Comments on: Columbine

By: Matt Mclaughlin

Matt Mclaughlin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:04:53 +0000

Great article, I’m really enjoying your blog.

By: liz

liz — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:16:55 +0000

I was in my senior year of high school during Columbine. The following day, half of the town’s police force was parked in the school parking lot, and we were told it was a “lock-down situation” to look out for copy cat acts. Any goth kid in black was questioned by authority figures, and most students felt instantly criminalized.

I still think about that severe, knee-jerk reaction to the incident by a suburban Michigan school thousands of miles from Littleton, Co. I remember it as the first time I realized that adults could feel viscerally threatened by teenagers.

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:31:45 +0000

When daily newspaper reporters attempt to be literary this is the inevitable outcome. It’s like sportswriters and the one-sentence paragraph.

By: sfmike

sfmike — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:44:08 +0000

What dan viesel said. “Elephant” may be Van Sant’s greatest arty film. It’s as formally elegant as “Last Year at Marienbad” but the subject matter is a sympathetic look at American youth as mass murderers (and it came out just when we started having 18-year-olds murdering Iraqis).

By: miserere

miserere — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:47:05 +0000

It made me think of
“There is, a house,
in New Orleans,
they call, the ri,sing sun…”

By: Marc Geelhoed

Marc Geelhoed — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:20:46 +0000

I’m willing to bet that most of Cullen’s readers will be from there and not the coasts, and so they won’t need any help understanding the place. You may feel like a tourist going there, but they feel entirely as out of place when they visit New York — which is one reason they never do. They’d feel pretty weird reading Bret Easton Ellis, I imagine.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:46:07 +0000

I don’t like. To read. Short, choppy, writing, either. You, are not alone.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:32:00 +0000

“There is a house, outside of Laramie. Itâ€™s a rugged Wyoming town on the fringes of the Rockies. Thatâ€™s where Dave and Linda Sanders were going to retire.”

These choppy sentences are reminiscent of the “frozen peas” advertisements that Orson Welles worked on. (“We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs. Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V14PfDDwxlE

By: Edith

Edith — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:12:53 +0000

My first editor taught me to avoid starting sentences with “there is” or “there was” because it is dull and passive.

What really annoys me lately is the horrid fad for present tense narration, in both fiction and nonfiction books. Borrowed from magazine journalism, it strikes me as a cheap, tacky attempt to manufacture immediacy for events which have (obviously) already taken place.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:54:15 +0000

â€œThere is a house, outside of Laramie, it’s called The Rising Sun.â€

By: dan visel

dan visel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:53:23 +0000

You've seen Gus van Sant's Elephant, right? It's a weirdly beautiful movie - I particularly remember liking the sound design of it. I think PÃ¤rt's Spiegel im Spiegel is used in it? or maybe that's Gerry.

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:28:50 +0000

“I think Cullen does his readers a disservice to assume that we understand the nature of the place.”

I would agree. I grew up in Highlands Ranch (technically Littleton), attended a very similar high school just down the road, etc. and now live in Boulder, a very different place culturally. The more time I spend away from the suburbs, the less even I feel like I understand them. I think it would have made for a more fascinating book if he hadn’t made the assumption that suburban America is any more “normal” than any other American sub-culture.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:59:17 +0000

Nico,

Thank you for describing your inability to accept “that straightforward a description of high schoolersâ€™ social networks.”

I was also in high school when this and other American school shootings happened (Paducah, KY; Pearl, MS; Jonesboro, AR), and I remember being frustrated with Dateline NBC-style analysis of the social lives of kids my age. Suburban teenagers were presented by the media in such a Column A or Column B way, that some of the adults in my life began to buy in to it, and start to eerily observe us, as to sort the “good kids” from the potential Trenchcoat Mafia sleeper cells.

Sarah Palin indeed grossly oversimplifies and polarizes when she makes “real America” speeches, but maybe ten years after Columbine, the mainstream media has come a little closer to calling bullshit when we are presented with such a Good vs. Evil declamation. Maybe.

I haven’t read Cullen’s book, but I’m glad that you point out that a perch in the middle of the country doesn’t necessarily offer the clearest vantage point to survey the entire land.

By: ZachW

ZachW — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:56:47 +0000

Whoops – just read Galen’s comment. What he said.

By: ZachW

ZachW — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:52:43 +0000

That stilted style smacks of NPR. Of course, it works very well on the radio, but it’s like writing a book with the mindset that you’ll eventually have to read it for an audio book. Ira Glass makes for good radio, but I’d slit my wrists if I had to read 1,000 pages in his style.