il y a dix ans things were not this way she said holding a cigarette to her lips the boy coughed but no one thought twice he just kept doing his homework legs swinging off the chair and his grandmother and mother talked about how the economy was in shambles no use in trying to get decent work these days work ethic counts for shit she said don’t repeat what your mother says she looked at the boy checking on his homework for a moment
wasn’t like this in France we were hardworking people but everyone talked about the opportunities in america what could we do but pack up and leave Your father worked so hard He did everything so you could have a better life He’s in a better place now where he doesn’t have to work so hard 60 cents an hour not bad for a guy with a family Bread was 9 cents Coffee was more No wonder he worked himself so hard
but all the boy knew was that he didn’t like the way bread tasted when it was a week old and he didn’t understand the questions on his grammar homework and why would he need this if he would just end up selling newspapers on the corner for the rest of his life but right now he looked at his mothers aging face her hands torn from working at the clothing factory but she did what she had to do and the boy watches Maybe he wouldn’t be so cold tonight
I found the camera eye moments throughout the novel to be very interesting. They take a step back from the narrative and explain a single scene. I tried to take some the the elements that I saw throughout the different camera eye passages and combine them into my piece. One of the first things that I noticed was the lack of punctuation or capitalization. Instead, many of the camera eye pieces contain run on paragraphs or play around with spacing and sentence structure. I also did some research about what the average hourly wage was in the 1930’s as well as what the cost of food was. I felt like this would help my piece feel more grounded and help date the piece. I had fun writing this, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Dos Passos makes it work so well in his novel, but it was really hard to figure out what imagery I wanted to depict and how to make it work without the grammar that I’m used to using.
This is an interesting imitation–stylistically it captures the sense of DP’s Camera Eye sections, but it’s also divorced in some ways from your own experience. I wonder what an imitation would look like if this was you framing a moment in your own existence (as a child, perhaps) that continues to resonate with you. How would you recreate the internal world of an earlier version of yourself? I’d love to see that kind of exercise as well. Great attention here to the formal particulars of the Camera Eye sections which do such an interesting job of capturing so concretely (and yet, disorientingly) subjective states of mind.