Daily Themes Week 5
2/16/23
Prompt 4: Choose a passage of 250 to 300 words (or two shorter passages of 100 to 150 words each) and type the passages out.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. London etc.: Penguin Books, 2017. (pages 1 and 343)
Page 1:
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Page 343:
Dewey looked at the gray stone inscribed with four names, and the date of their death: November 15, 1959. “Do you come here often?”
“Once in a while. Gosh, the sun’s strong.” She covered her eyes with tinted glasses. “Remember Bobby Rupp? He married a beautiful girl.”
“So I heard.”
“Colleen Whitehurst. She’s really beautiful. And very nice, too.”
“Good for Bobby.” And to tease her, Dewey added, “But how about you? You must have a lot of beaus.”
“Well. Nothing serious. But that reminds me. Do you have the time? Oh,” she cried, when he told her it was past four, “I’ve got to run! But it was nice to have seen you, Mr. Dewey.”
“And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,” he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining — just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.
I love the way that Truman Capote enters the atmosphere, sounds, and scenery of Holcomb, and then how he leaves it… how he leaves it!! In my copy of the book from 11th grade, I wrote in pink pen on the last page, “This is the best ending to any book ever!!!!” Writing it out to experience it again was really great.
I’m interested in how accessible the language is, yet how creative: “ranch-hand nasalness,” “wind-bent wheat.”
alliteration in “swinging, shining”: sounds in imagery? I imagine a shwink, swish sound of the hair.
Alliteration in “whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat”. I am always scared to use the same word twice in close succession. How does he succeed so well here??
I’m wondering if people feel the same way about these two passages, or if I just really, really like the imagery of a Midwest plain.
2/15/23
Prompt 3: Write either a cover letter to a potential employer or an application essay. Imagine you have received insider information about your reader’s hobbies, pastimes, or passions.
For a cover letter reader that likes receiving love letters/confessions
Dear Reader for the Hearst Summer Internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
The first time I saw you, you were taking notes on the wall plaques in the 6th Floor Gallery, standing in front of an Alma Thomas painting called Mars Dust. You were wearing a blue and red dress so the red brushstrokes looked to swallow you whole, like the swelling tide of some kind of cherry ocean, and you simply swept me off my feet.
Love is blind, yes, but I I think my Love might still be able to recognize you by your favorite Margiela scent, by the sound of your keys. I wonder if my Love were only near-sighted, if it would be able to see that two of your buttonholes of your business casual shirt were repaired with a darker thread, that you were the kind of person to care enough about a work shirt to repair it. I think my Love has 20/20 vision, and sees you in your entirety. You see, I have very good attention to detail.
I am efficient in my work, reader, and I know that if the reward was more time with you, I could catalog an entire collection of Albers prints in a heartbeat, an impressive feat given how fast that little muscle goes when I’m around you.
And then if we both worked for the Curatorial Department, we could clumsily trip and tumble down the stairs to the humidity controlled artwork storage during the lunch break, laughing all the while, and when our friends ask over dinner how it all started, we could say that it just felt like falling in love.
Sincerely,
H.R. Nitemare
2/14/23
Prompt 2B: Using the excerpt from George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism as a model or as inspiration, respond to an everyday metaphor with an extended metaphor of your own.
Day on the Farm
Women should bring home the bacon. They should stop taking care of kids or whatever they do all day and instead don Wranglers and plaid button ups. Instead of packing crustless sandwiches and juice boxes, they should rise with the sun every morning and get to work filling the feed silos and water troughs. They should stop spending all that time sending the kids to school and, rather, after checking the pigs to make sure they are all prim and porky, should siphon off the mature ones to the slaughterhouse. When women would normally go do their passion projects or go to their time-wasting “jobs,” they should now get to the real business. They should gut and flay the pigs, discarding the trotters and sinew for hot dog production, and make sure to preserve the tender flesh of the belly. Then, they can strip the skin of any spiky hairs (yuck!) and slice the marbled fat and muscle into thick slabs of glimmering meat. They’ll wait a while as the bacon cures in nitrates, and if they wanted, they could even take the sows’ ears and sew them into a silk purse as a leisure activity.
Then women should return home (not past suppertime) and immediately start preparing the bacon too. When men arrive home from making the real bacon, they are often tired, and need sustenance. Everyone in the household should sit down to sup on a woman’s labors. Then the family’s teenage vegetarian daughter should turn up her nose.
2/13/23
Prompt 1B: Recount an exchange (fictional or -non) between two people whose everyday metaphors come from different frameworks. You might make the difference glaring or subtle or somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. What do those contrasting metaphor sets reveal about the characters in the scene — about how they see themselves, each other, and the world?
Imagined conversation between my dad and I, where I tell him I don’t want to go see my cousins because I think they are annoying.
Me: They’re always just so mean to me. Every two seconds there’s another complaint about me. I’m too American, too fat, too loud, too smiley, too nice. You know I’m miserable with them.
Dad: You’re so dramatic. You spend too much time with your friends — I know that’s what you want to do instead. We hardly even see you anymore. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “Blood is thicker than water”?
Me: You don’t even know what you’re talking about. The real quote is “Blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb.” If you’re going to throw quotes at me, at least get them right.
Beat.
And I spend so much time with them because they actually have something nice to say to me.
Dad: Okay, since you go to Yale and are so much smarter than me now, let me teach you something in Chinese. In the Three Kingdoms period, there’s this famous general named Cao Cao. He had a favorite son named Cao Zhi. But when Cao Cao died, his second son Cao Pi became heir, and tried to kill Cao Zhi.
When Cao Pi was about to kill him, he challenged Cao Zhi to compose a poem in the time it took him to take seven steps on the promise that he would spare his life. Cao Zhi wrote, 煮豆燃豆萁，豆在釜中泣。本是同根生，相煎何太急！
He looks at my face, searching for any shred of understanding. Seeing none, he continues:
It means: You cook beans over a fire fueled by burning beanstalks, beans weeping in the roiling water. Beans and beanstalks stem from the same root originally, so why should we be so quick to kill each other?
When he heard this, Cao Pi burst into tears, tears hot like boiling water, and let his brother go.
本是同根生. You come from the same root. Beans and beanstalks, you and your family, tied together unavoidably. You and your cousins, still rooted together, shouldn’t burn and boil each other up. And it was water that the beans were boiling in, by the way. Your friends don’t owe you anything. They’ll boil you the same if you were a bean or a stalk.
Me: Oh I think Elon Musk tweeted about this like a year ago.
Dismissively: This is old news, Dad. Old news. You still don’t understand.