Rick Moody's Boys

One of the first things that struck me about this short story was the flow of it. I feel like it was almost more song lyrics than a story since it has that sort of flow to it. It seems that every other story in this book I read is more like poetry than an actual story. However, that isn't to say I didn't enjoy the structure. I found it to add something to the writing, making it easier to read.

The repetition struck me as almost necessary to the structure since it gives all these ideas a common ground. Another thing that I also thought was necessary was that it didn't actually read like a story. There's a huge difference between reading "There was once a boy who entered a house and (insert the actions here)" and "Boys enter the house, (insert action here)". It makes the reader feel like they are present at the time that the action takes place - and it very well should, considering the fact that it is said in present time.

All of the actions are, in my opinion, also essential to the message as a whole. The one part that struck me as completely sad was the mention of the boys holding their sister's hand after she is diagnosed with (I'm assuming) leukemia. It's sadness seemed accentuated by the fact that most of the story itself is full of trivial things that boys do. The second part that really chewed at me was when the narrator talks about the father of the boys dying. I think the message he was trying to convey was this: the true test of manhood comes from being completely on your own without your family.

T.C. Boyle's Greasy Lake

At first, I didn't know what to think about the story. It started off innocently enough and even reminded me of my summers back home. However, things took a turn for the worse as the narrator and his two friends went to tease one of their friends by finding a car that looked like his parked in a secluded area. Instead, they found some random guy getting it on with his girlfriend (….maybe). What then follows is them knocking the guy out and almost raping the girl, only to almost be caught by police. The boys scramble and hide and the narrator finds a dead body. For me, I think the dead body had the most significance in the story. After all, here he is in danger of being killed and there’s just this dead body next to him. It struck me as some type of symbol, because the first part of the story is them basically ‘just being kids’, running around town and going out to bars to get drunk. It made me stop for a few moments and think about mortality as a whole, especially since it is revealed near the end that the dead body is actually a young guy. I guess it just went to show that we’re not as immortal as we think we are.

Kincaid's Girl

Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid, struck me as a very interesting piece of work. For one thing, it reads more like a list of instructions about trivial things in the beginning of it, but then moves on to more abstract ideas. I can’t really make much of a comment on the story, because there is no real story to it. Instead, she tends to say something and then move on with the idea, but in an almost completely different direction. The story itself isn’t so much a story as the way a person’s thought seems to move from one idea to the next. In this sense, Girl is a piece of ‘stream of consciousness’ literature because it runs in this sense. The general idea – or what I got from it – was that it seemed like a list of things one would tell a little girl to keep her well-behaved. In fact, I identified with this a lot because I grew up playing with the neighborhood boys because there were no girls my own age in our neighborhood. So, what it meant to me was the things my parents told me as I got older and had to start ‘acting my gender’. I think that’s what Kincaid’s Girl really meant.

Blog Assignment - Catasrophe

To be completely honest, both the play and the video of the play are completely confusing to me. I usually try to look for at least a little bit of meaning in things like this, but I could not find much of anything. That said, the video of the play did help me to at least understand it better. The text of it just seems to be meaningless and at first I thought it had something to do with a corpse they were positioning (though I have no clue as to why I thought this). It was only when I viewed the video that I realized that they were actually talking about a man. I could not actually glean much of anything from either, though. It seemed to me that it was a useless play that had almost nothing to do with anything. In fact, I felt like it was a slight waste of my time. The only comparison I could see between the film and the text was that the film made it slightly clearer to me. It was a really bizarre work of both writing and art, but I cannot say I enjoyed it at all. It left me wondering exactly where the playwright was going with it.