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SuperiorPapers.com Review

Written by: Legitimate Writing Services

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Date published: 04/29/2016

8.8 / 10 stars

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Review of The Jungle Book 3D film

You belong to an English-language film club where you recently saw a film in 3D. You have agreed to write a review of this film for the group´s monthly newsletter. In this review you should give your opinion of the 3D effects in the film and say whether you think 3D adds anything in general, to the experience of watching a movie, as well as giving your opinion about the actual movie itself, and whether and to whom you would recommend it. (The task comes from the book: "Succeed in Cambridge English: Proficiency" by Global ELT ).

Film review on “The Jungle Book 3D”

When Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book, finished writing his master piece more than a hundred years ago, he probably foresaw the success his work would have one day; but not that his gorillas and wildebeests would come into life through the magic of 3D . On occasion of the release of the 3D version of the movie this year, I write this lines to highlight the positive and not so positive features.

First of all, and just in case there is anyone who is not familiar with the book itself, the plot revolves around the incredible life of a child who is abandoned in the jungle at birth and who is raised by wolves. Riveting story, isn't it? Well, it all becomes even more exciting in 3D. As far as I am concerned, technology adds to the story by making what we see almost seem real.

Secondly, and at this point it must be rather clear that I actually enjoyed the film, the acting by Neel Sethi and Bill Murray is superb. No one could deny the great job of these two stars, specially during the action scenes. In it also during these scenes that we can better appreciate the powerful effect of 3D. This is however not surprising, because former films such as “Star Trek” and “Indiana Jones” have already used this technology to engage us into their plots and blown our minds away.

Thirdly, and my last reason to recommend this film, the soundtrack ist brilliant. The music and in general the sound of the film is largely plausible. If there is anything that could be criticised, is maybe that it at times is rather dark, but considering the story takes places in the jungle, that is quite understandable.

All in all I would no doubt recommend ‘The Jungle Book 3D’ to both children and adults. Anyone passionate about animals and of course 3D effects will fall for this movie.

Words: 330

Text by Patricia de Pastors

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Those Old-Timey Essays: A Conversation with Patrick Madden

Jacob Eckrich, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Normal School, talks with essayist Patrick Madden about his new collection Sublime Physick, humor, Montaigne, and the activity we call essaying.

*

Jacob Eckrich: One of the things that I noticed about the collection was that you have a really strong emphasis on the Classics. The essays seem to be a bridge of sorts between classical thought and art and contemporary life. So I’m curious as to where this interest and focus on classical humanities came from.

Patrick Madden: I do consciously try to write something that honors the tradition of the essay and participates in it. I’m in love with these old dead essayists largely because they kind of taught me how to write. A lot of people…I don’t know about you…how’d you get into creative nonfiction? Contemporary writers?

JE: It was actually mostly through humorists.

PM: Right. Like Ian Frazier, I know you like…

JE: Yeah, absolutely Ian Frazier, but more than anyone it was Woody Allen. So I actually came into—I hesitate to call what I write personally “creative nonfiction” as much as I just call them essays, because that line between fiction and nonfiction, particularly with humor and satire, is often fuzzy, and irrelevant in some cases.

PM: True.

JE: So I came in through humorists, and now, through the program, much more traditional nonfiction essayists. Definitely contemporary. It was a couple years before I read Montaigne or some of the older ones, but it was definitely through Ian Frazier, yourself, Ander Monson, and such.

PM: Me too. I didn’t have a really wide base, but I really liked certain essayists that I found in Best American Essays, all living essayists. But once I started in classes—I did a master’s degree at BYU and then a Ph.D. at Ohio—I started to read some of the older stuff, especially with The Art of the Personal Essay, and then I took classes from David Lazar, and we read tons and tons of these essayists. Primarily we read Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Lamb, but also a broad group of essayists that you don’t find much in the anthologies. I feel like that’s how I learned to write. I could do the basics before I ever read those writers, but my writing became a lot more interesting, at least to me, and I feel that it improved a lot, and that was the key for me. A lot of literary nonfiction is narrative based, it’s memoir—and there’re some great memoirs, works that are influential, and I appreciate them a lot—but I love thinking. I come to the essay wanting to have an intellectual experience as well as an aesthetic or emotional experience. If you read these old essayists, that’s what they’re all about. They do share some of their own lives, but their main focus isn’t to tell you something that happened. Like I said, my life is pretty mundane—though I do have six kids, which makes for some interesting experiences—but I didn’t have a troubled childhood that I overcame, I haven’t done anything extraordinary, so I really liked finding these essayists who likewise were just writing about regular life. Another key was discovering Scott Russell Sanders, who was doing a bunch of essays in the late 1990s and early 2000s that were just like the old essays: they had a one word titles, like “Beauty,” “Stillness,” “Silence,” “Fidelity,” etc. They were basically the same thing that the great dead had been doing. I said, “Oh, cool. You can still do that now.” So that’s when I started going full steam ahead trying to write thematic essays.

JE: That’s something that I really enjoy about your writing. Like you, that is why I really enjoy the essay, whether it’s a personal essay or more humorous/satirical essay, or whatever, but it’s idea-driven and less focused on narrative. With that said, as you mentioned, you do have narrative elements from your life in most of these essays, if not all of them. I’m curious, when you’re approaching a new essay is it a thematic idea first that you then scaffold and attach the narrative to, or do you begin with the narrative?

PM: It goes both ways. For instance, the essay “Entering and Breaking,” which is about my sons going missing for a couple of hours, that was certainly driven by an event that I wanted to write about. But I didn’t want to just write the “what happened.” I wanted to think from it. So I tried to do that and I overlaid some ideas from physics like wave/particle duality and quantum entanglement. I thought about how, in a way, I’m entangled with my children. But in other essays, the ideas take the lead. “Independent Redundancy” is an essay about originality, and that’s a question I’ve had for a very long time: what is originality? Or, why do we oversimplify the idea of originality to the point of creating a false concept? So it can go either way. If I do write something thematic, I look for experiences that speak to that theme, and even if I’m beginning from a particular event in my life, I try to add to it, so that the essay is not just a recounting from beginning to end.

JE: Right. One of the Montaignean aspects of both of your books is that you stray away from the “what happened” over and over again within a single essay.

PM: Intentionally.

JE: I love it. I remember when I read “Spit,” I got to the point where I stopped and thought, “Wait, what is the title of this essay again? Oh yeah, ‘Spit,’” and I kept going. It comes back around and moves, and your work does that a lot, which I absolutely love.

PM: Thanks. I don’t know if everybody does. Montaigne was jumping all over the place, too. For instance, “Of Cripples” doesn’t mention cripples until about nine-tenths of the way in. “Of Cruelty” doesn’t really get to speaking about cruelty until seven-eighths of the way through the essay.

JE: Yeah, well, that in itself can be considered cruel.

PM: Right? Maybe he’s demonstrating cruelty. So it could be a little bit frustrating, but once you get used to it and expect it, then it’s really pleasing. In “Of Vanity” he says, “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” So he throws the blame back on the reader, humorously. I think he understood that he was a wanderer.

JE: Yes, absolutely. I’m trying to expand this train of thought. I feel that your work definitely has a strong foothold in a very classical tradition of essaying, and this book is a stark contrast to other essay collections being published recently. Yours seem very classical in form as well as content. I think you reference Montaigne and Pascal and Johnson—a lot of older writers and painters. I was thinking about D’Agata’s anthology trilogy, too. A lot of contemporary essayists are leaping off of the work in The Next American Essay. But I feel that yours would fit very much in The Lost Origins of the Essay. So I was wondering, where do you see your work fitting in today’s literary essayistic landscape?

PM: I really like a lot of contemporary essayists, and I think there’s a broad range in what people are doing, and I’m really glad that people are willing to call themselves essayists. There’s no longer really a stigma attached to it, and that’s been a change even since I was in graduate school. I remember essay collections that, whether because of the author or the publisher, wouldn’t announce that they were essays. They’d hide the fact, probably for marketing reasons. Now you can see the word essays on book covers, even on the front. I like a lot of essayists who aren’t pulling in quotes from the great dead authors, but I think they are still consciously participating in the long tradition, and they know somewhat of the past. It always feels good to me when an author acknowledges where we all come from and the debt we owe, to Montaigne especially, but to the others as well. I think I would definitely fit on the revivalist side. It’s not just me, but the authors who are trying to be a little bit anachronistic in terms of phrasings, from the sentence level to the essay level. You don’t even have to read my essays to notice this; you can just flip open the book and it looks different from what many other writers are doing, because you just see the block quotes throughout. It looks like what the old essayists were doing. I get invited to universities or conferences I think in large part because I’m doing something slightly different from a lot of others and people trust that I have, in addition to my own writing, a kind of historical and theoretical knowledge that I can teach from or speak from when I’m talking to students or other writers.

JE: Absolutely. I imagine a lot of people who might be reading this interview may have not read the book yet. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to give a condensed version of your “not official/official” introduction to the book. What is it about the sublime physical? What does that mean?

PM: Well, first of all, it’s always difficult for me to describe what my books are. I just came from the Tucson Festival of Books. This is a gigantic gathering and all sorts of writers are there, from Terry Brooks, who did The Sword of Shannara, and Jared Diamond who did Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer from NPR’s Fresh Air, and there were a lot of mystery writers. Anyway, over 100,000 people came through, and there I was. So a lot of people asked what my book was about. Other essayists or people who are aware of creative nonfiction can get what I’m doing and they can decide whether they want to read it or not, but for the general audience, I find it very difficult to describe. So I’m glad to be speaking to you, going to Essay Daily because the people who read Essay Daily know what we’re talking about, which is good. In any case, to tell this story, let me go back to my first book, Quotidiana. I was researching Amedeo Avogadro, the Italian chemist from the early 19th century who’s best known for his molecular theory—he figured out that you could determine the number of molecules in a certain volume of gas—it was a constant no matter the gas—and this allowed chemists to determine atomic weights in ways that they never could before. So later chemists named Avogadro’s Number after him. That’s the 6.02 x 10^23 that most of us remember. I learned that Avogadro was appointed by the Pope to be chair of the department of Fisica Sublime at the University of Turin in Italy. I read that phrase, fisica sublime, and I thought, “What a strange oxymoronic term!” I loved it. Those words seem to be opposed because sublime is that which is beyond the realm of the real world, the abstracted, the idea, the spiritual, whereas fisica is the physical world, things that you can touch. So “fisica sublime” is kind of like a concrete abstraction. As with a lot of oxymorons, it’s not just that the words oppose and obliterate each other; they oppose and create a friction that can then give you new ideas that you may not have thought of before. I started thinking about how essays perform that oxymoronic function, they take the physical world, whether things or experiences, stuff that you’ve lived, stuff that you’ve touched, and the essay, by processing experience through the mind, sublimates or gets to the relevant idea, abstraction, spirit. So in the introduction in the book, I started thinking about all of the different ways that essays can be described by that oxymoron. I’m hoping that my essays are doing that very thing. Another particularity is that I studied physics as an undergrad, I got a degree, and I’m still very interested in the implications of physics even if I don’t do the lab experiments. I use some physics concepts in the book metaphorically as a different take on my experiences.

JE: I feel that your essays are in a way your lab experiments.

PM: That’s a good way of thinking of it.

JE: On the page you are testing these theories with personal experience, I guess you could say. Another question I had: because you present a lot of physics theory as well as some philosophy, there’s that line that’s hard to tread for a lot of essayists of how much into a complex theory or philosophy can you go and still effectively contextualize and explore what you’re wanting to without getting too heady and losing the reader. I guess what I’m asking is, when you’re composing these essays, do you find yourself adding more theory or do you find yourself weeding a lot of stuff out in the revision process?

PM: I don’t know if I’ve really found the sweet spot on that because—well, when we say “the reader” of course there are a lot of different readers and the vast majority of readers in the world will never pick up this book. That’s fine, but I want to speak to a nonexpert educated reader, someone who’s interested in a philosophy of ideas but also likes art made from language and is willing to work a little bit. In my first book I had passages of equations and things, and I got some feedback that people just skipped over those. They saw equations and their brain went to a different mode and jumped to a place where they could find some words again. In this new book there are no equations at least, so maybe I’ve learned a thing or two. And sometimes I figure that you don’t need to catch the theory all of the way to feel what it’s trying to do within the essay. I’ve been thinking about this with “Moment, Momentous, Momentum.” It’s a short essay about my daughter getting hit in the head with a swing, and in it I’m thinking about my brother-in-law who pulled a pot of boiling water on himself when he was a toddler. These were the two experiences at its core, and my great fear in the essay is that you can’t protect your children from everything, and I think that people can get that whether or not they have their own children. I’ve also overlaid on it questions of momentum and of weight versus mass. The last paragraph says, basically, that you can get along in this world with a basic knowledge of physics that you attain through your sensory experience. You can ride a bike without understanding the equations of gyroscopic motion that allow you to balance on two wheels; you can do it by feel. But people often confuse mass, which is measured in kilograms, with weight, which we measure in pounds, because our everyday experience is inextricable from gravity. Behind all this, I’m considering a story I read about exit interviews with college students who’ve taken a physics class, but they’re still confused about some basic physics concepts, like conservation of energy or the uniform acceleration of gravity. Even though they’ve learned the correct principles, they revert to an Aristotelian sensory understanding of the way the world works. But that’s not essential to the essay. I think you can still understand the way that I try to use the word gravity in its double sense: not just the force the Earth exerts on our bodies or the way any two masses exert force on each other, but the emotional gravity of a situation, which is what the essay is about. So, in general, I think I’ve scaled back a little bit and I’m not so heavy on those kinds of concepts. I’m trying to allow them to work as metaphor. Can I ask your experience reading those parts? Do you have a science background?
 
JE: I have my general education and I took advanced science classes in high school, and I enjoy the essays. I don’t know if it’s just me as an individual or me as the kind of lay educated reader that you mentioned, but I found them very accessible and enjoyable.

PM: I’m glad to hear it, because I do worry about that. I don’t worry about that enough to completely obliterate that aspect of my writing or to hide it, but I try to find a balance so that someone whose background isn’t quite my own can get what I’m saying, at least sufficiently.

JE: Something else that I feel separates your essays from most other contemporary essays is that in both of your books you include a lot of images, photos or diagrams, and I was wondering—well, in a very simplified way of asking—why? In certain essays I could make a direct connection between the images and the text. With some images, I had to think a little bit more. I was just curious as to why you choose to purposefully include not just images, but a catalog—you have the references and the source material for each image—so everything is accounted for.

PM: I have a rather uncomplicated reason that I could complicate a little bit, but the straightforward answer is that I love W. G. Sebald’s books. Are you familiar with his work?

JE: I am not.

PM: Well, then you have a treat awaiting you, because I think he’s one of the most interesting writers I’ve ever read. His books are highly essayistic but maybe not utterly nonfictional. You were talking about how you want to call your work essays because in humor there’s a kind of tall-tale exaggerative effect that fictionalizes, if you have to name it. Well Sebald is not telling tall tales, but he’s accommodating reality, I think. In any case, his books are peppered with these images that are sometimes illustrative, like when a picture shows what he’s been writing about, and sometimes they’re more enigmatic, so they create a counterpoint to the text or even challenge what the text is saying. Other times it’s not entirely clear why the image is there, what the purpose is behind it. His images are like mine—they’re black and white, there’re many photographs or clippings or things like that—and they’re just printed in line with the text. Another author who has influenced me similarly, but in a slightly different way, is Eduardo Galeano, especially The Book of Embraces, which is illustrated. He took old-timey etchings and drawings and he cut them together into strange combinations like an octopus-headed schoolboy or a gun firing a bird, things like that. I’m not doing that, though. I’m doing more the Sebaldian style. And I want the images to be counterpoints to the text the same way that the block quotes are. The block quotes are in conversation with the text; they’re not really supporting my points or anything—at least I hope they’re not. Sometimes I want them to be a challenge. For instance, there’s a picture of Gleek, the space monkey from The Wonder Twins, and on the page right around it I say something like “I’m not going to go look this up.” I have this image in my mind of an eagle carrying Gleek carrying a bucket of water but I’m not going to go check because I’m just not keen on The Wonder Twins anymore now that I’m grown up. But then there’s this picture of the exact thing I said I was not going to look up, so I hope for some readers that’s going to be like, “What a minute, what’s that doing here?” It’s intended somewhat facetiously to undermine me a little bit. There’s another where I quote from an Aries zodiac sign bookmark that I had as a kid, and then there’s a picture of that bookmark, and if you pay attention, what I quoted is not exactly what it says on the bookmark. So there again I have undermined my credibility a little bit. The fact is that I wrote it as I remembered it, and then later I found the actual bookmark. Great! So I decided I was going to put that in there but noticed that the bookmark didn’t say exactly what I had remembered, and I thought, “Well, I’ll leave this little Easter egg for readers who have time on their hands and nothing better to do. They might enjoy this.” Or now they’ll read this interview and know that it’s there. I’m always trying to be a little bit playful, trying to rub against the essays with a different mode. The thing that I would love to do that I can’t do in a book like this, but I might try to do something online, is to provide music, sound files, YouTube clips, for an essay like “Independent Redundancy,” which relies heavily on musical examples. If I get the energy I’ll get that online someday.

JE: I’m sure Ander Monson would love to help you with that.

PM: Maybe I’ll ask him for some help.

JE: I have one simple question to follow up: When you buy books or browse books on Amazon, it always gives a recommendation like, “If you like this book you might like these other books.” So if you could be Amazon and somebody is loving your work, what would books would you recommend?

PM: You know, Amazon does a pretty good job with this by tracking what people actually buy together or what they look for together. We were talking before about essayists who are directly plugged into the classical form of the essay, and of course David Lazar, whom I studied with, influenced me a ton, and he writes in a similar way. Unsurprisingly, his mentor, Phillip Lopate, too. I really love Mary Cappello, who does book-length essays on interesting topics. She’s got a book coming out this fall on moods called Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (you can see that we share an affinity for archaic –ck spellings). I remember when I first encountered her work, about a decade ago, her website said she’d been working on a book on moods, and I remember thinking, “I can’t wait for that book!” It’s taken this long (though she published two other books in the meantime), so it’s one of the books that I’m anticipating probably more than any book ever. I’ve heard her read from it, and it’s tremendous. Chris Arthur, an Irish essayist, and I come from different backgrounds and are slightly off in generations, but we’ve kind of reached a similar place where we both love these classical-style essays. I’ve already mentioned W. G. Sebald and Eduardo Galeano, whom I love. Some essayists who aren’t so much like my writing but who I really appreciate: Elena Passarello, Joni Tevis, and Amy Leach. They’re all beautiful lyrical stylists. I mentioned Ander Monson, who’s a quirky, very cool essayist. Your own friend and advisor, Stephen Church, is doing a lot of essayistic essays, too. Essays that don’t just telling you what happened but think about it overtly. Kim Dana Kupperman and Matthew Gavin Frank, too. I love essayists who are a little weird and have a distinct personality. You could pick up a new essay and if you knew their other work, you’d recognize them based on just the writing style. As we’ve been talking about, I want to see somebody thinking on the page, and all of these writers do that. There are other writers as well. I’m certainly forgetting somebody important who I owe a great debt to, but those are a bunch there. Who are some of your favorites?

JE: Let’s see, obviously Ian Frazier, as we’ve already mentioned. Have you read Veronica Geng?

PM: No.

JE: She’s somebody you might be interested in. She was a contributor and an editor for The New Yorker for a long time. She was Philip Roth’s favorite editor. She wrote essays, though at the time, in the late ’80s and ’90s, they were called stories. She was a good friend and mentor to Ian Frazier.

PM: Oh, cool.

JE: Also, George W. S. Trow. He’s most famous for Within the Context of No Context, and My Pilgrim’s Progress. Those are both book-length cultural studies essays about the media, but he also has a collection that’s out of print, but you can get it online, titled Bullies, and again it’s one of those ones that’s called a collection of stories, but I think if it were published today it would probably be called essays. I love Dinty Moore, Elena as well. I love Elena to death. And John D’Agata.

PM: I think he’s brilliant.

JE: In one of Steven Church’s classes, he had us read Halls of Fame and I enjoyed it, but it was also very challenging. It challenged a lot of my understandings of what the essay is. On Looking by Lia Purpura did the same thing for me in terms of challenging the notions that I had of what an essay is and what it should be.

PM: Yeah. Lia Purpura’s doing these rich, poetic, lyric essays, but you feel like she’s also participating in the tradition of the essay.

JE: So many writers are essaying now, either as full-time essayists, or poets, fiction writers, and playwrights taking up the essay to explore what the mode can do. I’d be interested in your view on current the trend of essaying and the diversity of work being done with the essay. What is exciting to you about the state of the essay today?

PM: As I’ve mentioned, I’m very happy that the term essay seems now to be a badge of honor, something to shout from the rooftops instead of to hide or to hide from. Now there seem to be enough savvy readers who really know and like and purchase essay collections. I’m also very happy that more people are trying their hand at essaying, even those working primarily in other fields. I’m a little protective of the term, though, and I wish that we’d never used it to describe the five-paragraphy assignment that teachers use to test their students’ knowledge and rhetoric, and likewise I wish we’d call stories stories and essays essays, whether they’re fictional or nonfictional. In other words, if a writer tells a true autobiographical story, narratively, with no reflection or association, I don’t think that’s an essay. If it doesn’t essay anything, then it’s not an essay. I feel we owe this to the spirit of Montaigne. Still, I’m excited that writers are trying essays, and that they’re borrowing forms and experimenting with styles, pushing the genre in ways that Montaigne himself never tried, but that I imagine he’d be proud of.

*

Patrick Madden is the author of two books, Sublime Physick and Quotidiana, both essay collections. He also co-edited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays and co-translated the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán. He teaches at Brigham Young University

Jacob Eckrich is an MFA candidate at Fresno State. He currently serves Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Normal School. The manuscript for his first book, (A)musings: Essays, will be finished soon-ish.

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EssayLab.org Review [70/100]

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Do you really need to feature a photo of people who look like lab workers at a website called Essay Lab? That’s unnecessary. The overall design of this website isn’t that great. We thought it was too plain, but it wasn’t too bad, since it featured most of the information we needed before placing an order. The guarantees are listed above the fold, and you can easily calculate the price for a paper. Unfortunately, this is not the right website to use for urgent orders.

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EssayLab.org    - Range of Writing Services Offered    - Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy    - Quality Evaluation    - Customer Support    - Customer Reviews

Criteria #1: Range of Writing Services Offered (Mark - 16/20)

There are few types of papers students can order at EssayLab.org: essay paper, lab report, book report, dissertation, PowerPoint presentation, research proposal, research paper, thesis proposal, thesis paper, term paper, and admission essay. These are the products featured at the main page, but there are few others available in the order form.

In addition, the company offers editing services, as well as business writing assistance.

Criteria #2: Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy (Mark - 15/20)

This is where things get shady. The prices for academic writing services are relatively affordable. There are 7 quality levels to choose from: high school, college freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, Master’s, and PhD. There is no point in separating college level in 4 different categories. The most probable reason for that is to increase the price for each level, so the company gets much higher quotes for MA and PhD level. The quotes range from $16.50 to $44.20. As for an essaylab.org promo code, there is none.

The prices are okay, but the deadline options are a huge problem. First of all, the longest deadline is 15 days+, which means that you can hope to get your paper within 15 days, but the company has full right to deliver it later, because that + makes the deadline indefinite. The shortest deadline is 3-23 hours. Thus, it would be best not to use EssayLab if you need an essay overnight.

Criteria #3: Quality Evaluation (Mark - 15/20)

We decided to choose the longest deadline, just because we wanted to see what that + meant. We got the complete essay 16 days after the order placement. If your paper isn’t urgent, you might be fine with that. However, a student who needs the document by a specific deadline wants to get it right on time. Plus, the writers should always deliver the content a bit sooner, since the customer might want to get it revised.

Our paper was from the area of geography. The quality was not bad, but there were not many unique arguments in the content.

Criteria #4: Customer Support (Mark - 12/20)

The live chat feature is pretty cool, but we had to wait for 5 minutes on average to get an answer. When we did get some answers, it seemed like we were talking to a robot. We tried getting updates on the progress 14 days after we placed the order, and the agent said it would be ready the next day. It wasn’t so we contacted the support again. She asked us to wait one more day.

There is no direct contact with the writer, so this service should definitely work more on the support system.

Criteria #5: Customers Reviews (Mark - 12/20)

Mario F.:

“This service is almost a scam. I contacted the support because I really needed that paper in 8 hours and the representative convinced me it would be ready on time. She said: don’t worry, we have a writer and he’s ready to work on your paper. You guessed it: it took longer than 8 hours. I had to ask my professor for a deadline extension and he wasn’t happy about it. When I finally got the paper, I noticed some minor issues. It was fine, but the late delivery made me really angry.”

Laura:

“Basic paper. Order Senior level and you get high-school quality.”

Anny L.:

“Too expensive for me. I want discount price and better essay.”

Jonny:

“What’s the deal with this service? The prices are reasonable, I would even say they’re expensive. So I thought it’s a high-quality service. I’m still waiting for my research paper. It’s 2 days and there’s no sign.”

Extra Features:

• Free plagiarism report.

Conlcusion: The company delivers average quality, which is not good enough for the high price.

Site	Total Mark
EssayLab.org	70

EssayLab.org Review

Written by: Legitimate Writing Services

Service

Date published: 04/21/2016

7.0 / 10 stars

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Who You Are, Where You Are: Amy Wright on Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East AsiaBerkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2016

Over dinner once, Will Hearst asked his friend Gary Snyder what attracted him to China as a young man. The question was innocent enough to prompt an answer that surprised Snyder who replied, “I got interested at an early age in East Asia. But for the wrong reasons.” The inevitable follow-up, “Wrong in what way?” went unasked except by Snyder himself who tucked his curiosity into the back of his mind where it seeded an essay, as defined by Paul Graham as something you write to try to figure out. [1]
     His book-length answer will interest longtime fans of this Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, but what gives it appeal beyond Snyder scholarship is how he traces the question of what makes any of us the way we are through Japan’s and China’s complex relationships to nature, which is to say the paradox inherent in the process of civilization.
     Dedicated to Burton Watson, the PEN-Prize-winning translator and scholar of Japanese and Chinese literature, this book is a conversation as well as a work of Montaignean self-education. A landscape in itself, Snyder sweeps at times with a broad brush across this long cultural history, drawing as it does on a variety of influences, including “the great strengths of Neolithic-type culture: village self-government networks, an adequate and equal material base, a round of festivals and ceremonies, and a deep grounding in the organic processes and cycles of the natural sphere.” [2] Other times, he paints the “plum rain” and winter storms in Japan, characterized by their unusual share of lightning superbolts, with a brush as fine as those made with mouse-whiskers. [3]
     In the process, Snyder comes to recognize and to make readers aware too that from around the Ming dynasty (1368 on), landscape paintings that were designed to propagate a love of wilderness were increasingly created by people who had “never much walked the hills, for clients who would never get a chance to see such places.” [4] In this way The Great Clod feels timely, though Snyder calls on a decade spent in Japan in the 1960s and a trip to Hokkaido in the summer of 1972. But then so is his 1990 essay collection, The Practice of the Wild, still relevant to current climate conversations, even as the wild has been subjugated out of existence. What environmental discussions may in fact need now in order to evolve is Snyder’s willingness to be wrong, paired with his close examination of the complex reasons why.
     Still, Snyder is far from prescribing a path forward. After all he ranks Daoism, a philosophy that honors the way that cannot be named, as “one of the world’s top two or three” worldviews. [5] What he offers instead is a long timeline of Far Eastern progress and its ramifications on a planetary scale. His conclusion though, ending as it does with a line of poetry, refuses to draw a hard line about what to make of these “Notes.” Again recalling the gesture of Montaigne’s Essais, he leaves readers to do the same puzzling over cause and effect he has done himself.
     Take the word “civilization,” which he points out in Chinese is wên-ming, meaning “understanding writing.” The author of twenty-two books might know something about that. Snyder is not merely playing with semantics either, since the “tool of the poet and painter, the inkstick (even more essential to the Chinese administration), was responsible for much deforestation.” [6] One of humanity’s highest accomplishments—the ability to communicate with each other and to express ideas—depended on emitting carbon.
     He follows this stream of ink forward. Those pines burned to produce soot were mixed with glue and fragrance then ground with a brush-softening stroke in what amounted to “a meditation on the qualities of rock, water, trees, air, and shrubs.” [7] To understand writing, he demonstrates here, is to understand civilization. The act and this ancient method are ennobling but want less environmentally taxing means. A scientist-humanist in the eleventh century made one such effort that Snyder relays. As an alternative to burning pines, Shen Kua experimented with using naturally occurring petroleum as ink. I can imagine that black lacquer filling reams of books instead of engines, eons-sequestered carbon remaining stable instead of going up in smoke.
     The Great Clod, though, is not a tale of what might have been. Snyder’s rue for what is has been tempered with far too much acceptance for regret. Had his reasons not been wrong for pursuing the East Asia of his imagination he would never have learned more and come to better understand a nation he made home for over a decade. His failure to write the article that commissioned his travel to Hokkaido in 1971 at last became his inspiration to do it the justice of depicting the island in its historical context. The need to correct himself led him to research the habitat of this region 45,000 years ago and to trace forward the meeting ground of the Arctic bear and the shorter-haired black bear that fostered the Gilyak, a paleo-Asiatic people. The result is a mind map of East Asia, following the trajectories of the Hsia dynasty to the Shang, Han, T’ang, and more.
  At times the history lesson can grow tedious, as when one learns, for instance:
“A decade after the fall of the Northern Sung capital K’ai-feng to the Juchen (Chin), the town of Lin-an, at the rivermouth was declared the new capital. The émigré emperor, his court, and crowds of refuges of the northern ruling class settled in. The name was changed to Hang-chou.” [8] Snyder repays one’s perseverance, though, with a poet’s penchant for often overlooked details, as when he describes the blue-glazed brick of the Thunder Point Buddhist temple pagoda or a girl’s song about “gathering fennel on top of Sunny Point” from the Shih Ching, “Classic of Songs.”
     The real strength of these notes though is what has long made Snyder the writer he is—the allegiance to “one ecosystem/ in diversity/ under the sun” he pledges in Turtle Island. Forty-one years later, he augments that celebration of difference with a studied reflection. With the saving grace of humility he demonstrates the danger of romanticizing any culture or region, for one might stop at the surface layers of dissimilarity and miss the deep underlying common ground. Or, one might leap to commonality without appreciating centuries of accrued variegation, striking as canyon walls and subtle as leaf shades. From such apologias turn the great clods of earth and matter that we cultivate and reap, depend on, and are. Naturally, resolutions and solutions are born of them.

*

NOTES

[1] Klaus, Carl H. and Ned Stuckey-French. Essayists on the Essay. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press (2012), 174.
[2] Snyder, Gary. The Great Clod.  Berkeley: Counterpoint Press (2016), 30
[3] Ibid. 11, 123.
[4] Ibid. 130.
[5] Ibid. 34.
[6] Ibid. 65.
[7] Ibid. 124
[8] Ibid. 85

*

Amy Wright is the author of the prose chapbook, Wherever the land is, published in 2016. She is also the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press, Coordinator of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University, and author of two forthcoming poetry collections. Her writing appears in Brevity, Kenyon Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. More information at www.awrightawright.com. 

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FRANCE

I have always been a Francophile, hugely fond of France. There has been only one thing that I didn’t like about it: the French. To be exact, not all the French, only the petit bourgeois variety, as petty as bourgeois can get: miserly, xenophobic, small-minded.

The more educated classes, including the snooty quasi-aristocrats, are something else again, although during my year as a Fulbright fellow I didn’t get to know many of those. Though I was supposed to be working on my doctorate in Comparative Literature, I did not frequent the libraries, and only met my very congenial adviser late in the game for a very amiable session. I did however avail myself of the cultural and aesthetic bounties the capital could bestow, which proved altogether sufficient. As Rabelais said, the city of Paris was a better teacher than the Sorbonne University.

I have written about the time I did miss big when I did not attend a Sorbonne lecture by Thomas Mann, guest speaker, who committed a hilarious error. I have also written about the time I earned Mann’s gratitude when during his tiring book signing session, I did not, unlike most others, ask for a wordy dedication, merely his signature.

Typical of middle-class stinginess were my landlady and her retired engineer husband, from whom I rented a room. She would drop in on me periodically and compliment me on the French books I had bought, not a few of them the expensive, prestigious Pleiade complete-works editions, but never went so far as to invite me for a cup of coffee or glass of wine in her part of the apartment.

Even more damning was her boasting of having been classmates with Edwige Feuillere, a great stage actress we both admired. But, I was told, not to expect an introduction to the great lady. I assured her I wasn’t thinking of anything like that.

On the other hand, consider the genuine friendship that evolved with Simone Danloux, the charming proprietress of the delightful bookstore Librairie du Pont Neuf on that lovely Seine bridge. True, I was a faithful client, who spoke commendable French and spent much of my Fulbright Fellowship money there, but it went beyond that, as we always chatted like best of friends.

And something else. In France at that time quite a few genteel young women earned  a living by artful bookbinding. French books overwhelmingly come in paper covers, and the purchaser has them bound at his expense in buckram or leather, often in very imaginative bindings—I still have a few of them.

Well now, at Simone’s store I met and ordered some bindings from her favored relieuse, Arlette Duparquier. I met her only a couple of times but was bawled over by her stunning looks, unassuming intelligence, and enchanting personality. To this day I recall her name and person, and wish to hell I had invited her out for a meal or what the French call un verre, a glass. She lived in a distant town but came in often enough to accept an invitation from me. Why in hell didn’t I do it? I can attribute it only to shyness, to having felt too unimportant, too unworthy, to do so.

I did have an affair with an American girl, Marty, an American ballet dancer, June, and later with a French girl, Jacqueline.  Departing France, I left Jacqueline the legacy of my favorite French poet, of whom she had never heard, Stephane Mallarme. In the only letter I ever got from her, she informed me that his stuff left her cold until she came upon his one love poem, the one to Mery Laurent. I think Jacqueline entertained the notion that I’d be back for her, which never happened.

But to get back to the French. What other nation has produced a marvel like the croissant? The crescent-shaped breakkfast pastry, but the one that is feather light and flaky, not what passes elsewhere for a croissant, the firm and heavier thing that is really the Austrian kipfel, merely a breakfast roll in crescent shape. There are also French and other bakers who produce the correct thing, but in a straight, non-crescent shape, with the excuse that it is easier to spread butter and jam on it without staining one’s fingers and tablecloth. Somehow, though, that doesn’t feel right.

Historically , Dan Bilofsky writes in the Times, the shape was suggested by “the Ottoman emblem, to celebrate the defeat of the Turkish forces that ended the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.” But he continues “some food historians say the kipfel appeared in Vienna as early as the 13^thcentury.” What pastry, I wonder, will the defeat of the ISIS forces yield?

Charm, like the croissant’s, is something very French, which is exuded par excellence by French women. Take for instance my one meeting with that greatly gifted and enormously charming French film actress Anouk Aimee, whom you may  remember from “A Man and a Woman,” “La dolce vita,” and “8 ½.” Or else from any other of her 70 plus films under some of cinema’s greatest directors.

I was walking in Times Square one late afternoon when whom should I bump into but Anouk Aimee and her then husband, Pierre Barouh. I can’t recall who first addressed whom, but we stopped briefly and she asked, concerning a matinee they had just come from, “Quest-ce que c’est que ‘fiddler’?” I replied, “Violoniste,” and her face lit up like a klieg light as he laughed and said, in the most musical French, “Ah, didn’t I think so?”  The French, and not only the women, can say the simplest things unforgettably.

This is true not only of pretty actresses. Thus my friend Bill Hedges was

 a fellow Fulbright somewhere in the South, the Midi, as the French call it. I used to call him on the phone to chitchat, often and quite lengthily. His landlady, whom he described as a jolly, corpulent, outspoken, middle-aged woman, would usually first pick up the phone and came to refer to me as “le roi du telephone,” which I rather liked, and which, email notwithstanding, I may still be.

Then again, there was that reception at New York’s French Consulate at which I noticed a very attractive young woman looking somehow lost. I accosted her and she turned out to be a beginning film actress with a rosy future named Audrey Tautou. I sat next to her at the dinner (there were such things in those days), and we enjoyably exchanged views about movies, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not. She gave me her address to which I later wrote a jovial letter, identifying myself—even then—as the vieux monsieur she had chatted with, but never got an answer. By then, she had become a star.

A tribute is due, too, to a French diacritical mark: the circumflex. The aigu (acute) and grave are common enough in other languages as well, but the circonflexe (as Keith Houston in the Times of February 20 entertainingly informs me) figures, besides French, only in Romanian, Portuguese, Turkish, Slovak and Vietnamese-- languages rather beyond my purview. In French, though, it is a jauntily pointed cap sitting pretty on top of various vowels, lengthening or darkening their pronunciation. It was near-extinct before the Academie Francaise resuscitated it, and serves mostly as replacement for a discarded S in such words as bête, cout, and huitre, but thriving in English as beast, cost and oyster. It serves other purposes as well, like differentiating between du (due) with, and du (of) without circumflex. In French, it derives from circumflexus, the Latin rendering of the Greek perispomenos (bent around). And sometimes it is just there for no good reason, as in paraitre.

In popular English parlance, French stands for elegance, as in dry cleaning, cuisine, couture, pastry, cuffs, heels, windows, doors; and somewhat more equivocally in dressing, toast, fries, bread, and French kiss. But because of British jealousy of France, there is also the negative French leave (although based on an old French custom) and the now obsolete French letter (condom) and French pox (syphilis).

Most interesting of all is the euphemism “Pardon my French,” an apology for potty mouth, which surely derives from Americans’ equating French with erotic, as also in French kiss. If so, all I can say is “Vive la France!”

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Minnesota Melancholy and Masculinity

Maybe it’s something in the water. That would make sense; Minnesota is water-rich. The Dakota words that form our state’s name are “minni,” which means water, and “sotah,” which means sky-tinted or cloudy. Maybe it’s male insecurity clouding the water.

We love our water. Our license plates read, “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” which is some classic Minnesota modesty, rounding down the actual number. We’re home to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness: a national park consisting of over 1,000 lakes on the Canadian border—where my father and I used to go every summer to paddle and portage, still one of my favorite places. Lake Itasca: headwaters of the Mississippi River. Minneapolis: literally named city of water, with its Chain of Lakes described in 1884 as “a necklace of diamonds in settings of emerald.” Minneapolis grew around Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi, and flour companies like Pillsbury and General Mills prospered thanks to the waterwheels those falls turned. Minnehaha: a creek in Minneapolis with a 53-foot waterfall on its way to the Mississippi; the name Minnehaha means water of the falls—mistakenly translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to “laughing waters” due to the “haha” portion. The elementary school joke went: “I bet you can’t say Minnehaha without laughing."

I remembered this schoolyard joke when reading Kirk Wisland’s chapbook Melancholy of Falling Men, which won the 2015 Iron Horse Review chapbook prize judged by Roxane Gay. Wisland grew up in Minneapolis and received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, a program I currently attend, and he precedes me in a strange legacy of Minnesotans piped down to the Sonoran Desert to write about what it means to be a man.

In the opening essay of Wisland’s chapbook, titled “Johnny Cash Died,” Wisland writes a breathless single-sentence essay, including an anecdote where he storms down to Minnehaha Creek with a tire iron raised like a Cro-Magnon in pursuit of the hooligans who have egged his car, resulting in a broken nose and a story he can perhaps use to impress his tough-guy farmer grandfather.

With the Minnesota to Arizona connection at my disposal, I decided to track down this fellow traveler to ask him what it is about Minnesota that makes us want to scrutinize masculinity. I found that Wisland currently resides in Athens, Ohio, pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Ohio University. After a few friendly emails where we discussed the nature of life in the Twin Cities and our communal status—in Wisland’s words—as “long-suffering Timberwolves fans,” we arranged a phone interview.

On February 9th, when Minnesota was dealing with a 17-degree day, I parked my Chevy Malibu south of 6th Street and comfortably strolled in jeans and my favorite blue-checkered short sleeve button-up to the University of Arizona library through the bright, 76-degree Tucson air. I rented a private study room and set myself up with two notebooks for questions and answers respectively. When I dialed, Wisland answered with “That’s a real Minnesotan, 11 o’clock on the dot.” I chuckled and said I was trying to be timely. I started with a Minnesota Nice question, asking how the collection came together. Wisland said he was trying to find a home for these pieces, saw a thread of melancholy among them, and entered the collected essays into the Iron Horse Review chapbook contest. He won, impressing Roxane Gay to blurb:

Melancholy of Falling Men is a meditation, of sorts, on modern masculinity and the Midwest. There is so much ambition and risk-taking in this collection of essays that defy any sort of tidy description. From the first word to the last, these essays will leave you feeling utterly exhilarated and wanting to spend the rest of time roaming through the writer’s mind.

I have to agree with Gay; the collection is solid and made me want to spend some more time with this man’s mind. More recently, I got to meet Wisland face-to-face at AWP in Los Angeles, and I attended an Iron Horse Review reading where Wisland shared two short essays from Melancholy of Falling Men: “Future Weight of This Regret” and “A Crack in the Façade.” The first essay is about witnessing a break-up through a diner window in Tucson and the second a reflection on Wisland’s grandmother while he stood in the San Miniato church in Florence, experiencing an “absence of anxiety, the acceptance of mortality.” It’s interesting to hear a writer’s voice audibly after encountering it on the page, and Wisland’s reading was strong. Afterward, Wisland and I chatted Minnesota and the finer points of ESPN’s film The Fab Five.

But before the face-to-face niceties was our initial interview back in February, and I had one central question for Wisland. I asked what it is about Minnesota that makes us want to talk about masculinity. He thought for a moment, then said:

In general, we don’t have that kind of exuberant masculinity that a New Yorker has or a loud southerner has. When you think regionally, like when you say east-coast hyper-masculinity, I immediately think: Tony Soprano—Italian, Jersey, gold chain. Like a big blaring neon sign saying, “I am a man.” In the Midwest in general, but particularly Minnesota, we’re just not like that. Our masculinity and just our basic nature is so much quieter. Head down. Don’t stand out from the crowd. It’s a cliché, but there is something about that Germanic, Scandinavian quiet. I remember the first time I went to New York just being kind of amazed by how verbose and kind of boisterous people were. The weird thing is now, the older I get, I appreciate that a little more if I think it’s honest. Sometimes I think there can be kind of ridiculous, over-the-top personas. But that New York version in some ways is more honest than the Minnesota version. We have this politeness that we like to congratulate ourselves for, which is true, but it’s also like “I would never outright say that I think I’m a better person than you, but I’ll quietly think that to myself.” Whereas there’s something refreshing about the Tony Soprano type who you know he either likes you or doesn’t like you.

I confess, I haven’t been to New York. I have a kind of Old Testament fear of the city—it’s a mix of respect and a worry that the city would smite my tender, corn-fed nature. But I get what Wisland meant about the honesty of verbosity, and I think he hit on something important: maybe we as Minnesota men scrutinize masculinity because we’re afraid we’re being dishonest. We want to speak up, to discuss what truly makes a man a man.

Personally, I grew up feeling that I needed to remain a boy as long as possible, that one day, without noticing, I would transform from precocious to predator. When I was little, my mother would often roll her eyes at displays of masculinity from my father or other men, and she would turn to me and say, “Don’t grow up to be a man.” She was joking in that way you do when you think a child won’t understand, but I listened. I’m wary of sharing this quote from my mother because I know it hurts her to remember, and I don’t blame my mom for my awkwardness. I bought into the idea behind why she said what she said: that to be a man is to be bad. I’ll own my acceptance of such an attitude. For years I did my level best consciously and subconsciously to sabotage my progression into manhood, yet I became a man anyway. Not in a sudden, werewolf-and-the-moon, Jekyll-and-Hyde moment, but somewhere along the line I at least stopped looking like a boy. Although, even once I identified as grown, I still distrusted and disliked most men, feeling we were the cause of so much evil in the world.
 
I started to see that there is more to masculinity than aggression or the patriarchy while working with a therapist and reading the book Iron John: A Book About Men, which my therapist recommended. I specifically sought out therapy at the time to try to figure out why I couldn’t “act like a man,” and I asked my dad for help. He suggested that I see his guy, Adam, to at least get a referral for someone else. Adam and I hit it off, and with my dad’s approval, Adam became my therapist too. It also happens that Adam is a Minnesota man who wrote his graduate thesis about the psychology of masculinity. I’m telling you, there’s a pattern here.

Robert Bly, author of Iron John, is a former Minnesota poet laureate, translator, leader of the mythopoetic men’s movement, and generally another Minnesota man writing about masculinity, perhaps the most widely known. In our interview, I asked Wisland if he had read Bly’s book, but he said he hadn’t, though he had heard of Bly. Iron John is an analysis of a German fairy tale of the same name, and Bly uses the story to mine lessons from mythology, psychology, and elsewhere about how we progress from boyhood to manhood. It was an important text for me as I started facing the fact that I am a man.

I thought about how I used to harbor such fear and distrust of men when on the phone with Wisland, and, my Minnesota pride getting the better of my Minnesota politeness, I gently countered his claim, saying that the Minnesota version could be honest, saying that it was a shift in my life when I realized that my dad—who is the stereotype of the stoic, hardworking, Emersonian self-reliant man—was really being himself. For my dad, it wasn’t an act. I couldn’t exactly relate to him, feeling like I was lazy or an emotional creature, comparing my insides to my father’s quiet, composed exterior. It’s weird. I would silently berate other men for being what I typically considered manly, but I would also internally beat myself up for not being man enough. I think that confusion is why I’m interested to hear from other men like Wisland who have similar struggles. But from talking with my therapist who also knew my dad quite well, I started realizing that maybe some men just fit the Minnesota mold. Maybe some men are aloof and manly, and good.

Wisland responded:

My stepdad in particular is exactly that type. The stereotype of the hardworking, honorable Minnesotan. He’s retiring this year, but I mean he graduated high school, started working on the production line of a factory, went to Vietnam for a year, came back. He will have worked for almost fifty years. And I remember he said that, that he has worked full-time for fifty years, and I thought “I am almost the exact opposite.” Recently I started compiling all the jobs I’d ever been fired from. And I realized between age fourteen and forty, I think I only had two jobs that I didn’t get fired from. So I was contrasting that and thinking “How did I grow up in a household with a dad who was so nose-to-the-grindstone and end up being the person who just floated along paycheck to paycheck?”

I laughed. I’ve asked myself similar questions. And Wisland led me to another topic I wanted to discuss with him: humor.

My family, and the Midwest in general, loves dry humor. A deadpan delivery plays into the impassive, quiet persona and both ascribes to and violates that carriage. My mom’s full-blooded Norwegian dad, Ray, had a sense of humor where, if you didn’t know him, you might have to wait for him to crack up to know that he was joking. He would say something he knew would rile up my east-coast uncle, and then Ray would just quietly sit there, looking down with a twinkle in his eye during the ensuing tirade, and he’d shoot a quick glance at me to show he knew what he was doing before busting a gut. Ray was another man who honestly filled the stereotype of the stoic, hardworking Midwestern male—living his whole life in rural Western Wisconsin. Yet he was also an alcoholic and could be very sad at times and very funny at others. I asked Wisland what he thought about the role of humor in masculinity, particularly when feeling melancholy. Wisland said:

Humor is a double-edged sword. You almost need it to get by. Unless you’re one of those people who enjoys the routine of life, humor is almost a necessity to survive. But I suffer from an excess of self-deprecating humor. I’ve realized that I am constantly undercutting myself, and often in professional situations. I’ll make a joke at my expense and think, “That was kind of a stupid thing to say.” I put so much thought when I was younger into getting people to laugh. Someone pointed out to me once that there’s a little bit of the self-defeating clown that seeps in. It’s a self-defensive verbal tick that I have to consciously be aware of, and I’ll actually have this little voice in my head in a pressured moment or professional setting that wants to say something funny to break the tension. I’ll have to put a gag on my interior monologue. And there’s this defensiveness about writing. There’s sort of this idea that writing is not a real job. Even I fall prey to that still, thinking, “Oh, I’m just a slacker. Just stumbling along. Teaching a couple classes.” My parents will say these things with such pride that I’m going to get a Ph.D. And I’ll think, “No, no, no. It’s not a real doctorate.” You know? I have kind of bought into my own self-perpetuating myth that I should feel vaguely guilty for not being an upstanding citizen. Really ought to just give up on this silly dream and get a nine-to-five job.

I can relate. Accurate self-appraisal is difficult, and sometimes that Minnesota politeness can turn into humility as a defense mechanism, self-deprecation to beat others to the punch. It’s like we feel we’ll be cut down if we build ourselves up, so we preemptively cut, which keeps us from standing up straight and taking the blame and the credit when it’s warranted, which again sort of feels dishonest. I guess since I’ve been around these Minnesota, Midwestern types all my life, I feel like I can see when their humility is real and when it’s someone saying what they think they’re supposed to say, like an athlete addressing the media. For the latter circumstance, I know what the person says is scripted, and I cut them some slack for not wanting to air their dirty laundry or step on other people’s toes. But then I also kind of respect the honest, heart-on-their-sleeve reaction of guys like Cam Newton, who was criticized for pouting after the Panthers’ loss in this year’s Super Bowl, because, really, what do we expect from someone who cares enough about winning to make it their living? I suppose that’s where levity and humor come in; humor can keep the withholding nature of a stoic persona from being cold, but humor also prevents full disclosure and sometimes gets used to mask fear or pain.

I also asked Wisland what he thought about the role of melancholy for the modern man, why it seems to be so prevalent:

There is something going on in terms of a kind of sea-change of what it means to be a man over the past thirty years or so. The shriveling up of the American Dream. It’s interesting, yesterday I reread Seymour Krim’s “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” which is great, it’s forty-three years old, but it reads like something that you could have written yesterday. It’s basically just talking about how we’ve internalized this open expanse of the American Dream. We’ve internalized the idea that we can be anything, which for a lot of people ends up being kind of a false dream. It’s talking about all the people who wake up one day and they’re forty and they’ve had ten different jobs and ten different things they’ve tried to be. It’s a great piece; I highly recommend it. I was thinking about how that relates to some of the stuff that I’ve written. The long roundabout answer is I think that melancholy is inherently tied into the mourning for all those lost opportunities. Those little mistakes. I think particularly for men of Gen X on up, I think we almost had too much freedom. I look at my dad or my grandfather and think they really had what I would think of as limited choices. And I think, “God, I’m so glad that I grew up with this idea that I could be anything.” But the flipside is that I wasted a ton of time. Trying to figure it out. What do we want to be? I look at my dad, and I envy his seeming lack of existential angst.

This existential angst comes through in many of Wisland’s essays, but it’s particularly strong in “A Generation of Worthless Men.” He opens saying:

Watching and waiting.
Making nothing. Building nothing. Planting no seed.
What do we know?

Wisland then relays the things this generation knows: drugs, dancing, raves, boozing, fucking, profanity, abortion, how to break things, not how to fix things, the horror the horror (like Kurtz) of excessive information via the internet, isolation. These men, thinking of joining the Marines in the era “between Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom,” deciding instead to be artists. “Watching and waiting, wasted and wasting.”

I see in this not nostalgia exactly, not a desire to go back to the way things were. I see a desire for a straightforward purpose and an acquiescence to the complexities of modern living. It’s, as Wisland told me, a mourning for the American Dream. A meditation on the excess of freedom squandered. The fear that it’s your fault, that you’re the problem. It’s honesty. A plea for men to speak and share and improve. I relate deeply with this. We put on the old trappings of a man, but it doesn’t seem to permeate. We feel like pretenders.

In my favorite essay of the collection, “The Flying Lantern,” Wisland slow-motions us through a moment when he watched a man chuck a “mass-produced, faux-gothic porch lantern” into the sky and saw it smash in the middle of the street. In the essay, Wisland recalls sitting at “Bob’s Java Hut on the corner of 27th and Lyndale” in South Minneapolis with his “cool-rooster friends” when the lantern chucking took place. Despite first finding the coffee shop with his then girlfriend, Wisland writes that he stuck around because he was “hungry for the company of men.” Again, I relate. Just one block north, on 26th and Lyndale, I used to spend nights at the CC Club. I partly went to the CC because it’s a quality dive bar with just enough grime and edge to make it cool, but also based on a referral from Slug of the Minnesota hip-hop duo Atmosphere, who says on the song “Aspiring Sociopath,” “Maybe he should just go get a pitcher at the CC. Find a stool at the bar where he can stare at the TV.”

At the CC I drank Jameson and Grain Belt with guys who seemed to have the quiet cool of Minnesota masculinity ingrained in them, and I tried to steal some manliness for myself. I asked Wisland why we surround ourselves with these kinds of men, why we seem to collect them:

At its simplest level for me it was a lot of insecurity about my status as a man. I think it’s funny, I started hanging out at Bob’s Java Hut by accident. It was that a woman I was dating at the time would go there, and then I started hanging out. And I was immediately aware of feeling like I’m on the lower end of the testosterone scale. Sitting there and there’s forty motorcycles parked outside, and lots of leather and chain smoking. And I remember in the late ‘90s sitting there and feeling a little bit like a kid, like I am a little boy among men. I had a couple friends there, one of whom basically held my hand as I got my first motorcycle. And I remember thinking that this guy was like my Han Solo. He was my ticket to this cool world, you know?

I do know. And I think Wisland’s distinction that he felt like a kid or a boy rather than a woman is important. This anxiety around masculinity isn’t about disparaging femininity. It’s about wanting to be confident and wise and mature, to not be a scared little boy. And for some reason we need guides into that mature world. Bly writes in Iron John that such initiation and guidance are exactly what men require to be healthy and happy, and exactly what stunted, angry, aggressive men have missed.

In “The Flying Lantern,” Wisland’s guide was named Darryl, “who sauntered with the confidence of a guy who’s taken his share of hits, who knew he punched above his weight.” One of mine was named Shane. Shane was an east-coast biker, had run in gangs, tattooed up to the ears and down to the knuckles, scrawny but scrappy, chopped his long hair off for a high-and-tight, sustained piercing eye contact, called his drug of choice either crack or “cocaína,” claimed it was what made his goatee prematurely gray.

I met Shane at a men’s recovery meeting, and then again at a Buddhist Twelve Step group in Southern Minneapolis, not too far from Bob’s Java Hut and the CC Club. Shane and I bonded over our desire to stay sober, and our need to be around guys who wanted the same. He invited me to a private men’s meeting he and some friends held. They met at a Thai restaurant called Supatra’s on West 7th Street in Saint Paul, and then rolled on motorcycles or in contractor’s pickups or in Shane’s industrial painter’s van to the basement of a guy who had done years in San Quentin for meditation and sharing.

It was such an interesting set-up because I was a nerdy feelings guy, and these men with all the dressings of bad-asses were also feelings guys. But I remember thinking a few months in, after the first time I cried in front of them, how in active addiction or as kids we probably wouldn’t have hung out. As kids, they would have been the guys skateboarding and riding BMX bikes off jumps they built, and I would have been the guy flailing uncoordinated Pumas at a hacky sack at church youth group. But at this stage in our lives, as we were trying to be grown-ups, honesty and tenderness were valuable. The chains on their wallets, which weren’t just for show, rattled as they hugged me and slipped back on their bandanas and leather jackets. I buttoned my pea coat and oddly felt like I belonged.

For some reason this pull to challenge and reframe masculinity is strong in Minnesota men. Minneapolitan Slug of Atmosphere often raps about what it means to be a man, including the 1997 song “Ode To The Modern Man,” which contains one of Slug’s best lines: “I could fill your head some more with metaphors, some cute catch phrases filtered through accessible themes. But if I don’t stay sincere to love and hate, how do I differentiate between chasing C.R.E.A.M. and chasing dreams?” I feel like Slug is talking about that same fear of dishonesty that Wisland mentioned in our phone call. And both Slug and Wisland seem to err on the side of truth.

Garrison Keillor is a Minnesota institution, and in 1993 he published The Book of Guys. He says, “Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement and now it’s just a problem to be overcome. Guys who once might have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling are now just trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, be passionate in a skillful way, and yet also lift them bales and tote that barge.”

Perhaps it all stems from Robert Bly, who gave us Iron John: A Book About Men in 1990, where he says, “The journey many American men have taken into softness, or receptivity, or ‘development of the feminine side,’ has been an immensely valuable journey, but more travel lies ahead.” I think Bly is right: we’re progressing, but we’re not done. We want to be sensitive and honest, but we also want to be grown men. Wisland is embarking on the kind of travel Bly describes, and he’s adding himself to the list of Minnesota men we can turn to for guidance.

Wisland’s Melancholy of Falling Men weaves together the insecurity and thoughtfulness of modern masculinity, disclosing these musings in order to connect to his reader. He’s testing our masculine tropes, trying to filter truth from cloudy waters. I value that Wisland is willing to show his insides so that we don’t have to compare our interiority solely to the stoic exterior of Minnesota men. Near the end of my phone call with Wisland, he said:

People are always telling me there’s still an absence in masculine writing. There are not a lot of male writers who are willing to take big risks. There is an opening for men who are willing to write emotion and write about painful things, for those of us who are willing to lay ourselves bare.

*

Kirk Wisland’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, DIAGRAM, Paper Darts, Electric Literature, Phoebe, Essay Daily, Bending Genre, Fiction on a Stick, and Proximity. He lives in Athens, Ohio, where he is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at Ohio University.

Caleb Klitzke is new, but he’s giving it hell. He is a nonfiction candidate in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Arizona. Caleb loves Minnesota more than is reasonable to love a patch of land largely defined by the rivers that separate it from other areas.

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