Juice

When I first started reading this book I thought I understood what was going on. I thought it was about this person that was left in his society by himself. He left his town and when he returned the town was deserted, as stated on page 13 "I am not concerned about how the townspeople will express themselves upon their return; they could come in happiness or in extreme anger and it would not bother me. The point is that they return." As I kept reading throughout the story the theme changed. Now I started thinking that maybe the beginning was the present of the main characters life, and throughout the book he was reminiscing of past experiences he had had with people. He was so set on the townspeople returning and on page 19 he states, "In the appearance of any species there is an element of its disappearance and within its disappearance a particle of return." So while everything disappeared, he also said that many of the plants and all the fruit has disappeared, there is always that hope of them returning.

There are certain parts in this book that reminded me of other things that I have either read for the class already, or a movie that I've seen before. One line is on page 9 and its says, "The town took a child from every family, plus each child's third eldest cousin, and started to call us a gang." In the movie 300, which is all about Sparta and the wars they were in, in the beginning it shows that any couple who had a baby boy would have to give him up for training when he was very small. If the child was weak or diseased he was thrown off a cliff to face his death. The others were turned into fearless warriors to help protect the civilization. The line from the book reminded me of the movie. Another line from this book reminded me of the short story we had to read for class, Internal. "You get to a point in isolation where you have to grab the reins; you can't let the silence get to you" (Page 15). The point in the Internal when the interns are starting to lose their mental state because of being in silence for so long. This line in the story reminded me of that because it says that you can't let the silence get to you. The main character is alone in his society and still finds ways to keep himself occupied somehow. If he didn't keep himself occupied he would have ended up "going nuts" to say just like the interns in the Internal.

Overall, this story just confused me. It jumped around a lot and did not hold a constant theme all throughout. At one point he is by himself in his society, another part towards the end he is with his neighbors and one of the neighbors goes missing and nobody can find her. Some point during the story he is on a train, just people watching. Other points hes talking about his lovers. I had to closely take mental notes of where the character was during the part that I was reading at any given moment, because the setting changed so much and so rapidly. I'm very confused as to if he was actually alone or if others were around him, and one final thought, how did Juice actually play a part in this? Since the title is Juice, I figured it would've had a greater effect on the story, but it only shows up a couple times explaining how much he loved juice at one point, and at other points he just couldn't bring himself to drink more juice. What is it about the juice?!

Writing Stories

In the Lamott packet, there is one so called 'chapter' all about characters. It goes into detail about how to make a character in your story and how to make others enjoy reading about your characters. One point he made is "a person's faults are largely what make him or her likable." It may be hard to remember to make your characters have some type of fault. No human is superman, we all have faults of our owns, and characters should display some of these faults. This also helps the reader relate to the character when they are reading about them, which always makes the reading more enjoyable to read. I believe when characters seem to invincible it makes the story seem very unrealistic. With my writing I will have to remember that characters are to portray real humans, and real humans have many faults.

One section I really found interesting in the Lamott packet, still in the character section towards the end was when he said, " One final reminder: you probably won't know your characters until weeks or months after you've started working with them... just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple." When I read this passage it made me think that once you start writing, never think too far ahead in the story line. Let the thoughts and ideas just come to you as you write. Let your characters change throughout the story, don't even have a set schedule for them because it may not turn out the way you first planned. Be open to your characters and allow yourself freedom to have your characters change. When I would write stories in high school I'd try to figure out the whole story line before I even started writing instead of letting my mind wander while I wrote. Lesson learned, always give your characters freedom to change and develop throughout the story.

The first writing assignment we had was to change the words in one of the short shorts that we read and then add on to it. When I first started I just let my mind wander and went along with the first words that came to my mind. I didn't have a certain path that I wanted to take, and honestly didn't know what the topic was until I was already halfway done. Instead of stressing out about trying to pick a topic and then choose words to fit that topic, I just picked words that popped into my head first and then when I got farther along in the writing I stopped and reread what I already had. After I did all that I finally decided to pick a topic. I felt that this was much easier to do because I wasn't trying to find words that fit a certain topic, instead I picked a topic that matched the words I already had down.

Short Short Stories

Most of these stories all had great meaning and I could have chose any number of them to write about. It was difficult to decide which one to write and analysis about. Some of my favorites were The Wallet and Walking The Baby To The Liquor Store, but I decided to write this blog about one of the stories that we didn't discuss in class. This didn't leave me very many options but in the end I chose to go with Morning News by Jerome Stern.

In this story, the beginning line gives way to the whole story, "I get  bad news in the morning and faint. Lying on tile, I think about death..." I take this line as the main character gets news that he has some illness that is causing him to die sooner then he thought. He reminisces with his wife about a tombstone that they saw a while back that said Peace at last. That makes me think that this guy did not know about his illness, or possibly thought it was getting better, and then the doctor hits him with the bad news. But the saying on the tombstone makes me think that his illness has caused him to be in pain and he just wants peace from it all.

When people find out they're going to die soon they start to think about what they did during their life and what they still would like to do. In this story the man thinks about what he wants to do, and states, "I feel a failure of imagination. I should want something fantastic-- a final meal atop the Eiffel Tower." He can't think of anything that he wants to do that is spectacular like that, and he blames it on not being brought up religious. The thing that I find kind of funny in this story is that at the end he says him and his wife drive to the discount warehouse and they pick out the largest television set in the store. It makes me laugh that that's all he can think of to do when he knows he is going to die soon.

In the end this story makes me actually think what I might do if I was in his situation. I can't imagine knowing that I was going to die soon and possibly be relieved because I wouldn't be in pain anymore. Wondering what I might do to go out with a bang. Something fantastic maybe. Makes me feel a lot of emotions towards this man in the story and his wife even, because as much as the man is going through the illness his wife is right along for the ride with him.

Finally (Short Stories 1)

First, I would love to say how happy I am to be done reading poetry! I love reading fiction, and can comprehend it so much better, but now with my reaction to one of the short stories. Even though it wasn't that short, I read Internal, which is part of Contagion by Brian Evenson.

While reading this I became very interested, and came up with multiple questions. At the beginning this intern works for a Doctor Rauch, which raised the question of what kind of doctor was he? I assumed he was a psychologist because of the section that explained the books he wrote and also he sends his intern to study the behaviors of his brother. Sending his "irregular intern", which brings up another question of why is this intern so irregular? The intern seemed like any other intern, doing their job and following directions. When the intern gets to the apartment to study the brother, it reminded me of a horror flick. The imagery was so vivid, I actually thought of the movie 1408, which is a horror movie about a person getting trapped in a hotel room. One thing that I don't quite understand about this section is why Doctor Rauch would send his intern to an apartment for his brother to be studied when clearly no one has lived in the rooms on either side for some time. Was he trying to study his intern, and just told them that they were doing some research for him?

The second part caught me off guard a little bit. I thought it was going to end the same way the first half did, with the intern going to observe some one and then coming back empty handed, but it took a turn. The apartment seems to be a lot like the first apartment that the intern had to go to to observe. What really through me off was that instead of the intern observing, they in turn are being observed. Which makes me think that Doctor Ragan set his intern up to be observed by his brother, or maybe it wasn't even his brother...   The ending left me wanting to know more about what happened. Who was actually observing the intern, and what part did Ragan have in the whole set up? UGH! The ending is too abrupt, I want to know the whole story!