Engineering

This is a test post.

Come again?

Hello. I’m sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but it was as necessary as it was unexpected. I’ve been thinking – and playing catch up/reading – and I hope to regain the pace with which I flew through the first six books or so of this project. With five weeks of junior year left and “senioritis” already settling in my bones, I see no sign of that speed returning any time soon. Don’t fret, beloved reader! Memoir, the genre of silent conversation (I see that interrobang (?!, combined) over your furrowed brow. Let me explain…), will always lure me to the nearest armchair. Like any English major, I examine a memoir for its content and form, but judge the work for its character. Memoirs are petitions for sympathy, an open palm extended towards another.

I accept.

Finally returning to this project, I read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, a book on my “To Read” list since my sophomore year of high school. Born in the U.S., the America of beaming smiles and gilt eagles, McCourt immigrated to Ireland as a young boy. Job scarcity and his father’s alcoholism kept McCourt, his mother, Angela, and his younger brothers on the move, leaving one “lane” (slang for slums or ghettoes) for another, but never out of severe poverty. (I wonder, must a memoir include hardship of some kind, or merely a change, a shock to one’s system?)

A call for submissions

Because I am exhausted by dull conversations, the weighty presence of stodgy academia, I am planning an independent study about a topic of my choice, the genre of memoir. I want to read what interests me, and, fortunately, I have the time and the credits to spare. I am a terrible storyteller myself (my friends can attest to this), so I want to learn the difference between recollection and remembrance – how deeply to delve in memory.

As I formulate my reading list, I wonder if my readers have any recommendations for memoirs or essay collections. Autobiographies would be interesting to read, too, but I’m drawn to the art of memoir rather than the comprehensiveness and structure of autobiography. Thus far, my list consists of the following titles:

• Call the Midwife, Jennifer Worth
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• Speak, Memory, Vladmir Nabokov
• The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
• How to Cook a Wolf, M.F.K. Fisher
• Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, Paul Collins
• Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
• The Art of Virtue, Benjamin Franklin

A graphic novel would be interesting material, too. Over the course of this semester, I will practice writing of my own, reflecting upon the form and content of these works, as well as theories and evaluations of the genre. I have lofty goals for the result of all this reading, but we’ll see where I end up. Certainly not with a memoir of my own, although I sense I have more to reflect on than I recall.