Six Second Summary
Stimulus Booklet:
Text One (Discursive) - Being a Traveller Doesn’t Automatically Mean You’re Open-Minded (Carlo Alcos)
THERE’S A GENERALLY ACCEPTED NOTION — amongst travelers, at least — that if you travel you will become wise, more knowledgeable, more compassionate, that your mind will open like a lotus flower. From this flows the idea that to travel is to reach for an ideal, a heightened sense of humanness, of becoming more “one” with the world.
Over the years, since I’ve been involved in the travelsphere, I’ve seen tweets, Facebook statuses, article submissions, and blogs that make it evident to me that this is the prevailing thought — that to become wise and compassionate, you need to travel. Travel becomes religion, and the congregation loves to spread the gospel.
While travel can be a means to an end, it is not the end. Travel, by its nature, is like a hammer. Same with social media. None of these things is “good” or “bad” on its own. They’re tools. A hammer can build a house, but it can also end a life. Social media can help raise money to treat someone’s cancer or support a charitable organization, but it can also be used to bully people, driving them to suicide.
While there is no substitute for travel to see, firsthand, different cultures and places, the question remains, does one really need to see, firsthand, different cultures and places? Here is a famous quote that commonly makes the rounds, which seems to support that, yes, everyone needs to travel:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” ~ Mark Twain
It would be a stretch to conclude from this that anyone who doesn’t travel is a bigot, prejudiced, and narrow-minded. That’s obviously not what he meant. Yet the way it’s used within the travel community sometimes leads me to believe that that is one of the insinuations of the person sharing the quote.
Travel becomes religion, and the congregation loves to spread the gospel.
Isn’t it possible that even travellers can be narrow-minded? Just because a trip round the world was “enlightenment” for one doesn’t guarantee it will be “enlightenment” for another. But within the travelsphere, there seems to be a presumption that travel is necessary to open your mind.
Just as there are many travellers who return home without any profound shift in their worldviews, there are many who do experience that shift without stepping foot outside their hometowns.
I’d like to use my partner as a case study. While she has lived in various cities across Canada and has driven some great distances, she has never travelled outside of North America. She has never been immersed in foreign languages, customs, and different ways of living. Yet she is one of the most conscious, aware, compassionate, sensitive, open-minded people I’ve ever met. She is much more open-minded than the majority of travellers I’ve met. And I’m sure she’s not the only one.
What if we look at travel from another perspective? Rather than travel being arriving at some foreign destination, what if it were just a departure from our own culture? Following that, do we need to physically go somewhere to remove ourselves from our culture
Whether we like to admit it or not, we are guided along our path by a culture that is incessantly chattering in our ears, telling us how to behave, what to wear, what to like, how to think, how we should feel about ourselves. And since the way we treat others is a reflection on the way we treat ourselves, it should follow that if I free myself from thinking how I should be, then I free myself from thinking how others should be. To me, this is a step in opening our minds, in beating down prejudice. In this context, perhaps to travel would mean to turn off the television, boycott “lifestyle” magazines, stop reading newspapers.
What I’m getting at is this: Travellers don’t own the patent on how to be a better person. We all have our own paths in life, and we should be encouraging and supporting each other in whatever it is we want to do.
By all means, travel. Or don’t. Go to college. Or don’t. Just think for yourselves and keep an open mind.
Text Two (Feature Article) - A Eulogy for Danny’s Tavern (Jacob Arnold)
Danny's Tavern, the intimate, candlelit, apartment-shaped bar that's been a fixture of Chicago nightlife for 34 years, is permanently closed. It'd been shuttered due to the pandemic since March 18, and its owners told staff in early October that it wouldn't be opening again. Rumors of the closure started circulating on social media midway through last month, and Block Club confirmed the bad news on November 5.
The Bucktown bar was best known for its popular soul, Smiths, and disco nights, but over the years it also hosted obscure electronic music, poetry readings, art installations, live jazz, and much more. Danny's was an odd space in an unlikely spot—its location at 1951 W. Dickens was on a largely residential block—but its cheap, untrendy drinks and eclectic music reliably attracted large, diverse audiences. It was that rare kind of place that people fell in love with at first sight, where regulars became staff and stayed on for decades.
The bar’s namesake, aspiring power-pop musician Danny Cimaglio opened Danny's in 1986 after he and his wife, Barbara, pooled resources with two other couples. It was nearly called Pete & Danny's Truck Stop, because plumber and bartender Peter Nelson was among the investors.
Bucktown was still a working-class neighborhood, populated largely by first-generation immigrant families. The tavern in a two-flat that became Danny's had previously been a bakery and then a reputed bookie joint. Bartender Angie Hebda lived upstairs for a time. The downstairs space, the rear of which had previously been an apartment, had small tables and a dartboard.
In 1990, Terry Alexander and Michael Noone, two friends of Nelson's who tended bar at other establishments, closed a deal to buy Danny's. They managed it themselves for the first few years, and would soon begin its transformation from a jukebox bar into a showcase for curated music.
"Prior to us buying it, Danny's had a rockabilly culture and motif to it—a real Elvis Presley kind of bar," Noone recalls. Since rockabilly wasn't their scene, Alexander and Noone invited artists to redecorate its rooms, among them photographer and performance artist Sheree Rose, mixed-media artists Ike Hobbs and Martin Giese, and painters Dave Rodman and Tom Billings.
"In the front room, where the bar was, we would have an artist feature his or her work for a couple of months at a time," Noone says. "The back rooms were permanent installations that we'd switch out every couple of years." The bathroom, off what would become the dance floor, still had a working tub and shower, which one artist filled with papier-mâché sculptures under plexiglass.
"It was kind of the wild, wild west back then," Alexander says. "We went upstairs and made that part of the bar. We also went to the backyard. We had bands play on the garage roof. We also had what we called a 'cafe' out front." Alexander and Noone distributed business cards with a map to Danny's on the reverse, since the neighborhood was hardly a hub for nightlife.
At first Alexander provided the bar's music. "Michael and I put every penny we had into the bar," he explains. "I didn't have an apartment—I was actually staying there. So we bartended, we cleaned, we stocked the beer, and back then we had cassettes. We spent an hour a day cueing up the songs we thought we would be playing that night. So Danny's started not as turntables—it was cassettes. Rock, soul, grunge, or funk; De La Soul to Sisters of Mercy to My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult to the Velvet Underground."
A backup singer for My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult got a job working the bar at Danny's, which helped it become a hangout for Wax Trax! artists. They mingled with neighborhood regulars and assorted other weirdos. "We would have these old Romanians that lived on the block come in, we'd have bikers—the Outlaws used to hang out there. We'd have a lot of people from Berlin [nightclub] that would come down there," Noone remembers. "It was amazing how many different people from different backgrounds would be in that bar at the same time."
"To have any restaurant or any bar be closed for a year, I don't know if you can survive," Alexander says. He explains that even before the pandemic, Danny's wasn't breaking even, so that he and Noone had to divert their own money into the business. "Honestly, Michael and I kept Danny's afloat for many, many years. It was a labor of love. But it just gets to a point where you're so far underwater that—you hate to do it, but there was nothing we could really do."
Once again, the Danny's community has responded with an outpouring of love—the testimonies collected here barely scratch the surface. "That sucks that it's closing, because it's by far my favorite bar in the whole world," says Jeff Parker. With a laugh, he adds, "And I've been to a lot of bars."
Text Three (poem) - PASSED ON (Carole Satymurti)
Before, this box contained my mother.
For months she’d sent me out for index cards, scribbled with a
squirrel concentration
while I’d nag at her, seeing strength
drain, ink-blue, from her finger-ends
providing for a string of hard winters I was
trying not to understand.
Only after, opening it, I saw
how she’d rendered herself down from flesh
to paper, alphabetical; there for me in
every way she could anticipate
- Acupuncture: conditions suited to
- Books to read by age twenty-one
- Choux pastry: how to make, when to use.
The cards looked after me. I’d shuffle them
to almost hear her speak. Then, the world was box-
shaped (or was I playing safe?)
for every doubt or choice, a card that fitted
- Exams: the best revision strategy
- Flowers: cut, how to make them last
- Greece: the men, what you need to know.
But then they seemed to shrink. I’d turn them over, find
them blank, the edges furred, mute,
whole areas wrong, or missing. Had she known?
The language pointed to what wasn’t said.
I’d add notes of my own, strange beside
her urgent dogmatism, loosening grip
- infinitives never
telling love lust
single issue politics
when
don't hopeless careful trust.
On the beach, I built a hollow cairn, tipped in
the cards. Then I let her go.
The smoke rose thin and clear, slowly blurred. I’ve
kept the box for diaries, like this.
Text Four (Prose Fiction Extract) – In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried (Amy Hempel)
"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it."
I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on. The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.
"Go on, girl," she said. "You get used to it."
I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings "Stand by Your Friends"? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does "You're Having Our Baby." That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.
"What else?" she said. "Have you got something else?"
Oh, yes. For her I would always have something else. "Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons."
"Oh, that's good," she said. "A parable."
"There's more about the chimp," I said. "But it will break your heart."
"No, thanks," she says, and scratches at her mask.
We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones—a pro by now—she lets hang loose.
We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It's the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.
She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.
"I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada."
"That's how dumb we were," I say.
"You could be sisters," the nurse says.
So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?
They do not ask.
Two months, and how long is the drive?
The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death.
I mean, he died. So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it—and hoping that I will live through it.
Questions:
Text One - Discursive (3 marks)
How does the article use persuasive language techniques to challenge the reader’s assumptions?
Text Two - Non-Fiction Extract (3 marks)
How does the non-fiction extract establish the character of a place?
Text Three - Poem (4 marks)
How does the poem represent the differing behaviours shaped by the motivation of love?
Text Four - Prose Fiction Extract (4 marks)
How does the text use dialogue and narrative voice to communicate ideas about the human experience?
Texts One, Two, Three and Four (6 marks)
How do TWO of your given texts represent the process of dealing with loss?
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