret Atwood are people who enjoy thought-provoking and feminist literature, generally, but the title was "Happy Endings" and so I was expecting this to be a happy little short story about something or other.

I was mistaken.

It's set up in a neat format, kind of like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, which is always fun to see. But basically it outlines a married couple's life in the vaguest of terms in section A until they die. Then sections B-F are all variations on what happens before the part where they die. Ultimately, this is not a short story at all, but rather an essay on writing fiction. She says:

"The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die. 

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known
to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what
and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why."

which is of course very poetic and a lovely instructional piece on how to write good and meaningful stories. But I must say, I was expecting a Happy Ending and I had my bubble burst.

"The Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams. 

This is the story we picked as our piece for the book club assignment. I'll confess that my previous experience with William Carlos Williams is exclusively in poetry (so much depends upon a red wheel barrow...), and I had not read this short story previously. However, I am very glad that we picked it! It's a first-person narrative of a country doctor making a house call to check on a little girl who has been running a fever for three days. Diphtheria has been going around the school she attends, and apparently one of the signs of diphtheria is a sore throat because it is covered in a membrane. The story is actually the struggle between the doctor and the little girl who refuses to open her mouth to show the doctor, and his use of force to open her mouth to see. I won't say much more about it, just because I'm excited to see what my classmates have to say in our discussion.

 The Syrian Opposition is Disappearing from Facebook. Michael Pizzi. The Atlantic. Feb. 4, 2014. 

Wow. That's all I can say about his piece right now. It was considerably longer than the other pieces we read for the book club, but it was also the most important. It brought up so many fascinating points. The most interesting, I thought, was that it is incredible how people have started to use Facebook as a means of reporting civil conflict to refugees and the world at large. How incredible. But second, that there is a kind of guerrilla warfare happening between the factions for control over what gets posted on Facebook. Information is powerful. 

I usually have a hard time reading pieces like this simply because I feel so extremely helpless. I listen to NPR, I hear about these kinds of problems in different parts of the world, I read articles online or in the newspaper. And my heart goes out to these people whose lives are so oppressed and they live in constant fear for their lives. But what can I do? It's incredibly frustrating to know there are people like you and me around the world, just trying to live their lives, and they don't have the same luxury of knowing that they are safe in their home or at work that I do. I always feel so powerless to help anyone in any way once I read these articles. I wish I could help, somehow. 

Bluebeard 

Alright, so people have heard of Bluebeard, and most people probably equate him with Blackbeard of piratey fame, but according to this story, anyway, he is not a pirate but a vicious monster who slaughters his wives. The text of the story does not support this, but the illustrations lead the reader to believe that Bluebeard is from the Middle East. There is some serious "Othering" happening here. Especially in the end where Bluebeard is about to cut off the head of his bride and her brothers come in and kill him, give all his slaughtered wives "Christian burials" and the bride remarries someone good and handsome and forgets all about it. Talk about happy endings. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that this story was used to malign Muslims as monsters during the Crusades, and they therefore had to be saved and converted into Godly Christians. 

However, after a skilled Wikipedia search (everything on the internet is true, folks), Bluebeard is apparently a French folktale thought to be based on a serial killer. Fascinating. Those illustrations were very misleading. Something to bring up in class!