A Snapshot of US Culture

Cultural Poesis (Kathleen Turner) are vignettes on U.S. culture. The American dream dissected as people peer inside fancy houses, reaching for that something that it's not reachable anymore; playing driving or supermarket games to see who is going to turn where, or who is going to what register; homeless signs in your face; sitting at a biker's diner and listening to jokes about deer; the body culture seen through Body of Life; Laurie Anderson's songs. I finished reading it and thought I had been there: I look inside those fancy apartments, I make Myoplex shakes, and go to the gym in the hopes of reaching the Body of Life, and I feel that way when the homeless show their signs. Then I went back to the beginning and saw her explanations to write that way: "The subject I "am" in the stories I tell is a point of impact meandering through scenes in search of linkages, surges, and signs of intelligence. I suppose that the writing gropes toward embodied affective experience." The discussion we had in class about evoking experience became clearer to me. She writes that her piece "talks to the reader not as a trusted guide carefully lying the perfect links between theoretical categories and the real world but rather as a subject caught in the powerful tension between what can be known and told and what remains obscure or unspeakable but is nonetheless real." It is as if she went around with her camera clicking everywhere and capturing all these pieces of life. At the end I felt that she had capture something about the way one lives here and now.