Pleasantly surprised I was when I read Sparrow Needy. It was entertaining and well written. The narrative was also intriguing especially the dynamic contrast between Paul and the narrator. While reading it also made me realize how your environment often takes a bigger toll on you that most imagine. Yet we often look down upon people in our real lives that resemble the character of Lynwood. Yet Lynwood played a pivotal role and almost guided the narrator to achieve brilliance. The unorthodox/ironic element is what made this essay enjoyable for me.
The City that Bleeds in the other hand was the complete opposite. It was dry and boring and had a horrible narrative. There was no sense of emotions and although the topic was rather extremely serious since it touches on the injustice in Baltimore I felt the actual writing was an injustice to the situation. Often times where the situation is so severe and critical you would need to gauge the attention of readers to gain the situation attention to provoke change where this did the exact opposite and bored me to the point that I just wanted to not finish the essay.
Hi Nathan, again, please try to avoid focusing on whether you were entertained or not. This is an essay in which the author places himself at an historic event (the Freddie Gray trial) where we can see the rxn of Gray's family, where he examines broken windows policing (a close cousin of NYC's stop and frisk), where the author shares his own teenage run-in w/ the cops including peeing and crapping in his pants, and then concludes his essay w/ the statement that rioting "makes a lot of fucking sense," then I have to draw the conclusion that your boredom says more about you than about the essay. Please talk about what you find challenging in the text. As I've said multiple times, no text is inherently interesting or boring (I bet some people found "Sparrow Needy" "boring" too.)
ReplyDeleteYou write this: "Often times where the situation is so severe and critical you would need to gauge the attention of readers to gain the situation attention to provoke change..." I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it sounds like you're saying that you need to lure readers in w/ drama. Maybe. But then maybe there are multiple ways to address a topic. Maybe when a topic--like police killings of black citizens--is written about as much as it has been recently, authors have to find different ways to write about the same topic. Maybe this just isn't the strategy you'd take. It's probably not the strategy I'd take either. I also prefer "Sparrow Needy" as a text, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing some of the strengths of "The City that Bleeds" too.
Still, thanks for your commentary. I hope to hear others' rxns to this essay.