Short Takes

Part Seven 

The Essays that I read this week:
1. "Daylight Savings Time" by M.J. Iuppa
2. "Getting Yourself Home" by Brenda Miller

Analysis of "Daylight Savings Time"

 In this essay Iuppa describes the action and setting of six different fragments to paint an entire one day/scene of two individuals' journey in a 1968 Volkswagon bus in October. Her writing style and organization of the breaks seems very poetic and lyrical. Each paragraph represents a little chunk of the scene, yet stands by itself like the stanza of a poem. Her diction and variation of sentences are beautiful and capture the pace of the memory and/or action of each fragment. For example, in the first paragraph, there is: "Air pungent and sharp with its smells of wet leaves and earth and distant chimney smoke is loaded with melancholy, just lingering to be breathed in and set loose in a sudden gush, a thought of someone not quite forgotten, someone whose embrace felt dangerous and ticklish like electricity, like power surge before blackout." Although rather lengthy, this is a beautiful sentence with all the descriptions, power, flow . . . Still captures this same meaning in her short sentences, like in her last fragment, "There is always one. One left to know this. One left to keep quiet." She speaks of loss and the memory of the person that she is addressing throughout the story as "you." Altogether the writing style and organization embodies this memory and sense loss in a beautiful and break-taking yet sorrowful way.

This is one of the essays that takes more time to digest and read over and over to try and understand what is going on. But I loved it and thought it was amazing! So please read it and let me know what you thought!