Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid reminded me of an assignment I didfor Writer’s Mind with Professor Maxson. It was a multi-genre paper, whichmeant that we could incorporate poems, lists, narrative, odd spacing, etc.Pretty much anything that went against the norms of a traditional collegeresearch paper. I absolutely loved the paper I did, I had so much fun with it. I wrote a story about a doctor who accidentallycreated a virus that turned people into zombies. I had narrative, newspaperarticles that I wrote myself but that I formatted to look like they were real,a poem and even a letter that was hand-written on notebook paper for the final draft. Then I stapledall these together so that my paper looked like a scrapbook. It was totally awesome.

Anyway, I liked the poem at the beginning of “Billy the Kid.” I’llbe honest, I almost skipped over it because I thought it was part of thecopyrights and dedication and all that boring crap on the inside cover of abook that nobody ever looks at. But then I did read it and I liked it becauseit was background story on the house and what goes on in the house. Ondaatje didn’tfeel the need to go into as much detail about the history of the house, but hedid need to tell the reader why the house is important. And he did that throughthe poem. The poem was the complete opposite of the narrative that followed it,which was richly detailed, right down to the “suction as an arm lifts off atable breaking the lock that was formed by air and the wet of the surface.”

I think there were three different perspectives in Ondaatje’spiece because the first poem was very smoothly written, had proper grammar andpunctuation so I assume it was written by Sallie. The poem at the end of thepiece, however, would have made my old English teacher poop a brick becausethere was zero punctuation and the spelling was bad in a few places. It soundedlike broken English to me, I don’t know if that was intentional, but I supposethe gist of it was that either the narrator of the poem is slowly going insaneor he’s talking about Billy the Kid’s dead body floating in a river. Eitherway, I got a strong feeling of disgust and foreboding, just because of therepeated references to rats. The more I read it, the more it grew on me. It waslike a car accident.


On to the microfiction, Fernandez’s “Wrong Channel”  was hysterical, when the doctor was askingabout TB and Barbarita was talking about TV. The fact that the interpreter wasn’tvery good at speaking English should have been a red flag for Barbarita, but I guessit was better than nothing. But this story was also kind of sad because thedoctor was trying to tell this woman that she had a serious illness and she wasjust completely missing the point. Perhaps this was a social commentary onillegal immigration or something. Whatever it was, it was funny. And short!Hooray for flash fiction!

I liked Berry’s “Mockingbird” because it showed what blindfools love can make of us. The story was also ironic in that on the surface,the couple lived a perfect life, but then something ugly slipped to the surfaceand just for a second, when the guy said he’d rather inherit a rich life, thewoman saw reality and thought maybe she shouldn’t be with this guy. Then lovepunched her in the face and he said something cutesy to get out of trouble, andthings were “alright again”. Meanwhile, there’s a little albino boy playing inthe yard next door, which called for more irony in that, since he’s albino he’sgoing to have a hard life, trying to make friends and fit into society, whilethe fairly well-to-do couple next door’s only problem is that they don’t haveas nice a house as their friends, who are slowly drowning in their miserable,domestic lifestyle.

In Nelson’s “Land’s End” a woman is jumping the border….to Mexico.

I love irony. It’s good for you.

In Gopnik's piece, I liked the imagery of the musicless carousel. It was, for me, a satisfying image of irony, of something that’s supposed to be cheerful, but isn’t because it’s broken and battered from Time’s relentless hammering. And yet the carousel still moves and so the kids still ride it. Of course, the ride would be much better with the music, but the children can fill in the blanks, the silence, on their own. It evoked a feeling of sadness but also determination. All things become chipped and meek shadows of their former selves, but you’re not dead til your dead.

I also like the dreariness of the ring game. I liked the fact that even if you are good at the game, you don’t get rewarded for it. You just accept that you’re good at it, get off the ride, and do something else. This is the opposite of the American Way. If you’re good at something, you want people to know it. Football players showboat after a touchdown, baseball players stand and watch the ball fly over the stadium before very slowly running the bases towards home plate, musicians have hours-long awards ceremonies during which they pat each other on the back for making millions of dollars on a one-hit wonder. It’s not hard to spot an American in Europe, they’re so loud and rambunctious. That’s the way we do things. Europeans are more understated.

The final sad point (perhaps a matter of opinion) was that the carousel is being replaced by video games. When Baudrillard was talking about the Regulon in the Semiosphere, it seemed that he was pining for the Good Old Days of playing outside and walking three miles to and from school in the rain or sunshine. He didn’t seem to be a fan of technology, which he seemed to think was a form of false reality. In a way it is, especially when you look at video games, which are becoming more and more real visually, but not…physically. I mean, World of Warcraft and games like that are visually incredible, but there’s no such thing as dragons and dwarves and stuff like that. But there are so many people who are addicted to these games and feel that the real world is boring. I can understand that argument, but I love playing video games, a healthy amount I think, and I believe they’re just upgraded versions of the carousel.

I was like Joyce in school, I loved to read of fantastic adventures, but I was too chicken to actually go and look for adventure. He’s right, you can’t just wait for it to fall into your lap (not unless you’re Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter) you have to go find it. I wasn’t able to get up the courage to skip the second half of lunch period, let alone skip a whole day of school. But I would love to be a fearless Gryffindor—I mean, adventurer….Like Harry and his loyal companions….

Now to talk about place and characters, I thought it was interesting that the characters were so interested in the Wild West, emphasis on the "wild" because the characters were clean-cut boys who went to some kind of religious private school. I think they were so drawn to wild west stories because it was the opposite of who they were in real life, except when they skipped school to go on their little adventure. Another thing that was ironic about the "wild west" thing was that the boys skipped school and wandered around a place with "noisy streets flanked by high stone walls" and "working cranes and engines" which are all features of a populated city. But the Wild West is...well, wild. There are no structures, no machinery. No rules. That's why the boys loved it, I think.

P.S. There was a lot of British/Irish slang and terminology in this piece. It was hard to figure out sometimes, but it reminded me of when I read Anne of Green Gables, for some strange reason. But that’s a good thing. It reminded me of springtime where the trees are heavy with pastel leaves and the ground is covered with bright, fragile flowers. The breeze is warm, but not heavy like in summer. And it tastes sweet.

This is a very long blog post.

In Living the Narrative Life I loved how Pagnucci made a distinction between essays and actual stories because I agree that there is a big difference between the two. When your teacher says, “Okay guys. I want you to write an essay about what you did this summer,” he or she is expecting a topic sentence and five paragraphs. Each paragraph has five sentences that can’t be too long, like a run-on sentence, or too short, like an incomplete sentence. But I don’t think an essay is a good way to express what you did over the summer because it is so precise and orderly. Life is not perfect, there are moments like crazy run-on sentences like if you’re in the waiting room at the dentist’s for two hours and there are other moments that are incomplete sentences, like when you remember that you need to do something but you can’t remember what it is. Life is unpredictable and chaotic and that’s why it’s interesting. When you write an essay about life, you have to generalize the events so they can fit into five paragraphs, there’s no room for you to explore the minute details of a particular summer day. The warm breeze lifting your hair off of your sweaty forehead. Two squirrels chasing each other up a tall oak tree whose branches reach up to the sky as if in joy and triumph, mirroring the screaming children on the dusty baseball diamond below. You just can’t beat imagery like that.

The stories that form my life were Goosebumps, the Harry Potter series, and, most recently,H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King novels/stories. The people who know me now know that I’m a huge King fan so when I tell them that I want to be a writer they say, “Ooooooh, you want to write scary gory stories like Stephen King, huh?” And I hesitate before saying yes, but that’s not really the truth because I want to write more for young adults, which stems from my obsession with J.K. Rowling’s fantasy book series. So it’s hard for people to imagine a combination of Carrie and Harry. And sometimes, I find myself starting an innocent enough story with a young cast of characters but by the end, nearly everyone’s dead or about to die. I enjoy putting a dark twist to things…but like King, sometimes I’m ashamed to admit that.

In A Native Hill when Berry was talking about leaving NY University to go back to Kentucky, he said that he had achieved his goal of having a good job and talking with other writers and learning from them. This made me think of how depressing it is when I think I have a really good story idea and I start writing it and one day I’m surfing on Google and I see that my idea has already been taken. At that point I say, “To heck with it, I’m writing my story anyway.” And I guess that’s just it. The difference between my story and the other guy’s story is that mine is mine. Stories can be similar in the way a character might react to a situation, but each character is unique in their own way. I have thoughts for my character that no author can put in his head. Even if I don’t write those thoughts down, even if they’re just backstory, my character’s backstory is different from yours. But I still shy away from talking to other people about writing. Suggestions from acquaintances and family are especially unwanted because most of them laugh at me when I say I want to be a writer, anyway, so why would I care about their opinion? And when I give my creative writing teachers a story, I simply want them to like it….i don’t want them to change it….just to like it. Because if they change it, then it won’t be mine.

I’ll make for a lovely children’s writer, don’t you think?

Started this blog for a course. This should be interesting.