Maps to Anywhere

      First of all, I wanted to talk about the idea of a book of small nonfiction essays.  This is the first of these types of books that I have read and I love the way each story is its own yet they all work together to form the overall idea of each character mentioned.  It is like each little scenario had its own story line yet showed Bernard Cooper and his family in different situations thus revealing their true characters.  I think this is a great way to go about writing a book if you are focused on defining the characters.

      "Say ""Cheese"" was a very interesting short story in Maps to Anywhere.  It is random and has nothing to do with anything and is just thrown into the mix which makes it unique.  "Perhaps photography is the cockroach of art forms, obdurate, common, multiplying, destined to outlive us and inherit the future."  This quote really stuck out to me because it made me realize how important photography really is in our society.  Since humankind began we have wanted to capture a moment.  First we painted it with the colors retrieved from squished berries, then from a paintbrush and canvas, then from a huge box that gave us a fuzzy representation in black and white, and now we have cameras that can capture every color and texture imaginable.  Just like the quote says photography has always been here since we had the technology for it and it will continue to expand and evolve into a more high-tech system because humans always want to remember something.  I think that Cooper wrote this based off experience.  His entire book is a sort of photograph.  Instead of a picture he uses words, but he still uses art to capture moments just as a photograph does. 

       My favorite section out of the book is "House of Cards."  In this section Cooper discusses visiting his dying brother's nurse's home.  Throughout the rest of this section Cooper discusses his brother's condition and how his brother has not much longer to live.  Cooper used to entertain his brother every Saturday while their mom disinfected Gary's room.  Cooper would try to entertain Gary so as to keep his mind off of the fact that he was dying and no one could do anything about it.  Later on, Cooper and his father visit Martin's, Gary's nurse, home and discover that the home is hanging off a cliff and is supported by a couple of thin beams instead of ground.  "Anna shivered, hugged her ribs.  "If I thought about it," she said, "I'd never get to sleep.""  Anna, Martin's wife, has to keep her mind off of the idea that she and her home are being supported by a couple of pieces of flimsy wood that could break at any minute or she would go crazy.  This reminds me of Gary.  "Gary must have felt as though he were living in a house of cards, that the merest breath, the wrong move could set in motion a chain reaction which threatened to topple everything solid- the lintels and beams of our stucco house, his own bones."  It makes sense if you think of Gary as similar to Martin's house.  Gary is so nervous about those little beams of health holding him to earth breaking that he needs a distraction being Cooper.  

         Along this same idea, Bernard Cooper makes Martin out to be a great help to Gary.  If you think of this passage that makes sense as well.  Martin is used to living dangerously in his home where at any moment he could fall off the cliff so he is able to relate to Gary who at any moment could be torn from the little protection he has and die.  I believe this is why Martin is able to help Gary more than anyone else and have the compassion necessary to help someone else's dying child.  

Fiction Packet 3

      "When It Rains It Rains A River" jumped out at me not as much for its symbolism and story line, but because of its sentence structure and diction.  "Us brothers, we love mud.  Mud, us brothers, we can't get us enough of mud."  It is almost as if the author takes a word or phrase out of the previous sentence and finds a place for it in the next sentence and continues to do this throughout the story.  This lends a sort of pattern to the story that is a distraction to the overall meaning, and done so on purpose I believe.  Also, as far as sentence structure, the sentences seemed to either be very short and choppy or separated by a plethora of commas.  This idea is unique but somewhat hard to read and by the end I am still unsure of the symbolism of "Girl" and the girls within "Girl." 
      I absolutely loved reading "The Falling Girl."  As far as sentence structure and diction the story was rather normal, but the message I received from it was impeccable.  ""You have your entire life before you," they told her, "why are you in such a hurry? You still have time to rush around and busy yourself.""  This quote I believe is the key to the story.  The author was trying to get at the idea that most 19 year olds, the age of the girl falling off the skyscraper, have.  The girl, who is later joined by many other girls, jumps off because she wants to reach the party at the bottom.  On the way down she is confronted by many people who try to help her and try to get her to simply enjoy life because it doesn't need to be one big rush to the finish line.  While falling she sees other girls falling and is more concerned with how her dress compares to them then the fact that in reality they are falling to their death because no one survives a trip off a skyscraper.  
        Continuing on with "The Falling Girl,"  as the girl nears the bottom she is spotted from a window by a man and his wife.  Strangely, by the time she reaches the bottom she is an old woman at the end of her life when she started at the top as a 19 year old girl with her entire life before her.  The skyscraper is supposed to symbolize a persons life.  The girl wanted to go straight to the party and skipped the floors like the party floor and the work floor.  She was so focused on the end picture that she loses all that was in the middle, what life is actually made of.  She reaches the end realizing that she never really lived, but simply died.  ""At least down here there's an advantage," observed the wife, "that you can hear the thud when they touch the ground.""  In the end the girl lived a small part of her life to just jump off a skyscraper, pass all the real aspects of life, and hit the ground like the rest of them, regardless of who's dress was prettier.  This story told me that we should just live for the now because we all end up in the same place in the end,  6 feet under.  It is just how we get there that counts. 

Juice

       I feel that I should start off saying that Juice completely confused me.  I believe that the first section of the book, "Translation" is about Gladman's past.  I believe that she was an archaeologist in a small, close knit town and she wanted to learn who she was and where she came from.  "Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore."  I believe that Gladman one day realized that she was not really a part of her town that she found so much comfort in, so she became separate from her town and had to find herself again.  This idea was symbolized with her saying that the villagers disappeared and she missed them and loved her town but was no longer with them (this is pretty much the point in my opinion of the first short story). 
      In "Proportion Surviving" Gladman is beginning to search for herself.  "For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there."  Gladman spends this part of the book explaining how she had worked to break down any walls that she had so as to be able to fully learn who she is.  She explains her routines, as minute and yet complex as what juice she is drinking, and learns to deal with her issues.  "There was absence there, but one so constant it became familiar.  I did not want to drink it."  I believe that at the end of this section Gladman realizes the absence of her family and her past, yet realizes that she is okay with this absence and does not want to face the return of these things.
       "No Through Street" was the section that had me really confused.  I believe that Gladman decided to face her fears and return to her family and her prior life.  "After five minutes or so, I hit what felt like a wall.  I looked up and saw the sign Hershey St., and found that I could go no further."  Gladman returned home but realized that life had gone on without her and she was no longer able to join her old life with the ease she used to be able to.  She represents the fear she had of seeing her family, yet the want, with her sister.  Her sister in the story was making signs to go up all over town, and was very successful but yet Gladman was afraid to go see her.  This shows that her life had successfully moved on and did what it wanted to, but Gladman had been left out of this.  "...especially when the passenger has done something that she will always regret.  For example, when she has given up the long-awaited homecoming."  Gladman realizes that life has gone on without her and as opposed to confronting this fact she moves on with her life and yet again leaves her past and family behind her.  
      "First Sleep" did not seem to really fit the three previous short stories in my opinion.  I believe that it is Gladman years later looking back on her life, and she switches from using first person to using third person.  "On the night of Mrs. Gladman's disappearance, the old woman on the corner pretended to be at rest."  She speaks of herself as if she had disappeared at some point, and maybe she had.  I believe that Gladman left her life behind and became a totally different person and she has grown so distant from her previous self that she feels no connection to her and thus refers to her in the 3rd person, thus not showing any type of ownership.  Overall, I did not understand a lot of what Juice is saying but I find it to be pretty depressing and deep in a way that is hard to comprehend.  

Response to Fiction Packet

      Ungulated by Walter Bargen is a perfect example of what fiction is.  This short story takes something as simple as a deer eating food out of a garden, and turns it into a masterpiece full of details and all the senses making it possible to mentally see it happening as if you were there.  "They nipped the frothing magnificence of oregano.  Its leafy slopes suggesting a rugged perennial range now clipped back from mountain to molehill."  Bargen could have simply said, "The deer ate some oregano," but instead he chose to paint a picture of how and to what extent the deer ate the oregano so as to enable the reader to imagine it.  It is one thing to see words on a paper and follow a stories plot, it is quite another to be so entranced with the details that you feel as if you are a part of the story as opposed to an onlooker gazing from afar.  Another way that Bargen creates images is the adjectives he gives to the basic plants to bring them to life in our mind.  "The broad leaves and prickly stalks, orange, loosely folded, napkin sized flowers, the finger length zucchini, eaten from the center out." This way of writing is so much more effective then simply saying orange stalks of flowers and zucchini.  These adjectives are what make the image come to mind, and this is tell tale sign of a good author.
      Another short story that stuck out to me was The Letter From Home by Jamaica Kincaid.  This story had an impact on my idea of fiction because of the sentence structure.  The sentences are long and full of commas and lists of actions and this lends a lot to the story.  "I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, i baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children..." Not only does this structure and diction provide rhythm to the story that helps it to flow and somewhat speed up, it also provides action which leads to the story coming alive and the reader being able to become a part of it. Another strategy used is to ask questions.  "(Is the Heaven to be above? Is the Hell below? does the Lamb still lie meek? Does the Lion roar? Will the streams all run clear? Will we kiss each other deeply later?)"  I think these questions not only tie the reader in more because it gives them a chance to think of answers, it also shows that the speaker has a lot on their mind and questions parts of their life and beliefs.  This idea humanizes the speaker allowing us to connect more freely to them.  The strategies used in this short story provide a lot of energy to the tale.  
         The final short story that stuck out to me from the packet was The Talking Cat by Sharon Krinsky.  This short story, which is very short, stuck out to me because it is so absurd I have no choice but to believe it is fiction.  I used to believe that fiction was only fiction if it was obviously not reality and could never happen. I obviously know now that there are many forms of fiction that could possibly happen, but they just have not.  This however is about a talking cat, therefore I know that it is fiction and that is what caused me to take a second glance at it.  "He (the cat) tells me he's happy to meet me and we have an instantaneous rapport."  
Now, I understand how a meowwww might mean something different to each owner, but there is no way that a cat could carry on such a human conversation with an actual human.  I like this story because it is so short and concise and obviously fake that it does not take all the details and evidence to convince you of its originality.  It simply is what it is.  

Poetry Packet

       The sonnet "130" by Shakespeare characterizes the idea that "love is blind."  The author discusses all the negative aspects of his lover by comparing her to good, beautiful things and then saying she looks nothing like them.  "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red..."  It would be a compliment to tell a woman that her eyes sparkle like the sun but instead the author says that his lover's eyes specifically do NOT sparkle like the suns.  Then, he goes on to say that her lips are not as red as that of coral, a complexion thought pretty by men but not possessed by her.  As if these points were not clear enough, he goes on to say later, "And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks."  Now, not only is he saying she has unremarkable eyes and dull lips, but he also has the nerve to say his lover has bad breath!  At this point he should be sleeping on the couch, but then he changes directions at the end revealing the real theme of the sonnet.  "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare!"  He saves himself with these two lines by showing that the point of the sonnet was that he loves her regardless of her appearance, not because of her appearance (a trait that is hard to find in men).
      The sonnet "Dim Lady" by Harryette Mullen also focuses on love being blind.  "Today's special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser....And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes."  I may be wrong, but generally girls do not like to hear that their lips aren't an attention getter to their man or that they have awful breath.  The author is literally ragging on his little woman's  hair, lips, eyes, breath, chest, and complexion while poems tend to have a romantic tinge to them. "And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief."  This is where the author digs himself out of the hole he had made in the previous lines of the sonnet.  These lines mean that maybe she does not meet the standards for what society calls pretty, but that she has a uniqueness about her that makes her prettier and hotter than society's prettiest girl.  This is a twisted way of giving a very sincere and heartfelt compliment, but in the end it does indeed succeed. 
      These two sonnets, although written by different authors in different time periods, have a lot in common.  Both deal with the idea that love is blind.  The differences between the two is that that Mullen's sonnet takes a very blunt approach that we can apply to our time period whereas Shakespeare takes the softer approach.  Mullen's diction causes "Dim Lady" to have a more severe negative connotation as well as it almost makes him sound like he is demeaning his lover by referring to her as a child.  Shakespeare uses words like "damasked" and "far more pleasing sound" whereas Mullen's uses words such as "...but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug."  In conclusion the poems convey a similar message besides Mullen's uses a more brutal diction and is obviously written in a more contemporary time.  

A Little Bit About Me

Hi, my name is Alexis Sowards but I go by Lexi.  This is my first year at Eastern and I hope to one day be an attorney.  I used to love to write fictional stories as a child but then my mind was shoved into the cookie cutter "way to academic success" and I lost the ability to think outside the box.  I hope to not only enjoy reading but also enjoy writing through this class. Nice to meet you. 

Lexi