Kung Fu Trap Master

Susan Orleans's profile piece on 10 year old Colin was very descriptive. I loved the flow of this piece and the diction of it as well. She kept me enthralled and interested in this little boy throughout nine pages of detail and script about this little boys antics. Orleans's made me feel as if I was looking through a lens into Colin's day to to day life. There were two paragraphs that really stood out to me and really made me laugh at the simplicity and yet how cunning it was.

It's the last page of the reading and the last two paragraphs. Orleans describes Colin as devising a trap, and his inspiration was a boy in his class that had been pestering him. The paragraph begins with the narrator going over to Colin's house one afternoon for a few rounds of Street Fighter and how he started building the trap. She said that he was so absorbed in what he was doing that to me he seemed like a much focused Kung Fu master of traps. She described how he wrapped lace lining around and through the railing of the shed and back to the deck. "He encircled an old jungle gym, something he'd outgrown and abandoned a few years ago, and then crossed over a bush at the back of the yard. Briefly, he contemplated making his dog, Sally, part of the web. Dusk fell. He kept wrapping, paying out fishing line an inch by inch." Susan Orleans's did a fantastic job at capturing how intense this moment was and how focused Colin was. His concentration was unbreakable, his trap was elaborate in how she described how he encircled his old jungle gym and even thought about making his dog apart of his trap. To me that’s astonishing how she brought out his creativity in his elaborate scheme! She made her character truly come alive and seem so sure and knowing, as well as an extremely smart ten year old boy. However, the simplicity of it came out to me at the end when it got dark, she described how you could hardly see the lines of the trap and he tells her “That’s the point.” He told her how you could’ve used thread instead of fighting line but it is invisible and that’s perfect! He was so proud to be the only one who knows about his trap besides her and how it is virtually undetectable at night. “With that, he dropped the spool, and skipped up the stairs of the deck, threw open the screen door and then bounded into the house, leaving me and Sally his dog trapped in his web.” Amazing ending to me! It was well written and well executed. This evil genius of a little boy devised a trap that was so perfect and cunning that he was even able to trap her and his dog in the process! Although he was able to act so slyly with this trap, he still retained his youthful mind frame when he skipped up the stairs and away from them. I thought that was really cute and a really great way to end this piece.

Outspokenness, fantasy and cruelty in the central phase of mental growth

Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age Ten" appeared to be a stunning read, especially because of the reporting tone of the text in combination with the various credible details and quotes which make Colin Duffy clearly visible to everyone who has ever gotten in contact with a child in the age of ten. Except for the introductory paragraph, which combines the details to follow in a more experimental way and makes up a playful and attention-grabbing beginning for a text, "The American Male at Age Ten" is an observation in which the author may appear as a figure inside of the story, but seldom as an actual commenting narrator. It was admittedly hard for me to sort out a particular paragraph to comment on, but I finally decided on the following one from page three:

  It happened to be Colin's first day in fifth grade. Before class began, there was a lot of horsing
around, but there were also a lot of conversations about whether Magic Johnson had AIDS or just
HIV and whether someone falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his would get the disease. These
jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness are a ten-year-old's speciality. Each one comes as a fresh, hard surprise, like finding a razor blade in a candy apple. One day, Colin and I had been
discussing horses or dogs or something, and out of the blue he said, "What do you think is better,
to dump garbage in the ocean or to dump it on land, or to burn it?" Another time, he asked me if I
planned to have children. I had just spent an evening with him and his friend Japeth, during which
they put every small movable object in the house into Japeth's slingshot and fired it at me, so I told
him I wanted children but that I hoped they would all be girls, and he said, "Will you have an
abortion if you find out you have a boy?"

This passage is undoubtedly a highly accurate description of what conversations between children around the age of ten, a phase not only of physical but also of mental growth, can be like. It's both there, the naivety and the limitless, excessive fantasy of the early years, combined with a sometimes surprisingly deep understanding of the world and its problems. The first often leads to a sometimes shocking outspokenness when talking about topics, which in later years aren't addressed that easily because of social conventions and communicative boundaries. It's questions like "Will you have an abortion if you find out you have a boy?" which can make adults stutter sometimes. The adult world has forgotten how to cope with such honesty. Unfortunately, the child of ten will too within a short span of time. What is particularly childish about the conversation between the children though is that they are discussing HIV on the subject of basketball player Magic Johnson and the concrete example of "falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his".

I believe the reader really enters the story because of it's accurateness and again, the narrative reserve of the author. The examples and dialogues are credible and the whole paragraph the result of long and thorough observation of reality.

Hard-boiled isn't just for eggs?

Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age Ten" was both incredibly endearing and thought-provoking; I had a hard time peeling myself away from the screen through all nine pages. Yet, it was this paragraph on the second page that really stuck out to me:

 "He has had other losses in his lifle. He is o1d enough to know people who have died and to know things about the world that are worrisome. When he dreams, he dreams about moving ûo Wyoming which he has visited with his åmrly. His plan is to buy land there and have sorne sort of ranch that woull defniteþ include horses. Soretimes when he talks about this, it sormds as ordinary and hard-boiled as a real estate appraisal other times it can sound ñnøstical and wifly and achingþ naive, informed by the last inklings of childhood - the rnsìngs of a bahry real estate appraiser assaying a wonderfif and magical landscape tlnt erodes ûom memory a little bit every day. The collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he tgures orf, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines, makes an interesting mess. The mess often has the form ofwhat he will probabþ think lfte when he is a grown mar¡ but the content of what he is as a little boy."

Well, clearly some things have gotten a little confused in the copy-and-paste process, but aside from that, this paragraph is truly beautiful. Every line up to this point has managed to describe Colin in such an elaborate way while still maintaining a general sort of diction that is so straightforward and child-like that it is almost as if you are speaking to one of Colin's classmates who observes all of his doings. This portion is no exception, but just the second line, "He is old enough to know people who have died..." sparks a contrast against that feeling of naivete. It's such a simple way to observe Colin's age in both matters of maturity and chronology, and it introduces the idea that the audience is going to be learning more about Colin than superficial things like his love for Nintendo and the Eurhythmics. Orleans proceeds to talk about his plans to move to Wyoming and have a ranch, which is a seemingly un-extravagant idea, especially for a ten-year-old boy. Orlean realizes this, and uses a description I've never seen in literature, and one that I now adore. For when he talks about this grand idea to move to Wyoming, it sounds "as ordinary and hard-boiled as a real estate appraisal...". Even without encountering this figure of speech before, it's easy to know exactly what kind of image of blandness Orlean is trying to portray. Granted, she contrasts it immediately after by insisting that Colin can also make this plan of his sound "fantastical and achingly naive"; which are also fantastic ways of describing Colin's ways of thinking; but such a strange yet accurate image just stuck with me as I kept reading. Olrean then proceeds to delve into Colin's thoughts further by creating that long list of a sentence, listing "what he understands, hears, etc." This sentence itself excellently builds up both a categorization of Colin's mind and just what she describes it as, an "interesting mess". Here Orlean has created another phrase that I absolutely adore, because anyone that has had a prolonged conversation with a ten-year-old; male or female; can understand immediately what she's talking about. All of the things that are mentioned later to be running through Colin's head fit this description perfectly; his psyche can clearly be understood as an interesting mess, if it can be understood at all. It truly is a mess that "has the form of what he would look like as a man, but the content of what he is as a little boy".
In short, I'd want to give this paragraph a hug if I could. It's a true introduction to the type of person Colin is, the kind of writing the audience will see in Orlean's work, and a slight hint at how adult and child-like ideas constantly coincide in Colin's every day life.

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