FSB intro on steroids

After reading the first 32 pages of Fathers, Sons, and Brothers, I have an overall pretty good vibe. When it comes to the insane ups and downs of The Liars' Club, I have a feeling this book isn't going to match up with it. That's fine, however, because not everybody's family is as dysfunctional as Karr's was so it's nice to see a good memoir from a some what normal point of view. I absolutely love how Lott transitions back and forth from present and past. Especially when he recognizes resemblances between his kids and his childhood with his brothers. His writing makes me believe that he sees his own childhood living on in his kids at the very moment he observes them. Like his kids are a living home video of the past. This makes for good transitions between past and present."And here are my own two boys, already embarked" (32). Others may find it quite confusing, but I enjoy it. In my opinion it adds to telling a better story. Karr would stay in the past for numerous amounts of time to the point where I pondered how she remembered all of it day by day. Lott uses little stories in the past and then relates them to the present right then and there. This to me makes it easier to see him reminiscing and telling his story. The way Lott intertwines the stories of his sons, to the stories of his brothers, helps me see the bigger picture of how the different stories of the memoir are connected to each other. Like one big spiderweb that you can follow each strand to the other side. Karr's writing was more like a maze that had a destination eventually, but you have to go through a lot to get there. Also, the fact that I'm a guy makes it so that I'm able to relate to the book more. Overall great first 32 pages and I'm excited to read more.

Memory List

I know the assignment was about a memory list, but coming up with memories is very painful for me to do. There's like a block the size of the Berlin wall that enables me to do so, because metaphorically I died inside, and was born again. All a result of this particular memory.

It was a friday night, August 30th, 2008, and of coarse I was planning on going to a party, or chilling with a couple of people. DIdn't end up finding anything to do, so I stayed at my friend's house. It's about 1:30 am, and I call my younger brother Garrett, who's 16. to see what he was doing. Me and him weren't doing very good lately, so I thought maybe I could go to wherever he was to chill, or at least make sure he was home. Considering the fact it was 1:30, he should have been home, because my mom makes him come home at 12. Dial tone, but no answer. That was strange to me, because he always answers, or at least calls back. So about an hour or two goes by, and I decide to go on home. I live in a small suburban town of Columbus, and that night it seemed more quiet than usual, the ill type of quiet that gives you the impression your not the only one around. I get home, go upstairs. and open his door. He's not there. It's 3:30 am. "He must be spending the night with wayne", I thought. My mothers already sleep. So I get all comfy in my bed, turn the lights off and start to dose off. Nobody ever knows the exact time they fell asleep. So I drift off for who knows how long, and I hear this voice in the distance. Sounded blurry, so I thought it was apart of my dream, even though I wasn't having one. I hear it again. Its saying my name. I wake up and realize it's a distressed call from my mom downstairs. She said the cops are here and to come down, you might want to hear this. So I grab my pillow for reasons I still don't know, but I think it was my unconscience mind telling me to get something you'll be able to embrace. I walk downstairs, and there's two policeman standing at the door, and one in a suit, kind of heavy set, with glasses. "Is Garrett in some type of trouble, did he get caught for curfew, you'd have to call his dad about all this because he's a police officer and I don't know how to deal with any of this", my mom says. "Describe your son Ma'am" She describes him, and they look ath the ground. "Ma'am, do you have any pictures of Garrett" he then replies. "Well sure, right here, but what does that have to do with anything, tell me what the hells going on with my son". Those words lit a short fuse to an atom bomb ready to explode and destroy any normalness we once knew. What came next was like the secret password to open a door in hell full of demons whose purpose was to come make my mind the terrible place it is today. "Ma'am, Garrett's dead".

600 Words

Its apparent by now that Mary Karr uses imagery in her writing that have more to them than the actual image itself.
They're many examples of this, and because of that fact, I wanted to pick two examples that I believed would be less obvious than others, and hope that I stumbled onto something big. What stuck out to me was the theme of white hands in times of crisis. The owners of these limbs having the life some what metaphorically sucked out of them, for one reason or another. With the life, went the color.

"Then out of all the darkness I see Mother's white hands rising from her lap like they were powered and lit from inside. Like all the light in the world has been poured out to shape those hands. She's reaching for the steering wheel, locking onto it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She's trying to take us over the edge" (138). Mary's mom is nothing short of an emotional train wreck. Throughout the book being represented in many occasions with the "Nervousness". How she got to that point is an argument in itself. The fact remains though that she is mentally unstable. With that being said, being mentally unstable doesn't just happen on its own. It's a result of the things we go through in life, and the things that have happened to us. Whatever the case may be in Mary's Mother's life, I believe that each trial and tribulation sucked a little piece out of her at a time. All of these things building up, and hitting a climax(even though worse things happen later) at the point where Mother reaches for the wheel. She wanted to kill herself and her family. In my opinion you must be lifeless on the inside, or void of any good emotion's a normal human being should experience. So Mary describes her hands as being "powered and lit from inside". That's a very white glow. White being colorless. Colorless being lifeless, in a book that uses a vast majority of colors to describe many situations and emotions.

"But there was another hand from that time that also got seared into what I can remember. It was the hand of Bugsy Juarez's wife. It was covered in flour one morning she came to our backdoor. She pressed that white hand onto our damp breakfast table while she said to Daddy, please come quick, Bugs shot hisself"(174). I don't know much about Mrs. Juarez state before this incident. I do know, that if your husband kills himself, and you loved him, it would suck every good emotion out of you until you recover. Her white hand, being metaphorical to having no color, which means being void of any good emotions in my opinion, represents another example that makes me believe Karr uses colors to describe emotion. No color means no emotion, or at least no good emotions you might feel, like what other colors might represent. She just lost her husband, which means she probably felt as though she just had a big piece of her life sucked out of her. What is left when you suck the color, or emotion out of something? Plain, blank, white, emptiness

These two examples are proof in my opinion to my claims. If these aren't enough, then I ask why Mary chooses to emphasize the colors in these two situations? She's caucasion, so we obviously know what her family's natural skin color is white. Why then did she choose to point out the white in these two situations? This is why it stuck out to me as something deeper than what was being read. Hopefully it does to you too. If not, I could be wrong. "We all see the same shit, just through different eyes", to quote one of my favorite musicians.

8 Images

1. " What was running through my head though, was the song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy's house lands on the witch with the stripy socks" (pg 99)

The fact that Mary chose to say with the stripy socks is evidence of how she uses extreme detail in her writing. We all know what scene she's talking about in the movie (if you've seen it). The stripy socks was an unecassary detail, but that's what Karr has done throughout the whole book. Give unecassary details that ultimately help us picture the scene.

2. "In the next slide, dark finally comes in" ( pg 116)

In the next slide is one of the many things Karr will say to transfer from memory to memory, or parts of the same memory. She does it throughout the book

3. "I wrapped my arms around my knees, bowed my head, and prayed to a god I didn't trust a prayer that probably went like this....." (115)

This shows how much Karr really cared about her sister, because she actually got down to pray to god after all the cynical things she'd said when it comes to religion. This also interested me because I believe this is symbolism for how the world is. We could care less about a God, question wether one exist, if there is we dont live like he wants us to, but when shit hits the fan its all praying and "please do this and that" for us.
4. "I stopped trusting the world partly from seeing how those meaty-faced men bellowed under the shadowy bills of their tractor or cowboy hats" (104)

This was the moment Mary's cynical attitude towards the world really started to take control of her I think. I personally don't blame her either.

5. "But I knew with cold certainty while I stood there in that lukewarm water that she was going up there to get drunk" (109)

I can't say because I'm not Mary Karr. Just doing some foreshadowing. I ultimately am convinced the passing of the grandmother is what started the mother on her psychotic trip. But I believe that with Mary's realization of this moment, this represented the spiral downward her family was going to take, or at least their mother. They took a family trip to have fun together, and instead of having fun with her children, she goes to get drunk. Would she have done that had grandma still been alive?

6. "My feet sank and couldn't get traction, like the run in a bad dream" (114)

This is an example of Karr's amazing writing style, where she uses something most of us have been through at a certain point in time or can imagine, and relates it to what was happening to her at that moment. It helps us put ourselves in her mind and feel her emotions at the time.

7."mother is shouting, shouting she'd wished herself dead before she'd ever married daddy" (138)

In writing about this, mary uses the word shouting twice, back to back. Putting it this way builds up the dramatic intensity to the climax of the memory I believe. It also helped me visualize it more because it made it easier to imagine Mary's voice in my head instead of knowing I'm just reading ink on paper.

8."and that's it, that's what I remember about my birthday" (139)

To have her birthday go the way it did must of had some later psychological effects unseen right now. To have your mother try to drive the car off the road, possibly killing you and the rest of your family, on your birthday? As we all read this book and are amazed at how this woman's life went. Do we question how it could have been this way? Or why? I didn't really have an answer up until now. Now I believe it's a result of the parents she had.

Quiz

A. Please write specifically about Mary's feelings about her grandmother. What are some of her grandmother's habits? What does she suffer from? What does she think about Mary and Lecia? What does she reveal to Mary about Mary's mother?

If you cannot remember the answers to these questions, don't despair. Write as much as you can about the relationship.

B. Briefly, What causes Mary and her family to run from Leechfield? What happens on the bridge?

A
-Mary's feelings about her grandma are not very good. Her grandma is more of a figure of torment, amusement, and fear in her eyes than that of a loved one. Torment, because her grandma hates the way she's being raised and how she acts. Amusement, sometimes anyway, when it comes to her grandma having no leg. Like her pretending she was captain hook, or laughing when the national guardsmen tried to pick her up and her stub kept slipping out. Last but definitely not least, fear. The fear of seeing grandma laying in the bed after surgery. The fear of the wooden legs shadow in the hallway. The fear of the smell of death in grandma's room and it bubbling from within her stomach, rising through her throat and out of her mouth.

-Some of grandmas habits would be always trying to tell Mary's mother how to raise and discipline her kids, and always eating baby aspirin, just to name a few.

- Grandma suffers from cancer, to answer the question generally. A specific thing she suffered from was having mustard gas pumped in her leg. The doctors thought it would stop the spread, but they were wrong. Her leg was pitch black and had to be amputed. The book says that she screamed for a week or more straight.

-Grandma thinks Mary could probably be the Anti Christ(not literally) when it comes to the way she behaves and how a child should behave. Her opinion of Lecia however, is much better. Not because Lecia acts any better than Mary behind closed doors, but because Lecia knows how to suck up and do things that please grandma, like go to church.

-Grandma reveals to Mary that her mother has two older childer, named Tex and Belinda. She says to Mary that her mother had them "sent away" because of their behavior.

B
-Mary and her family had to run from Leechfield due to a Hurricane. They weren't going to leave, hadn't it been for the National Guard busting in their door and making them. They make it all the way to the bridge which is very steep. On the bridge Mary throws up in her shirt. I believe the cars spins out of control? Or they almost crash? Or something of that matter. My imagery of the scene at the time was not as sharp as its been throughout other parts of the book, and I'm not going to pick the book up and look because I spent most this week actually reading and keeping up specifically so I wouldnt have to today. Pride issue, I'm sorry

If I recall correctly, the assignment was to write in detail about some family imagery, and a passage in the liars club. If I'm wrong and my passages are off topic, please forgive me.

They're numerous things that I could speak on about the liars club right now. The first one that really stuck out to me is when mary karr was telling the story about her mother almost dying. "Mother said that she saw the whole sky through gray curtains"(pg. 25) This interested me because it says she was two years old. How many of us distinctly remember anything from when we we're two? For the ones that do, do you distinctly remember it, or do you have bits and pieces in your brain, like pieces of a movie with clips missing. Thats how my brain is. Well, before the age of four anyway. Another passage that really stuck out to me was the whole going to visit grandma in the ER. This was chilling to my spine. Only because my grandma just had surgery at the age of 93 to get a tumor removed in may. She still hasn't really recovered. Remembering her not knowing who we were as a result of dementia was painful. It's still like that sometimes. A big one was the whole her losing her virginity at 7 thing. I can't believe a 14 year old boy (I think that's how old he was) would even think about messing with a 7 year old. There's some sick people in this world. Anyways, as I stated earlier, there's numerous things that I can speak on, but I've never been the type to do more work than I have to. Especially on a saturday night=)

For the family imagery, one I distinctly remember was when I first went to kings island. It was me, my brother, my mom, and her boyfriend. I remember first walking in, and smelling the water from that gigantic fountain they have in the middle. It looked like a pool for a giant. It had 3 or 4 more towering fountains in the middle of it spraying water and creating this lovely mist. At night it has lights that turn the water every color you can think of. Its surrounded by a strip of shops and food places. Smelling all the food, being surrounded by all the scurrying people, and seeing all the rides in the distance. I was overwhelmed with excitement, and didn't quite know what to do or where to go first. It was my first time even being in an amusement park. I probably road every ride in the park that day. I don't really know what else to say because I'm not much of a writer like I said. More of a you ask a question and I'll answer type of guy. That'll improve as time goes on though, I'm sure.

Liars Club and MM

My first thoughts on the liars club are that its boring. I do know that its way too earlier to judge the book by the first 22 pages however. I'm wondering if what happened the first night with the doctors being there well be revealed later or if it will be left a mystery. Same with the Dad leaving a bullet in the chamber part. I don't really know what else to say about my thoughts about it. It is very well written and the writer uses a lot of details that help me picture what he's talking about and the scene the story's taking place in. I'm really curious to find out more information about the other members of the liars club themselves and they're different relationships with each other.

As far as mm. It pulled me in quickly and I have no reason why because it actually had less of a story going than the liars club. I just believed it was really interesting the type of book it was though. I was reading a book , which is written about a writer himself preparing to help writers? Amazing. The lessons learned in it could be used in a text book. Well I'm only assuming anyway because I haven't gotten that far. I guess we'll see.

Hello anyone that cares.

My name is Georden Burton. I'm as experienced in English as a caveman would be with computers. I think some things about it are interesting, but mostly I find a lot of it to be boring. That lead to me sleeping in most of my English classes throughout high school. However, I still acquired good grades. My main problem with it would probably be that they're a lot of intelligent things that could be said on a subject, but if somebody doesn't say them with proper grammar most people will not respect it, and my grammar isn't the greatest. I am in this class though so hopefully that changes. My background information will probably be brief because I was never good at the whole introducing myself thing. I was born and raised, and currently live in Columbus. That's the capital of Ohio for you out of staters. This is my first quarter at OU due to some unfortunate circumstances. I'm sure you'll learn why later. Now that I'm here I plan on making the best of it though. I don't really know what I'm supposed to be writing about though so lets get back to English. What I expect out of this class is to broaden my horizons and overall intelligence through reading and writing about the material we're assigned. Especially the writing part because I used to bring my essays up to my teacher to proof read after every paragraph in high school to make sure they were okay. I'm a very opinionated person and would love writing if I didn't have to worry about all the technical aspects of it. So I'm looking forward to being able to sharpen my writing skills. I enjoy reading a good book also, but probably won't enjoy it that much at this school, being surrounded with all the tempting "distractions". Overall I'm hoping this class will be interesting and that I'll soak up as much knowledge as possible that will be useful outside of it. That seems to be the case so far.