Jiajia-Binks

Similar to the children’s experience with Madame, this is another “coming-of-age” moment for the children of Hailsham, as they start to realize what other people expect them to become. In this passage, Ishiguro reinforces the “in-group” and “out-group” distinction between the “students” of Hailsham and everyone else. Ishiguro uses specific diction to make this distinction, from the outsider’s/guardian’s point of view as well as the thoughts of the children themselves.

Miss Lucy, with much hesitancy, describes the students as “special,” and she implies that this is something that is often told to the students. The word “special"can have positive or negative connotations; most guardians present the word “special” as a compliment, though Miss Lucy’s hesitancy with this word makes it seem more like a euphemism.

According to Kathy, the students knew that they were “different from the guardians, and also from the normal people outside.” While reading this page, I almost missed Ishiguro’s almost casual use of the adjective “normal”. He intentionally crafts a story where the children recognize others as normal, which implies that the children labeled themselves as abnormal. The guardians do not directly label the children as such, but their euphemisms and attitudes toward the children influence the children’s self-image and identity. This reflects what often occurs in real life; others usually do not explicitly label us, but we learn about ourselves from their attitudes and actions toward us.

Finally, I thought it was interesting that Ishiguro repeats the children’s treatment of Marge in this passage. The children collectively believed that Marge had asked a “rude” question and punished Marge, independent of any instructions from the guardians. Kathy expresses how they “hated the way their guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory,” so that was why they “punished Marge K. so cruelly for bringing it all up.” In the interview that I watched, Ishiguro talked about our compliance to what we perceive as our fate. The children’s discomfort toward uncertainty in their authority figures may have been Ishiguro’s way of illustrating our want for the guidance of authority in determining our fate.

This passage is one of the first points in this story when Kathy, the narrator, overtly addresses the difference between her sheltered world inside Hailsham and the “outside” world. In this passage, Kathy and her friends had just completed their plan of walking past Madame, an outsider, to test her reaction. As they expected, Madame physically recoiled from them in disgust and fear. Ishiguro, after a few opening chapters of warm, rather nostalgic stories, drops this cold, sobering moment into the narrative. Throughout this book, the characters rarely actually interact with anyone who is not a clone. In this memory, the sheltered bubble around Hailsham is broken for the first time, just as Kathy and her friends were finding their identities; Kathy recalls that this is when they begin to realize things “about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside.” 

Interview with Ishiguro: https://youtu.be/_jCB59pPG7k

This post isn’t exactly tied to any specific annotations, but I had a lot of thoughts after watching this interview. I thought I would expand on them here (relating to the entire narrative and theme in general), then connect them to specific passages and Ishiguro’s craft in the explication of my essay.

Before reading this book, I expected it to be a classic dystopian novel reminiscent of the Hunger Games, where an oppressed, dehumanized group rises up against a system that is stacked against them. This novel is a departure from the “brave hero” narrative, as Ishiguro explains in the interview. He states that he was “never interested in looking at...brave slaves who rebelled and escaped,” and rather he focuses on “how much we accept what fate has given us.” From this perspective, Never Let Me Go is a social commentary on the extent of obedience and compliance within our society. Not once did Ishiguro hint that Kathy or anybody else had serious intentions to escape from their given roles, even though they were afforded many freedoms to go wherever they pleased. The furthest any of them went were their “dream futures”, or their fantasies of the life they wished they could live. Even then, these dreams remained a fantasy, and no one actually acted on any of their imaginings.

Another aspect of this book that quite honestly astounded me was the way Ishiguro was able to build in mystery into a retrospective narrative. Ishiguro intentionally kept the final fates of Tommy and Ruth secret until they were revealed much later in the narrative, although the “telling” of the story is after all of the events have already occurred. He manages this thread of mystery by dropping hints and subtle implications in Kathy’s passing mentions of Ruth and Tommy when she talks about her present.

Weaving a coherent and engaging narrative through a non-linear timeline is no easy feat. From the beginning, as Ishiguro introduces Kathy, we know that she is bound to meet again with “Ruth” and “Tommy”, though we do not know who they are. We also learn that Kathy is a “carer” and she takes care of “donors”. As the story progresses, Ishiguro introduces childhood stories about the narrator, Ruth, and Tommy, as well as stories from their adolescence into their adulthood. For me, this created a “child Tommy”, “teen Tommy”, “adult Tommy”, and finally a “donor Tommy” in my mind as Ishiguro presented anecdotes from different times in Tommy’s life. Then, I blended these subsets together created one whole timeline of development for each character.

One of the most unique aspects of its book is its non-linear timeline. While other non-linear timeline books have different scenes that are clearly defined, this book was almost like one continuous scene, with a variety of stories with hazy edges branching off in different directions. 

Ishiguro writes the story as if Kathy, the narrator, is telling her story in retrospect. Many times, just as one story is hinted, another story or incident is brought up that is related to the original story. As each story unfolds, many more unfold along it, intertwining with each at different points in the timeline. Eventually, all of the stories are tied up at the end, as “Kathy” adds more and more detail to each one. Only at the end does the full picture become clear; it felt like Ishiguro was painting independent parts of a painting a little bit at a time until finally, you took a step back and it all fit together. I think that it is fascinating that Ishiguro was able to make such a fragmented timeline so cohesive, since I had minimal issues following along with the characters and their development. 

This book was definitely not what I expected, but I enjoyed it very much. From the few reviews that I read before I actually read the book, I was expecting this book to be an overt ethical argument about cloning and human rights. However, this book read more like a narrative diary entry, much like The Handmaid’s Tale. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale though, most of the symbolism is very subtle, and the moral ethics were mostly implied and left up to the reader to decide. 

I felt like Ishiguro focused on the narrative/story first and foremost, rather than the technical aspects of bioethics. In biology, we mostly discussed the rights of bodily autonomy from an impersonal, outside perspective. Ishiguro focused on the humanity of the clones (the main characters), which meant that we were looking at the ethics of medical cloning from an insider/personal perspective. I think this novel way of looking at the rights of clones is significant because if technology like that described in the book actually existed, we must consider the ethics for every stakeholder (like we discussed in ethics club).

In ethics club, we discussed an interesting case about the donation of bone marrow and the rights of medical patients. In our rapidly progressing world of new medical technology, cloning and organ transplants have passed from science fiction into reality. While our technology is racing ahead, questions about ethics and rights remain unanswered. 

Mr. Kreinbring first recommended Never Let Me Go to me after we discussed the bioethics case in ethics club. In addition, it was one of the recommended readings on Goodreads under The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a nonfiction book about the story and ethics of the infamous HeLa cells. I want to read this book because although I have read a lot about the biology behind cloning, I have never read a perspective, albeit fictional, about the ethics of cloning. Skimming through the first few pages of the novel, it is written in second person-which I personally enjoy- and in a casual, modern tone. Not only is this a study of ethics, but it also seems like a compelling narrative.

This is definitely one of my favorite poems by Brandon Amico. In this poem, the speaker represents someone who is completely immersed in the mainstream culture of the U.S. and social media, which is at odds with the socially aware and “wide-awake” poet. This oblivious, complacent speaker is used to provide metacommentary on the toxic side of our Internet culture. For example, the speaker rejects Harold, a character who has fallen out of the mainstream, because he has “less than hundred followers,” which makes him “some kind of monster.” Amico could have used sarcasm to achieve some of the same goals of this poem, but using a speaker who appears to be speaking earnestly highlights the terrifying consequences of Internet obsession, because we all know someone or a celebrity who actually speaks like this.

One major theme throughout many of Amico’s poems is obsession, more often unhealthy than not. “#Moongate” focuses on our present obsession with following the mercurial trends that spread like wildfire across the Internet. We are obsessed with the statistics of social media- views, followers, likes- and we always want more. The speaker claims that Harold’s content “is lovely,” but he needs “to engage with others” by making content like a “pop song” or “using more active headlines.” Instead of focusing on the significance and quality of content, our Internet culture is hooked on viral trends that catch our attention for only moments. The euphemism “active headlines” really just mean clickbait headlines, or “the kind with one half missing.” Clickbait articles are rarely informative or really all that surprising; they only lure us in with instant-brewed curiosity that has no real substance. 

Amico also comments on the increasing influence of capitalism and monetization on our everyday lives. The speaker refers to everything, even those who we usually exempt from discussions of cost and worth, in terms of how marketable it is. Kids are described as “blog posts that walk around and edit themselves.” This reminded me of an article I read about parents who overshare information about their kids online. Many bloggers use their kids to pull in views and likes, and most of those kids aren’t old enough to truly understand how their pictures are being published. For many celebrities, kids have become part of their brand and help to sell the image they want to portray. In the speaker’s eyes, kids are always #trending.

Finally, an overshadowing theme that has plagued humanity since its very beginning is greed. Especially when we can see the highlights of everyone’s lives on social media, there is always a want for more in our lives. The speaker claims that “if you asked [them] to choose between music and ifre, I’d swallow the bird whole and go looking for a light.” Just like how swallowing a songbird for its song ultimately destroys the bird and the song, our greed often consumes the very thing that we want to acquire.

Link to “oversharing parents” article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parents-overposting-online_l_5cb4dd23e4b082aab08a5c10 

“The First Technology” by Brandon Amico is an interesting take on our loneliness in a connected world. The first line introduces the narrative of someone who is alone even among other people; the “conference line on mute” is somewhere one can “feel loneliness pinball for a time.” People are talking over you in the conference call, and while you can hear them, they cannot hear you. Amico uses the verb “pinball” to describe the figurative motion of “loneliness”, which I thought was unusual but very apt. The ball in a pinball machine makes it circuits, but rarely reaches its destination. You can move around different groups of people, different conversations, and different social media apps, but you can still feel lonely. 

The irony of our connectedness yet lack of actual connection is not lost on Amico; all the friends and followers on our social media outlets are “people [we] can go to and be alone.” Conversation is “a cage or key in our tradition of ...freedom and its decay.” Communicating with others can be a free expression of our thoughts, but more often it is constrained to a cage, limited by social constructs and norms, as well as our own need to fit in. 

Amico also discusses the social anxiety of being different from the crowd.  In our highly connected world, mob mentality can easily build up among large online communities, and speaking outside of the mainstream is “an act of contest.” 

In addition, Amico repeats the idea of fruit and its decay throughout this poem. Opinions are “fruit,” and our “teeth [test] its flesh.” Speaking invites the risk of “a nectar flood”, though we can only “write down the past” through “fruits and dyes smeared on a wall.” The destruction of the fruits reminded me of Dutch still life paintings. At first, they appear to be a decadent display of wealth and plenty, but a closer look reveals insects creeping in the shadows, wilting flowers and leaves, and signs of mold and slow decay on the fruit. The life we portray to others on social media can look pretty on the outside, but it cannot mask the loneliness we feel on the inside. (364)

“Self-Portrait as Messenger App” by Brandon Amico looks more like two paragraphs of prose than a poem; it consists of two solid blocks of text with no line breaks, spacing irregularity, or other visual formatting that is typical of poetry.

Amico once again writes in a “stream of consciousness” style. Unlike “Carnival” and “Ode to the Charging Cable”, this poem is mostly made up of complete sentences. However, it still feels like a stream of consciousness since his thoughts bounce from idea to idea along connections of obscure references and imagery. 

The main themes are summarized by the title- self-identity and communication. One of our primary methods of communication is social media, where our identity is disconnected from our real self. The first sentence claims that we have “a Facebook self, Twitter self, LinkedIn self, Tinder self,” and each identity is created by “calculating the average projection forward or back among [our] digital selves, what range [our] limbs cover, spanning shares, retweets.” Amico reflects the data-driven way that we define ourselves online; we all define ourselves with the number of likes, comments, followers, etc. The “identity” piece of the theme is continued through the discussion of the “self” in literature and the “sum of the self”. The “messenger” piece of the theme is extended through exploring literature, specifically poetry, as a form of communication. The final rhetorical question plays on the connotations/allusions of “messenger”; he asks, “Are you more Hermes or postal service worker?” 

Another rhetorical move that Amico uses is intentional capitalization. “Poetry” and “Great Literature” are capitalized like proper nouns, which might be Amico’s way of making fun of the pretentiousness of people who claim to write/analyze poetry and classic literature. In the paragraph in the parentheses, Amico implies that creating Poetry (with the capital P) is like putting “Greek, Latin, and Old English in a blender,” resulting in an abstraction of words that sounds nice but doesn’t mean anything.

One textpost that captures Amico’s ironic distaste for poetry is this post from the tumblr user werecat:

“Husband” by Philip Schultz:

I chose to “cheat” on my mentor poet with Reb’s mentor poet Philip Schultz. I assumed, from the title, that this was going to be a poem about the poet’s husband. However, I was surprised when the poet described his wife at the end of the poem. Although he describes his wife in detail, the main subject of the poem is his relationship to her, hence the title “Husband”. 

I chunked this poem into three parts. The first five lines set the scene of the date between the poet and his wife. It begins with the sentence stem “What could be more...”, which I expected would be a rhetorical question. However, this sentence ends with a period, cementing the certainty of his statement. 

Then, Schultz moves to more introspective thoughts with references to famous psychologists. He claims that while marriage is about “overlooking”, as psychologist William James said, marriage is also about “overlapping”, especially the overlapping of “the truth of someone not you sitting across the table seeing the you you can’t bear to.” Essentially, Schultz claims that your partner in marriage sees the “real you” overlapping with the facades you create for everyone else. Relationships can be about “overlooking” those facades and being vulnerable enough to show the face that even you are scared of seeing. 

Finally, Schultz returns to the original scene of the romantic date, seemingly shaking himself out of his own thoughts with the line “Here, now, us, sipping wine...” The vivid description of his wife’s mannerisms completes the theme of seeing others “the way a stranger does in moments,” since these little “familiar gestures” are not part of the planned facade that is presented to people.  

Related song: “Call It What You Want” by Taylor Swift

“Carnival” is structured similarly to “Ode to the Charging Cable”, one of the first poems I found by Brandon Amico. It is a continuous stream of consciousness, though this poem includes more periods/pauses than the “Ode to the Charging Cable”. 

I had to read this poem multiple times to even determine a loose paraphrasing of it, and I still don’t completely understand what the main theme of the poem is. The title seems simple enough; there are clearly allusions to a carnival in the poem. The carnival is the “thing”, but the “other thing” is harder to find. The speaker of this poem seems distracted, which makes the “other thing” more ambiguous. Amico inserts phrases that seem unrelated to the poem, such as the sudden interjection of “-a homeowner!” in the seventh line of the poem and “-and how have so few people taken advantage of a maize pun there?” Perhaps these interjections serve as transitions into the next line or idea, like a conversation about one topic might lead into another seemingly unrelated topic through a common thread. The “homeowner” interjection leads into a description of the speaker’s office, while the “maize pun” leads into the “punning” of a tilt-a-whirl announcer. 

This imagery reminds me of going to brightly lit carnivals as a child, but Amico throws a melancholic mood over the delights of the carnival. As he throws “four-seamers at the distortions of [himself]”, the mirrors shatter, destroying the image of himself.

Another repeated theme that adds to the melancholy of this poem is traveling/wandering (lines highlighted in pink). Amico describes how they “pack up and hit the road...when the snow sends its emissaries from the north.” This endless wandering and asking “where are we going” makes the speaker seem lost and uncertain. 

In an odd twist of the imagery of the carnival, Amico describes “wearing the clown mask, the painted shirt...existing solely...as idea...” Every clown or performer in a carnival is playing a character, not themselves. Amico might be pointing out that our masks and facades create an idea of what we are, but we are not truly existing as ourselves. His final line of the poem sums up this theme of nonexistence: “I am not my body, I’m just living here.” This line seemed paradoxical to me at first, but perhaps Amico is expressing that the physical body is not what makes a person who they are.

When I read this poem, the first thing I thought of was the book The Night Circus. The themes of traveling, characters, and the vivid imagery of the carnival with a darker twist fits right in with the themes of The Night Circus. Spoiler alert: the idea of existence outside of the physical body reminded me of how Celia and Marco (the two main characters) existed only as a manifestation of the circus itself rather than in their physical bodies.

The first feature that caught my eye was the anaphora, or repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of each line. Each line is a different variation of a “gun that folds into” something else. I was very confused why Amico decided to use that particular sentence stem because I thought it was oddly specific, just like the title. Later, I searched up the title of this poem in order to find a link to an online version. The first search result was an article published by the Huffington Post on March 30, 2016, but it was not about this poem like I had first assumed. It was a news article about a gun that folded up like a smartphone in order to make the weapon less conspicuous. Amico repeats this phrase from the article to comment on the article itself and gun violence in the U.S. 

Many of the objects that Amico alludes to are related to gun violence, usually mass shootings, that have occurred recently. Amico describes a “gun that folds into legislation- folds and folds until so thick it can’t physically be folded again.” This line brings to mind images of legislation and failed bills, with piles so thick that they cannot be folded any further. Figuratively, the legislation can be weaponized into a folded gun- a weapon of the 2nd amendment. Amico criticizes the endless debates on gun rights that end with little real action against the mass gun violence in the U.S.

Another loaded line in this poem is a “gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.” This immediately reminded me of “A Thousand Cranes” and the narratives of those who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those who didn’t. Those detonated nuclear bombs are now a “history lesson”- a warning of the horrors of war. Every time there is a mass shooting, it is treated as a lesson to save more lives the next time it happens, but that means that we expect a “next time”- when did that become a reality? We supposedly “learned” from the nuclear bombings in Japan, but we still lie on the brink of worldwide nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. Each mass shooting brings new legislation on school safety, new investments in security systems, and new purchases of bulletproof backpacks, but we still hear of so many mass shootings that the casualty numbers become blurred in our minds. 

The last line concluded the poem with a full circle back to the title- a “gun that folds into a cell phone”- but with an additional clause- a “gun that calls your children home.” A cell phone literally can “call” the children to come home, but Amico uses another connotation of “call” in the second clause- a gun calling your children home is an unsettling euphemism for the lives cut short in school shootings.

Link to Huffington Post Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ideal-conceal-gun-smartphone_n_56fab0c4e4b0a372181b0c0f

Song: “American Elegy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY6TGPi_qwQ

When I first opened the spreadsheet of mentor poets, I had no idea where to start. Of course, I decided to use a mathematical method to go through the extensive list of poets, so I clicked the link of every sixth poet, starting from a random poet. Brandon Amico was the second poet I looked at, and I was immediately intrigued by his poem “Ode to the Charging Cable.” Here is a short excerpt from this poem:

Persistent whisperer, beginning

of many ends & end

of the diaphanous trek of electricity

through wave & turbine,

fiber & ground & up

through the home’s flooring;

yarn-spinner, enabler, life-

preserver in the ocean of codified air

we’re apt to drown in...

His vivid imagery of the unseen and creative word choice creates a whimsical, otherworldly atmosphere around a mundane household object. This atmosphere was exactly what I wanted to create in my poetry. However, since he was the only the second poet I explored, I decided to keep going down the list.

I also looked at the poems written by Tina Chang, Louise Glück, and Safiya Sinclair. Tina Chang has a very similar racial/ethnic background, but an entirely different life experience. Her poems hummed with a darker energy, especially her poem “Origin & Ash”. My voice usually doesn’t carry that kind of intensity, so I kept going down the list. 

One of my favorite poems by Louise Glück is “The Evening Star”. It is romantic yet wistful reflection on Venus, one of the brightest objects in the sky. She subtly hints at her feeling of being wronged by Venus, the goddess of love, which is what many of her other poems are about. Her reflections on divorce and heartbreak are beautiful, but rather inaccessible to me and my experiences. However, I did like that she was quite literal in her poems and less vague than some of the other poems I have read.

I chose to explore the poems of Safiya Sinclair partially because I liked her alliterative name. Her poems also have a darker atmosphere like Tina Chang’s poems, often in a sexual nature. She created amazing allusions to Greek mythology, but I preferred Amico’s lighter, witty style.