Almanac? More like fantastic short stories combined to bring about joy in your everyday life!

Well I can't discuss Agee anymore. Love him but let's move on. I am really feeling the Sand County Almanac though. First impressions (before actually opening it)... an almanac really? I always thought almanacs were just dressed-up calendars. Marking off seasons, talking about when to plant your green beans, et cetera. I have to tell you I was blown away. I think the only thing Leopold really got wrong is the title. Probably draws a lot of people away from the book.
Things I really like about the almanac:
1. It's really accessible. The stories are like small anecdotes that can be read separately but fit like a dream when you read them together. (I hate when books don't have chapters... some place to put your bookmark.) A good example of this is the way Leopold weaves Wisconsin's ecological history into the story of the oak struck by lightning. I find history boring at least sixty percent of the time but I basically forgot I was getting the whole run down due to Leopold's masterful dispersal of factual tidbits with meaty prose.
2. I can't decide if it's because we just came off Agee's style or what but I love Leopold's straight-forward-ness. Talk about a guy that knows what I want to read. Killed it. And it's not to say that the writing isn't complex, it is...just more periods, less commas.
3. The chronology. Again... maybe it's Agee. I've had a craving for a point by point timeline ever since stepping on Porch One. I like knowing where I start and (at least some idea/concept) of where I finish.

All in all I dig a Sand County Almanac. I was surprised in a good way.

Riddle me this...

There are several aspects of Agee’s novel that I would like to address. First off, it baffles me that Agee makes such an effort to outright defy art, and yet he style of work comes off, in my opinion, as extremely artsy. In my fourteen years of formal education, I have never encountered a book like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not only does he not have chapters or divisions of any form, but the book also starts with photographs. Instead of starting his book with words or a clear-cut message, he begins it in the artistic manner of allowing the reader to first encounter the characters through photographs. If that is not artistic, I do not know what is!

It also confuses me that Agee offers the idea that his readers should just take his work for what it is rather than try to read into it. How can he expect his readers to take such a complex, intricate piece of literature for what it is, without any kind of contemplation, consideration, or contradiction? Honestly, I respect Agee for producing such a bold book and as a historian; I especially admire him for quoting men so controversial as Marx during a time when this certainly was not considered socially acceptable.

Even the most elite literary critics are still unsure of what Agee meant to do with this book, or why he felt the need to structure it the way he did. After reading his book and discussing it in class, I am only sure of one thing: I possess a passionate admiration for Agee in his ability to fully divulge himself in his work. He clearly spent an intense amount of time investigating the lives of his characters and attempting to truly understand their lives. I would argue that his style of work is certainly artistic and that it is nearly impossible to take a piece of work such as this simply at face value, but despite these criticisms, there is no doubt in my mind that Agee has produced a revolutionary piece of literature.

Comparisons between (On the Porch: 1 and (On the Porch: 2

            In Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men he has sections that add as dividers between the different families, which helps to provide some shape to his madness and lack of organization in this non-novel. Even though Agee rarely shares which family he is working with, the hierarchy of poverty within the photographs helps to provide a road map.  I am still trying to decide if the porch from the first section and the porch from the second section are the same or different porches.

            In (On the Porch: 1, Agee barely gives the reader a visual of the porch.  Instead, he describes a room in the house where the family sleeps.  In this section, Agee is aware of the five senses.  He mentions the visuals that he observes from the house and how “there as no longer any sound of the settling or ticking of any part of the structure of the house” (17).  Agee utilizes theses senses to create a sense of peace and openness in comparison to (On the Porch: 2.  In this first section he rambles on while not describing the actual porch.  However, in the middle of the rambling, the reader is given this passage, “The sky was withdrawn from us with all her strength.  Against some scarcely conceivable imprisoning wall this woman held herself away from us and watched us…” (18-19).  Agee possibly personifies the sky to provide a sense of confinement, like the sky is a wall closing in on the porch. 

            In (On the Porch: 2, Agee repeats the line, “We lay on the front porch” (197).  This section actually provides an action and provides a concrete image that is missing in the first section.  Also, in this section the reader is given a physical description of the actual porch, “A light roof stuck out its tongue above us dark and squarely, sustained at its outward edge by the slippery trunks of four young trees from which the bark had been peeled”  “By letting the center of your weight fall far enough on the high side it was possible to effect a compromise by which you had the benefit of a fair amount of the width of the seat and yet were not rolled off it” (197).  In these passages, the confinement from the first section is extremely apparent which makes me think that this may be the same porch.  However, this section gives more description of the actual porch, which makes me think that the porch is different.  Since this section offers more confinement, I feel like it might be in relation to the photographs, following the hierarchy of poverty. 

 

Blog 5-Clothing

In the chapter on clothing, Agee discusses the various clothing ensembles each member of each family wears, in which occasions. The clothing is worn and dirty and ill-covers corporal parts; many of the children don’t even bother with wearing it, unless they are in public. Agee describes the clothing of the Gudgers, Ricketts, and Woods as he describes their lack of plumbing and an efficient way to clean and use the bathroom (remember they use leaves and pine cones as toilet paper). However, the issues the families have with dressing themselves manifest social issues.

This is most apparent with the mothers, who make themselves new clothing only after their families are well-dressed. Paralee is dressed well because she is getting to the age where she must attract a match. The young children are dressed well because material for their costumes is cheaper. Thus the mothers sacrifice--Mrs Woods must go into town with a dress made of this cotton that is cut low so she can nurse in it. The material of the dress is so thin her nipples show through and the men of the town stare at her body less than covertly, consistently. This is her Sunday best. The clothing is portrayed not only as a way to show social stratification but also to show how public the stratification can be. It is not like the lack of plumbing, irritations resulting from lack of wealth that are suffered in private. The clothing is a very public humiliation, one that cannot be avoided.

-Jessica Grabert

The Overalls

“Try—I cannot write it here—to imagine and to know, as against other garments, the difference of their feelings against your body", Agee begins his description of the men of the tenant families' overalls. This quote points to the effectiveness of a description of clothing that, because of it's universal and sensorial nature, goes beyond what the description of the houses does in terms of drawing conclusions about the owner. I most enjoyed Agee’s description of the overalls and, assuming from his lengthy devotion to the description, it appears as if he did as well. Agee describes the overalls in a number of ways: The overalls are described in an almost scientific manner, much like the categorical way in which he describes the rest of the tenant’s clothing. It is obvious that Agee loved the overalls because of the life-like qualities he endows them with. He describes the seams as “those of a living plant of animal” and the garment as an almost independent being that ages, matures and evolves. They are compared to art: not only are they compared to a painting of Cézanne, but they are given architectural qualities that allude not only to the esthetic quality of the overalls, but its functional ability to protect and house the man inside (reminiscent of the description of the shoes in this chapter that we read the first day of class). And, most importantly, the overalls are described as indicators of the lfe and identity of the owner. Agee refers to the overalls as a “blueprint” and “a map of a working man” because of the conclusions we can come to about not only the curves and contours of the owner’s body but the rigor of his work and the state of his poverty. Not only do the overalls illuminate the nature of the lifestyles of the owners, but, they also provide an indication of identity to the families: Agee mentions in this passage that the appearance of a “peasant” is universal both through time and place, however, that overalls are “a garment native to this country” and “are relatively new and local”, therefore, rooting the Gudgers, Woods and Rickets in their place and time in history. Furthermore, the description of the overalls allows us to further deduce Agee’s preference for the Gudgers. George Gudger’s overalls are the only ones mentioned in this description and he is glorified as a worker who “wears in his work on the power of his shoulders a fabric as intricate and fragile, and as deeply in honor of the reigning sun, as the feather mantle of a Toltec prince”.

The Futility of Words

In class we have continually asked why Agee wrote this work is such a convoluted manner. What point was he trying to make and why is he so apposed to seeing this book as a novel or work of art? Agee himself attempts to answer these questions in the section entitled On the Porch: 2. Agee begins this section by describing his sleeping conditions and closely detailing what it felt like to wake up after a long night on a hard pallet. However, he quickly transitions into a long diatribe on art and journalism and how neither can adequately portray the truth.

Agee begins this discussion with the realization that George Gudger is unique. Agee states, “George Gudger is a human being, a man, not like any other human being so much as he is like himself” (Agee 232). Agee notes that he could have created a history for George Gudger that, while completely invented, would have most likely revealed Gudger’s character. This would be art. However, Agee reminds us that Gudger is “exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, where, when and why he is. He is in flesh and blood and breathing” (Agee 233). Because George Gudger is a part of the real, unimagined world, his life cannot be made-up. In order to properly represent him, Agee feels the need to reproduce the Gudgers and all of the tenant families as faithfully as possible through unending detail.

This need for adequate representation leads Agee into yet another discussion on the futility of words. Agee artfully asks the reader to reproduce a street using nothing but words. He notes that while you can describe the “materials, forms, colors, bulks, textures, space relations, shapes of light and shade…all this gathers time and weightiness which the street does not of itself have” (Agee 235). This method of writing appears to mimic the writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee continually berates the reader with unending descriptions that weigh the work down and slows the prose. However, Agee describes this overly detailed writing as naturalistic and states that that is not his intention. Agee ends his rant on words by saying, “I feel sure in advance that any efforts, in what follows, along the lines I have been speaking of, will be failures” (Agee 238). Inevitably, no matter how Agee presents this work, parts of it will resemble art and journalism and posses naturalist ideas. However, by blending these modes of representation and fully addressing the inadequacies each mode posses, Agee allows the readers to question how things are characterized and to ask themselves what is the truth. This overly vigilant way of reading art and literature can then be applied to all representation of the dust bowl and the depression. Through his convoluted writing, Agee stresses the importance of looking past the propaganda and finding what is real.

Modern Preservation and Agee’s Choice of Inclusivity

During our class trip to the Lilly, we discussed the purpose of saving and preserving historical texts, and why they are still valuable today. This was a question I had not really considered before, and just assumed that it was interesting to be able to view an original copy of a popular and/or much loved book—it was simply a sentimental thing. And while this is very much true in many cases, (I have saved many books from my childhood up until the present for the sake of their sentimental value to me), I thought our discussion on this topic was really interesting; that we save books because the actual book and its annotations or marks or ripped pages tells its own story, one that may be completely separate from a “new” copy of the actual piece of literature.

In addition to allowing contemporary readers and viewers to experience the art that may have been a part of the book and the artists who contributed to the work, it provides insight into the way the literature was perceived upon its original publication, and explains what the reader found to be important in the text, and gives details about the life of the reader (who also is, or will be, a historical figure, whether or not he or she is famous).

This mindset of total inclusivity in regard to literature seems very much similar to the way in which Agee viewed his own work. We have discussed in class how at times, the book contains so much detail to the point where his sentences (or entire paragraphs) seem superfluous. A reader would need to spend enormous amounts of time in order to take in everything that Agee tries to project in his writing—in some ways, it just seems to be too much. But on the other hand, Agee felt that if he left anything out, it could have been something that would have been indispensable to one’s understanding of the situation—a detail that while some readers may have simply skimmed over and paid no attention to, others would have taken it as the difference between a work of insignificance and a work documenting the inhumanity of the lives of real people. Just as Agee had to make this choice or what to include in his writing, modern readers and book-collectors must choose what to preserve and save. And while it may seem excessive, it may also make a significant, indispensible difference in a modern understanding of historical literature and the times in which they were written.