Discussion Questions (week 8)

Discussion questions for this week:

• How does the form of each book section interact with the content? In what ways are the two inseperable? What does the form allow Richards to do or to say that she might not have been able to otherwise?
  
• In what contexts are race and gender being represented? Try to identify the ways in which the authour is "framing" these representations (frames of reference).
  
• What words seem to play a center role in the book? What words change meaning or accrue new meanings as the book progresses?
• Can you identify different "voices" in the text? Who's saying what? Where do voices sound/look/feel different? Is the authour's own voice consistent/singular? Is it even identifiable?
• How are "easy" or obvious or surface meanings being complicated, problematized, deepened?
  
• In what ways is history being incorporated into the work? What kinds of histories are incorporated? How do the varying histories inform/complicate/question each other?

Book of Jon notes

Book of Jon

Much more enjoyable than the first two texts. It seemed a little more accesable. I have thus far not really enjoyed that actual reading of our previous texts, though the discussions were fruitful. Book of Jon had a flow to it that felt more like a scrapbook than anything else. the transitions from traditional prose, to poetry, to non-sequiter lists was almost seamless. i also love her imagery and how she moves, in the middle of a piece, from a seeming interview with her father, to a luscious poem about the depths of heroin. i almost wanted to do some it sounded so unique (im not serious.) She plays it off so well. Her father was a junky and it ruined his life. it ruined many others life as a consequence. sikelianos has a way of translating her relationship with her father that is not so much resentful, just weary from the weight of her love for a man that was constantly testing her limits. the obituary in the end was touching. i lost a very close friend a long time ago to suicide and i wish i had the balls to write something as poignent as that. she and ehr family describe all the little things about jon that made him a wonderful man. they are not concerned with the things that held him back from being a greater man. that is all past. the things we miss the most are the things we love. were always ready to forget about the bad parts of a person or the past as soon as we realize we shall never have any of the small things.