Reading Response

Jason McGee
I believe both essays to be written in first person. Hogg, she is writing about her experience with a famous singer, Davey Jones. She talks about her fondness for him as she was a child and her fascination with him as she begins to grow older. Yet later in the reading she begins to lose the once obsessive attraction to Davey as he begins to slip into history. She finds out when she gets to Fort Randall that he is staying at the same place she is, rooming right next to her, and eating at the same buffet as her. Not living the once luxurious life he once had. She begins to really look at his role as a singer at Fort Randall Dam and seems to feel sorry for him. “As soon as he exits the stage, I wonder out loud if we should buy tickets to the second show. Yet it differs at the same time because there is not a real tension. It’s more of a loss than anything. She is not having a conflict with Davey but his popularity. She hates to see this once elite singer who had thousands of people at these concerts goes to forty. While in Blacks writing the first person tension between the subject and writer is her conflict with trying to find something she loves about the place she lives. She was so succumbed to finding coffee shops and burying her nose into books about distant places. “Instead of surfing, I hunted down the few coffee shops Honolulu could offer and buried myself in novels set in faraway times and places.” She was always thinking about places and things far away from where she actually was and never looked around to smell the roses. To really enjoy what she had around her. The loving environment that was on the tip of her nose.
I found in “The subject of the essay is often commonplace,” that Hogg’s writing was just about her daily life, and about Davey Jones’s career. It was about both her fondness for him, while at the same time it was almost a timeline of his downward career as a singer. It was not a noun, yet feelings and lifestyle. In Blacks essay the subject was her feeling of exploration. Where she finally finds something she enjoys and begins to explore the cultural, spiritual, and mental aspect of what’s around her. “Several hours pass, and I am still bent over among silky, heart-shaped leaves that nod pleasantly at me in the breeze, marveling at the mud as it slips smooth between my toes, the long, hidden weeds straining against my foot soles.”
The thesis I found in Hogg’s writing was that even though Davey Jones career went downhill she still managed to have those same feelings toward him even though he was kind of run down. “I could get up from the bed I am sitting on, take about ten steps, and be in his room.” While in Blacks writing the thesis was more of a message. What it implied to me was that you should always look around you. Smell the roses and indulge in the culture that surrounds. Try to get involved, there will always be a place for you somewhere no matter how stubborn you are to the world around. “I can’t believe I was clueless about it for so long.”
In Hogg’s essay I found that she had researched plenty by the timeline she had for Davey Jones. She knew names of people, who were involved with him, and locations. “Don Kirshner (head of Screen Gems-Columbia music) later told a Monkees biographer, “I was going to let the boys do their own thing, but my standards were number one records and hits.”” But in Blacks writing it seemed to be more of a personal experience. She wrote as if she was just thinking about it on her own. It was a story, given that she knew all of the places she mentioned pretty well.
In Hogg’s essay it was very evident that she shifted from her life back then, along with Davey Jones’s success at the time. She would even state what his career was like as she grew up as if it was a timeline of her feelings for him and his careers success. “At the concert in June of 1986, fans of the Monkees filled the buffalo Bill Rodeo Arena. Before the Monkees came on stage, I pushed my way to the front of the crowd until I was stopped by a scowling security guard.” In Blacks writing she only shifts from when she was against Hawaii and the now. She talks about how she tried to escape Hawaii and would study abroad for college just to escape. While this would demonstrate to the reader why she was just now discovering a new place that she had been home to for so long.
I believe the “so what” of Hogg’s essay to be, stick with something you love. No matter how outdated, imperfect, or old. If you really enjoy something it will be around if you want it enough. In the story she loves Davey Jones and his music and even ten years later he is still around, given that he is not number one anymore, she still goes to his show because of her fondness with him from her early years. While Blacks is a message for all, to never try to escape something you don’t understand. Try to embrace it and educate yourself about the world around you.