Sarah Viren on Hybridity

Hybridity and Essay DNA

(or my answers to your question on the event of the second day of my qualifying exams)

It is five in the morning and I am awake. This is not an uncommon occurrence. I’m bigger now and so I sleep less soundly. But also, the baby likes to wake around 5 a.m. and move around a bit. I felt her this morning, needling my left side with what I assume was her right foot. She’s upside down by now. I know because when she hiccups I can feel her in my hips.

When I last wrote to you all, it was before I started feeling her, before what they call “the quickening”—a word I’ve always loved. I wrote then about going in for a screening to test the traces of her DNA that are floating alongside my DNA in my blood. I wrote about how just the fact of that test made me aware of my own hybridization, how I have become two in one. And I compared that doubling to the essay and the way it can be embedded in many forms, including poetry and fiction, sometimes without us ever realizing it.

I now realize I am hybrid. I don’t need a test. I have those kicks in the night. The roundness when I look down at my feet. The way my belly button is filling in, threatening to pop out. But mostly it’s the kicks. There is nothing like a movement that is not your own to confirm that you are no longer alone in a room, or in the world.

And so now you’ve asked me about the essay and how I recognize it, especially when it’s often still so small and growing within the body of another beast, something someone else has called a story, a novel, or a poem. It would be easy if I could just tell you that it kicks. And in some ways it does. Seeing the “I” on the page is always a hint that the essay might be there, but not an assurance. I’ve had palpitations in my leg at times before that feel somewhat like this baby moving inside me, but I know there is no baby there. It is not enough to just see the “I” on the page or even necessary to see it at all. What you need is the presence of an I—or its implied presence—an “I” that is thinking, thinking on the page, thinking in an invented timelessness that is the mind on the page, in an attempt to figure something out, and maybe failing.

I just listed six characteristics—you may or may not have noticed. I don’t think all six need to be present for us to feel the presence of essaying in another work. If they are all there, you’ve probably already felt the kicking anyway. But since you’ve also asked about hybridization, I think it might be helpful to consider moments where the contours of the essay are less clear, as well as some moments where an essay has just been born.

1. The “I”—or its implied presence

I’ve always liked the way Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin called the novel a work of competing voices. He invented the term heteroglossia specifically to describe the way in which the novel—for a long time the defining literary work of our era—was marked by its many voices: the narrators, the characters’, sometimes the author’s. At the time he contrasted that multi-voicedness with epic poetry, but I think it’s better compared with the essay, which many now say is the defining literary work of our era, and which requires the presence of an “I,” even if that I is only implied and never directly stated.

Of course, what do I mean by the “I”? Novels include the “I” all the time and they’re still novels, at least mostly. But what I mean is an “I” that is not competing with other voices. The “I” might be competing with its many-voiced selves, the many selves of one’s mind, but we are not witnessing the village of voices in the novel that Bakhtin meant when he thought up heteroglossia.

Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation is called a novel, but much of that sparse book reads very much like an essay, in large part because of the insularity of its narrative voice and the prominence, and isolation, of the “I.” Composed of short fragments—some quotes from philosophers, some facts about space travel, some that read like journal entries penned by an isolate new mother moored in a timelessness that is new parenthood—the book reads in many ways like an essay by Montaigne, who also liked to mix quotes from others with his own pedestrian thoughts on a subject he hoped to dissect.

“I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger,” Offill writes. “‘It’s for my daughter.’ I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.”

The biography of the first-person narrator in Dept. of Speculation overlaps in several ways with Offill’s autobiography: both are new mothers, trying to write a second book without much success, while living in New York. But that quality—what used to be called autofiction—isn’t what makes much of this book feel like an essay. What makes it read like an essay is the strength and solitariness of the “I.”

Even when partway through the book, Offill suddenly revokes the “I” and replaces it with third person, referring to “the wife” as a character, even then we feel the steady beating of the “I.” We realize that she is trying to make herself into a character, as if that might give her the distance she craves from her own life. But that distance is only invented. Every time we read “the wife” we can easily see behind it an “I,” lurking. And by the end of the book, Offill returns the “I” to its rightful place on the page.

Though it is also at the end that the book starts to feel somewhat like a novel again and less like an essay. There is resolution to the story being told and a sense of completion as we move toward closure: the marriage recovers, the narrator finds a sense of peace, order is restored. And instead of ending in an “I,” Offill ends with an “us.”

2. —who is thinking,

This is key. Because there are “I”s everywhere. In pop songs, in novels, on reality television, in that text message you just got. But in an essay, the “I” is thinking. Or as Mary Capello explains in her essay "Propositions; Provocations: Inventions,": “I write creative nonfiction because while many ask how I’m feeling, no one asks how I’m thinking."

Cappello says creative nonfiction, but I think she meant essays. Creative nonfiction doesn’t always require the presence of thought. There are beautiful pieces of reported journalism or memoir that likely required much thought to piece together, but that don’t including that thinking as it is actively thought, by the narrator, who is also an “I.”

But what do I mean by thinking? I mean something that is not feeling. Not that feelings don’t enter the essay. They do. But when they do, it is often so that they can be thought out or about by the narrator. Think of T Fleishmann’s Syzygy, Beauty, in which the author tries to think out desire and its opposite, rejection. Or think of Eula Biss in On Immunity as she tries to rationalize her own fears about contamination that arise soon after she gives birth to her son. Or Hilton Als in White Girls as he understand his competing desire for and anger at the figure of the white woman in America. In all of these books there is an “I” thinking and we as readers witness their thoughts.

An essay, Philip Lopate writes, “tracks down a person’s thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands.”

Scott Russell Sanders in his essay “The Singular First Person” adds: “In this era of prepackaged thought, the essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and play. It is an amateur’s raid in a world of specialists. Feeling overwhelmed by data, random information, the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos."

3. thinking on the page,

Now we’re getting somewhere. And by somewhere, of course, I mean the page. Thinking on the page is different than just thinking. I am thinking now, but on the page I’ve only written this sentence, and so you, my readers, have no idea what I’m actually thinking, or if I’m even thinking at all. What I’m thinking, though, is about how to parse the difference between thinking and thinking on the page, between the static “I” and the “I” who thinks.

I think what I mean is that to think on the page is a different sort of act than to just think. There is a leap of faith required on the part of the reader and an act of creative invention on the part of the writer. The essayist must simulate what it feels like to think and make that feeling felt.

How we do that is another question. In his anthologies on the essay, John D’Agata often includes works that are fragmentary. And it’s true that our thoughts are often fragmented. They are also often associational.

I had a student one semester who was mostly silent up until we read Lacy Johnson’s memoir The Other Side. “This is amazing,” he said, during our first week into the book. “It’s just like the way my mind works.” Johnson’s book is composed of hundreds of small segments of prose that move back and forth in time and seem to cohere mostly by way of association, though there is a narrative arc and some chronology.

Little Labors is a book by Rivka Galchen that was supposed to be a work of criticism about Japanese literature in translation—specifically The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu—but ended up being a book-length essay built around fragmented thoughts about Galchen’s new baby, among other things. If Galchen had written the book she was supposed to write, that book never would have been a literary essay because, more likely than not, the critical thoughts she had about The Pillow Book and The Tale of the Genji would have appeared on the page fully formed, organized, and argumentative. Whereas what Galchen gives us in Little Labors includes a list of her baby’s habits, musings about Godzilla and Frankenstein as metaphors for baby-making, notes on authors and their parental or non-parental status, and the conclusion that all reactions to a baby are really more indicative of the hopes and fears of the reactor than they are of any intrinsic characteristic of the baby. Galchen leaps from one subject to the next with almost no connector except, of course, the baby, which always seems to be on her mind, at least on the version of her mind we find on the page.

4. thinking in an invented timelessness that is the mind on the page,

In his Believer essay on the “expositionary novelist,” Ben Marcus makes a distinction between time in traditional fiction—which he calls invented time—and in nonfiction, which he characterizes as timeless. These hybrid novelists, he argues, are “working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well, literally timeless.”

Of course, what Marcus fails to notice is that a sense of timelessness on the page is also an invented form of time. It’s an invented form of time, in fact, that mimics the mind on the page.

In her memoir Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso writes what is essentially an essay about becoming a mother and no longer writing in her diary. The book is also very much about time and, though it moves in a more or less chronological manner from before Manguso had a child to afterwards, the writing itself occurs in a state of invented timelessness. That timelessness is marked by sudden chronological leaps and by a constant sense of revision, in which one thought is expressed only to be contradicted or overridden by a subsequent though. For example:

Left alone in time, memories harden into summaries. The originals become almost irretrievable.

One day the baby gently sat his little blue dog in his booster seat and offered it a piece of pancake. The memory should already be fading, but when I bring it up I almost choke on it—an incapacitating sweetness.

The memory throbs. Left alone in time, it is growing stronger.

The baby had never seen anyone feed a toy a pancake. He invented it. Think of the love necessary to invent that.

In this series of mini-observations, what we feel as readers is that we are inside someone’s head as they think through an experience. We have just watched Manguso consider memories as they exist and change in time and yet the state in which she considers these thoughts is a timeless one.

5. in an attempt to figure something out,

We all know the most famous characteristic of the essay: as an attempt. Montaigne called his collections essais, which in French means “attempts” or “tries,” and at some point English-speaking essayists latched on to the quaint simplessness of that idea. Unlike novelists, we are not trying to build a world where one did not exist before. Unlike poets we are not trying to build a new language. We are just trying something out, or trying to figure something out.

For instance, I’m eating Korean sushi at ten in the morning and I’m trying to figure out if that’s because I’m pregnant or because I’m pinned to this desk writing these exams or because someone got the sushi for me to be nice and, when someone is nice to me, I feel obligated to accept their gifts, even if they’re not exactly what I wanted at the moment. Though this sushi is good and, if I were so inclined, I could probably write an essay about it, or about the regularity of meals and the jouissance of breaking out of that routine.

The fact that essays are preoccupied with attempts means that they tend to be, by nature, much more focused, more quotidian, more ordinary, even, than either novels or poems. But this is not to say that they’re boring. In fact, one of the tricks of an essay is to take the smallest, most pedestrian aspects of life and, by filtering them through the questioning self, suddenly make it intriguing and new—bigger and flashier, somehow, than they were before.

For instance, The Pedestrians by Rachel Zucker is called a book of poems, but it reads very much like an essay, especially in the moments in which we see our narrator observing and questioning herself and the world around her:

It was hard to say goodbye to the ocean. It was not the same ocean as it had been the day before. Today the waves crashed against her, pushing her back toward the shore. At the same time the tide was going out and tried to pull her with it. It was hard work just standing her ground. She wanted to say, ‘I love you.’ She wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ But to whom? To which part? The part of the ocean that was trying to push her away or the part that wanted to swallow her?

In this essayistic moment, Zucker is simply trying to think through her feelings about the ocean, but when this scene is read within the context of the whole work, we can’t help but also see the ocean as a metaphor. Because throughout the rest in the book, Zucker keeps trying to understand what it means to be a mother and a writer, but also a mother and writer with no plans to have more children—and yet with the desire to have them, to keep having them. Her book, then, is itself a contemplation of the pedestrian aspects of life—like motherhood, like standing in the ocean—and how they correlate to the larger questions about life and death and meaning. In a poem near the end of the book, Zucker asks:

—how can any mother write an epic when—my
fear receding behind his small-voiced apology (a
little nodule in my right breast) safe—when I'm
so terribly interruptible

My response is that maybe you don’t write an epic. You write an essay.

6. and maybe failing

At the end of her book of essays, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes:

Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea. The thread is cut and becomes the ribbon with which everything is tied up, a sealed parcel, the end. It’s easy to do, and I’ve done it again and again, sometimes with a betrayal of the complexity of what came before, and sometimes when I haven’t done it, an editor has asked for the gift wrap and the ribbon. What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?

What she’s asking, it seems to me (though of course you can disagree) is why we can’t accept that essays by definition fail—to conclude, at least. Stories are supposed to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Poems are known for that last line or lines, in which everything turns and paints the world anew. But essays are about process and process is not the same as product, which is to say conclusion.

Solnit’s book is fascinatingly hybrid in that it mixes literary analysis with the retelling of myth with an attempt to understand the life and slow death from Alzheimer’s of Solnit’s mother. And then running like a counter narrative to all this is a ticker tape along the bottom edge of the book with another narrative about sadness that both complements and distracts from the main one Solnit is trying to tell. Even the chapters of the book refuse to move toward some sort of pat ending. The chapter titles are a series of words that eventually mirror each other, with a “Knot” chapter in the center: Apricots, Mirrors, Ice, Flight, Breath, Wound, Knot, Unwound, Breath, Flight, Ice, Mirrors, Apricots. And so, even in this, there is the sense of circularity, of ongoingness, rather than of ending, even when we get to the ending.

Which is a failure of sorts, though now that I’ve written all this, I’m apt to revise my thoughts. Perhaps an essay is not about failure, but about incompleteness, like this baby kicking inside me. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its verbosity, can be the most arresting in those moments when the last sentence of a chapter just breaks off, as if in mid-thought

*

Sarah Viren is a writer and translator living in West Texas. Her essays and essay-like beasts have appeared in the Iowa Review, Guernica, TriQuarterly, The Normal School, Diagram, and others. More at sarahviren.wordpress.com.

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CAE Exam March 2017 Writing an Essay sample

Submitted by Guillermo Delgado

# of words 275 / Task from book: Advanced 1 (Cambridge)

Task

Your class has listened to a radio discussion on how more young people can be encouraged to study science. you have made the notes below:

Ways of encouraging young people to study science:

1.- Advertising

2.- School programs

3.- Government grants

Some opoinions expressed in the discussion:

"You never see positive images of young scientists on TV, just pop stars or actors."

"Science lessons should be practical and fun."

Write an essay discussing two of the points in your notes. You should explain which way would be more effective in encouraging young people to study sciencie, provinding reasons to support your opinion.

You might, if you wish, make use the opinions expressed in the discussion, but you should use your own words as far as possible.

Essay on young people and science

It is often claimed that education is the single most important factor in the development of a country. Nonetheless, official statistics show that the number of students pursuing a degree program related to a science field has dramatically declined. Not only does it seem to be decreasing scientific research, but also the country’s financial development.

One of the main causes of this problem is the government’s lack of financial support to educational institutions. It appears to be the case nowadays, that the State is unwilling to provide university grants and scholarships. Fifty years ago it was a different story, there were many options for middle-class people to access decent education; on the contrary, in the current scenario, with life being so expensive and unaffordable, young people prefer to get a job rather than going to university.

And those who do go to university are inclined to study other areas which they find more appealing. It goes without saying that advertising plays a crucial role in people. Currently, all publicity campaigns seem to be focused on the pop-stars way of life. Consequently, young people feel more interested in becoming actors, musicians or reality show producers. However, who is it to blame? That is an interesting question.

Most experts agree that the burden of responsibility lies in the hands of the government, since they are supposed to provide assistance with promoting science. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the time is ripe for the political authorities to implement a grand program and financial support to talented teenagers with limited resources. This is, as I see it, the best way to promote economic growth and sustainable development.

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CPE exam 2016 Essay writing practice

Submitted by Julia Angás 

#Words: 280

Task

Essay on computers: friends or foes?

 

Computers changed the world we live in a long time ago. But was the change for good? The two texts contrast different views on computers and discuss what we have gained and lost because of them.

The first extract argues that an enormous amount of information is now at our fingertips. Anytime, anywhere now, a person can, within a few seconds, find out what the biggest fish in the Amazon river is called, or which the highest tree is in his home country. Anything can be researched and found out straight away. Not only are we now able to access tons of information, but we can also contact people who might be on the other side of the planet.

The author of the second passage puts forward the negative aspects of our computer-based society. For example, that many people nowadays seem to be too absorbed by their computer to notice the people around them or even to get up from their chair. One current phenomenon is online shopping; people no longer need to go to the shop to buy anything, since it will be brought to them with a few clicks of the mouse. The writer suggests that soon we won't even have to think at all, as every answer will be there on the screen, for the taking.

All things considered, I am of the opinion that computers have the power to make our lives marvelously easy. We just need to be careful not to let ourselves be absorbed by them. At the end of the day, they represent progress, and a tool that we can use to help us shape a better future.

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Feedback on a piece of writing (CAE/CPE writing practice)

Submitted by Maria Victoria Ferrer

Task:

“Write an article describing a river and its effects on the 

people who live near it.” Use approximately 200 words.

Plan

• Title with a catchy phrase
• General introduction about the topic: river ( the river Ganges )
• The scale of Ganges and where it is located
• Its importance in history
• Its importance in culture
• Today's relevance in the economy and commerce in general
• Pollution
• Final conclusion and wrap up

Feedback from CPEsamplewritings is in color red.

                         “The River” (title is not catchy at all!)

Flowing through India and Bangladesh, the Ganges river is 

today one of the most important natural flows of water in the

world(,) not only due to the fact that it is the third largest river

in the world (repetition) by discharge but also because of its 

cultural and  historical relevance that are far larger than its 

2700km of length. Good intro but too long, 4 lines would be

enough. Punctuation needs to be checked, as there are no

stops or commas.

“Ganga”, as Hindus call it, is a place where many people 

practice religious rituals because they consider its waters to 

be sacred(,) so public bathing is not an uncommon thing to 

see.  (a paragraph should not be shorter in length that the 

introduction).

Furthermore, Ganga has also been a gateway for commerce 

for many centuries and it still is in the present. Locals use it 

to transport goods to other regions and also take advantage 

of its fertile soil dedicating to agriculture.

However, it is also known to be very contaminated and 

polluted. It is the fifth most polluted river in the world.  

Sewage from many cities, industrial waste and garbage are 

the main sources of pollution and it has been suggested to 

be the cause of around 80% of all illnesses in India.

Even though the Ganges has played (plays) a

role of imponderable importance in the history, economy,

 and culture of India. The time has come for its society to 

make changes in their lifestyle and industries in order to 

preserve it.

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Persuasive Essay on Drug Testing in Schools

Drug abuse is a relevant problem nowadays. Many people take different types of drugs to alter their mood and change their behavior.

Some people take drugs to reduce pain. Others just want to try something new. Drug abuse is crime. In the majority of countries drugs are illegal. One cannot go and purchase drugs in a store. Moreover, one cannot sell drugs openly whereas this product is banned. Drugs are prohibited because they influence our organism inadequately. Many people commit crimes under the influence of drugs. 

Others just enjoy themselves but waste too much money on these harmful substances. Consequently, drugs influence our health and financial condition. Sad to say but many children become the victims of drug abuse at school. They want to seem cooler and mature when they smoke marijuana or use methamphetamine. Children are vulnerable to such things. It is easy to persuade a child to try drugs. If he enjoys them, he can become a returning customer. Therefore, dealers make money on students and cause harm to the younger generation. No wonder, there have been many attempts to stop the spread of drugs in schools. Students are tested on drugs from time to time to make sure the educational institution is healthy. On the other hand, many people think that drug testing in schools should be prohibited because this action violates children’s rights.

As for me, I believe that drug testing in schools is a good idea. There are drug dealers in every school. They provide children with drugs and make them steal money and valuable things at home. 

Obviously, young students do not have enough money on drugs. Thus, they have to steal it somewhere. As a result, drug abuse is closely connected with robberies and assaults. It is vital to prevent such antisocial behavior as soon as possible. If a child is caught on taking drugs, there is time to change his lifestyle to the better. Many people say that it is impossible to catch the dealers who sell drugs in schools. However, we should find and catch them. Although there will be new dealers, they will have to ‘work’ less openly. Such criminals should understand that the school administration, parents and students are against of taking drugs. It is useful to conduct drug testing from time to time to detect the students who are under the influence of drugs. They will probably name the people who sold them drugs. Therefore, drug testing can help the police catch dealers and more solid criminals.

Of course, we should test students in the proper way. It is possible that a child decides to try drugs for the first time and he is caught at once. In this case, teachers and parents should be very careful. It is considerable to explain the negative impact of drugs on the human health to the caught child. They should not shout at him or exclude him from classes. The student’s nature is rebellious and he will do the opposite on purpose. Parents should be glad that their child was caught early whereas it is still possible to change his life. it is possible to persuade him give up drugs.

Then, many students take drugs because they are forced by their peers. Others decide to take drugs because they have personal problems. Therefore, it is reasonable to test students on drug abuse in order to learn about their unfavorable social position. The child is probably neglected or abandoned and he believes that the only way out is drugs. Due to drug testing social services learn about dysfunctional families and ‘difficult’ children.

Next, schools that check their students on drugs demonstrate their concern about the healthy way of life. When students see that administration, teachers and parents care about this problem, they realize that it is important to live in a drug free environment. This concern makes students believe that healthy lifestyle is more important than short-term euphoria caused by drugs. More children will refuse to take drugs and they will promote this idea among their classmates. Thereof, more students will reach their goal and build a successful career in future.

Drug testing in schools is the best solution of the problem of drug abuse among young people. It is smart to detect and prevent this problem when students are very young than to bring up a grownup person. Although this procedure is unpleasant and even shameful, it will save many young lives.

For professional persuasive essay writing help you should visit this page: https://www.essaylib.com/type-persuasive-essay.php.

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On What Maps Might Do: A Conversation From The Editors of Territory

Nick Greer: How do you feel about maps? I ask this question often. I ask it of friends, acquaintances, and strangers; artists and non-artists; old and young. It’s not an especially hardball question, but it’s one that’s intrigued me (and my co-editor Tommy) for a while now. Intriguing, in part because I wonder why I myself am so attracted to maps, but more because the answers to this question are surprising.

The responses are surprising, but not because people have especially personal or well-considered thoughts or feelings about maps. It’s the opposite. Most people say sure, they like maps, or that they love maps, how did I know? Nobody dislikes maps, but when I press for specifics or an explanation, the responses I get aren’t exactly illuminating. The most common response is to shrug, but rarely is this to communicate nonchalance. Unable to give a good explanation, people ask me what others think, what I think, what they should think. Some divert the conversation or get defensive. Others backtrack and apologize. Some simply stare at their shoes.

In other words, people tend to behave the way we do when we’re lost, when we need a map. Territory is an attempt at making that map.

Thomas Mira y Lopez: In the course of reading up on maps before we launched Territory earlier this year, I came across this legend. It doesn’t necessarily articulate how I feel about maps (I’d most likely be staring at my shoes), but it does get at what I feel maps might do:

In 1824, the Scottish explorer Hugh Clapperton visited the court of Mohammed Bello, the sultan of Sokoto and the most powerful man in western Sudan. Clapperton wanted to trace the course of the Quarra, also known as the Niger, the third longest in Africa.

European geographers had been seeking this course for centuries. The Quarra runs inland from the Guinea highlands, extending north and east over a breadth of 2,500 miles until it bends sharply—and unexpectedly—at Timbuktu and empties into the Gulf of Guinea. Rumor had it, however, that the river ran straight east until it joined the Nile. If this were the case, the Quarra would prove an invaluable tool. Colonial armies could travel inland without the prospect of becoming lost in the desert. They’d also possess a trade route to transport men and goods from the Gold Coast to the Mediterranean. In short, a great many lives depended on the knowledge of the Quarra’s path.

When Clapperton arrived in Sokoto, Sultan Bello drew the river’s course in the sand: its path north and east and then its sudden drop into Guinea’s gulf. Clapperton was thrilled and asked Sultan Bello’s permission to navigate the route. But the Sultan surprised the explorer and refused. Clapperton was unable to set off without the Sultan’s goods and men and so he remained at Sokoto, hoping in vain for a change in mind.

Clapperton was ill and a year later he would return north to Tripoli and die from yellow fever. Before he left, the Sultan provided him with a map of the Quarra’s route. But this map, Clapperton noticed, looked completely different than the line first drawn in the sand. The Quarra was once again the river of European legend. The Sultan had drawn a bold black line on the map—in reproductions of the map (only available in lo-res online, perhaps fitting given the map's history), it looks a bit like a stray hair left on a photocopy—curving down and around Sokoto and the other cities of his kingdom. Nowhere did he show its origin or its emptying out into the sea. Along the line, the Sultan wrote that this was the river “which reaches Egypt and which is called the Nile.”

                                                 

In other words, the Sultan drew a lie. And Clapperton believed the lie, or at least he accepted it, bringing the false map back to Tripoli to live on as an artifact of his daring yet never traveled adventure.

NTG: Lying is central to maps, both to its construction and its appeal. The atlas I grew up with, my mom’s own childhood atlas, was published in the early 70s, and I remember loving its anachronisms: Rhodesia, South Vietnam, the USSR. Maps that still include these countries are “wrong,” but this wrongness is charming in a way. You can decide to right the wrong by buying a new atlas, altering the old one, or simply making a mental note. Or you could leave it as is, a wrong. When I was a kid, reading my mom’s atlas, I often chose this lattermost path, choosing my own adventure, so to speak, seeing these countries as mythical and mystical, the stuff of legend. I imagined myself there, a spy or journalist among elephant poachers and puppet rulers, an exciting alternate reality to my safe suburban one.

Our fondness of maps is so often childlike--friendly and natural; curious but uninspected and unaware--and many of us have pleasant memories from childhood. Of leafing through an atlas or spinning a globe, using these maps as prompts for play and imagination. Here is where you were born. Here is where you will get married. Here is where you’ll die. And, if you don’t like what you got the first time around, you could give the globe another spin--right the wrong. I played my own versions of these games, sometimes losing entire afternoons to “reading” my mom’s atlas. I obviously loved it, but had you asked me, How do you feel about maps?, I couldn’t have offered any specifics, just that I did.

Nobody did ask me that question, not so directly at least. I encountered this and other questions over many years and in many forms. A short story about pogroms and labor camps. Movies about child soldiers, heroin smuggling. Photographs of napalm eating through skin. A childlike joy is something that can’t really be accounted for, so it’s no surprise that once you make someone account for it, it goes from childlike to childish, selfish even. Thinking back on how easy, how enjoyable it’d been to make places and their people the objects of my fantasy, I grow embarrassed. In my excitement, I had let the map become the territory, but, when made to see the territory through another map--an other’s--I realized the crassness of my own.

When you read the Clapperton story, whose sympathies and motivations are consciously gray, how did you read the Sultan? Is he naive, believing the Quarra to lie just as the legend describes, or clever, knowing Clapperton expected a hospitable and dignified, but ultimately unrefined African to somehow fail him? Or maybe a combination of the two, or neither, or something else entirely. The legend, or rather, Tommy’s version of the legend, leaves enough of these doors open that it invites the same questions about the story itself. Look at how he insists on calling it a “false map,” as if there were such a thing as a “true” map. Look at how you accepted this implication without a second thought. The story doesn’t put on airs about putting on airs--it announces itself as a legend in ways explicit and implicit--but this guilelessness is a kind of guile. It makes the story friendly and natural, inviting your uninspected curiosity, your childlike attention.

In other words, Tommy drew a lie. He and I know this, but we’re presenting this false map to you anyway, an artifact of artifice.

TMYL: Right. And the tension created by that lie is what interests us in a lot of ways at Territory. It’s after all what inspired our name (and URL): the map is not the territory. Part of our aim is to explore this tension; what happens, if you’ll excuse the pun, when we investigate the difference between the lay and the lie of the land?

You could argue most interesting writing, and most interesting essays, explores that tension. It limns the uncomfortable, often unfathomable difference between the way we conceive of the world and the way the world actually is (if we can even say the world is actually some way and not just the sum of other people’s conceptions...but that’s a rabbit hole for another day). If you put me on the spot and asked me why I like essays, that’s the closest answer I might stumble towards.

That tension--and that uncomfortable space--also pops up in the moment when a first romantic notion about maps--as child’s play, as space for the imagination--abuts against a growing awareness of their connotations. That might be as good a reason to like anything, including maps: they’re beautiful and dangerous at the same time.

I come back again and again to the story of Sultan Bello and Clapperton (a story that I picked up second hand from a book, of course, and whose holes I populate with my own thoughts) as a tool for both artifice and accuracy. I like the story because it calls attention to its mapmaker and his motivations, to his awareness of a map’s social concerns. If we see an essay or work of prose as a type of map, that is as the translation of experience into a legible construct, we can carry this parallel over to the question of who’s telling stories and setting the terms of the world today. We might start questioning our own legends: the ways we interpret a set of signs on a map and the stories so well-known their provenances becomes doubtful.

And finally I like this story because I like maps. I don’t know if I know why I like them--but I figure if they cause most of us to express fondness without being able to articulate exactly why, then that’s as good a reason as any to direct writers we admire towards them. If a map claims a territory, we want to see what happens when those writers claim the map, knowing the full effects that claiming a territory implies.

Nick Greer is a writer living in and originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and a BA in Mathematics and Music from Williams College. His chapbook, Glass City, a collection of vignettes about life in a fantastical modern city, is forthcoming in Salt Hill (2016). Find more about him here or @nickgreergkcin.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is from New York and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. He currently lives and teaches in Athens, OH. Find him @TMiYL.

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Prayer for the Lamplighter: The Little Prince as Essay

I.

The Little Prince is now streaming on Netflix, and there was a movie version in theaters. The ads on my Facebook tell me this. I recoil at the mention of The Little Prince as a movie. And I have to ask myself why. It’s not because I don’t think books can be made into compelling films or because I think the subject matter is too precious. It just doesn’t feel right to me, the way cheddar cheese with ice-cream would be horrible. Sure, the two substances have lots in common, but something in the mixing surely must be awry.

The Little Prince is, of course, a beloved children’s book that has fans who insist it’s not really for kids. An aviator gets stranded in the desert and meets an other-worldly visitor in the form of a child. The child-prince tells the aviator of his problems on his home asteroid involving a conceited rose and his travels to various other asteroids, where he meets archetypes of adults, including a king, a drunk, and a businessman. The moral of the story is something like Only with the heart can you see rightly or Grown-ups are terrible creatures.

I’m being glib here because it’s hard to explain why the book matters to so many people and I include myself as one of those people, especially because of a strange time in my life almost a year ago.

I think the main reason behind this gut reaction of Oh no no no no no for the book being a film has to do with how I think of The Little Prince. There’s a plot and characters, sure, but it reads something like an essay, especially the middle portion with the archetypical adults. And no one wants to see the film-version of an essay by Montaigne or Camus. The book is often discursive, with the Little Prince going from asteroid to asteroid, interviewing different types of grown-ups, asking them what matters. And the pilot as narrator too reads something like an essay. He is looking back on a strange time in his life, trying to make it make sense, somehow. The whole thing is colored with memory and a deep sadness.

For example, in Chapter Four, the pilot discusses how adults would be loathe to believe his story of the other-worldly visitor in the following manner:

Just so, you might say to them: "The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists." And what good would it do to tell them that? They would shrug their shoulders, and treat you like a child. But if you said to them: "The planet he came from is Asteroid B-612," then they would be convinced, and leave you in peace from their question.

Here, the narrator isn’t going over plot saying “This happened and then this other thing happened” but rather reflecting on the events as a whole. The Little Prince isn’t just the pilot telling the story; he’s reflecting back on events and looking at the act of reflecting. He is presenting a worldview here, one filled with melancholy and isolation because no one shares it with him. He presents what it means for something to be true: namely, personal experience.

It’s depressing that I think of The Little Prince this way, as an essay and not a book for children or book-for-children-but-not-really-for-children. The characters don’t seem real. An elephant inside of a boa constrictor just looks like a really stupid tattoo. And I think the Little Prince would cry, probably, if I told him he wasn’t a real character, just an matrix of thoughts and ideas. He would call me a grown-up and tell me I’m not seeing things rightly.

But it’s important that I think of the book this way, I think, because all analysis begins with description, and if you leave out that it’s at least part essay, you’ll run the risk of falling into the book, over-relating to it, acting like the book was made just for you, and buying tickets for what is most likely a very stupid movie.

II.

With the idea of The Little Prince as essay in mind, let’s take a look at one discursive part in particular, Chapter 14, where the Little Prince meets a Lamplighter and a discussion ensues.

The Little Prince said that the Lamplighter could have been his friend, of all the people he's met, because he is the only one that thinks of something other than himself. That's an odd thing to say of someone who does nothing but complain the entire time of his need for sleep. That's an odd thing to say of someone who lives on a planet where there isn't any room for other people.

I wondered what it would be like to have such a silly-looking friend, hair sticking out like frying pans on either side of his head, a scarf that goes around and around. He must have sturdy shoes, although it's hard to see in the picture, and it's not discussed. And he could have been safe in those shoes, I'd bet, roots springing from the heels, to counterbalance a planet that speeds up. He could have stood by that lamp, carrying out orders, like the stiff, clown-doll he is.

I’m inferring a lot here, and I want to learn how not to do that. Because an analysis starts with description, and what I’m describing isn’t actually in the book. The book isn’t any of the things I’m trying to make it do to make it fit a strange time in my life; it’s too much of a meditation, of a rumination, on things I can’t see rightly.

The Lamplighter said that every minute there's a sunset (light the lamp) and every minute there's a sunrise (put out the lamp). He thought he was the hero. He thought he was the hero. Carrying out orders so adroitly.

The Lamplighter's planet is so tidy and has no plants. Clean and still. My house and garden are a mess. They're full of things I don't need and don't know how to take care of. But there's big a porch with a cheap chair that isn't heavy so I can move it around when I go out there after my dinner to smoke, and sunsets are beautiful when you're sad.

But I won't cry about it. Not this time.

Someone I thought I knew well did an appalling thing where he bought me a ring. And I, who I thought I knew well, said No and Get out and I don’t love you. After four years of trying to make it work. After four years of forgiving, of over-looking everything. After I bought a huge house for us, with the big back yard so he could garden. People keep telling me that they thought we were doing fine and try to give me food and let me stay on their couch. And that's the thing, isn't it? Fine isn't enough. You can be faithful and lazy at the same time.

And when I think about The Little Prince, and what the book really is, I once again am lazy and faithful. I want Chapter 14 to to be an image of my actions, to mirror my thoughts and ways, but it doesn’t work, no matter how hard I try to narrativize and impose my own justification. I can’t pretend the essay is other than what it is, but I can’t stop myself either. I want to say I was the Lamplighter and My lover was the light and write a sort of fan-fiction for a new ending for the Lamplighter, but essays don’t really get new endings.

My arms grow tired, and I don't know how to rest. And so I make up a new ending anyways, and pretend the book is a story so I can sleep better. I soothe my conscience through a false interpretation. And in the end, I’m no better than the filmmakers who’ve tried to make movie-versions of the book that eludes a simple transposition from book-narrative to film-narrative.

The ending for Chapter 14 that I wrote is this:

My hope, my prayer, for the Lamplighter, is that maybe a flock of birds will come for him too, like they did for the Little Prince. He'll jump up and hitch a ride to Earth, ridiculous scarf flying out behind him.

He will feel like he's lurching towards an abyss. He will feel like he's been bit by a snake for his abandonment. He will sit in train-stations and villages and desert places and feel like a piece of shit. He will call himself a cunt when he is very drunk, with all his friends around him in a very public bar. They will all say Shhh, Nadia, don’t call yourself that. He will have to learn about numbers and figures and maps and matters of no consequence.

But maybe, just maybe, if he can see rightly, he will meet a great astronomer (in Turkish robes) who will tell him about spin. How if an object is weighed down, it slows down. Picture a large top, the astronomer will say. Now glue a small object on the side, such as a snail or coin. The top careens off-course and doesn't go as fast as it ought.

And then the Lamplighter will think of his planet and that lamp he used to care for. And perhaps the planet is spinning a little faster every year, gathering much more speed without him and his rooted shoes. Soon, the planet will flicker like a candle between sunrise and sunset. Flickering faster and faster still, shorter amounts of time between sunrise and sunset. Soon, all will be light.

*

Nadia Wolnisty is a poet and performer in Dallas, Texas. Her work as appeared in several small, independent magazines. She can be seen performing with Bonehouse, Common Company, Dark Moon Poetry Arts, Mad Swirl, and Poets on X+. She doesn't like it when people include information about their pets in their bios.

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B2 Certification/ CAE: Report Sample 2016

Submitted by Miriam Ortega

 

# of words: 190

Task: 

Last year a new Sport and Leisure centre opened in your home town. You have recently received the following letter from the manager of the centre: "I am writing to all members of the Active Leisure club to thank you for your custom over the last year. We want to make the facilities ever better this year! Please, send a short report to us, telling us what you think are the best and the worst aspects of the club. We also want to hear your suggestions for new facilities".

Report on the new Sport and Leisure centre

Introduction

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the services provided by the Active Leisure club during last year, as well as to make some recommendations on new facilities to be implemented.

The best aspects of the club

From my point of view, the strongest suit of the Leisure centre is the personalised and very friendly way in which they treat all the members. From the smiling "good morning" in the entrance, to the constant supervision to customer satisfaction regarding the sport classes they provide. I just find this fantastic.

The not so positive aspects of the club

Something to criticise is the lack of variety in the sport activities that are currently being offered. Paddle, swimmimg, and a couple of other water sports are the only options available. It clearly makes very little sense when we consider that the club has space enough to build a tennis court, a football ground or a running course.

Recommendations

I recommend investing on building new facilities for the members to be able to learn to play tennis, football or do athletics.  This measure would certainly please the members and attract new people to join in.

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