Atlantis

Atlantis, pages 17 and 18, is a story that compares a barber shop to the undersea world of Atlantis. We are introduced to a male character who is arriving to get a hair cut. He admits that nothing could have prepared him for this haircut. He starts comparing everything in the shop to the theme of the ocean. "Strands and locks in arrested motion, cresting waves styled into hard edges, like Japanese prints of typhoons." Here he is describing the many different hair styles he is considering, and as he looks he realizes that the models don't have a face. I think that here he is expressing his identity issues that he has within himself.
It seems like the man comes to the barber shop for comfort. In one part of the passage he says, "The drone of the fan, the mint and intoxicating scent of Barbasol pressed upon me; phosphene shimmered like minnows in the dark corners of my vision, and I found that this world, cigar stained, sergeant striped, basso profundo, was the lost world of my father, who could not love me." I think that these certain things remind him of his father or maybe even a father that he never knew. It refers to the name of the passage, Atlantis. Atlantis is this unknown, never found, under the sea world. It seems like this man has never know his father and he can't find him or he could also be fictional like the made-up world Atlantis.
No matter which of those situations the man is in he turns the hair dresser, Nick into his sort of comfort or father figure. When he is cutting his hair it takes him to the unknown world of Atlantis, aka the world with a father that he has never known. He explains, "His fingers flowed over my forehead like water. I began to smile imperceptibly and see barber poles aslant like sunken columns and voluptuous mermaids in salmon-pink bikinis and bubbles the size of baseballs rising to the surface and bursting with snippets of Filipino small talk." This also suggests that his father, or he thinks that his father was or is Filipino because he has mentioned the barber's ethnicity twice now in the story. He even goes as far to say, "…this inundation of two paternal hands", which proves even more his fantasy of a father figure. He is obsessed with the idea that this barber is basically acting like a father and his home is that of Atlantis, aka the unknown. "I've driven by and glimpsed him asleep in the barber chair, his face turned toward the street, his combs soaking gin blue medicinal liquid, the barber pole softly aglow like a nightlight, the stripes cascading endlessly down, rivulets running toward a home in the ocean."

Lenses

Dillard's story called Lenses really shows the differences in the stages of our lives. This particular piece really focuses on two separate lifestyles of this one women. Looking through lenses as a child and then again once she is all grown up. First we are introduced to a little girl with a microscope, investigating all sorts of algae and tiny specimens. She becomes almost obsessed and turns her basement into a laboratory where she spend hours and hours looking into this microscope lens, where she could only use one eye,  only see a little part of what's going on. We can make the claim that she likes the sense of being responsible for something, or having control over something when she talks about how she basically enjoys watching the tiny specimen die under her large wattage light bulb. She says, "When all of the creatures lay motionless, boiled and fried in the positions they had when the last of their water dried completely, I washed the slide in the sink and started over with a fresh drop. How I loved that deep, wet world where the colored algae waved in the water and the rotifers swam" (pg. 106). From that particular passage we can see that this little girl just likes having power. As a child, we don't have control over many things, and by overseeing this whole little world of organisms and deciding when they live and when they die gave her happiness.

The story then takes a dramatic turn to when the girl is now a women who claims the story is actually  about the description of swans. And now, she is looking through binoculars, which you can use two eyes, therefore she is seeing a larger perspective of the world now. She revisits the pond she used to go to as a little girl yet sees everything much differently than before. She looks more into the beauty of it all, slowing down to appreciate that some of these organisms are living an actually life, this is where she becomes obsessed with watching the swans. By looking through the two lenses she can see more detail for example, "It is impossible to say how excited I was to see whistling swans in Daleville, Virginia. The two were a pair, mated for life, migrating north and west from the Atlantic coast to the high arctic. They had paused to feed at Dalevillle Pond. I had flushed them, and now they were flying and circling the pond" (pg.107). When she says she had flushed them she is referring to the many samples of pond water she had just so simple destroyed and threw away, where as now she can just admire the good things about the pond that she had never recognized before. I think overall the two differences in outlooks just represent how we change the way we look at things as we grow with age and experience.

Fiction Packet #3

The Falling Girl
At first glance this story seemed very intriguing in that the first paragraph really catches your attention. It's in depth description of the beautiful city and glamorous life style draws you into thinking the story is going to have a very happy tone. Then once we find out that she jumps off the top of the building everything takes a turn for the worst and the story sort of takes on a depressing tone. The author did a great job of transitioning the two contrasting themes by using examples of them by who she sees when she is falling. The higher floors are the young rich people partying and drinking their "cocktails and making silly conversation." She continues to fall past millionaires and beautiful people, they keep stopping here asking why she is falling so fast, or asking her to stop by for a minute. This part really interested me because the know she is falling, yet they want her to join them, adding on to the original problem that this women is just going through the motions trying to be this certain somebody. I feel like she is falling deeper and deeper until she eventually has just wasted her life on these superficial things and people. To see all the people who just stood by and watched almost parallels into real like when a person is slipping into a lifestyle that is not good for them, yet no one helps them, they just become the bystander who does nothing. As she falls closer and closer to the ground the author also creates a sense of time going by, it is getting darker and darker until it is morning again at the bottom. The classes of people also go from highest to lowest as she makes her way down. At one point a lady says to her, "You have your entire life before you, why are you in such a hurry?" She tries to stop but the gravity keeps pulling her down. She is too far into trouble that she cannot pull herself out and turn her life around. It is truly a sad story about unchangeable fate and the effects that society has on women. It puts this social norm and expectation on us that we feel we need to fulfill to be successful and happy. And when this women spent her whole life doing everything she could to be that "it girl" she realized that it wasn't really her, and she still wasn't happy. So she jumped.

While reading the works by Goldburg, Burroway, and Lamott I chose my favorite stories or section from each and analyzed them.

Goldburg: Blue Lipstick and a Cigarette Hanging Out Your Mouth
          This story really let my imagination wander. The author is explaining how when she is writing she has to wear something different, become someone else, or wear something outrageous. The things way she described things really made me picture everything and a stereotype that went along with that "look". It kind of made me think that when you are writing it is almost an escape from reality, and you can create anything you want, be anyone you want. I know she literally is wearing these crazy outfits and having a unlit cigarette hanging out of her mouth but it makes me think that she does this in relation to what or who she is about to write about. The story has a deeper meaning of simply the art of writing and how it can change your outlook on anything and make you be anything or anyone else. It is an escape.

Lammott: Dialogue
        Basically dialogue can really make or break a fictional story. Lammott talks about how her students can really ruin a piece with some bad dialogue, you really have to know what you are doing. On the other hand there is nothing better than great dialogue. It allows you to actually hear from a character and directly know what they are thinking, where as otherwise you would have to infer or guess about how they feel about something or what their opinion is. Lammott says that dialogue in fiction should be more like a movie, very dramatic. She suggests sounding it out and making sure it sounds good out loud. What a character says should represent who they are. Lammott gives the example to put two people in an elevator who hate each other the most and let the elevator get stuck. This really was amusing to me, but it makes sense. Fiction writing really is a bit more complicated than I thought, yet that is such a simple idea that would be very entertaining to readers. She talks about how what they say has to be believable, and to treat these characters like real people, give them time to meet the other characters, then see how things go. This really opens your mind to a certain way of writing. You have to know the hearts of your characters. Character composition is quite the process. I feel as after reading Lammott's work I need to get started on some of my fiction works and rethink my characters and figure out who they are.

Burroway: The Active Voice
      After the character analysis of Lammott's work I became interested in another author's views. Burroway introduces the active voice. It is basically how we make our characters "come to life". It includes making their dialogue and actions much more detailed an interesting, in depth. We mostly use the active voice in fiction because it makes everything more dramatic, only using the passive voice for someone when we want them to be more of a background character or they are saying something un-important. Burroway talks about how we have to explain an action of a character, saying they are shocked is not enough, we have to explain an action that shows everyone they are shocked. I never thought of this specifically before, I understand how much it could improve a story. He is saying to use action to suggest an emotion. Burroway stresses to make sure the explanation of the action needs to quality though or it will not be as effective.

Writing My Own Short Story

When writing my short story I started off with the completely wrong process. When my professor explained to just start writing about a place describing it by using what it looks like. We were supposed to make something up about a certain place where if someone read it they would know where it was. I began explaining myself on a long trip to Wyoming without saying exactly where we were going. Then when we were introduced to having to create a character and explain them I had to restart my whole little story. I changed everything to focus more on imagery. I didn't use any references to any characters until half way through the short story, then I switched from a place to a person perspective. This was much easier to focus on each separate concept then to try and combine the two right away. This process taught me that fiction short story writing was much more organizational than I thought it was. It is a much shorter space so you have to really think about how you want to write a story and what you want to accomplish. It isn't as easy as just writing any story, it has limits. I have much more respect for short story authors now that I tried to also write my own story and make it some what decent.

Fiction Packet #2

The second fiction packet that we had to read for class was much different than the first one. These pages contained three longer stories. The passage that really caught my attention was part one of the Internal. We are introduced to the young intern who is working in a mental hospital for a man named Rauch. When he first takes the job many people warn him about this man and tell him that something just isn't right. Due to the fact that the interne's job is to give medicine, and more legalistic duties he finds himself avoiding Rauch as much as possible. Rauch right away is treating his new intern differently and almost favoring him. He gives him a special job of observing his own brother and gives the intern an apartment right next to that of his brother's. It is explained how the brother is the nervous type, the depression type, and the suicidal type, and that he needs extra attention so that he doesn't try and hurt himself. Right around this time in the text we also see how the intern is starting to explain everything like a psychiatrist would. He is putting percentages to many things, and examining all situations from a perspective of someone like we would think to be Rauch's. When the intern gets to his apartment the author makes it seem like he is trapped. He gets into this weird cycle of doing the same thing everyday and counting steps, and repeating certain numbers. When he goes exploring down into the basement he finds a drill. He uses the drill to make holes into the walls to the apartments next to him to spy on this so called brother. He finds out that there is no one living here and there hasn't been anyone there for a long time. This part kind of started to creep me out a bit. It makes it seem like the intern is going crazy when clearly Rauch is not clear on who is brother is and that there is no one next to the intern's apartment. The intern at the end of part one makes up the percentages of the brother of all 0%. This is just the first instance where we see the craziness of Rauch really start to affect the intern,

Literally this reading was very good, yet I found a little difficult to follow. Just the way it was written kind of made it hard for someone who knows nothing about psych houses to follow along. The imagery was great though and I really got a look at what was going inside of the intern's head, even when he did start going a little crazy.

Fictional Short Stories

After reading this fiction packet one of the stories that I enjoyed the most was the very first story called survivors. It is about a gay couple who are both on their death beds basically. They are arguing over who was going to die first. We see the perspective of one of the men, he wishes to die first. There are many different reasons why he wants this. He goes into poetically explaining how he wouldn't want to be stuck with his partner's family. The father was and ex-military man who beat his son, and clearly was not supportive of his son's sexuality. The mother was very judgmental. And the two older brothers also disapproved of the situation. The man talks about how if he didn't die first that he would have to deal with the family and how he would have to change things about his house because he knew the family wouldn't feel comfortable with it the way it was now. He thinks maybe he will remove some of their items and maybe even set a parrot free. The parrot creates another almost metaphor for his partner. If he opens the window and lets him go, and be with the other wild and free parrots. But then he would be all alone. The parrot is basically just like if his partner would pass away and be free, going to be with other free people, flying away. It sounds like he would be going to a better place, maybe even implying heaven. And if he passed first this man would be very devastated. He would be alone stuck in this place where no one else understands him like his partner did. The story finishes by reading "dear God, he thought, let me die first, don't let me survive him."

This short story really made me reflect on what so little words can create such a big message. My explanation of the passage was close to or longer than the actual passage. It was how thought out and poetic the text was that makes it a great fictional statement. There were multiple symbols and representations of actual things that happen in real life even if every word was made up. That is the magic that fictional writing can create.