Hello! We need to start thinking about our 20 minute lesson we want to do in class for our paired teachings. I'm pretty sure we'll be together. I was thinking of reading a short passage from the text and then doing an activity with it, maybe with writing style and have the people in class write something in O'brien's style. We can talk about it in class next time probably, but just keep it in the back of your head that it's coming up!

I've finished the NCTE book. I feel like there were so many ideas being listed I got a little overwhelmed. I think my favorite activities though had to do with the writing that they suggested with the novel. I really liked the idea teaching students how to write in a certain style and using O'Brien as a jumping off point. I think because his book is really about the art of story telling, this would be good to start off the year with and start students writing with this as an example. I think students would have fun writing like Tim O'brien and investigating how he writes. Then through out the year the students would be able to learn from the masters with other novels. They would start being more proactive with their reading and really dissecting how authors write and how they write!

Hmm the truth..

The truth of storytelling I agree with you Rachel..it's more about picking it apart and being like this could have happened and it's written like it did..but it didn't haha. Umm deciding when to do that would be tricky. It reads like it's true and a type of autobiography would you tell them before or after the book? Hmmm..

just a literary petit four:

I'm reading "If on a winter's night a traveler," by Italo Calvino, in which he scribes:

"Behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words."

Thought of O'Brien and his truer than the truth sack o' lies.

GI anti-war movement documentary

I watched a documentary this weekend called "Sir! No Sir!" It's about the GI anti-war movement, and I kept thinking of "On the Rainy River" chapter about O'Brien's inaction, whereas the doc was all about actions soldiers took. There's a whole bunch of clips from it on youtube, including a 12 minute trailer that gives a good synopsis. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDk6Qal2DCI Give it a watch. I liked it a lot, and think maybe portions of it could be used in class to expand the portrait of the Vietnam soldier and the times.

Aaaaaaaand documentaries are just about the best things ever. Ever.

Any other texts you would want to bring into the classroom to use with "The Things They Carried?"

What "essential questions" do you think you would explore with this book? How would you frame the study of TTTC?

Posting area for LAI 513 Members

Hey everyone! I'm finding that you can't add a new post on people's blogs unless you're a member (The Gatsby group has it organized in a nice way that you can though). So if you're trying to make comments for out assignment this week, here's a space for you :)

living through stories

I'm done with the book! I love that the end concludes with the story of Linda. O'brien reverts back to a childhood story which I think shows the juxtaposition of innocence and war. Childhood seems to be the knowing of so little and war seems to know too much. But these "men" are children at war and innocent to the ways of war. And O'brien became knowledgeable about death at a young age with the first girl he loved.

I like the that the end of the book can connect to any reader. Some of the experiences in the book seem so far removed from how we live our life. In the end O'brien says that the dead live through stories and we tell stories to make them less dead or keep them alive in a way. I can agree with this. It's been years since 3 of my grandparents have passed away. My family and I still tell stories about them. And if someone will listen, I'll tell stories about my grandparents to them as well.

ghost soldiers

I just wanted to post that I thought that "ghost soldiers" was a fun chapter mixed in with all the emotional ones. It shows that these guys are just young men having some fun like guys would be doing back at home...just in a jungle instead of in the suburbs. haha.

Notes on Courage

Wow, the story of Norman Bowker was tough to get through, but I couldn't put it down either. When Kiowa was slipping through Norman's hands I found myself reading faster and faster to find out the end...keep in mind I have already read this book! The complete sadness of the story, mixed with the complete grotesqueness gives a strange feeling to the reader. Then reading on to "Notes;" I feel like the only thing to say in the end is "Wow." I definitely had tears in my eyes.

Tim says that he kept Norman's name real in the book. I tried to look it up on a Vietnam database but couldn't find it. I don't know if there was something I was missing in my search, or again, this is a story. Because of the passion behind the story, something tells me this is a real one.

The question of being a hero comes in to play and how do we know what a hero is? Bowker was convinced he wasn't a hero and wasn't brave because he didn't save his friend and let something like the smell of shit keep him from bravery. I think through O'brien's writing, Bowker does become a hero in my mind. At face value of the events, he' not a normal hero, but when the emotion is added in, I think he's the perfect hero.

One Leg

There's a part really early in the book on page 31 of my copy..It's titled spin. He talks about war not being all terror and violence and about the boy with the plastic leg. He asks for a piece of chocolate and Azar laughs and hands it over..he then procedes to make the comment amount someone not having enough ammo to finish the boy off. Wow I just keep on thinking about that part. He acts so humane and caring and then makes a remark that is so cold. It's just a little section so the story itself was trying to show something significant I think.. maybe that war is viscious even in what seems to be an act of kindness? Or maybe that the enemy is always the enemy in a foreign land and no matter what it's impossible for Azar to feel compassion? What do you guys think? Like I said while I read I just keep on thinking about that part.

The Cast

I've made a list, because I needed one. Maybe you need one too?

Tim O'Brien -
Dave Jensen -
Bob (Rat) Kiley - medic, storyteller, "Night Life"
Lee Strunk - stepped on mine- killed
Ted Lavender - shot in head - killed first, in April
Kiowa - killed in shit field
Norman Bowker - "Speaking of Courage," hung self in Iowa in '78
Azar - jackass.
Mitchell Sanders - radio
Henry Dobbins - big man, machine gunner, "Stockings"
Jimmy Cross - Lieutenant, "Love"
Curt Lemon - In pieces from tree - killed. "The Dentist"

Social Networking Sites + books

Hey! Look at this! That social networking book site I like, Goodreads.com, now has widgits. You just copy an paste the html they give you, and kids can ad a montage of book covers they like or are currently reading of have read to their myspace or facebook or blog!

Start your own account and play around on it for a bit. What do your book montages look like?

Emily's book montage

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the man Tim killed

I thought this part really got to the heart of what Tim is talking about when he's explaining how stories are told. He tells us how the man looked, laying there dead, over and over again. This story may be true, that the man was laying there, with a star for an eye, but he tells it so many times and gives details about what the soldiers life might have been like. We know he's making stories up about the man, and even though we know this, we get sucked into the story because of the passionate and emotional events that happened with it.

Stockings

Stockings is in close second with my favorite stories of the book. Besides being hilarious, it again has a lot of emotion. I feel so bad when Henry's girlfriend dumps him! I thought he would be devastated but he just says, "no sweat, the magic doesn't go away." What a positive guy! haha.

Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong

I've decided to add in some comments on individual stories so you can both respond back to the stories maybe. It might be easier to break it all up.

So the story of the Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong is where I really get into the book. I LOVE this story. I think I like it so much because it's a little bit longer and everything is explained in one story instead of in chunks at random parts (except for the end really when the "facts" aren't known by Rat). I love how Mark takes the bet, his girlfriend comes, and her sweet self turns into a "Greeny." Mark goes crazy and she goes missing. It's an ironic tale and not a happy ending at all. I love though that it's a love story of sorts. Maybe that sounds cheesy because these are Tim's war stories, but as he says, war is about a lot of things. I feel so bad for Mark but at the same time I love that MaryAnne goes out and does her own thing! It's such a fun and sad story at the same time.

Another thing that I like is that MaryAnne becomes this ghost figure at the end of the story. Even though we grapple with the truth of the stories the whole time we're reading the book, and this story may seem outrageous, it does seem one of the most real because of the emotions and details put into the story telling.

Definitely my favorite part of this novel!!!

not as far as you Emily

Hey girlies. So I finally had some time to do some good reading today. I'm still in the set up of the book. This is my second time reading it and I'm actually enjoying it more the second time around.

The first time I read the book I found the first chapter pretty boring. I was wondering if the whole book was going to go on and on about "things they carried were..." I remember looking past the first chapter to see what else there was actually. I was reading it because I wanted to use it in my classroom and the first chapter made me second guess this! I remember getting frustrated because there were chunks of stories here and there and nothing was completed. I wanted to know more details about Ted Lavender and the dog getting killed and Bowker getting shot into a tree. The small details got me interested but frustrated! ...Maybe an author's technique? I did keep reading...

This time around though I'm enjoying it more because I can appreciate more how he's putting in bits of the story at a time to coax you in. I remember the parts of the story and how attached I got to the characters and how real they all seemed (or possibly fake, we don't know yet, as Emily said).

This time too I'm catching on more to O'brien's artistic writing abilities and how he can make the war sound beautiful and poetic. I guess that's an oxymoron, but I think in this instance, it's true. Beautiful, poetic war mixed with every possible human emotion someone can muster.

Vietnam Song, and what is wrong with education

It isn't completely related to TTTC, but it is Vietnam related, and multimodal. Once, my friend was such a brat in 10th grade S.S., that the teacher let her do a few week independent study on the Vietnam War instead of coming to class and being a brat. Her final project for the independent study was to make a mix CD of songs that were somehow related to the Vietnam War era, and write a paper/CD insert about why each song was important/what it showed about the time period. And I was totally jealous I was a suck-up and not a brat, because if I would have been more obnoxious, I would have been able to do an independent study and make a mix CD too. But I was well-behaved, so I had to stay in the classroom and read the textbook and make flashcards.

Anyway, this song was the most memorable of the ones on the mix CD:

Country Joe's Vietnam Song

the dedication

"This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Michell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa."

Ok, so this is basically the very first page of the book after the copyright page. It's the first page of the book you read, and in that fact, you might read the dedication and think "Oh, that's nice. He's dedicating this book to his war buddies he knew during Vietnam."

But the names in the dedication are actually the main characters in his book! His book that is confusing enough with fact and fiction crossing, or is it just fiction? In the course of the book he makes you believe it both ways. Tells you it's true. Tells you it is all made up, but it could have been true. Tells you parts of it are true. He puts into the book autobiographical facts about his life that you can check for yourself are true, but then he surrounds those facts with this novel, these lies.

So maybe the dedication is to real people with those real names he elaborated stories about to create this book.

Maybe he wrote these characters around people he really knew in the war, and the dedication is a pseudonomic way to dedicate the book to the real people that inspired the characters.

But then, if you are a really careful reader, the copyright page, which is opposite from the dedication page, says, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary."

Which is like letting all the air out of my balloon. I don't want to believe it.

But it's true, apparently, if it's in the copyright page. Even the title page doesn't say "a novel." No, it goes as far as to make very clear this is "a work of fiction."

It's like the periferies of the book want to make it perfectly clear that everything you are about to read is NOT true, but then the book goes to great lengths to make you feel that it is true. There are chapters dedicated to the author's/narrator's quest to make stories true, or feel as if they are true.

So what about this dedication?

Is it just a clever ploy to further elaborate on the truth/untruth of the story?

Is it his way of dedicating the book to all soldiers of the Vietnam War - excuse me, Conflict?

What do you think?

Time-Binding

"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present." (180)

O'Brien constantly is referring to the power of his stories to make the past present, that this is in fact the very reason for stories.

"[As a writer] you take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present." (34)

"...The war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes the remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." (38)



Neil Postman's "End of Education" says that this making the past present and future present in the now is the very nature of man and words. Postman writes on Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950):

"Korzybski began his quest to discover the roots of human achievement and failure by identifying a critical functional difference between humans and other forms of life. We are, to use his phrase, "time-binders," while plants are "chemistry-binders," and animals are "space-binders." Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical energy; space binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Humans have these capacities, too, but are unique in their ability to transport their experience through time. As time-binders, we can accumulate the knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future. Science-fiction writers need not strain invention in their search for interesting time-transporting machinery: We are the universe's time machines. Our principal means of accomplishing the binding of time is the symbol [language]."

While all stories are then binding time, O'Brien's is unique in that he recognizes the phenomenon and makes us privy to it.

It's not a book about war.

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war." (85).

It's a book about storytelling.
That's why I love it.

Dog ears:

p. 85: "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth."

p. 157-158: "Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat... By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain thruths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

p. 179-180: "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is trues sometimes than happening-truth.
"Here is the happening-truth. I once was a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
"Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of the red clay trial near the village of My Khe. his jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him."



I like how O'Brien takes time out of the narrative to talk about what he is doing in his storytelling and why; the way he questions what is Truth in a story, or how the truest things are often total fabrications. Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is like this book in those respects - it is a story that self analyzes what it is doing and to what ends, and if the end justifies the means.

I made it green for spring...because I'm getting sick of this cold...

Woot! I made a blog!