Advanced Essay Writing, Spring 2013

I like “Delivering Lily”. I love the way the writer share his personal experience. His descriptions are so vivid that I can image myself in the same room. The story is so personal that I feel part of his family.

When I started reading I could not stop because I wanted to know the end of the story.  I like the whole story, specially when he describes the last push and the baby come out. The antepenultimate paragraph of page 436.

“…if I had been a little less stubborn, a little more awed by authority, a little less economically privileged, a little more charmed by tranquilizers, a little less able to research my own disease, or simply unlucky, I’d be dead now.
And you would not be reading this.” (Robson, 244)
I found this transition to be extremely effective for two reasons: Firstly, the way this sentence is read is as if said in one breath. As a reader I almost felt overwhelmed by the lengthy sentence and felt that it mirrored the author’s sentiments as someone going through such a trial. Secondly, I felt this sentence played in to the cause and effect. She sums up how certain aspects of her own personality, seemingly unrelated to cancer as a disease in itself is responsible for her recovery. What she says is true, if she did not have these attributes she would not have survived. These attributes were her saving grace, after all, even those whose jobs it was to save her- could not had it not been for her taking initiative. I felt that both the style of the sentence coupled with the content demonstrated her story of survival succinctly and powerfully.

“I weighed less than one hundred pounds and was so thin it hurt to sit on a chair. I had fevers that clawed at my bones. I was so weak I crawled down the hallway to the bathroom. I lost all my hair, even those sweet little hairs on my toes.

It’s become mundane to lose one’s hair.” Robson 232 Paragraphs 8 & 9.

I love this transition. She takes her excruciating experience with chemotherapy and shows us what it did to her, how it affected her physically. She even makes the point of emphasizing the loss of hair on her toes, something that usually get taken for granted, and makes it an important detail. And she immediately follows it up by saying that it becomes mundane.

I think this is a very effective transition particularly because after reading the first paragraph there I was thinking about what other things I take for granted and that it takes a great shock to make me realize that I am indeed taking those things for granted. Then I read the following sentence and it shifted my mood. It made me think that over time everything becomes mundane, even the awful things like chemotherapy that literally change the way we look and the way we look at the world.

She sobbed like a whip-poo-will, then brayed in and out like an affronted donkey.
Abandoned. (Lopate, 437, 1st & 2nd paragraph)

This paragraph break truly stuck me. Lily’s birth was the cause of Cheryl’s labor pains, and Phillip’s emotional pains and when she was finally born, she was left on the table, crying alone. Phillip begins his paragraph with such a strong word, Abandoned. It was as though Lily were brought into this world and was left there unaccompanied. He uses this word as a reflection of what the world feels like. A human’s attention span is so limited. Lily was brought into this world and is immediately left alone. At such a young age she gets a taste of what the world is like. Even Phillip who see’s his daughter alone on the table, feels intimidated and fails to go accompany her.

Lily’s “abandonment” might be a reflection on how Phillip felt through Cheryl’s labor. Cheryl threw all her frustrations out on Phillip. No matter how hard it got, he stood by Cheryl and tended to her every need. The labor had taken a huge toll on him as well.

But when we do, like this morning, her image is as vivid as it ever was– her dark eyes as bright, her odd smile just as annoying.

I’m not crazy. (Callahan, 369: first and second paragraph proper)

“I’m not crazy” is more than just an harbinger of his subsequent scientific rationalization. It is a statement that disavows him of all the accountability he would have otherwise if we weren’t slaves to our body and its complex mechanism. “I’m not crazy,” can also be a justification for the unspoken emotion that he keeps occult because he thinks that his love towards his wife is logical and sane within the context of science, within the context of how human are really made as. He is, however, very careful not to mix the visceral and scientific justification together. He leaves it up to the reader to decide whether he is crazy or not; Is he crazy because of all those scientific jargon that he spews out, or that he sees his dead wife, or even whether he is crazy because he is trying to blur the boundary between emotions and science to make the sighting of his dead wife “as real as it ever was”.  But one thing for sure, he is playing with a dualism and as with dualism, the hierarchy vanishes or it fluctuates all the time. In the last sentence of the previous paragraph, the use of “as” is ubiquitous and at the same time very effective. Are thoughts “as” real as the reality? Are the phantom and immunological memories of her wife as real as wife? I think we see the dualism here again in the form of an oxymoron: “dark eyes as bright”; “odd smile as annoying.” This paragraph break between these two sentences not only marks his attempt to make sense of his imagination, but also a declaration that for some people “as” is as real as the REAL.

If anyone could make sense out of this jargon–it beats me– please feel free to enlighten me.

I loved “Chimera” by Callahan. I literally was not able to tear myself of the book.  Not only I loved the content, but the way he writes is just brilliant. I like that he does not use smooth transitions, he just goes from one thought to another, yet his structure is well-thought. The structure of his story reminds of a ring, when the reader comes back to where he started, and in the middle there is something else, his thoughts, main content. If you dont agree, try to read the first four paragraphs (until “I was wrong”) and the very last paragraph, omitting everything in the middle. It will make sense.

As for choosing one paragraph break that is especially effective, to me it is when he speaks about immune systems remembering things followed by the next paragraph which goes : “My grandmother had a penchant for saving things” (p. 370). I would make a smoother transition here simply because I cant write as sophisticated as Callahan does. He inserts a bright example from his life to what he just said right away, and the following paragraph speaks about immune system again. This type of devise keeps readers entertained, not bored by simply scientific description. And Callahan does not do it only once, that is how his story structured.

From Callahan’s ‘Chimera’:

“Until one day, what remains is truly and thoroughly a mosaic, a chimera- part man, part woman; part someone, part someone else. And then, if that man or woman is amputated from us, clipped as quickly and as cleanly as a gangrenous leg, our minds are suddenly forced into a new reality – a reality without the other, a reality in which an essential piece of us is missing.” (378)

Although the transition is from one lengthy sentence to another, I feel that the author maintains the flow of thought without interruption. The picture of a man made up of parts of his wife (the reality of his whole). The  break from this wholesome picture to the broken one painted in the following sentence  was to me beautiful not only in meaning, but in structure. The break there was necessary, I think it made the picture of the amputation more vivid, and put emphasis on the transition from something whole to something broken. I really love the way these two sentences create a full picture, a journey from one state of being to another- one paragraph ending, and another beginning.  In this instance, the writer emphasizes the contrast between something whole ( a mosaic) and then made it shatter (an amputation); it’s imagery and structure put together to evoke a strong feeling in the reader.

Strapped into the massive white donut of a machine, I prayed the images it produced would be tumorless.

Mesmerized by the television sets in the waiting rooms, I prayed the images they transmitted were exaggerated.

(pages 240-241: from the last paragraph on 240)

I absolutely love this transition. I think this paragraph break is particularly effective because of the way that she juxtaposes her CT scan images with what she has to witness on her television on 9/11. It’s such a relevant comparison. She goes through the worst, most traumatizing experience of her life, having a near-death experience and being misdiagnosed. In that last line on page 240, readers can clearly visualize the state that she’s in and identify with her feelings, considering the fact that she already lost so much. She prays that the images her CT scan produces are good. And then she successfully shifts to the equally tragic event of 9/11 by praying that the images transmitted on television of that disaster are not real, but exaggerated. It’s almost as if there’s a deeper connection between these two events, and as a reader I feel like the writer somehow identifies with the people who were affected by that tragedy. She may not have lost a loved one in the literal sense, but her experience was just as painful and her life drastically changed. She also pointed out that no amount of money could make up for what she had to endure, and I feel like several victims of 9/11 had a similar mindset. Also, I love that she uses repetition as well; from I prayed the images it produced to I prayed the images they transmitted. That method also makes this paragraph break very effective. I really like the connection she makes here.