The Art of Fact Essays

"Portrait of Hemingway"

So, as it turns out, I actually really dislike everything about Hemingway. I've known this for a while, and it is the kind in which I am stubbornly stuck. I will not stop hating who he was and what he did, and I will never enjoy his writing, not because he was a misogynist, but because I just don't like it.

The assignment technically said "Why you liked," but as I didn't particularly like this piece, I can't abide by that rule. I didn't learn much other than that the person who had the book before I did doesn't understand how to highlight with a straight line, nor when lines are appropriate to highlight in the first place.

And the way it began didn't make much sense, because it was taken out of a larger piece, but was still seemingly out of context. I don't much care for feeling like I'm not getting the whole picture. The style was too clipped for me, and nothing that was being said seemed either important or interesting.

I'm also not sure where this author somehow got this dialogue, or this scene. Reading the intro didn't help on that account, and I am left very confused by what feels a  fictional account of a man I care nothing for, with a very boring scene chosen to write about. I am not sure what the idea was behind writing this, other than as is said in the intro, because it was very much so dull. A chore to get through, some people might say.

Others might call me too harsh, but if by the end of the piece, I was never interested in anything I was reading, I'm not sure how anyone expected me to get through the first page. It seems to equate to someone telling me about every lunch they had for a week: overly detailed for something so dull. The into said that people found it devastating because they wanted to believe that he was a good person, but it's just devastatingly boring. I don't need confirmation that Hemingway was a horrible person. It's just common knowledge, at least as far as I'm concerned.

"Lady Olga"

This piece was much more engaging and witty. It didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was, and wrote in clear, concise writing. The person it spoke about was interesting as well, which held the majority of the story. It's a life that we don't hear much about. I genuinely enjoyed the piece, although it was written like any newspaper piece might be, as I've noticed a lot with profiles. It lead me to wonder why people do that, and don't, instead, try to make it at least a little different.

It takes more skill than one might think to write out the average newspaper article, but no one appreciates that because they're just so darn dull to read. The word choices are all just so neutral most of the time that it gives you no sense of emotion or danger or enticement, and this is written in the same way. Miss Barnell is what carries the entirety of the thing, with her stories and her uniqueness.

The removed narrative may help her to shine through, but I also wonder if there is a good middle ground.

My Face

[Inspired by "My Face" by Robert Benchley.]

Some mornings, when I'm drawing in my eyebrows, my nose seems to take up most of my face. It is those times when I take the time to cover it up and look and imagine what I might be with a different one. I know that I'm too fickle with my own appearance to actually change it, nor would I be able to justify the money. I'm stuck with it, but that doesn't mean I'm happy with it. 

I was told that the nose determines the facial attractiveness of a person. 

 

But that's okay, because I don't always hate it. Some days I wake up and the line of my jaw looks particularly pleasing in the yellowish light of my dorm room and the faint white sunlight peeking over the hills in the distance and held off by a pane of glass and blinds. I tilt my head a few times on those days and smile at myself before going about with my morning routine. 

Being a woman, and being a woman who sometimes bothers with makeup, but only after 9 AM, I spend a lot of time staring at my face. And sometimes only a few inches from the mirror as I try to make an arbitrary line on my eyelid as straight as I possibly can, and then match on both eyes. 

 

Makeup can be dangerous. As it turns out, there are rules. And there are things you need to keep buying every six months, lest you end up with an eye infection. When I first started wearing makeup, just a little bit of mascara, in high school, I ended up with pink eye because no one had told me about that rule. I remembered lying down on a pile of blankets in the living room, taking pain medication that would put me to sleep because although it wasn't oozing puss, my eye did feel like someone was scooping it out from the inside. 

I didn't know what caused it until much later, so I didn't put the blame anywhere, although whether it would be me for not knowing what to do with old mascara or the media for telling me that I needed it in the first place. 

But I don't know if it was something wrong with me, or some failure for advertisers to get on my brainwaves, but I never thought that I absolutely needed makeup. I believe that I have proven often enough that I don't feel it necessary to put on before leaving, particularly if I know I'm just going to get up, shove myself into some clothes like an overstuffed sausage, and head off to class without much time to contemplate whether that zit needs covered up or not. 

 

My face is ever changing enough that I feel as though no one would notice a day without mascara, although that's likely not true. To other people, my face probably stays the same. They don't devote the same amount of time watching the expressions that it makes in the mirror, looking at all flaws from just half a foot away. 

 

Looking so close at your own flaws has got to have adverse effects on your self esteem. Three percent of women would never let their significant other see them without makeup on, and that figure apparently means just...forever. It isn't as though makeup hides who you are as a person. Your face still looks the same underneath, but to the 33% of women who have gotten up before the person they are dating to put on makeup secretly, perhaps the line isn't as fine. 

 

Hell, I do bother to color in my blonde eyebrows most morning, and yes, I do feel naked without them colored in, to an extent, but I still like my face the way it is. Even if it never looks the same from day to day.

Seeing: Response

"It's all the matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things."

I like what this section is saying, about looking for hidden things and looking harder for the things. It resonates with the rest of the piece, regarding the rest of the essay and parts of it about blind people, because seeing, for them, was work. It took effort, like a person who was deaf and then gets a cochlear implant. It takes effort to hear for the first time as an adult, as it does when you see for the first time. But, at the same time, it can work for people who have always seen. It can be work to actually see the world around you and not just let it go past you without really looking. People who can see take it for granted.

"When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find."

The beginning of the piece indicates wanting to hide something and have it found, and although it goes on to talk about seeing, it seems to end up being more about finding. Finding through seeing, and finding the beauty in things that you wouldn't have looked at more than once. A penny isn't something that most people would find wonder in, but to a child, it's great, because they don't know what money is worth to people who need to deal with it.

"I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I'd look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it."

I love the way that she talks about her as a child focusing on the small things and looking not at the distance, but at something as insignificant as the air, and the small lives that affect people. I think that it adds to the effect the piece has to include this sentiment, and it's phrased beautifully.

"'Well, that's how things do look,' Joan answered. 'Everything looks flat with dark patches.'"

Even though it's dialogue from someone, this line stopped me in reading the story, because I felt that I had to sit and try and see it that way. I tried to stare at something and see it in two dimensions, but it didn't work. I love the addition of the way that Joan saw things after her sight was given to her through surgery.

"Why didn't someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn't know what anything was? Then maybe we could all see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I'd see trees like men walking; I'd run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping."

There's a sense of jealousy here, that she didn't get to experience that altered sense of sight, look at things in the same way, and I think it's how I felt while I was reading about certain things in the essay. She's after something that's different from the rest of what the world sees, perhaps something special, and that altered sight might give that to her. It's a surreal image that she plants in your head, but it's still not enough to get you there.

Three Essays From Short Takes

["Disclaimer," "Moon Snail," and "The Khan Men of Agra."]

Although, on the surface, each of these stories seems to be about something different, not related in any particular way other than the book that binds them together, but they're all written in a specific style that I admire. They all focus on on moment in time, describing it, talking about this one time in their life. They elaborate, and then they extend it to mean something else. Every one of these stories seem like they're just going to be a simple narrative about a past event, and then grow bigger and bigger. For example, in "The Khan Men of Agra," she says, "I like to think it was a sweet kind of victory for us both," referring to her opening up and trusting another human being, and the reward that she got out of it, as well as what he got out of showing someone the truth of his city. She's implying a sort of wonder that you can only get out of opening up and letting another human lead you blindly.

And in "Disclaimer," although he is more overtly making a point throughout the entirety of the piece, he is still defining a moment in time. He's also defining a feeling, a sense of immortality and timelessness. But at the same time, that's not all he's talking about. He's looking back on a time in his life, but also inflating it to mean something else, to expand on the notion to show that people in books are inevitably about people that we know, that even when we're writing fiction, we write about people that we know. "Write what you know," they say, but J.K. Rowling never went to wizarding school. But inevitably, whether we know it or not, everything comes from something that we know, and that is inevitably what he is trying to point out.

"Moon Snail" is less about a moment, and more a focus on the one being that is the point of fascination in the piece, the moon snail. It supplements itself with information that was researched and descriptions of imagination and what the snail looks like. But by the time she ends the story, she hasn't said anything explicitly, but there is a suggestion of a bigger idea. She's set out to disprove this idea that something that's small can't be beautiful, and ends with an almost grotesque image of snails and their viscera. The entire time, she discusses the idea of a painting of the snail, because painters bring beauty to things that we don't think of as beautiful in our day to day lives.

And that's what these stories are doing. They bring beauty and grandeur to small moments and small things that go unnoticed, that fade away in the memory or fall to the sides of peripherals. It's bringing to life the idea that you can bring joy and life to things by focusing on the small things. They focus on the small to bring meaning to the whole picture, rather than just experiencing life and trying to take it as a whole. Because sometimes the beauty is in the small things.

Gidget: Rewrite

When I was in third grade, my parents got divorced, and my mom got a dog and a new boyfriend. Eleven years later, and my dad still hasn't had a new relationship, or anything other than fish to keep him company in the 50s house he lives in. The divorce happened around the time my mom was shopping for a cat; the beast she eventually bought only knew a divided home, and loved no one but me. When she eventually ran away, no one made posters. It seemed I was the only one who cared.

After, she just slapped a dog-shaped band aid on my wounds and called it even. 

I loved the pug puppy, but my brother and I were still afraid of her. We hadn't had a dog before, and even though she was tiny, bug-eyed, and lazy, her claws and teeny, pin-prick teeth hurt us occasionally. For the first few weeks, we ran from her, terrified that she was going to draw blood. Perhaps it wasn't her, but was some lingering fear from the furry, grey devil who had just taken her leave from the household. Maybe, in retrospect, we were afraid of the change she represented. My brother was only young, four or five years old at the time, and he likely wasn't thinking that deeply. I probably wasn't thinking that deeply about it. 

It was a safe fear, though. She was something we could channel all of a child's terror into. We were just discovering the world together; I was more sheltered than he was, but it was the divorce that launched us into reality. Fairy tales were crumbling around us like old castles, and we learned that love doesn't always hold people together. 

Gidget loved us despite all of our hangups about her. It was silly, that we were afraid, given that she was so kind compared to Heidi the demon cat. She chased us when we squealed and ran from her, yipping happily, big eyes bulging out of her tiny skull, tongue lolling out of her open mouth. Back then, her black fur was soft and shiny, although now it's going brown along her spine and more often greasy than not. 

It evolved from a fear into a game of “Poison Dog,” where she had the ability to kill us with merely a touch. We ran, giggling, and trapped her under baskets while she just panted and spread out across the floor under the basket, waiting to be let out. When we did, we would sit on our mother's bed and lean over, lifting it up and releasing her, but she was too small to get to us from where we were. She would run around the perimeter of the bed, looking up at us with excitement shining in her brown eyes. 

She's not like that anymore. 

Now, with arthritis aching in her joints and a flap of skin hanging from her right back leg, she spends more time in bed than anywhere else. Her little, curled tail still wags vigorously when she sees me, although her hearing is completely gone. She doesn't bark anymore at noises outside of the house; she only does so when she sees the other dogs barking. My mother bought her a comfortable dog bed in December, and she splits her time between that and underneath the dining room table, to hide from her bulldog bullies. 

The game was a play at real fear. We were just getting a sense of the things that were out there, the divorce showed us the reality of relationships, and television taught us the rest. I started reading books at a higher level, getting into themes that I didn't know how to deal with quite yet. Gidget was an escape. She gave me love when my parents fought over differences in raising me, over custody, over Jason. He's now my stepfather, and one of the worst decisions that my mother has never made. But without him, I wouldn't have my two little sisters, so I suppose there's a reason to thank him.

We dangled our legs between the spaces of stairs and let our dog chase us like a real threat, some imitation of a prey and predator chase. The reward for our predator was cuddling and petting, rather than our bloody meat for dinner. I don't think she would have had the guts. She still wouldn't. It was the thrill of fear without the danger of being murdered. 

As we grew up, new things took the place of our pug fear. Horror movies were our new game, scaring us with things that weren't likely to hurt us, like werewolves, or ghosts. It was a slightly different version of the same thing, but our awareness of the world grew. Fears blossomed with new information. The basics, of course, were ingrained as soon as we could understand them: death, murder, abduction, starvation, homelessness, large animals. They only added on, elaborated themselves, layering on top of one another until we were swamped in fear. Mine differed from his, of course, because he didn't care how high up it was, but I wouldn't mind being in a closet for a while. When I got bit by a wolf spider at thirteen, I never looked at another arachnid the same way again, but after being stung by a wasp in the eye, Brian cringed at the sight of bees. 

Gidget grew older with us, grey hairs around her face, forming a beard and eyebrows that looked constantly quizzical. She had her own fears, although they came later. The smallest dog in a group of three, her two bulldog roommates constantly picked on her. Being chased around the house wasn't as fun for her as it was for us, perhaps because along with the very real threat of being drooled on was the strength of an English bulldog's jaw. 

Gidget is old. Eleven years old, twelve in October. Her acceptance into the family was a change, along with everything else that had been going on, but she's also been through a lot. The average lifespan of a pug is twelve to fifteen years old, and she already has problems. She's been around for over half of my life, for most of my brother's.

Change is difficult. I haven't given much time to thinking about what life is going to be like without her. Before, she was riding in on a wave of changes, lives reshifting and forming around one anther. Her presence was a barely distinguishable event when she joined our family. But with her leaving, she's creating change all of her own. 

I'm terrified.