Doctorow on the making of Ragtime

Doctorow on the Making of Ragtime


How I Made It: E.L. Doctorow on 'Ragtime'

* By Boris Kachka
* Published Apr 7, 2008 (New York magazine)


(Photo: Jerry Bauer/Courtesy of E.L. Doctorow)

R agtime is a sprawling work that began with … your own old house in New Rochelle?
My previous book, The Book of Daniel, had been published the year before, and I had been emotionally depleted by it. So I sat around for a year. And I was staring at the wall, and had arranged my desk so that the only way out was through the sentences. I began to write about the wall, and I realized that this house was the first house on the hill built at that time. And then I imagined what things looked like from the bottom of the hill. From one image to another, I was off the wall and in a book.


And then you did some research?
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you. Walking around town was very much a part of it. I wrote a scene where Tateh and the little girl take trolleys up through Westchester, but I didn’t know if it was possible to take streetcars all the way up to Massachusetts. I was walking through the Public Library in midtown and banged my knee on a book and looked down, and I picked it up. It was a corporate history of trolley-car companies. This is the way the book was assembled.

You grew up in New York in the thirties, so there must be memories of long-gone places in there, too.
I know that I set off for college in Ohio from the old Penn Station, which is why I was able to describe it. And when I was a college student, a friend of mine was graduating and he sold me his Model T Ford. Even then [in the fifties], it was an antique. Fifteen dollars, and he totally overcharged me.

You’ve spoken a lot about nineteenth-century inspirations. What about your contemporaries?
I can’t think of any. There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was The Adventures of Augie March—the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was the U.S.A. trilogy, by John Dos Passos. It’s interesting that of those thirties writers, he was the most self-effacing, and he had the most ambitious project of all, more ambitious than anything Hemingway or Faulkner did. I think I picked that up from him.

Right down to the modesty? You weren’t exactly shouting from the rooftops like Mailer.
Mailer made a terrible mistake. He often stood between his readers and his work. That kind of assiduous pursuit of celebrity, that’s not me.

You were praised and criticized for using historical figures—Ford, Morgan, Houdini—in fiction, as if it were a brand-new thing.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. I thought, If they want fact, I’ll give them facts that will leave their heads spinning.

It’s hard to think there was a time when this kind of thing was controversial.
I heard secondhand that the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, was very critical of the book, that someone prepared a major review and he said no. I had transgressed in making up words and thoughts that people had never said. Now it happens almost every day. I think that opened the gates.

What else did the book do?
Well, after the book was published, I got a letter from the then-director of the Morgan Library, and he said he wanted to thank me, because as a result of my book [in which a black militant threatens to blow up the building], they were able to persuade the trustees to spring for the money to install a state-of-the-art security system.

O'Connor short story/E.B. White "About Myself"

Discuss "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor.

SO, WHAT ARE THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF THE "SOUTHERN GOTHIC" WRITING STYLE? Both Faulkner and O'Connor employ elements of the grotesque and examine moral flaws and failures. Any connections to be made?

Discuss E. B. White's short essay "About Myself"---What is his purpose? Who is his audience? What rhetorical strategies does he employ to achieve his purpose in this essay? Does the essay employ satire or irony? Rhetorical mode---description---but does White accomplish the task of describing himself (or any man or woman) in this essay?

(If time permits--begin watching RAGTIME)...Carry on....

Presentations, Homework for Tomorrow, and Extra Credit

We are going to TRY to finish the following presentations today:
*Journey in As I Lay Dying
*Motivations and Existence in As I Lay Dying
*Alienation and Loneliness in As I Lay Dying

Lets try to keep the presentations at 10 minutes each so that the groups are able to finish on time.

For tomorrow:
Please read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner and "About Myself" by E.B. White.

Because I printed out the copies, please annotate the text! I think you will really enjoy Flannery O'Conner!

Extra Credit for the Prezi Project:

For extra credit, you must have the extra credit completed for tomorrow! This is extra credit for your whole group. If you do not have a Facebook account, then you will not participate in this extra credit -- however as long as your group complete the requirements then the whole group will receive the extra credit.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRN2JkNGE1MDgtYzFmNy00ZTUzLTg5ZmUtZmUwMDk0OWNiMWE2&

Presentations -- Monday and Tuesday

Agenda:

*10 minutes to prepare with your group
*Group Presentations for the remainder of the period
*Question and Answers after each presentation

Presentations Monday and Tuesday

Be prepared to present your presentations on Monday. I am shooting for around ten minutes for each group. If you go over, that is perfectly fine. WIth that said, a group or two may be bumped to present on Tuesday.

I will give you ten minutes at the beginning of class to collaborate with your group members to solidify the presentation or make those decisions of who you want to speak and present when.

See you Monday!

Prezi Presentations

Today you will begin working with your group to create a Prezi to teach us about your topic.

You will create a Prezi something like this:

As I Lay Dying: Comedy or Tragedy
http://prezi.com/3m9vq1mvdpyx/


For the rest of the period:

* Begin brainstorming and blocking out your information for your presentation with your group.

For a PDF version of the project guidelines handed out in class: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRNmEyNTJhYjctNjQwZS00ZmE0LTgxMmEtODdmNTg0ZDQwNWZk&hl=en

* Create a FREE Prezi.com account here:
https://prezi.com/profile/registration/?license_type=PUBLIC

DON'T FORGET TO WRITE DOWN YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION AND PASSWORDS.

Tomorrow be prepared to continue to work on the presentations with your groups!

Coming soon...

* More on literary criticism coming soon!

As I Lay Dying Presentations

As I Lay Dying Presentations
Instead of writing a paper on Faulkner’s text, you will be working together to complete and conclude the novel As I Lay Dying through a presentation.

I would like to introduce you to a new presentation tool. It is called Prezi. It is relatively easy to use and is much more interesting (in my opinion) than using simple Power Point.

Our Agenda for today: 12/9/09

*Welcome to Prezi! What is it? Please watch the “What is Prezi?” 1 minute video.

http://prezi.com/

The following groups will be:

Existence and Motivations in As I Lay Dying
Medina
Eliza
Micah
Celia
Sara

Death and Dying in As I Lay Dying
Malkah
Marguerite
Meredith G.
Amanda
Daniel

The Journey of Symbols, Archetypes, Myths in As I Lay Dying
Meredith J
Nautica
David
Lauren
Emily

As I Lay Dying as a Modernist Text
Kadisha
Nahoma
Elena
Mary
Erin

Loneliness & Alienation in As I Lay Dying
Ian
Hannah
Molly
Rachel
Linh
Martin

-- Begin to think about textual examples to use for your presentation – quotes and specific references to the text and materials used in class.

-- Think about what is this topic, who exemplifies, When and where are there textual examples of the novel, and Why is this an important topic to this novel as a whole?

-- Your final presentation will be a ten-minute presentation. You will also need to create and include a one-page handout for your presentation that outlines your topic, examples, and ideas about these topics.

I will provide you will further guidelines and rubrics tomorrow.

MAKE SURE YOU SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN.

You will have the remainder of today, tomorrow, and Thursday to work on your presentation. We will present our Prezis to each other this Friday.

So, what IS the point?

Today we uncovered a little bit more of the story: and the plot thickens. (If there really is any plot to this book...)

We discussed today the descent of Darl into madness. One of the prevailing questions that Erin raised in class is this: Why? What is the point?

Let me suggest to you that although we have been reading this novel as a bit of comedy and a bit of tragedy, is there really anything comedic to this poor family full of people that just are trying hard at life -- but society fails them. Anse puts Cash's leg into cement and rips his skin off. Vardaman drives holes into his dead mother's face. Darl begins to talk to himself in the third person. Yet, we laugh at them. We ridicule them as white trash and just southern derelicts.

So, according to Faulkner, who are the real monsters? The Bundrens... or us? ;-) Are they a product of a society that laughs and mocks them? And maybe, just maybe, that is one of his points?

Do we do this to people in real life? Do we laugh at their predicaments? Do we take humor in their ignorance? Hmmm.... Does that reinforce their roles that society has set before them? and what does that do to their pursuit of freedom and hope that Crevoceur and the Declaration of Independence value in a world in which laugher and mockery is their oppression.

Just a few of MY thoughts. What do YOU think?
Ms. Moraites

HW: finish the novel and read the article on Darl's madness handed out in class.

Hemingway and Faulkner and My Other Favs

I hear you had a great class today with Ms. Gamzon and covering a short story by Hemingway. Hemingway is another of my favorite authors. I am particularly a fan of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway.

In Our Time: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Time-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0684822768

Really, most of the modern authors -- the ones that deal with these issues of loneliness and the questioning of existence, the existentialism, etc is MY specialty. It is the literature that I truly love. If you are like me, you may find some other philosophers interesting:

Sarte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

Simone de Beauvoir http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

I love this short story, "The Library of Babel" by Borges http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html You should definately check it out!

Tomorrow we are going to perplex ourselves with what you are reading tonight. I will give you an additional reading assignment tomorrow for over the weekend. I would like to finish up the book next week! How does that sound?

Ms. Moraites

How would you score your argument essay?

Here is the AP score rubric. What would you give yourself? How can you improve?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CA0QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gingercherry.com%2Fblog%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2007%2F08%2Fapwritrub.doc&rct=j&q=ap+writing+rubric&ei=WHsWS9ukHdGTlAej8NDPBQ&usg=AFQjCNGXd5anRpSNFv9w3oqgwDmlmflKYA

Working on our Conclusions

As we take a look at your essays today, what are some of the strategies for creating that WOW conclusion that will keep or boost you up to the next score on the AP exam.

Here is a little advice from Ms. Moraites:

The first step to an argument essay is to understand the point that you will argue for, against, or qualify. If you don't actually understand the argument, then your connections will be weak and may be faulty.

Figuring out what the argument is a lot like what we do in class. We take a text and analyze it -- what does it mean? What words are especially important? Who wrote it? Why would they say this?

As you begin writing your essay, it is important to start out your essay strongly and clearly! As a reader, it gets me interested in seeing what you have to say. Then, you will make connections, arguments, etc. But, it is equally important to end your essay with an UMPH! Keeping your essay solid throughout is not an easy task. Trust me, I have written many, many essays. Sometimes the conclusions come together and sometimes I felt like they didn't.

So, the question is -- how do I make that conclusion so awesome that the reader of your AP essay exam say "WOW! This student knows his/her stuff. This student is a solid 8! or 9! for this essay!"

Keeping that ending of your arguments and conclusion solid is one of the keys to keeping your reader engaged and interested in the points that you make.

Check out this website on Conclusions. What are you doing right? What could you work on?

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/conclusions.html

We will be working on these in class today and I am giving you an extra day to make changes and bring in a revised edition of your essay as a final copy for me. DUE TOMORROW! (THURSDAY!)


Our Agenda for today:

How do you work up to the conclusion? You have to be stating your thesis first and have made your arguments and points already.

How do you work through your paper? What does your intro say? What are the mini-thesis of each of your paragraphs or points to your argument. And can you share your conclusion?

Reflection: Where do you see gaps in your conclusion? How can it be made better? (Take a look at that website that I put above.)

Conference with a partner. Proof-read each other's papers.

When you do this, read the conclusion first. Do you have any extra suggestions for your partner?

Then go through the rest of your paper with your partner to suggest any other issues or concerns as well as things that are good with their writing!


Ms. Moraites

So, we've read some books, but What IS the American Dream????

For those of you working on your essays tonight. So, what IS the American Dream?

"Essentially the American Dream is an idea which suggests that all people can succeed through hard work, and that all people have the potential to live happy, successful lives. Many people have expanded upon or refined the definition of the American Dream, and this concept has also been subject to a fair amount of criticism. Many people believe that the structure of American society belies the idealistic goal of the American Dream, pointing to examples of inequality rooted in class, race, and ethnic origin which suggest that the American Dream is not attainable for all."

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-american-dream.htm


This expansion and redefining of the American Dream spans from Crevoceur's time (and way before!) to now.

As you write your essay, you will want to first think about:

What IS Crevecour's vision of the American Dream?? <--- What does he state in this Letter? Analyze.

Then, defend, challenge, or qualify his vision. Use textual examples and personal experience examples to back up your your persuasion. You want to make me believe that your defense, challenge, or qualification is absolutely right!

Make sure you refer back to De Crevecour's letter to further support your thesis.