Stranger Fiction

Letters and Numbers

2008-09-04T19:15:00.000+08:00

I haven't really posted anything public in quite some time, owing to the rather delicate nature of certain topics that only a select few can read. But lo and behold, I post once again. And of course, things will be numbered because I'm too lazy to write connecting paragraphs to each one.

1. So I'm apparently going to the Avril Lavigne Best Damn Tour concert on Sunday. O_o Now, you have to note two things: (a) I am NOT an Avril fan, and (b) I am only doing this because it's someone's birthday and I wanted to give a gift that is more than just the usual cake/ice cream/sweetmeat. I've always believed that part of what makes performances (concerts, musicals, etc.) great is the fact that you are paying for an experience, as opposed to something mechanical, something that can be put on repeat and allowed to go on and on and on until it's almost dead. So I would like to gift the birthday celebrant the experience, since they are just diehard fans of Avril and, despite all protestations, would have really wanted to watch if they had the cash. So tadah! Wish granted.

*pokes fingers through holes in pockets*

2. Yes, I have heard of the Eraserheads reunion concert and the surreal events that happened after. I would have seriously wanted to be there - the Eraserheads was such a defining Pinoy band that forever shaped the direction of Filipino music as well as the musical tastes of a generation. And they're timeless: it's been ten years, give or take, since they were together as a group and yet my younger sister Bea is hopelessly devoted to Ely Buendia and knows more Eraserheads songs than me. And she wasn't even in grade school when the band split up! It's really boggles the mind. And as for myself, there are still a number of Eraserheads songs that I will never get out of my head, including the following:

- my baby brother Louie singing "Overdrive" when I was in fourth grade (so that made him in first grade) during the Dans New Year's Eve celebrations. Do you guys remember that? Louie was in his funny blue shirt and it almost looked like he was eating the mic at Tito Butch's house. Oh yeah, and Cutterpillow was our first album, when they were still selling cassette tapes for something like 60 pesos a pop.

- Lin, Jilly, Kla, and myself singing "Sembreak" and "Pare Ko" in a deserted gym the night of the Turnover Ceremony in fourth year high school. I still remember Kla and Jilly on the stage while Lin held up a video camera and my friends sang to me because I was leaving for college the following schoolyear. Incidentally, this was also the year that Lin broke her ankle because of...certain dance moves which I cannot detail here.

- I remember watching the video of "Ang Huling El Bimbo" and thinking, Oh my God, this video is seriously fucked up and it's FANTASTIC. This was perhaps the first locally made music video that really made the hairs on my arms stand up and a delicious shiver run through my spine.

And because it's the -ber months, this is the song running through my head:

So take a bite. It's all right. ^_^

3. And I'm finally done with Avatar: The Last Airbender (thank you Hiyas!). I've already read the spoilers and even saw "The Ember Island Players" on YouTube, but nothing beats watching "Sozin's Comet" just for the sheer awesomeness that is Aang. Seriously, they delivered what was perhaps one of the best finales for a series ever. Everyone played their parts, were fantastic, and I am so happy that Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko managed to make everything cohere together without truly giving anything away and still retaining the precious balance of humour and emotional resonance that made Avatar more than just a kid's cartoon series, but a true piece of storytelling genius. And I'm sorry Zutara shippers but Kataang will beat you in all their happy, mind-blowingly sappy glory. ^_^

I read somewhere that true shippers will see that the OTP of the entire thing was really Appa/Momo...which disturbs me a lot. O_o

Oh, and here's a teaser clip of Book 4: Air of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's aptly titled "Forbidden Love".

4. Finally: Happy 25th Birthday (tama ba?) Aster! ^_^ I'm sorry I'm not there for the dinner and the sleepover (meron ba?) but know that you're in my heart and in my mind. Thank you for crazy get-togethers in college and for giving us what's now known as "mga kwentong Aster" - for a fuller compilation, please look for Roja - and for sleepovers where you disregard all concepts of personal space and use me as a pillow (which is why no one likes sleeping beside you), for being there to comfort me in CCHQ when I broke up with my first boyfriend and couldn't eat fotr two days and you and Meia and to force-feed me food, and for all the bunny craziness and hoping that your latest pet survives the curse. Thank you for providing us with optimism and hope even during our most Sylvia Plath-like days and for persevering in law school where none of us ever dared finish. May you have everything good that you deserve in this life. ^_^

Believe it or not, wala tayong picture na magkasama, so kayo na lang muna ni Meia dito. Ayan, tingnan mo, nakapikit ka pa. ^_^

People Are Talking

2004-09-08T08:47:00.000+08:00

An Open Letter to the Members of the Manila Critics Circle
Carla M. Pacis

This year's National Book Awards has once again been a major disappointment for those of us involved in the creation of children's and young adult books. This year, the members of the Manila Critics Circle have proven that the desire to encourage, support and uplift writing for children and young adults is not enough if it is not accompanied by a true understanding and appreciation of the unique requirements and structures of one of the largest sectors of the international book industry. Children’s and Young Adult literature is not to be treated dismissively or cavalierly as a kid brother or sister. It requires the same due diligence true judges give to any creative or intellectual work.

The winner for the Children's Book category was Sabrina's Cookbook Diary which was published in 2002 and therefore should have won in 2003. However, according to the critics, they had overlooked this book. (Last year, the Manila Critics Circle did not deem any of children’s book published in 2002 worthy of an award. Only two, Carancal by Rene Villanueva and Og Uhog by Christine Bellen were nominated out of more than twenty books published that year.) They went on to say, that of the children's books published last year, none deserved to even be nominated. To add insult to injury, they said that maybe this was a sign that the industry needed to improve.

I strongly disagree with that statement. The children’s book industry continues to grow with more and more titles published every year. The quality, design and content of the books have improved over the years, a fact that many parents, teachers and librarians have recognized. More and more children read locally published children’s books and libraries are stocked with books we can all be proud of. I can think of many children's books published last year that deserved to be nominated for this year’s National Book Award. There was Russell Molina's "Isang Dosenang Kuya" the Philippine Board of Books for Young Readers (PBBY) grand prize winner, Eugene Evasco's "Si Isem sa Bayang Bawal Tumawa", Lara Saguisag's "Tonio's Wishes", Tahanan Books and Jose Rizal’s "Monkey and the Turtle", Rene Villanueva's "Graindell" and “Teo’s Trash Can” by Grace Chong, all original and imaginative stories, all very well written and richly illustrated. There was also Lampara Publishing’s Aesop Fables which may not be original stories but have been beautifully illustrated by Jason Moss.

The winner in the Young Adult category was "Almost Married" by Tara FT Sering published by Summit Publishing, the same group that publishes Cosmopolitan Magazine. It is the sequel to “Getting Better” the first book in a collection that has been categorized as “chick lit”. In fact, “Getting Better” and all the little books that followed after, adhere to the Cosmopolitan Magazine philosophy. The title alone of this “winning” book already begs one to ask the question why a teenager would be interested in marriage or being married. The blurb of the book begins with the sentence "After a traumatic engagement to a man who eventually cheated on her, 28-year-old Karen is, once again...” It goes on. “And their year-old relationship rocks…the conversation is satisfying and the sex is great...” And it goes on.

Is this a book a teacher, a parent, an aunt/uncle, or thinking individual would give a teenager? Obviously, those who chose this book as the winner in the Young Adult category are completely and absolutely ignorant of what the term Young Adult means in literature. The key words in the citation were "it is young yet adult"; “adolescent yet sophisticated”, are evidence that they have their definitions of young adult all mixed up. They might have been referring to the "younger adult", people in their 20's and not the 12 to 16 year-olds (give and take a few years) that the local and foreign publishers have identified as young adults or adolescents.

The term Young Adult was coined by American publishers to distinguish the books written for children from ages 1 to 11 yrs. old (the board books, picture books, storybooks and chapter books) from those written for teenagers or those from ages 12 to 16 yrs. old. The age parameters vary and can go all the way to 19 yrs. old for the young adult category and are only meant as guides for writers and illustrators. I do not in fact agree with the term young adult as it can be misunderstood as has happened with the Manila Critics Circle. The other terms for this type of literature were juvenile fiction and adolescent literature. Both have been dropped for being derogatory. Teenage fiction may be a more appropriate term but may confine this literature to the high school audience.

Some examples of great literature for young adults are the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Are You There God? Its Me Margaret by Judy Blume. Locally, we also have fine examples of this type of literature, some of which have been chosen by Reading Coordinators in some private schools as required reading. Some of these titles are Pedro and the Lifeforce by Joel Toledo, The Secret by Lin Acacio-Flores, Senior’s Ball by Rene Villanueva, Anina ng mga Alon by Eugene Evasco (which won the National Book Award in 2003) and Miguel and Una by Lilledeshan Bose. The protagonists of Young Adult books are approximately the same age as that of their readers and therefore share the same dreams, problems and issues as their readers. They are generally concerned with concepts such as coming of age, self-identity, heroes and role models. Sex is discussed in young adult fiction, but with more caution and sensibility.

The citation goes on to say "it (Almost Married) pushes the genre in the right direction with this light but profound novel about marriage, relationships, sex, oh yes, sex, women who are no longer girls, and yes, boys who will always be boys". It would have been absolutely hilarious if it were not so horrifying.

And speaking of horrifying, it seems the Manila Critics Circle, an esteemed group of literary writers, is now promoting "chick lit" as literature, which, and many will agree with me, it is definitely not. There is, however, a place for this sort of work but it should be properly categorized.

In all fairness to Tara FT Sering, who I think is a great writer, she wrote a wonderfully clever book for young adults called "All the Right Moves" published by Adarna House which was nominated in the Young Adult category last year. It was patterned after the Choose Your Own Adventure books that children and teenagers absolutely love. In this case, it was a “choose your own romance” and its inevitable consequences.

The National Book Award is clearly looked upon by many writers and authors, including myself, as confirmation of our good work. It encourages and supports the production of quality books in this country that sorely needs to build a population that reads. The number of genres, categories and types of books that have been recognized over the years have increased to include many that may be outside the expertise of the members of the Manila Critics Circle. To consult with experts in specific interests and fields can only be for everybody’s benefit. In the field of children’s and young adult literature, I would highly recommend Ms. Neni Sta. Romana Cruz, who represents the sector of reviewers in the Philippine Board of Books for Young Children (PBBY) and who contributes articles on locally published children’s book to the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Parenting Magazine, and Dr. Nina Lim Yuson, President of the Museo Pambata, founding member of PBBY and contributor to Baby Magazine. That the award is given by a body of distinguished and highly respected writers and critics give it so much more value. They owe it to all of us writers not to waste the goodwill that has been bestowed upon them.

*

And then one of the more outspoken detractors:

More Cohesive Thoughts on Summit Books and Tara Sering
Lilledeshan Bose

I'm sorry this e-mail is late, but while I agree that "Almost Married"is definitely not YA lit and did not deserve to win that category (asa writer of YA lit I am very insulted), I think that is the awardgiving body's fault and not the book's. I do, however, very strongly disagree with Carla Pacis' statement that chick lit is not literature. I think Summit Book's publications are the best books to come out ofthe Philippines in a very long time.

Before I expound, here are some disclaimers: One, Tara Sering is a very good friend of mine. However, I'm not writing this in her defense. Two: I used to work at Summit myself. I know these books were not written for the love of literature, but were, in fact, made to be marketed and sold as Chick lit. Knowing that, however, my personal bias (which I am proud to wear on my sleeve) regarding Philippine literature is I don't care what the Filipino audience is reading. It's enough that they're reading. Maybe they'll eventually develop good taste and maybe they won't. At least the books are in their houses. Three: Say what you will about Summit Publishing--that it is a purveyor of ad-driven, popular culture and the magazine content is sometimes crass, superficial, elitist, cheesy or misogynist--no one can deny that Summit has uplifted the Filipino taste. The quality of their publications--from the paper to the layouts to the content--has raised the bar so high that no other publishing house in the country can come close. Summit created the current aesthetic standard for print publications in the Philippines. More importantly, it has givenits market a venue to see themselves represented in media that isaccessible and affordable. Teenage girls, Filipino gamers, working stiffs, our titas who like to watch gossip shows on Sundays, andrepressed Catholic men all now have their own niche.

I remember life without Summit: glossy mags lived a year and died without anyone ever mourning them. Before Summit Books, before I studied English lit in UP, I never got to read Filipino writers. I never even knew Filipino writers beyond Jose Rizal, Amado Hernandez and my parents' friends existed. I never knew people were writingstories about lives like mine. None of my friends knew Filipinowriters eiher, and after I studied English lit, I found out most books (in English; I think Lualhati Bautista was the only exception) only got a print run of a 1000 copies, max. Most novels were about old men and farmers. It made me think: what was the use of writing the great Filipino novel if no one except students required to read it in obscure Comparative Lit classes had ever heard of them? Summit Books, however, is publishing books about single moms, baristasand coleigalas, girls who want to live on their own, twenty-somethingswho like to travel, have flings, get dumped. They're stories about girls like me, who live in apartments like my friends do, have boyfriends who take them to Tagaytay, just like mine did. Sure, they cater to a niched market. But they're well written stories of women who have their own minds and are fiercely independent. Not only are they empowering heroines, they're also inspiring many young writers who didn't know that we could produce this stuff. Now everyone knows who Tara Sering, Maya Calica, Abi Aquino and Melissa Salva are. Everyone can also afford to buy their books.

And why can't these books can't be considered literature? Is it because they're not about incest in barrios? Because they don't reprazent? Because their covers are pink? Because they're about middle-class girls who went to exclusive Catholic schools? Is it because they're sold in news stands as opposed to bookstores where sales ladieswho don't know the difference between a hairnet and a haiku are manning the shelves? These novels are laugh-out-loud funny, cleverly punny, sometimes cheesily emotional and given to inducing PMS tears. These books are definitely literature that I'd keep on my shelf, right beside my beloved Paul Auster, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dobyns and Jessica Hagedorn books. The best thing about these books? They are alive. They're discussed in offices, passed around by friends, reprinted by the thousands. Their writers are being paid very good money from royalties. THEY'RE BEING READ BY A LOT OF FILIPINOS.

I also mind the condescending term "novellas" as a description for these books. Sure they're shorter than Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy," but I think this genre is in a stage of infancy. The Filipino writeris taking baby steps, growing with the reader and the book publisher at the same time. Everyone is just discovering what they can do, who the audience is (and that such a huge one exists!). Kudos to Summit for respecting the Pinoy reader enough to print on good paper, making sure that the text is typo-free, that the covers are very attractive, and trusting their writers to come up great stories backed with lots of marketing pesos all the way. As a result, you see Filipinos of all ages--whom everyone said "just didn't read"--saving their allowance, skipping lunch, to buy these books (The magazines sometimes have short stories in them too.) I'm proud to read them, I'm proud to be associated with a company that recognized the Filipino reader wasworthy of good books.

Summit Books has taken the stories of the age and put them on paper.They reflect the period that we live and love in. Her work may not beYA, but I think Tara Sering (who has impeccable taste) is the saviour of Philippine lit.

The Rambling (Posted at Last, Passed the Hard Copy of this to you on time Mr. K)

2004-09-07T22:10:00.000+08:00

The Rambling
My Take on Paul Auster’s “The Locked Room”

If there’s one work I’d pound my head on the wall for, it’s no doubt Paul Auster’s “The Locked Room”. Yes, it was definitely peppered with universals (quotable quotes) about life minus the didactic voice, but its length didn’t prove worth all the hours of anticipation. I was waiting for the punch line; for the locked room; for the narrator to turn out to be locked up in an asylum where he recalls the story after months or years of swallowing bitter pills; for the supernatural to weave its way through the story. But all I got were a narrator who could quote blocks of statements as if he always had a tape recorder at hand, yet didn’t bother to mention his name, two male best friends who used to want to marry each other (now, how gay can that get), coveting thy neighbor’s wife, espionage (a.k.a. stalking), waves of unconfirmed psychosis, desire, coquetry, and sex (nothing beats having sex with your best friend’s mother), the financial anxiety of a writer vis-à-vis the financial freedom in getting published (in this case, having your best friend’s works published), and the unanimous question of the living, thinking human: why do I exist in this world? (Of course other versions exist: why am I studying?, why am I dating this guy and not his best friend?, and the like.)
With all the rambling and hodgepodge of themes--“…nothing is that simple”--the drift of 115 pages by an anonymous persona was basically the dissatisfaction with life of a person deemed by others as Mr. Almost-Perfect, if not Mr. Perfect, in his younger years--Fanshawe (probably a reshuffling of ‘awe of the fans’):

…one had the impression there was nothing he did not do well, nothing he did not do better than everyone else. He was the best baseball player, the best student, the best looking of all the boys...more ideally a normal child than any of the rest of us.

and the desire of his best friend to be just like him or to even be him:

If envy is too strong a word for what I am trying to say, then I would call it a suspicion, a secret feeling that Fanshawe was somehow better than I was.

To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.

Years of being apart probably faded this emotion, but wasn’t the narrator’s physical resemblance to Fanshawe, his marriage to Sophie, his adoption of Ben, his hand on the sorting-out and publication of Fanshawe’s works and the royalties he got from them, and both of them being writers too much of a coincidence? Why didn’t anyone gossip about Sophie and him when they got married? He seemed to be an extremely sensitive guy that he’d probably mention a phrase or two about these instances--if they existed--in ‘his’ 115-page work.
I must say that the narrator and Fanshawe even sounded alike. And that Fanshawe must have been the narrator as well; that everything was all in his mind:

At best there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude – living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered was located inside my skull.

The Boston House ‘confrontation’ was probably a ‘confrontation’ with his subconscious once and for all. And that the whole story proved to be “…no more than the sum of contingent facts…of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose” – a mere rambling.

Weh?

2004-08-30T01:28:00.000+08:00

I'm getting workshopped on Wednesday?

*pauses*

Okay.

Lack of the Surreal

2004-08-29T18:10:00.000+08:00

Seriously, I don't know why I'm writing at all. I should be doing my thesis that, up to now, still doesn't have a title. Surrealism sucks...big time. What about the surreal do I have to write about except the fact that surrealist fiction is non-existent in the Philippines. Zit.
Maybe I should start writing surreal stories. After all, I'm always in that dream-like status, mind floating and wandering. Zit.

Truth and Fiction

2004-08-27T05:14:00.000+08:00

Hello, class. I spent early Wednesday morning slogging home through thigh-high floodwaters after spending over 24 hours straight at the office, so you can imagine that the decision to cancel classes was something of a relief, not just to all of you who were spared a rainy commute, but to me as well. Still, we may have to schedule an extra meeting sometime to catch up. Anyway, next Wednesday, we'll workshop the stories we should have discussed this week: "The Second Coming" by Gabriela Lee, "11 PM - Onwards" by Kelly Mata, "Remembrance" by Anamer Menguito, "A Big Countdown (1, 2, 3)" by Charmian Lim, and "Received Messages" by Alicia Perez.

Speaking of stories, I was going through some of my old, uncollected fiction on my PC. Several years ago, I wrote a story called "Subterrania," about a girl who decided to cut herself off almost completely from the outside world, and just stay in her room, for presumably the rest of her life. At the time, I thought I was writing a quirky, CW 111-type story, to be classified under "stranger fiction." It was after the story was published that I learned that such extreme self-imposed urban isolation was, in fact, something of an epidemic in Japan.

The word for these "adolescents and young adults that feel overwhelmed by the Japanese society, feel unable to fulfill their expected social roles, and react with social withdrawal" is hikikomori. And now, well, there's even a movie based on the phenomenon. (Lord knows if it's any good; the plot doesn't seem promising. But then again I suppose many of my favorite films would sound stupid when reduced to a two-paragraph summary).

Anyway, rereading "Subterrania," it's kind of nice to recognize the state of mind I was in at the time I wrote it, to remember what inspired it (sunless weeks obssessing over an intractable thesis, accompanied by general withdrawal from most social activities), to know that the prospect of becoming hikikomori-like was once oddly appealing, and to realize that, for one reason or another, I don't feel like that at all, these days.

It has nothing to do with impoliteness :)

2004-08-17T18:49:00.000+08:00

Hi! I just read Gabby's reply. Hmmm... They were both weak I think, but I just want to ask: Which of them was weaker? They both went through the process of having their memories of each other erased. We watched Joel from the start of the process, until later when he realized he didn't want his memories of Clementine be erased, pleading not to continue the process anymore. It's sweet, yes, but we will never see it as a weakness. Why would you decide to go through the process and eventually beg the eraser people to stop? It was all or nothing, and Joey should have known that. He would have saved himself from a lot of trouble (but of course, we don't want that because there will be no story, and we like watching men go through a lot of trouble and in the end, save themselves and their women because that would make them men.) Clementine was the first one to have him erased because maybe, just maybe, she wanted to move on. And if she did, it was a tough (very tough) decision to make, and I would have wanted to watch her go through the process and I wouldn't expect resistance from her because she felt she needed it and she would go through it and finish it for her own sake. Most of us are not like Clementine. We desire to move on, but a very few of us make the decision and even few actually make it through because others end up to what they were before - thinking about the person and realizing we're still not yet ready to move on, just like Joel did or what his character had shown. But hey, it's human nature. This weakness is naturalized (or normalized?), and so we don't see it as a weakness. Romantic pa nga di ba?

Don't Point Fingers, It's Impolite

2004-08-12T11:59:00.000+08:00

It's not Joel's fault, Cris.

We all have those moments when we just want to start on a clean slate. And we can't really blame him now can we? After all, it was Clementine who had him erased first - and on a whim. That shows real weaknes of character just there; just because you fought with your lover doesn't immediately mean that you should erase him right then and there, right? I mean, you allow your anger to stew, and then try and see if the relationship is worth salvaging. And you have to admit that Clementine isn't also the easiest person to live with. Hell, none of us are easy people to live with.

I remember something Neil Garcia said to us in poetry class last year. Writers will always have the tendency to love more because we're all too damn emotional. And that will, more often than not, be our mistake. (Something which I'm also familiar with all too well.) But hey, if we're going to make mistakes, we might as well make them beautiful. Better to have had your heart broken into a million tiny pieces and living with that pain and moving on rather than a tabula rasa life where all our memories trickle down into oblivion and we've forgotten how it feels like to love someone.

Joel's actions were valid in their own right - the pain of losing Clementine through her own impulsiveness is something akin to a kick in the balls. And he had to forget. Don't we all have to forget some things in order to make room for new ones? But what the mind abandons, the heart will always cherish - even though it becomes something amorphous and nameless, it will still be there.

People are Strange

2004-08-12T00:06:00.000+08:00

I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to react to this novella. Sure, I was pissed off by the characters, but that’s not what makes the story strange. I was really looking for the “strange” in this story, and the only “strange” thing that I got from this was the characters. Their behavior made the novella strange – Fanshawe disappearing and trying to find another husband for his wife; the narrator acting beside himself when he was looking for Fanshawe; Sophie thinking that she’ll lose her new husband once he writes Fanshawe’s biography; and, Fanshawe’s mother “punishing” his son through the narrator (and vise versa). If it is human behavior that makes this novella strange, then I might as well claim that every story presenting the different human behaviors are STRANGE stories. (Come to think of it, anything that deals with humans and their behavior is considered strange.)
The characters in the story were well developed, to the point that I (as a reader) already knew how the narrator would react to, say, an incident in the story. Given the way the characters were molded, it was not difficult for me to not understand Fanshawe’s reasoning at the end of the story. I had already been conditioned from the very beginning that Fanshawe was strange; it was further affirmed by stories of his peculiar behavior. Believing what Fanshawe said at the ending was not hard to do; it was already a given fact that he was different, and that his reason for disappearing should not at all be shocking.
How the narrator behaved throughout the novella was also expected. He lived in constant fear (if that’s what it’s supposed to be called) of Fanshawe, not because he had been threatened, but because he knew Fanshawe was still alive. He had to constantly lie to himself, to Sophie, to Jane Fanshawe, to Stuart, and to everyone else who had read Fanshawe’s works. This ‘fear’ also came from trying to understand why Fanshawe left.
An interesting part in the novella was when Jane Fanshawe and the narrator had sex. Both of them hated Fanshawe to some extent, and their way to get even was to hurt each other. Both of them had been part of Fanshawe, and in a way they saw Fanshawe in each other. The narrator hated Fanshawe – he disappeared leaving him with the burden of hiding the truth. The mother also hated Fanshawe – he never allowed her to be his mother.
Sophie’s behavior was also interesting. I could call her paranoid, but then she had a point in worrying about her new husband. The more the narrator researched about Fanshawe, the more he became like him. Sophie was worried that he might not come back too.
Still, I don’t know how to properly read this novella. I just know that the whole story is weird because of the way the characters behaved. I didn’t even like the ending. The narrator and Fanshawe meet, a locked door between them. The narrator tries to open the door – and understand Fanshawe – but Fanshawe stays inside the locked room.

It's Joel's fault!

2004-08-11T00:34:00.000+08:00

First, I want to thank Kelly, Rica and Steph for convincing me to watch the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Second, I want to kill Rica and Steph for thinking that I changed after watching the movie. I still don't think that the movie is telling me something personal. You might laugh at what I'm going to say next but I can relate with Joel. The only difference is I didn't choose to erase my memories like he did. Therefore, I'm somehow fortunate :)

Anyway, since at the beginning of their relationship, it was Joel's fault because he wouldn't let know what he was thinking or feeling. He was nice, but being nice all the time didn't make the relationship last. Talking to would have made a difference. It would not kill him to say things other than "You're nice" to . How would she know he really loves her? Charades?

My most favorite part in the movie was when Joel became aware that his memories of were being erased and he realized that they were too special for him, and he tried to save them. (I just have one question to you guys: Was Joel trying to save his memories of because there were feelings that were too special, or he was saving them because Kate was there, even if what he was feeling was negative?) Again, it was his fault why he had to struggle (Men, men, men) but it was just the sweetest thing to do (Rica, please believe that I'm saying this.)

Overall, the movie was great.

One last question, would anyone want to marry Joel? I wouldn't. He was too secretive.

Free

2004-08-10T19:51:00.000+08:00

“Hate is burden; life is too short to be pissed off at all times.” – American History X

I do not know where nor how to begin, I am not even sure if the aforementioned quote has anything to do with the story, but it seems so relevant. I was taught in my phenomenology class that memories to our lives are like anchors to ships, you cannot move on until you remove them. You cannot progress and grow as a person until you free yourself of memories, especially memories that remind you of the harm and injury done to you. Fanshawe was a burden to almost everyone. Sophie felt and knew it that was why she hurriedly freed herself of things that has anything to do with her ex – husband. The main protagonist however, took a longer time to unburden himself. He had intense feelings towards Fanshawe. He even went to the point of screwing Fanshawe’s mother out of anger. I think what made it difficult for him to forget was the fact that he had mixed emotions for his best friend. He admired Fanshawe, hence the clinging to the books. He was envious of Fanshawe, hence the desire to kill him. I also felt that there was something inside the protagonist that was bothering him and only confronting Fanshawe would end it.
In the end, the couple was able to let go and move on, along with their kids. They decided that though the published works of Fanshawe helped them a lot financially, the thought that Fanshawe was still living with them, inside them was too much of a burden. A professor once told me that people should never live in the past, for it is senseless. What’s important is now, what is.
Is the “Locked Room” Fanshawe? An enigma that the main protagonist was trying to solve and eventually understood in the end?
By the way, that Fanshawe dude maybe a genius but he’s a psycho, a total lunatic. though to have a friend like him would be interesting.

on "the locked room"

2004-08-10T15:11:00.000+08:00

I thought the disappearance of Fanshawe was caused by some grand supernatural phenomenon. I even thought he turned himself, or was turned into his own manuscripts (an out-of-place speculation, huh?). In any case, I thought that was what made the story, that the text was driving itself to a revelation as to how Fanshawe disappeared. I read fast because I was excited to know what would have caused his sudden disappearance, and that was what I really mainly wanted to know.
The story turned out to be better, and more complex than just having to reveal how Fanshawe vanished. It could even have been realistic – no magic, no bizarre transformations, no enormous radios that broadcast the neighbor’s squabble. Nothing of that sort, actually. So I wondered what could have qualified this story to become part of the CW 111 strange fiction readings. I didn’t have to think it over long, though. The character of Fanshawe, and his sudden disappearance are bizarre enough. The narrator is even strange himself (I’m not too sure either if he has a name). Sophie, Fanshawe’s mother – all of them are creepy. The name “Fanshawe” alone is weird.
The story is eerie. But that’s what makes it interesting. And I love the anecdotes scattered throughout the story, especially that one of how the narrator faked questionnaires. There are a lot of things and insights about life (“Discretion has its role, but too much of it can be fatal,” is my favorite) that just come naturally out of the story and events. There are also striking thoughts on writing, I even highlighted some (“. . . be able to write something that would touch people and make a difference in their lives”).

Reading The Locked Room

2004-08-09T11:35:00.000+08:00

I found the story very fast-paced. Perhaps the author’s knack for suspense had a lot to do with it. I felt myself drawn into the story once I started reading it (I couldn’t wait to get to the next pages) and, if not for pressing matters which I had to attend to, I think now that I would have finished it in one sitting. But that is entirely another story.
I found the premise extremely intriguing. Interesting would be the wrong word to describe it—it would be quite inadequate. The speaker’s obsession with Fanshawe was remarkable; so were the conflicting mixture of envy and admiration that the former had for the latter. I, myself, was fascinated by this kind of fascination. He felt these emotions quite intensely and this was conveyed with clarity in the text. It literally jumped from the pages to the reader’s perception. The man felt so strongly, and it showed.
Fanshawe was the quintessential angst-filled artist. He embodied the qualities of the deviant individual (redundant? I got carried away); so well tuned to his inner self that the rest of the world seemed—or was—abnormal for him. He very well knew that he couldn’t possibly bear to live in such a place; therefore, he ran away as much as he could, if little by little. In the end, he fulfilled this very strong need to ultimately run away from it all, under the guise of death. Yet it was also ironic that, for all the hiding he had done, and in spite of the disappearance he had staged for himself, his name and his writings had inevitably served to immortalize him. He had given away small bits of himself to the world he so shunned that in the end, he was never truly lost.
Sophie was the balance, the anchor to which the “I” could hold on in order for him not to completely lose sight of reality, the someone whom he could come back to after it all ended, the reason for him to come back at all. As I saw it, he did become a little mad in his pursuit of Fanshawe; when he felt that, in his desperate search for this person, he was actually the one being hunted down.
When I think about it, there was something spooky about the entire thing, something sinister. I wouldn’t go so far as to put the story under the horror category, but I have to say that there were certain parts in the story that sent shivers down my spine, pardon the hackneyed expression.

Tabula Rasa

2004-08-09T10:30:00.000+08:00

May I just say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was amazinglybeautifulandohmygod Icant believethatthatfilmwassogoodIalmostcried? ^_^

I raved about it more in my blog. Hehe. Plugging.

Fanshawe in a Box

2004-08-08T04:30:00.000+08:00

I just want to take this opportunity to exercise the approach I’m going to use to analyze the gay short stories in English and Filipino in my CW 199 thesis. Here I go.

In the story, the narrator tells us about his childhood with Fanshawe:

“…for several months Fanshawe kept the cardboard box in his room. He had always been generous in sharing his toys, but this box was off limits to me, and he never let me go in it. It was his secret place, he told me, and when he sat
inside and closed it up around him, he could go wherever he wanted to go, could be wherever he wanted to be. But if another person ever entered his box, then its magic would be lost for good. I believed this story and did not press him for a turn, although it nearly broke my heart. We would be playing in his room, quietly setting up soldiers or drawing pictures, and then, out of the blue, Fanshawe would announce that he was going in to his box. I would try to go on with what I had been doing, but it was never any use. Nothing interested me so much as what was happening to Fanshawe inside the box, and I would spend those minutes desperately trying to imagine the adventures he was having. But I never learned what they were, since it was also against the rules for Fanshawe to talk about them after he climbed out.”

In this whole passage, the image of the box was a derivative of the gay’s closet (and it doesn’t need to be sexual). The gay’s closet is a representation of a gay man’s experience in most societies, where homosexuals are not acceptable. Just like Fanshawe’s box, a gay’s closet is “off-limits” to anyone. It’s a caution, which every gay man has to have because of fear of discovery, and then of persecution, of rejection, of discrimination. It’s a personal space, “a secret place”, where one can be himself – “go wherever he wanted to go, could be where he wanted to be”. Its secrecy, “its magic”, will be lost for good because of public humiliation and false judgment. However, in this passage, the narrator’s character was showing curiosity not towards the box itself, but to the experiences Fanshawe was having inside of it. He was not a threat, but someone who wanted to experience something new. Outside, the narrator was doing mundane things – setting up soldiers and drawing pictures. Doing them was more rational than “out of the blue” going inside the box. The curiosity was driving the narrator to imagine the “adventures” Fanshawe could be thinking of inside the box – an onset of desire to cross the boundary from where he was to where Fanshawe was. But Fanshawe was keeping it to himself because it was his secret.

In terms of identity, Fanshawe’s character was a representation of the universalist-separatist dichotomy of gayness. He was described as someone who was a stand out among the crowd, but at the same time, blending in it. It was the very heart of the gay identity – the contradiction between being an individual, and being someone who was just like any straight men around. On one hand, he left because he realized he wasn’t meant to live with others; on the other hand, he kept on moving from one place to another, establishing relationships with different people, acting like normal people.

Sorry, this is too long because of the summary

2004-08-08T03:50:00.001+08:00

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?

Paul Auster’s Locked Room, to put it simply, is about the narrator’s best childhood buddy named Fanshawe who left his family, making himself disappear as what he had planned to do, because he realized he was not meant to live with other people. He entrusted his unpublished works to his wife Sophie (still in accordance to his plans), instructing her to give them to the narrator, “his best friend in the world”. Then, the narrator was surprised when Sophie wrote to him, telling him that Fanshawe disappeared and she wanted to meet him. He then met her, seeing how beautiful Sophie was, and met Ben too, Fanshawe’s son to her. Sophie handed Fanshawe’s work over to him, and he gave in to accepting the responsibility of reading them and finding a publisher that could take them in. He then fell in love with Sophie, without knowing that everything was a set up to make him Sophie’s next husband. After his discovery through a letter that was sent to him by Fanshawe, telling him it was all his doing, he was torn between telling Sophie about it and keeping it a secret. But of course, he kept it to himself, and everything normal followed then: the marriage, the honeymoon, Ben’s adoption and success of Fanshawe’s works. Also, he wasn’t writing anything big then, growing slack towards his work, until a convenient solution presented itself to him as he was dining with Stuart Green. He accepted the project of writing Fanshawe’s biography, and went on researching until he realized he wanted to see Fanshawe and terminate the latter’s hold on him. But going through it, he lost Sophie and Ben, and his insanity, until he came back to his right mind and realized, which was the very first sentence of the novel:

“It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where
everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am.”

He learned that what he was looking for was not what he needed. He tried to win Sophie back, and he did, and this time he was prepared of Fanshawe, if ever he made himself present again to their lives. Fanshawe wrote to him again, telling him he wanted to talk to him. They talked, the narrator asking so many questions and Fanshawe trying to explain himself as much as he could. The former called him Fanshawe and wanted to tear down the door of the room where Fanshawe was, and the latter burst in anger and threatened to kill him. Eventually, Fanshawe gave a red, spiral notebook that would explain to the narrator everything that had happened to him, and the narrator walked out from the house holding it in his hand. At the train, the narrator read the notebook, which was full of questions that were answered by questions, and then he tore the pages from the book, throwing them to the trash bin.

HOW WAS THE STORY PRESENTED?

Though I think the novel resists to be understood fully, the whole story is one big irony. The whole idea of someone finding out he was being ignorant all along of something that was planned for him is effectively haunting; even more haunting and terrifying was when the narrator tried to find Fanshawe, thinking it was the most important thing to do, but he became insane for one month, losing the persons that mattered most in his life. Instead of putting to a stop everything concerning about Fanshawe by searching for him and killing him for everyone’s sake, it turned out to be worst, dangerous and futile. Quoting Stuart Green’s comments about Fanshawe’s Neverland below, The Locked Room too was one effective, strange story:

“I read the book more than two weeks ago, and it’s been with me ever since. I
can’t get it out of my head. It keeps coming back to me, and always at the
strangest moments. Stepping out of the shower, walking down the street, crawling into bed at night – whenever I’m not consciously thinking about anything… There’s something powerful about it, and the oddest thing is that I don’t even know what it is.”

Anyhow, the story has a lot of weird, disturbing scenes. Among these scenes, I find the sexual intercourse between the narrator and Fanshawe’s mother the most perturbing of all. It’s not because of moral reasons, but how this was used to convey the narrator’s hatred to Fanshawe. It was very real and sincere. On one hand, it was fulfillment of a young boy’s lustful fantasy; on the other hand, which I think more significant than the first, it brought the narrator’s realization of his hatred to Fanshawe to the surface, and was used as an act of revenge, or killing. Giving the word “fuck” in that part of the story another meaning – “screwing up” or “destroying”. It was therefore a very odd, but pertinent juxtaposition of pleasure and pain.

Among the three major characters in the story, Fanshawe was the strangest, even though he claimed that he was sane. He was unusual, a stand out in the crowd, but at the same time, he blended in. At times he acted as one of the gang, and all of sudden he wanted to be alone. He attached himself to people, and quickly detached himself from them. He possessed qualities that cancelled each other out. He was unpredictable and no one could get into him; he was right at all to tell that he was meant to live alone. For that, (thank God) Sophie chose to move on after he left.

At first, I thought Sophie was naïve not to think that Fanshawe had really left her and her son by themselves, but she wasn’t really being clueless at all. Fanshawe could probably have acted very natural, carrying out his plan to fool Sophie. As the story went on, Fanshawe, like any other men, was a good actor. It could have been the greatest performance of his life, and Sophie didn’t know she was in the role of the victim. Then it continued when she married the narrator, who was so condescending, and doubtful of her feelings to him, and untruthful. The only thing that was good on him was when he was tearing up the pages of the red, spiral notebook Fanshawe had given him. It shows how he wouldn’t give a chance for him again to mess up his mind. But still, he had to go on and chase after insanity. He was very fortunate he won Sophie back (Men. It always has to be the hard way. Tsk, tsk, tsk.)

Also, in presenting the story with disturbing scenes and images, the process is suggestive of the writing process itself. When you get to the part when the narrator tried to write a biography of Fanshawe, instead of going directly to the Fanshawe's life, the narrator did mention a lot of stories, weird stories to make his point that in making a story of someone, it had to be something "weird" or worthy to tell because if it isn't, why do you have to tell it in the first place? It's a justification that what the narrator was about to tell was something the reader should pay attention. It's brilliant for Auster to write about writing, and use it to tell the narrator's experience with Fanshawe, which was the main story.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2004-08-08T01:19:00.000+08:00

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

-- from Eloisa to Abelard, Alexander Pope 1717

I watched the movie yesterday. I wish the eraser guys would come and get me.

The Locked Room

2004-08-06T19:28:00.000+08:00

This story is good at handling suspense and mystery. By the time I finished the first chapter I couldn't help but continue reading it till the end. I wanted to know everything about Fanshawe, I wanted to understand him, to know why he acts that way, to see what's inside that locked room. It helps that the story has that silent, ominous atmosphere (mood) because it piqued my curiosity as to what will happen to the narrator, to Sophie and Fanshawe. But (yes, there's a but) the ending seems to just fizzled out. After reading I told myself, 'Okay, so Fanshawe remains an enigma from start to finish. He's a genius and a bit of a psycho and a wicked person- because of what he did to his wife-so, what?' I'm not saying that the author should've explained to us why Fanshawe acts that way or that he should've given us a glimpse as to what's written on the notebook. No I don't want that (mmm...on second thought, giving us a glimpse of how Fanshawe's mind works is quite interesting). The thing is what happened to the silent, ominous mood?, to the "darkness is what surrounds me whenever I think of what happened"? , to the "In the end, it would probably not be wrong to say that everything was lost on me"? The story made me expect that something more than the tearing of the pages of a notebook would happen. But then it's Auster's prerogative as a creator to decide what will happen in the story, it's just that the mood and the suspense that he successfully built up, it seems to me, gone to waste.

About the non-fiction quality of the story (as mentioned by Kelly) I think it's a good thing because here fiction is able to create that illusion of realness. Isn't it what fiction ought to do (at least according to some critics)? To create an illusion of life, to let the readers feel that what's he is seeing inside his head is true.

Spotless Minds

2004-08-05T23:49:00.000+08:00

"Like the greatest science fiction writers, Kaufman is using a bizarre futuristic scenario to tell us something about the here and now: about the loss of our most vivid loves to the impermanence of memory; and about the life we lose when, to go on living, we force ourselves to forget." -- David Edelstein, on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Saw the movie last night, and I'm very glad I assigned it to you all. Let's talk about it on Wednesday. :)

Identity

2004-08-03T22:27:00.000+08:00

*finds herself being dragged to the blog to write her reading journal*

Fine.

I'm not quite sure how to take Paul Auster's The Locked Room precisely because it is such an ambiguous piece of fiction. At first I was perfcetly prepared to take it as a surrealist mode of fiction, and then it became a detective story, and then towards the end, it became auto/biographical (not sure where the narrator ends and Auster begins) and when the reader is shifted all around by these modes, somehow I end up twiddling my thumbs and asking what the hell just happened to my brain.

But don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the story and towards the latter part I felt that the persona, particularly during the Paris sequences, was already writing Fanshawe's biography. You know that moment when you start inhabiting the shoes of the person/character you're writing about to the point that you don't know where fiction ends and fact begins? I have a feeling that that's what happens with this particular story. It's a story within a story with a story - sort of like those Russian dolls (ano nga ulit yung tawag sa kanila? I forget...) where you twist open one doll and there's another one exactly like it inside.

I mean, the biggest doll - if we're going to continue with the metaphor - would be the author, but inside him would be the persona (if Auster and the narrator are indeed different persons) and then beneath the persona would be Fanshawe. Although I think that there was a point where you couldn't tell where the persona began and Fanshawe ended. And somewhere in that stack is the reader, who starts questioning where one character ends and the other begins.

I think that the story was all about identities and about how we all assume other people's characters at one point in our lives. The narrator was doing that with Fanshawe: first as a childish imitator and then as someone who literally inhabited Fanshawe's shoes. And by the end, it didn't matter anymore what reasons Fanshawe had for disappearing - the story had stopped being about Fanshawe and became about the narrator. And in the end, when the notebook is already in his hands, when all the answers are given, we are never even given the answers because it's not important anymore.

I remember the movie "Identity" with John Cusack, and somehow I can't help but think that there's a connection with this story. But that belongs to another blog entry...

Unlocking the Locked Room

2004-08-03T13:43:00.000+08:00

I hate Paul Auster. Not because he writes badly or anything of that sort. It is, in fact, how well he writes that I hate him so much. What Fanshawe did to the story’s narrator, Paul Auster does to the reader.

The story grabs you from the first page and never lets go until after the last. The tension, the suspense and the excitement the story offers are present from the beginning to the end, but not to the point of being stretched out too thinly. Auster lays it on thick, so thick that one gets a feeling of suffocation during and after reading the story.

Is there such a thing as happily sad? Or successfully failing? That is what I thought Fanshawe was. First he was a missing husband, and along with Sophie and the narrator, we feel concerned, even worried, about Fanshawe, and whatever that could have happened to him. Continuing with the story, Fanshawe becomes a no-good husband, leaving his wife and son just like that. Tagging along with him in his adventures, we see the little changes that happen to him, and how these events made him the psycho he was as portrayed in the locked room scene.

I hate that Fanshawe was so cruel, playing with the narrator’s mind like that, as though they never were friends at all, but enemies. He planted this little seed in the narrator’s brain, which grew so big at a breakneck pace, and like a tumor, it ate up the narrator’s entire being, compromising the people, things and principles that he felt were most important. In a way, Fanshawe built and destroyed the narrator’s life, very effectively reflecting the way their relationship was during their childhood, with Fanshawe as the leader and the narrator as the fanatical follower, the difference is that the game Fanshawe created in their adulthood affected more people at a greater degree. Mind games are fun, yes, but only when you know that it will end sooner or later, but what Fanshawe created was worse than that; it being fatal, not only physically, but also spiritually and mentally, and that’s what he almost succeeded in doing: even if his gun did not go off and snuffed the narrator, he almost killed the narrator’s spirit, and he successfully messed up the narrator’s mind. If I were the narrator, I probably would have gone crazy with paranoia, dreading the day that Fanshawe returned and reclaimed his wife and child, destroying whatever I could have already repaired from his mess, and what I could have already created by that time. In a way, Fanshawe now seems like some miserable coot, who made other people miserable too, just so he would not be alone in his misery.

Through Fanshawe’s deeds, we see the character of the narrator: how he grew from a meek little sidekick boy, into a man of himself, although still not as defined as he wanted himself to be, but at least he was his own man, driven to actions by his own thoughts. The moment Fanshawe reappeared in his life, that was when he started to be controlled again by Fanshawe, and being led around like this is something I think is a sign of weakness. So, given that the narrator is weak, this makes the other events in the story more believable, with him running around the world, looking for clues and all that, and we see that on his arms and legs and head are invisible threads attached to wooden bars, controlled by Fanshawe. This endears the narrator to me, how he, in the end, was able to bounce back from his drunken misery, and repossess the life that he lost.

Paul Auster is Fanshawe, who kept the door locked, who held a gun waiting to explode. The reader is the narrator, taken along for the ride, controlled by Fanshawe/Auster, the way a puppeteer would his puppet. And like the narrator, we wanted so much to unlock the locked room, and up until our dying day, admittedly or not, we would be forever wondering.

Wicked

2004-07-30T20:20:00.000+08:00

Paul Auster is wicked. He is one of the few writers who have managed to drea me into his story, lead me into a series of stories from the mundane world, sometimes made me smile but most of the time made me cry. It is quite a long piece but I didn’t mind. I was reading the novelette continuously and as every chapter ends, one slight look at the beginning of the next chapter makes me want to go on and on. Auser is quite wicked because he confuses me if this is fiction or non-fiction. Of course, I do not have any background about the author but it really ‘tastes’ like non-fiction. But whatever it is, I have to say that whatever the genre is, I have to agree with the persona when he said: “These are true stories. They are also parables, perhaps, but they mean when they mean only because they are true”. If this event really event happened, I’m going to be sooo sad.

Technically, I have no problems with the writing. The story is very easy to read, very fluid, sometimes even very poetic but not sounding too profound. I notice that the narrator tries to be precise as much as possible and wanted the reader to trust him. He does this by putting in some evidences that prove to whatever he is telling to the reader (“We were born less than a week a part and spent our babyhoods in the backyard together…[There are photographs to document this]”). Moreover, the narrator is also fond of enumerating things to support the events that he has to prove to the reader that they really happened. He is also not hesitant to tell everything, and gives in crucial details about the story. He also tends to be very emotional, as again, maybe a tactic to make the readers trust him in whatever he tells us. Even in the part where he experiences surreal things when he was in Paris, he tries to be honest as possible for the benefit of the reader. The narrator is very conscious about what he writes although he keeps some things to the reader. It wasn’t really a problem for me for it could also be another strategy to convince us that such things really happened. I also liked the narrator’s thoughts and side comments for they contain creepy but true themes. Auster gives us a story which ranges from a how-to-write a biography manual, a detective story, a romance (or erotic?) story, a thriller, and maybe a story which is close to our own realities.

I Ain't Buyin' It

2004-07-29T14:58:00.000+08:00

THINGS ABOUT THE STORY THAT ELICITED VIOLENT REACTIONS:

1. FANSHAWE, THE 'GIFTED CHILD': I used to envy people whose brains came naturally. They were those who didn’t have to work at being smart and were just effortlessly good at doing everything (or at least a lot of things). I felt this envy bordering on resentment especially when I encountered someone who was just naturally skilled at doing something I love; writing, for example. Someone like Fanshawe, let’s say. Writing was a disease?! Boo-freakin’ hoo!

In the beginning I felt this grudging sort of admiration for someone who was so special but so nonchalant about it. Later on I just saw Fanshawe as this tortured artist type that made happy writers like me look so shallow. They have the hidden depths because God saw fit to bless their lives with angst and pain, and EVERYONE knows pain makes great art (I’m not good with sarcasm so tell me if it worked).

In the end I pitied Fanshawe for never having been able to just be. Whatever demons he had that caused him to leave was no excuse for me. How high-handed was he to decide that Sophie needed a husband? How godlike did he think himself to be that he decided to ‘die’ and leave everything to his loved ones? It would’ve been much better if he’d been dead, or if he’d been strong enough to stay consistently dead. Instead, he became a specter in his family’s life, hovering like a cloud, making everyone miserable. I hate people like him.

2. THE PERSONA: It just struck me how unaffected he was whenever he would tell a story about Fanshawe. What amazed me more was how little he seemed to downplay the fact that he was living Fanshawe’s life. Even though he had these reflections about making crucial mistakes or whatever, I thought it was unbelievably sporting of him to live his best friend’s life. And the part about doing Fanshawe’s mother just showed me how Fanshawe’s presence started to twist his simple life and change him for the worse. The persona, whose name I didn’t catch, was completely replaceable. His personality didn’t matter, only his narration of Fanshawe’s life and his relation to Fanshawe made him a little relevant. But despite this I identified with him more. I understand the feeling of having to work to be good at something, of being excruciatingly normal, of being simple. I’m sure had he been given more space he would’ve showed more depth, but placed beside Fanshawe in the story he was completely dismissible. I know that feeling.

3. THE ABSENCE OF FANSHAWE’S WORK: Deliberate or not, it made a difference to me. All the while I read I kept asking, “So what the hell is it about this Fanshawe guy’s writing that made him so special?” I was reminded of ‘The Purloined Letter’, where the central object, the letter, can be compared to Fanshawe’s work. They were both absent, even if the titles of Fanshawe’s works were mentioned. Maybe it bugged me so much because I needed to see the works and decide for myself if Fanshawe deserved to be feted. You see, I’m long past the days when I obediently read and judge a piece as masterful just because others (teachers, critics, writers themselves, even people who know what they’re talking about) say it’s a classic. I’m way past it. Arrogant as it may be, I only say something’s good when I think it’s good, not when others think it is. I’m not right all the time, and the occasional ‘classic’ flies right over my head, but it doesn’t matter. I have my standards and I’m sticking to them.

Floody Flood and Sweet Summer

2004-07-20T23:38:00.000+08:00

I like “On the Flood” because it subtly and matter-of-factly narrates a story that would have been typically treated bizarrely. It starts with a very ordinary situation, that of the speaker being tired and ends with an almost impossible event. Well, one can of course be in flood and can probably survive it. But the situation of the speaker is far different since he is on a mattress, carried by the strong currents of the flood. When you come to think of it, he must have swallowed some really big powerful sleeping pill to not notice that he was in the midst of a flood instead of in a cozy bedroom. He would have been dead already, in short. The beauty of fiction comes here when the text makes the situation probable, that maybe one can sleep on a bed in a room, wake up one the same bed but this time, floating amidst a turbulent flood.

The story tastes sweet. The title starts it, “Sweet Summer,” and candies occur throughout the story, it felt like I was also eating Halls honey-lemon myself. Sweets are mentioned at the very start. Sarah gives Frederick Cloud 9. The dog licks chocolate off Sarah’s fingers. And there’s that wonderful part of Frederick’s breath smelling of Halls honey-lemon. The story also crucially ends with candy, Frederick spatting the Halls away. Even the club’s name, if that really was their name, had Candy in it.
Is this story a prelude to a larger, longer love story between Frederick and Sarah? I don’t think so. I was wondering if this story could become a Chapter 1 in a romantic novel, but I figured it cannot be. It is too condensed for a chapter, for it is itself a story already (yah, we’re talking about short short fiction here). I would have hoped for a longer love story between them, but that is of course already a job for another fictionist.

STIMULATION IN AN EYE CANDY WORLD

2004-07-20T22:35:00.000+08:00

Now I get it. Men are animals, or should I say pigs, and women are, well, what else? Of course, when there’s poultry, there’s fodder. In this case, or in this story, however, we’re talking about boys and girls. Remember these constants – boys in this story are dogs (disregard Camilla, the other éclair, referring to Sara as Frederick’s dog) and girls are sweets, and oh so yummy sweets at that. There are the “two creamy long-legged éclairs” and the “nut-brown fudge”. If you ask me, I’d pick the nut-brown fudge in a heartbeat – who can ever resist chocolate? But then this isn’t a story about chocolate; it’s about colonial mentality – how boys prefer the fair-skinned girls over the morena one. Talk about a very Filipino backdrop. Add this to the choice of the Doberman as Frederick’s dog (I think it’s a must-have status symbol for most Filipino households), the mention of the water tank and its diarrhea-inducing water (very Third World), the housedress (a.k.a. duster), the designation “Kuya”, and the Filipino sweets (macaroons, Halls honey-lemon, and Cloud 9) in the story that give me the idea that the story’s set in the Philippines. I suppose every Filipino kid grows up on these sweets or must at least be familiar with them – if you’re not, I don’t know what cave you’ve been hiding in for the longest time.

The story, however, is also about desire. A teen girl feels sexual desire towards a younger boy, even if she deems him as not that attractive. It’s what I call raging hormones. But of course, the more obvious proponents of arousal are the boys who can’t help but ogle the girls – as the constant excuse goes, “men will always be men” or, in this case, “boys will always be boys”. I suppose the mention of the age of the girls and that of the boys is to show how both sexes start to become more sexually aware (hornier) at this age as their bodies develop. Here is where the boys as dogs enter. Boys like hanging around girls just as dogs like hanging around sweets, waiting for a lick or two. You get the picture.

The dog’s licking of his nose at the end of the story is like saying “thanks for the lick, Sara, but there are other more lick-worthy girls out there waiting for me”. Forgive me for my obscene imagination and language, but that’s how I see it. Boys indeed will be boys. And this story has presented colonial mentality, adolescence or growing up, desire, even the idea of rape (how teen girls become physically ready for sex, therefore are more prone to become victims of the crime or, in this story, of being jumped on) in such a (for lack of a better term) cool way.

The way the characters talk or act and the telling of the story are fanciful at times, and the story, minus the Filipino details, sounds American because of the mastery in the use of English, but these have all contributed in the effectiveness of the story as the opposite of didactic, boring, and painfully serious.

REMINISCENT OF DREAMING OR A SHRINK SESSION

2004-07-20T22:29:00.001+08:00

Since I don’t really practice morning writing, I can’t verify if I indeed had dreamt of myself being carried away by a flood on my bed. But if it’s any consolation, I remember falling down from the sky and landing on my bed. So what’s with all the talk about dreams? Well, because the story reminds me of dreaming – being omniscient in a story where I’m also a character. And come to think of it, it also reminds me of a hypnotized patient relaying his thoughts to his per-hour shrink. That’s why this is one of those times when I want a shrink for a relative or the expensive book about dreams just so I’d know what the story means if it were a dream. But then again, if the story means something bad, the story will lose its original flavor.

I find the story quite funny, and I can very well relate to its details. “I decide I have to be dreaming. Any actions should wait for the clarities of daylight, I drop back onto my pillow, and wrench the blankets over my head and my thudding heart, and squeeze my eyes tight for sleep” is quite a laugh when read with its premise. “…my fist under my pillow clutching wallet and documents, in the night grip of a voyager” reminds me of how I did the same when I slept over at a friend’s house, and how my dad clutches his gun beneath his pillow as he sleeps – the obsessive compulsive stance runs in the family, just so you know.

Two Very Short Shorts

2004-07-20T18:11:00.000+08:00

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

            In this story, two very young hearts imprinted their names on each other’s bodies, which is something quite magical. And I am interested to know what will happen to them in the future. Now that would make for a very interesting story. Will they find each other as grown-ups? Will they fulfill the “fortune” foretold them by the lights of their lanterns? Or will the future fulfill it for them? How heartwarming it would be to see these two children grow up and be together, without ever knowing what had really happened in the insect chase.
The narrator must have felt it—the magic of the moment—and it was with him that the impression of the incident stayed. There was wonder in his tone, and rightly so. I am certain that this incident will have a lasting effect on him, as I imagine it would be for me, had I been in his place.
I surmise that this person is a romantic: he described the play of lights and colors created by the lanterns as “a scene from a fairy tail”; He felt “slightly jealous of the boy, and sheepish” when he realized how the boy felt about the girl; he was left musing about how there are girls who are grasshoppers and those who are bell crickets; and he brought forth unspoken “words of wisdom” to the boy, which he might as well had been directing to himself.
Stories like these are the kind that make one sigh, sit quiet for a moment, think, and remember.

Sweet Summer

            Sara happens to be one of my favorite female names, a fact that immediately endeared me to the girl in the story. She was described as “the nut-brown fudge in a housedress melting in the sun” and called “Sara the Square” by the two other girls, “the two creamy long-legged éclairs”.
I deduced that Sara was plain and common-looking, based on the names she was called. The clincher came when Frederick’s older brother led him away to introduce him to “some real yummies”. The implication of this was that Sara was not a “yummie”. And yet it was Sara who was the first—and only one—to be interested in looking, at all, at the boy and his dog. Characters like these are the ones who get my sympathy, for obvious reasons.
I felt sad for Sara. After experiencing a show of kindness from someone, after forgetting—even for just a while—“the brown face, pudgy hands, squarish body”, she was once more made to feel whatever inadequacies she had. This, of course, was in relation only to the prettier girls. For whatever she lacked in physical beauty, she more than made up for it with her innate goodness.

Sick Day

2004-07-20T16:35:00.000+08:00

Hello, all. Am at home today, sick; down with a bad cold, a sore throat, and what feels like a fever (I'm just guessing though, not having access to a thermometer). I was supposed to interview Gilda Cordero-Fernando for a publication today, and I was very sorry to cancel it. Sadly, I don't think I'll be well enough to teach tomorrow morning, either. We'll catch up next week.

In the meantime, keep those reading journals coming. It's rewarding -- and quite enlightening -- to read about everyone's reactions to the stories. When I first read "Moonlight Shadow" years ago, it affected me a lot, and am glad to see it left quite an impression on most of you as well. Banana is a woman, by the way (now there's a statement that makes no sense, taken out of context). Interesting point about the boundary between prose and poetry, Gabby. "The Page" is a mystery I'm still unravelling, myself. Its meanings seem to change slightly as I read it at different times of my life. Am surprised that many of you chose to comment on "On the Flood": I'm not entirely sure yet what it means, myself, just that it was a pleasure for me to read. But I've learned by now not to underestimate you guys.

"I think I’d particularly enjoy seeing a cow float by me." Heh heh.

Have to rest now. See you all next week.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also touched but...

2004-07-20T10:13:00.000+08:00

The lengthiness of the story seems appropriate to the mournful and tragic experience of the main character. The story is simply about someone who tries to cope with the difficulties in letting go of a dsead loved one. But the form becomes superficial. The main sentiment – the longing to see a dead loved one – is repetitive in most parts of the story. The author fails to renew the sentiment in each of these scenes, making the whole story overly sentimental. The other two characters in the story, Urara and Hiiragi, are not unique characters. What they are going through is just similar to Satsuki’s, thus adding more pages of sentiments of the same depth. The only technique, I think, that work in the story is its plot. The narrator goes back and forth in time to tell the story, sustaining the reader’s motivation to read the story closely until the end.

I just have one question, why did the writer choose to end the story with Satsuki’s note to Hitoshi, instead of ending it with the scene where Hitoshi was waving his hands to Satsuki during the “Weaver Festival Phenomenon”? It seems like the scenes after the phenomenon were all just there to tie the loose ends of the story. They are just similar to the experience of the main character.

Now where did that come from?

2004-07-20T10:11:00.000+08:00

At first, the situation is normal and tries not to look normal. We have a character who knew he was going to be blind, and so he wanted to see, as in visually experience, things that he thought he would miss when he couldn’t see anymore. But as the story approaches the ending, it becomes strange, which is both good and bad (I don’t know how to put it) strange. The idea that the main character’s pictures of his old face turned out to be objects and the idea that the soul is being reincarnated into non-living things are good strange. Also, the sentimentalism in the story is subdued. But when the character tried to make sense of his pictures, it’s bad strange because it sounds “forcefully” philosophical. The whole doctrine-sounding explanation about the soul by Norman sounds so weird that I wanted to ask the author where did it come from, and why did it have to be there. It’s so hard to accept Norman’s profundity in his realization, because in the denouement, he was rationalizing what just happened – an obvious intention of the writer to explain the event. It was such a big leap from finding a way to preserve a memory and have a full experience, to the explication of reincarnation of the soul. The transition, which was when Flynn was telling to Norman what happened to his childhood crush and her mother as he was developing their pictures, was convenient (a deus ex machina). The wheel in the desert and the moonlight in the pictures should have been enough to suggest the main character’s fate, but their impact is lessened because of the denouement.

Another “blown-up-to-proportions” story

2004-07-20T10:05:00.000+08:00

The title does not intend to mock the story or the writer. I just don’t know what or how to call the technique in which the story was told. The story has a central focus – the little girl who was answering a crossword puzzle and her parents – and that what makes it short and concise. Everything that the narrator was saying was controlled by it. Unlike the narrator of the Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket, one can hardly accuse the narrator of over-reacting because his reaction to the parents of the 12-year-old girl is quite sincere and natural for someone who knows the spelling of ELIJAH (and I just assume this narrows down to those who are educated and those who read the Holy Bible) though he was a bit judgmental and condescending. He says, “…you can no longer concentrate on anything but this young girl’s crossword puzzle, quickly being polluted by the advice of these people she calls her parents.” Then he says, “This poor girl, stuck forever in a dim, ill-spelling world, nowhere to turn. She’ll never know the spelling of Elijah, or Enrique, or even Justin or JC. Should you intervene? Isn’t it your duty? Don’t those who know the truth have a responsibility to stop the dissemination of untruths? You must step in. You can do so good-naturedly. You can do so without upsetting the family unit, the sanctity thereof.” In these lines, there’s a shift of tone – from a tone of petty concern to the girl to a tone that’s profound, “truth-bearing”. Reading these lines give you the idea that the character sounds like he needs a break from whatever he’s doing at that time, which is confirmed in these last lines, “And really now, what were you doing, listening in to her spelling request? Isn’t your own life complicated enough? Is your own existence so free of mistakes that you need to seek them out in strangers, inserting yourself into the life of a 12-year-old with a crush on a hobbit-playing actor? No wonder you’re on your way to a spa in Palm Desert. You damn well need the rest.” He was now truly blowing up the issue to proportions and it all comes down to himself. It’s appropriate and “excused” – he needs a break.

There was no story if it wasn’t for…

2004-07-20T09:58:00.000+08:00

The tightness of this story has something to do with the writer’s technique. Its structure is obvious (and I’m tempted to say that the whole story is contrived… too much). The first three paragraphs constitute the introduction. It builds up its characters (the children) and the situation (they were making lanterns and chasing after insects). In the next paragraphs, the complication starts. Then, a boy shouted for three times that he caught a grasshopper. For the first and second times, children went to him until the third time when a girl went to him. The climax of the story is when the girl told him it was a bell cricket, and not a grasshopper. Lastly, the denouement comes.

What’s the significance of laying down all of these elements here? (In short, why am I saying this?) It’s important because it’s the ground that the story is built on, and because of that, the story turns out to be simple. However, its simplicity doesn’t mean that the story is boring or there’s nothing new about it; though it has the tendency to bore the readers, yet it didn’t – that’s because of the story’s narrator. It’s common for a story either to have the narrator as the main character of the story, or the narrator is omniscient. But in this case, the narrator was involved in the story. It’s refreshing to me because I haven’t read enough stories like this in the past.

The story was told in the first person point of view, but it was not about the narrator. At first, I thought it was about the boy who thought he caught a grasshopper and a girl who told him it was a bell cricket. But I was wondering if the story was all really about them because the denouement was in the narrator’s point of view. The scene where the boy’s name was on the girl’s breast and the girl’s name was on the boy’s waist meant nothing for the boy and the girl because they didn’t know about it.

And I think that’s what the story is about, or specifically, what the narrator wants us to think that the story is about. The image or the scene was so suggestive that the narrator felt that he had to say something about it (because if he didn’t, the story was nothing). One can accuse the narrator that he was overreacting or “over-reading” the scene, blowing up the image to proportions. The narrator said, “Even if they (Fujio and Kiyoko) remembered forever that Fujio had given her the cricket and that Kiyoko had accepted it, not even in dreams would Fujio ever know that his name had been written in green on Kiyoko’s breast or that Kiyoko’s name had been inscribed in red on his waist, now would Kiyoko ever know that Fujio’s name had been inscribed in green on her breast or that her own name had been written in red on Fujio’s waist.” At first, the scene was just a scene, but in here, it becomes an image with meaning for the narrator. Then you ask, “So what’s the image all about?” The narrator could either be suggesting an unspoken connection, maybe love or mutual understanding, between the two, or a destiny that the two of them are clueless about. But whatever the image means, the narrator went on suggesting in the following paragraphs that there’s more to the image. He was trying to convince his readers. He says,

“Fujio! Even when you have become a young man, laugh with pleasure at a girl’s delight when, told that it’s a grasshopper, she is given a bell cricket; laugh with affection at a girl’s chagrin when, told that it’s a bell cricket, she is given a grasshopper.”

“Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not too many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.”

“And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper.”

In these passages, the narrator was now taking his interpretation further, assuming that Fujio becomes a grown up and meets girls along the way. He was now telling about that one-time experience of meeting someone who’s noticeably “grasshopper” but really a “bell cricket”. Whatever this means, the readers are now interpreting what the narrator had thought he saw. There was a tendency to get lost with what he was saying and be mushy about it, but sticking to the image, talking in terms of grasshoppers and bell crickets did the trick.

and suddenly an answer fell from the sky

2004-07-20T00:37:00.000+08:00

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Howard Nemerov
The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov
Edited by Daniel Anderson
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press

Playah

2004-07-19T08:38:00.000+08:00

I’ve seen this kind of people. The unnoticed, the invisible… outcasts but not because they’re repulsive nor ugly, they’re just not … there. I understand them, well sort of for I believe that once in our lives we become nobodies ourselves. We experienced one way or another what nut – brown fudge experienced in the story.

We feel so lonely and so unwanted sometimes that we take anything (or anybody) regardless of whether it’s (he/she’s) bullshit or not. When we do get this anything or anybody we are too afraid to let go fearing that the utopic feeling it brought to us will never happen again. Happiness overwhelms us until reality slaps us in our faces and reminds us that we are still nobodies.

Bumalik pa eh...

2004-07-19T08:27:00.000+08:00

I’m not quite sure what to make of this piece; the point seems so obvious, like it’s already there, staring at your face. But still I have second thoughts about my interpretation. Well enough of the “pampahaba”, here’s what I think about “Lost”

I think, that it’s about this girlfriend who went “out” of a relationship for a while, reasons vary from going out of town, on a vacation or (this is what I believe) this is some case of a “’cool – off” where both parties get to set aside their commitment/s to each other and play the field for a while (which the girl did). Then, I think, the girl actually liked her time apart from her partner; “…and how incredible it was to be in orbit.” Even though she’s already back, again involved with her original partner, she couldn’t help but think of the time when she was free, and compare her world with her partner to the world she experienced while they were apart (much to the disgust of the boyfriend).

So that’s it, that’s what I think… please don’t laugh. Hehe. I liked the story, very well told, simple but very true… it does happen.

I’M AFRAID OF SHORT SHORT STORIES

2004-07-18T15:53:00.000+08:00

After reading the assigned stories, I realized that the lines between short short stories and anecdotes (found in Reader’s Digest, for example) and short short stories and poetry can get very blurry. I felt this especially after reading the stories of Dan Rhodes. After that I began wondering what short short stories were really all about, what conditions must be met by a story to be called a short short, aside from its being really short of course.

I got my first clue after reading Atwood’s “The Page”. I’m still not sure about this, but some of the assigned readings, especially “The Page”, resembled poems. Not in structure, not in meter or language, but in their treatment of the topic. Atwood’s story for instance made the mundane dynamic and more complex than it really is. I mean, how many short stories see a piece of paper as a dimension all its own, a desert, or an almost otherworldly experience? This treatment of the topic has a very poetic quality; it is turned into a metaphor, a symbol for something else. This metaphor idea can also be seen in Cyan Abad-Jugo’s work, although not as clearly in my opinion, because the metaphor of the candy wasn’t successfully sustained in the end.

Another poetic quality I noticed in short short stories is evident in Yourgrau’s “On the Flood”. Here it is not so much the treatment of the topic but the atmosphere of the story. I found it dreamlike (well duh) and surreal even though I’m not sure if the character is really dreaming. The vivid descriptions reminded me of “The Day After Tomorrow”: stark and awe-inspiring. Good poems successfully foster a certain atmosphere that puts the reader right in the middle of the text.

After reading the story I remembered a similar fantasy/musing I had, although in it, humans lived underwater. I found the story very funny because I sleep like the dead and am prone to hissy fits when something or someone disturbs me. I’d probably react the way the character did when he was awakened, though I’ll probably stay awake in awe and wonder much longer before going back to sleep. Not reading implications of a natural calamity in the story, I’ll probably even enjoy the sight of floating objects, especially if they don’t normally float (because of my humans living in water fantasy). I think I’d particularly enjoy seeing a cow float by me. Again, this part reminded me of “The Day After Tomorrow”, especially of the scene where a ship glided in the middle of New York. Still, despite my possible enjoyment of the strange situation, I know I’ll be freaking out in a huge way when the novelty wears off. I’d still do what the character did, however. I’ll conserve my energy so I can row myself to somewhere more interesting, like Makati or Hong Kong.

Like a poem, there is a story beneath a short short story. The strict discipline of limiting the number of words challenges the writer to find words that mean more than what they seem to mean and images that hint at something deeper. Short shorts don’t have the luxury of explaining themselves unlike regular short stories. For someone whose poetry sounds like prose and who is already having a hard time trying to write stories that can be considered short, I hope short shorts won’t be my downfall as a writer.

Clap Clap to Sudden Fiction

2004-07-18T13:03:00.000+08:00

You know how to spell Elijah by Dave Eggers

One amazing thing about Sudden Fiction is that it works like a poem. It takes you to a single image/scene, presents the story, and strikes you hard on the face. In the collection of readings, I particularly like Dave Egger's "You know how to spell Elijah" because of the humorous and witty tone of the story.

More on the story, I particularly like the character of the "you" since it is very well developed. The story takes you to the airport even if there is minimal description. I also like the setting because even though, it is ordinary, a very smart and humorous situation happens. I also like how the "you" reacts and how the irony is presented towards the ending of the story. The language is also nice since even though it is very mundane, it catches your feeling and how the you will naturally react with the irritating situation. I kind of relate to the story because sometimes, I tend to listen to other people's conversation and criticize/judge them at that instant. I believe the story gives me the realization that I should think about myself first before problematizing others' life. Yepyep... Woohoo! Clap clap!

Innocence by Dan Rhodes

In the "Five 101-word Short Stories", I choose the story Innocence because of the ability of the story to summarize everything what happened even though it is just composed of 101 words. It presented the life of the "I" before he marries his fiancee and because of the parrot, he realizes that he should not marry her.

This particular story focuses on one imagery, and as in the story, the character also focuses on one detail about her fiancee that eventually changes his mind. I admire the author's ability on how he had done this and his ability to write this in an original and formalistic approach. With his stories, I realize that sudden fiction really works even if there is a certain limit in words. Clap clap to Dan Rhodes. Woohoo!

BITTER and TIRED

2004-07-17T22:43:00.000+08:00

(My apologies to Cris for my reading of THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE BELL CRICKET. I can only interpret the story THIS way.)

I was thinking about what the bell cricket and the grasshopper symbolized. On my third reading of the story, a phrase caught my attention, and from there I was able to make out what the story MIGHT have meant.

"Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket."

Bell cricket = one of a kind; special
Grasshopper = common

In that line from the story, the “I” persona likened the “ordinary” girls to a grasshopper, and the “special” ones to he bell cricket. Since this line was directed to the boy (Fujio), the persona was telling him that maybe someday, he’ll find an ordinary girl whom he’ll think is a special one. He’ll think himself lucky to have found that special girl because “there are not many Bell crickets in the world.”

I sound like another hopeless romantic (Cris+t!) with this reading because of the finding-that-special-person theme I have going here. But I’m not. In all these, I find the “I” persona a sexist (sort of). He narrated how Kioko responded to Fujio’s cries only on the third call. Fujio asked who wanted a grasshopper and almost all the other children came to take it. On his third call, Kioko responded; she was now sure it was she who was being asked if she wanted a grasshopper. The narrator was implying that only when the girl was sure about something did she act on it. The third to the last paragraph also carried the same theme: “Laugh at a girl’s delight; laugh at a girl’s chagrin.” This stated that girls always preferred the bell cricket – something special – over something ordinary like the grasshopper. This is somehow ironic because the girls themselves were being likened to the bell cricket and to the grasshopper.

The last paragraph was also directed to Fujio. If he saw girls as grasshoppers and crickets, and got wounded by the “special” one/s, he would see all other girls as just grasshoppers, even if a true bell cricket was in front of him.

The persona recounted however, that there was a moment when bell crickets and grasshoppers didn’t matter, and that was a special moment. Sadly though, Fujio would never know if there would be a special girl – or moment – anymore since he’d think only grasshoppers existed in this world. He’d never know if his name was ever going to be written on a woman’s breast – he wouldn’t enjoy that moment – because in the first place, he never knew that a play of light ever happened.

ON THE FLOOD

The first paragraph indicates the weariness of the persona. He is tired of his present situation, and he tries to escape this through the easiest way possible. He sleeps it off.

Whether what he experienced was a dream or not, my interpretation of the events remains the same. Everything the persona saw – the wreckage of the calamities – are representations of his present turbulent situation; it’s also as if he can’t, or won’t, do anything to remedy the problem. All he does is escape (through his sleep), and he thinks that maybe what he is experiencing is a bad dream – something he’ll wake p from once the sun rises. But even after he decides to fall back to sleep, he is aware that he’s just going to float onto a more “turbulent” body of water, the sea. He even indicates that the sea contains the same turmoil as the places he just passed.

The Flood always needs somewhere to go to, or flow to. In this case, it’s the sea. A turbulent flood from river to sea.

Sudden Fiction

2004-07-17T19:50:00.000+08:00

Innocence by Dan Rhodes

This story confirms what David Lodge says, in his essay Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction, when he argues that in postmodernism there is a return to telling as a dominant mode of narration.

In this story the I practically summarizes the whole events. This summary style of narration allows the story to be complete using so few words and like any other traditional short story we can see movements within this short short fiction: 1) inner movement, the reversal of the character from ignorance to knowledge (what Aristotle calls peripateia- I'm not sure with the spelling) and 2) physical movement, the flow of events, from before marriage to the couple's eventual breakup in the future.

On the Flood by Barry Yourgrau

This story tells of an instance in the I's life using the images of the flood and the 'wreckage of calamities'. The story seems to evoke a certain emotion from the image of a person lying on a bed being carried by the flood amidst the clutter of things and I guess this is why this story sounds like a poem.

It seems that the I is having lots of problem which drains his/her energy and time and that by the end of the day s/he decides to just let things go by, to watch and be carried away, at least for now.

Size Does Matter

2004-07-16T15:05:00.000+08:00

In my CL 145 class (Japanese Literature - which, under Sir Wendell Capili was more Japanese Culture than anything else, no harm done though, I still enjoyed it very well), I've learned that the Japanese are one repressed lot. Imagine having to hold your feelings inside you for as long as you can remember. (I remember Doc Ock saying how complex emotions shouldn't be kept locked inside.. oops, back to the topic) so it isn't such a surprise to see extremely wordy works by Japanese authors, since literature is one field they can pour out their emotions with the safe guise of "poetic license". Recalling Banana Yoshimoto's story, which was really wordy I almost grew nauseous, I felt relieved to discover that Yasunari Kawabata's The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket was only two pages long. I read on, and found out that whoa! This is very typically Japanese, so wordy, yet so natural. The idea could have been expressed in a shorter piece, but I believe its wordiness was what won me over. It almost feels like sitting under a cherry blossom tree in autumn, just when the pink petals are falling. A shower of damaged pink petals is more beautiful than the single perfect petal falling on your lap.

The large number of words used and the subtlety of the realization were working against, but with each other, like a fugue where the main melody woven with the counterpoint resulted into something of beauty. The repetitions, which would have been irritating in other cases, became charming, especially since the repetitions were placed where they should be: near the end of the story, offering an echoing quality to the tale. And the way the repetitions were done was such that I could vividly picture the other kids flocking around the boy, the girl and the insect, repeating each other's comments.

The idea of the names written in green and red light is nothing to scoff at. Such sweet beauty is almost heartbreaking, especially for the adult watching over the children, whose only outlet for emotion is to watch the children do the simple things which symbolize most of the feelings he could never show. Children are so lucky to be allowed such a freedom, only they are not aware of it. And if they became aware of it, that freedom is taken away because awareness signals maturity, and maturity calls for supression of emotions. Thank God I'm not Japanese.

***

Dan Rhodes seems to be addicted to biatches. Of the five women featured in the five 101-word stories, it is only the girl in the "Mold" story who is not "bad". But of course, I'd rather be a bitch than a bore.

The stories are really irritating and at the same time pretty hilarious: irritating because they are all about women and gosh, the pseudo-feminist in me just wants to scream "FOUL!", while the hilarity of the situation kicks in just when the realist in me says it's all true.

Looking at the form of the stories, I find it marvelous how one person could create so much amusement in 101 words. There are funny one liners, yes, but they usually don't have complete narratives such as Dan Rhodes' pocket stories, do they? His ability to squeeze in dialogue is nothing short of amazing. Also, the one-word titles successfully sum up the main theme of each story. Now, if only I could devise a way to tell these stories to my friends with a straight face...

Drawing the Line

2004-07-14T23:05:00.000+08:00

For the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out the difference between prose poetry and sudden fiction. The gap between fiction and poetry, which was once as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, has now been reduced to a single strip of asphalt that can barely accommodate two cars. And for the longest time, I’ve been trying to puzzle out what makes poetry poetic and what makes fiction prose – both tell stories, in my opinion, it’s just that fiction writers take a lot longer in explaining things than poets. But the end effect is still the same: that light-heavy sort of feeling that you get from reading a really good piece of literary work that I’m assuming is akin to the buzz you get from recreational drugs.

But if I write:

I’m eating M&Ms right now, and the last green candy falls from my fingers to the floor. I’m finally out of wishes.

– is this prose? As opposed to:

I’m eating M&Ms right now.
The last green candy falls
From my fingers to the floor.

I’m finally
out of wishes.

Have I already written poetry?

At any rate, these were the questions going through my mind when I read through the collection of sudden fiction. Some of them, particularly Barry Yourgrau and Dan Rhodes, sound more like prose poems than sudden fiction. Dave Eggers and Michael Swanwick and Cyan Abad-Jugo are definitely writing fiction pieces. Yasunari Kawabata writes like a Japanese writer writing in English; it doesn’t matter what form he’s taking. ^_^ And Margaret Atwood, as usual, loves screwing around with my mind.

I’m tempted to take Swanwick and Abad-Jugo for my reading journal entry just because for me, it’s the easier, more ‘fictional’ pieces. But I felt a special kinship with Dave Eggers’ “You Know How To Spell Elijah,” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Page” and that’s why I’m going with these pieces.

Dave Eggers

If I wanted to have a crush on a writer – if I was insane enough to actually want to have a crush on a writer – then I’d probably have the biggest crush in the world on Dave Eggers. He makes me laugh. I love the way he thinks and how he articulates his thoughts and how he has absolutely no reverence for the literary establishment and how he succeeds in his parodies. I’ve never finished reading “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” but if anyone wants to buy me a copy for Christmas, I’d gladly accept it. It doesn’t hurt that he’s not bad looking, either, in a cute puppy-dog sort of way.

Yes, contemporary fiction has now found a poster boy in Dave Eggers.

I enjoyed the scene presented in “You Know How To Spell Elijah.” At first I thought it was some Biblical situation with allusions to the Old Testament’s prophet instead of the actor. And I loved the humor and subtle sarcasm in the story, and how Eggers takes our all-too-human capacity to involve ourselves into other people’s lives and encapsulate it in this tiny little scene in the airport with this person getting irritated at the misspelling of Elijah Wood’s name. And of course, it’s poking fun at our tendency to want to correct people who make mistakes within our periphery – as if doing so would make us akin to God. Or at least a minor deity.

To extend the story would be to rub salt on an already open wound. The length and compression that Eggers did to the scene was enough to make it work, to make the tone sound as if the person telling the story is right in front of you – that in fact it is you, what with the usage of the second person point of view (which was incredibly effective, in my opinion). All of which basically says – I LIKE THIS STORY.

Margaret Atwood

My first encounter with this writer was perhaps the most chilling. I read her novel “The Handmaiden’s Tale” as a high school sophomore, and it scared the bejeezus out of me even more than my encounter with Edgar Allan Poe (who used to occupy the top of my list as The World’s Freakiest Writer Ever) back in fifth grade. And she didn’t even use blood and gore and suspense in order to make the hairs on my arms – she just created a world where women were used as birthing equipment for the propagation of the human race, and that they didn’t even have the right to read. That seriously freaked me out.

Again, if anyone wants to buy me a copy of “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” I’d be happy to accept it. ^_^

At any rate, I’m not even sure if I should approach “The Page” as a piece of fiction or as a really long prose poem. On the one hand, it was labeled as prose – although in my opinion, it is anything but. But my gut tells me that I am reading poetry. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because if there’s anything “The Page” succeeds at, it’s that it delivers a truth about the craft of writing. (Ars prosetica, anyone?)

Atwood captures the process of approaching the greatest hurdle any writer ever had to face – a blank page. She describes it in so many ways, all of them true, and presents to you (particularly if you’re not a creative writing student) just how difficult it is to choose the right first word, the right first phrase, that moment when everything clicks inside your head and the torrent of words comes tumbling out, splashing onto the page. She talks about the frame of mind prior to that first drop of inspiration, that preparation for the foray into the wild wild jungle of the imagination.

It was a different kind of enjoyment for this piece: a quieter, more introspective sort of appreciation, and realizing that starting is just as difficult – if not more so – than ending.

Of Boredom and Nostalgia

2004-07-14T08:32:00.000+08:00

With all the talk about mundane settings fused with impossible objects to form stories, my first impulse was to think that the story was about a magic camera that would solve Norman Beizer’s problem. Maybe a magic camera that would produce pictures even blind people could see.
Even as I neared the last page, I had my hopes up on a magic camera, especially when Jeremy Flynn called up Beizer about the pictures – I thought a Frankenstein-looking man would appear on Beizer’s pictures or a ghost would be beside Beizer on them. But the story wasn’t about a magic camera. It wasn’t even close to anything scary or interesting. The pictures were that of a wheel in the desert, the moon on some swings and other similar objects. Talk about boring. I would’ve found it more exciting if the camera produced pictures that showed how the people whom it took pictures of would die, even if the concept had already been used (in a TV show I can’t remember). I was instead stuck with a man’s journey towards epiphany – his realization that “the feelings, temperatures, sounds…that were in each of the pictures” were “what he would remember after he went blind”. To tell you frankly, I found the whole story too predictable. The conclusion (solution) followed the premise (problem), and in between them was Beizer’s mental journey towards the conclusion or solution – somewhat in the form of stream-of-consciousness because of the quick shifts in the viewpoint from the semi-omniscient narrator to Beizer and back.
Although the story spoke of realities about life, presented funny instances, or did both at the same time, through Beizer’s encounters with the camera salesman, the blind beggar (“Fried chicken. Can I have my ten dollars, please?”), the cheat of a girlfriend, Jeremy Flynn, and other characters, and through Beizer’s thoughts (He should give it to the poem stealer…), I found the story quite didactic, especially in its conclusion. I was insulted as a reader because the ending seemed to tell me ‘this is the gist of all these, this is the moral lesson of the story, this is how you should see life’, as if I didn’t get enough of these from fairytales when I was a kid. I also didn’t fancy the concept of reincarnation, especially the thought of turning into anything other than a human being. But I must say I’m quite interested in the travel of the soul because I believe in out-of-body experiences, in the thought that one’s soul travels when the body is in slumber or coma and it is only attached to the body by a string. If this string snaps, the person dies. I think it’s called “projectile motion”. I’ve experienced it in the form of a dream wherein I felt like I needed to take a pee, I stood up and walked to the bathroom, relieved myself, and found myself wetting my bed. A friend’s sister had a scarier version – she woke up at night, walked to the bathroom and relieved herself, and saw her body still lying on her bed when she went back. With this whole talk about peeing, I can’t help but think of Beizer’s “Weeing in the Wee Hours”, which I found really funny.

I thought I was in for the same boredom when I looked at the thick Xerox copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s “Moonlight Shadow”, save for the amusement in coming across a Banana, a Japanese one at that, who authors a story. I read a few pages then put the copy down for a few days. I thought it was one of those trite stories forwarded from one e-mail inbox to the next as stipulation to find one’s true love, which when ignored or erased, sentences the lazy or the disobedient into eternal bachelorhood or spinsterhood. I changed my mind about it, however, since I had no choice but to read it and since Anamer disagreed on my initial response to it. Knowing Anamer to share the same hopeless romantic outlook in life, I gave the story the privilege of a clean slate. And boy was I in for a great surprise. Here was a story that slowly unfolded before my eyes and captured my very pain of losing a loved one, the difficulty of moving on, and the satisfaction of discovering love again, minus the predictability (even though I figured out that Satsuki and Hiiragi were each others’ second chance on love) and the didactic quality I resented in Jonathan Carroll’s “A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings”.
They say the death of a loved one is easier to accept than seeing a loved one love someone else. I can’t argue for any side since Satsuki and Hiiragi lost their loved ones through death, and I lost mine through circumstance, yet Banana’s descriptions just seemed to perfectly embody the two’s feelings and my own feelings, which I used to lack words for or used to avoid putting into words. She was able to capture the pain of losing a loved one, whatever reason or whatever manner the loss had happened. This made me wonder if Banana had experienced losing a loved one himself/herself (what’s Banana’s gender anyway?). Because I think the only kind of person who could perfectly convey these emotions through the right metaphors or descriptions is one who doesn’t only ‘know’ or sympathize with those who have experienced them, but has also experienced them himself/herself to truly understand them. Take it from me; I’ve taken the role of the inexperienced single-since-birth friend, the indifferent love doctor, the loved one who jilted her loved one, and the jilted loved one. I used to brush off other people’s love problems, and I used to underestimate the pain of losing a loved one, but when my turn came, I couldn’t even curl my lips to fake a smile. The pain was indescribable. And just now, I found solace in Banana’s descriptions in “Moonlight Shadow”. The story is thus my Urara because it had made me realize that there are Satsuki’s and Hiiragi’s out there who had felt the same way as I did, and who was given a second chance on love by a force more powerful than who or which had made possible the “something”.
There were some instances in the story, however, that were other than sad or painful. These were either baffling or funny. Urara’s expression on her face was like that of “a demon turned human who suddenly caught herself feeling emotions and was warning herself that she wasn’t permitted to” made me shiver and wonder as to who Urara, whose name I found really funny, really was – was she an angel, a demon, or just a human being? I also found “whenever Hitoshi took out that case, which he used as a wallet, we heard its faint, clear, tinkling sound” quite sexist and funny at the same time. I don’t know about the others, but it made me think that Hitoshi always spent money whenever he and Satsuki were together, especially with the emphasis that the bell was attached to his wallet and that the bell, and inevitably the wallet, was with them in each and every thing they did. There were occasions when Hitoshi need not bring a wallet since they just lived from opposite sides of the river and often met on the bridge where I can’t think of anything to spend on, so does the bell attached to the wallet represent a social commentary? Another thing that baffled me was the name of the “something” – “The Weaver Festival Phenomenon”. Was it named so because it interweaved the world of the living and the world of the dead?
I would’ve wanted to quote the precise descriptions of Banana Yoshimoto about love, loss, pain, moving on and letting go, and other universal truths, but since I can’t, I’ll just pick out a few to quote:
“A lover should die after a long lifetime” explains how lovers live on the concept of ‘forever’ when they’re together.
“I would repeat to myself, like a prayer: It’s all right, it’s all right, the day will come when you’ll pull out of this” is a version of my “God please remove all this pain, please, please make me strong again”.
Satsuki’s message to Hitoshi, which I think was in the record she gave Hiiragi, seemed to sum up the whole story – the whole process of loving – without sounding didactic or repetitious.
Needless to say, I found the story brilliant and incomparable (partly due to my limited literary diet). And that Hiiragi wearing Yumiko’s sailor-style girl’s high school uniform, no matter how unbelievable and ridiculous, is I think one of the sweetest ways of remembering a departed loved one.

a girl who jogs with a thermos in her hand...and a guy who wears skirts

2004-07-14T08:17:00.000+08:00

"So that was about a friend who’s fuckin’ up and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you just watch him go down, down, down. Other times you have good friends who don’t fuck up at all and they’re great people… and you just lose them for some reason. And they’re just off the planet and you even never have the chance to say goodbye. I only mentioned this because we used to know a person here…her name was Dianne. And I… we never had the chance to say goodbye. So this is goodbye. And if you have good friends, love them while they’re here.” -Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam (a concert in Holland)

I liked the story a lot, surprisingly. Surprisingly because usually, I don’t like mushy stuffs… and this is definitely a mushy stuff. Another thing… it’s Japanese!!! Not that I have a grudge against them, no… definitely none. It’s just that whenever I encounter Japanese literature I have problems remembering the characters’ names… everytime, man. But I think I’ll make an exception with this one, this is definitely a great story. It was long but never boring, dragging nor tiring. It was pretty successful in maintaining the calm atmosphere, my house actually stopped “talking” while I was reading the story, and everything was so quiet or actually too quiet. I liked the brother (what’s his name?), very light, funny, not really an anti – thesis of the girl but more or less the brother balanced things. What’s with the skirt? I’m not quite sure if that was intended to be humorous but it was funny nonetheless. But I can say that that was a weird way of showing depression.

The magical aspect of the story helped a lot, if it wasn’t for that, the story would have been forgettable… just another story about loss. But I’m not saying that that was the essence of the story. I can’t say I can totally relate to the story, but somehow I can sympathize (not empathize) with the girl, I mean we all more or less have experienced loss of a loved one.

a blind photographer?

2004-07-14T07:59:00.000+08:00

I think it was Edmund Husserl who came up with the connection between essence and experience; it was either Husserl or Martin Heideger. The essence of a human being is its experience (or something like that), this is what makes you, us, human. A Greek philosopher once argued that there is inside each and every one of us an indestructible soul, ready to “transfer” to another physical body once we die, bringing with it our collected knowledge and experience. I’m really not sure how I can connect these to the story but these two are the things that immediately popped into my mind after finishing the assigned reading.

Beizer was too much concerned on the irrelevant, insignificant (or the not too important), and the superficial. He was so worried about objects, what his face would look like with wrinkles, that he totally forgot the one thing that mattered to him, one thing that will matter to him after he goes blind… himself. It’s funny though that it took objects to remind him of this. Nevermind the toothbrush, as mentioned in the story, there were probably thousands of people who already made a toothbrush as their subject in their photos…Beizer should’ve focused more on himself, it was the only thing that he could truly claim to be his.

on sentimentality and transcendence..

2004-07-13T19:22:00.001+08:00

It felt like i was watching one of those mushy japanese cartoons when i was reading yoshimoto's moonlight shadow. I imagined the scene of a girl going on and on with her monologue while cherry blossoms drift in the background and you hear her faint voice with the wind. Mushy and sentimental but i end up liking it anyway because of yoshimoto's sensitivity in handling the theme of grief, moving on, teen angst. I think she was succefull in being able to show fleeting moments of such intense grief and not being pathetic about it. I also liked the parts on urara, and i felt eerie on that too though the part when they were on the bridge and when on a sort of a time warp got on them was a bit corny for me.

If, in a flash, we remembered, we would suddenly be crushed with the knowledge, the knowledge of our loss, and find ourselves standing alone in the darkness.--Satsuki

I liked Jonathan Carroll's story better because it wasn't that too mushy though it is also sentimental. Bezer wasnt wallowing in nostalgia though he knew that he was facing something that would change his life drastically. I liked Beizer's humor and his musings on the soul, though musings on the soul is a mushy thing for me, was handled very well too. Both of the stories bear something metaphysical, something trascendental and their sentimental thoughts about losing a part of themselves was what both Beizer and Satsuki got over with in the end.

on sentimentality and transcendence..

2004-07-13T19:22:00.000+08:00

The Awww Effect

2004-07-13T12:17:00.000+08:00

A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings

The first thing that struck me about the story was the first line. For me, that particular line hooked me up and made me go on reading the story even if it was about 12 midnight (i was actually struggling with my insomnia). The good thing about the first line was its irony, and that it captured my sympathy for Beizer since he was going to be blind.

One thing that I liked about the story was its tone that was very calm, witty and humorous as seen on the part when he was disappointed about his toothbrush, thinking that "a few hundred thousand people had probably had the same idea in one way or the other" and also about the "Wee Poems". Moreover, I liked how the author developed Beizer's character by using details that tells much about Beizer's attitude --being cool and unworried about his life. The climax was a surprise and also haunting, although the resolution tends so rationalize but it was not really a problem for me.

I would be curious on what things would be reflected on the pictures if Flynn took pictures of me. Would it be a condom under a moonlit beach? ahahah...

Moonlight Shadow

My impression about this story is that it reminds me about the Korean telenovelas, specifically, "Endless Love" Seasons 1 and 2, and that is a compliment because what I do love about those telenovelas is that they had characters which captures the heart of their audience.

What strikes me about the story is its characters, which features people who are so real and sooo inlove. The use of small details for character development very effective. I also like the tone which even though it tends to be melodramatic, it still not so mushy and there is still that sense of reality in it even though there is a fantastical element involved. I really loved the descriptions because you can really feel the coldness of the atmosphere. And finally, I like the use of the bell where it was still brought up until the resolution of the story. The effect is haunting but also it is "Awww".

Going blind and getting thin

2004-07-13T12:00:00.000+08:00

A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings

I liked the fact that even though this was similar to other stories I've read that had cameras taking pictures of people's souls, it had a twist of some sort. The camera caught Beizer's soul - its past, present, or future; what it knew and did; and, what it was going to do after Beizer goes blind.
There was a paragraph in page 227 that I didn't exactly know how to react to. In that paragraph, Beizer was trying to rationalize what happened to the pictures Flynn took. Since he was going blind, I think I forgave the character for doing that. If his situation was different, I wouldn't have accepted his rationalizing. At the same time, allowing him to muse all he wanted provided me the chance to believe (for only 20 seconds) that maybe his theory was true. After reading through what Beizer was thinking, I was completely back to thinking what he just said impossible and too damn unbelievable. I guess part of my believing Beizer's theory was Flynn's account of another incident similar to this. Beizer's theory somehow relied on Flynn's story.

MOONLIGHT SHADOW

The mind can play tricks on people. Why can't the heart do the same?

The story was a sad one (big understatement). I've read other stories like this, but Moonlight Shadow stood out. It being narrated in the first person added to the "sadness" of the story. The "I" persona made the readers feel what she was feeling. The narration was effective in that aspect. The things happening to Satsuki also showed the readers what she was going through. Satsuki was getting thinner; she jogged every morning; she did things just to keep herself busy. The narrator always found a way to associate what she felt with everything she saw - the beel, the misty mornings, the half-moon inthe sky, even the color of the sky before sunrise. She connected all those with her feelings.
The tragedy experienced by Satsuki as seen by the readers permitted her to have that "vision" at the end. Because of the way the story was told, the readers had become sympathetic to her, thus, permitting her to see that vision of Hitoshi. Whether it was possible or not to have that experience, the readers permitted it as a reward to the suffering narrator.
On the technical side of writing though, the story had a few lapses. One is the use of tenses. We know it uses flashbacks as a means of narrating, but because of the shifting tenses, readers are sometimes confused whether that part of the story was still part of the present or just a flashback. The story was also a bit hard to read because of the language. There were some wrong idioms used; even some word choices were awkward. I got the feeling that the story was too wordy. But all these lapses weren't enough to hinder the persona from conveying her feelings through her narrative.

On Loss and Loss

2004-07-13T00:00:00.000+08:00

The two stories we were assigned to read are about loss, both of which are grave and life-changing: the loss of a loved-one and the loss of sight. The difference is the main characters’ treatment of the loss they suffered. While Jonathan Carroll created in A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings a character which acted upon his loss as soon as it hit him, the main character in Moonlight Shadow written by Banana Yoshimoto took the more passive approach. Why they reacted differently can be explained by the large disparity in their personalities.

Norman Beizer is the kind of man who’s incurably happy that fate may hit his face with a club and his smile would still remain plastered on his face so his reaction when he found out that he was going blind didn’t come as a surprise. If he had gone and flailed and wailed about, it would have been more surprising, in a bad way. His reaction to the realization that life would be so much harder for him when he became blind was so muted, but it jived perfectly with his personality. While I was reading the part where Flynn showed Beizer the pictures he took, I was tempted to think that Beizer was in fact insane and that the wheel in the desert and the moonlight on the swings was a photographic manifestation of that insanity, especially since we often associate the moon to lunacy, and the solitary wheel as a representation of the head whose screws have turned loose. This insanity idea was further supported by Beizer’s being extremely good-natured, which I thought from the very beginning was very suspicious. His reaction to his girlfriend’s infidelity was such that I could only conclude that he indeed was crazy. But of course, just before the end of the story, where Beizer realized that the pictures of the objects were pictures of his soul, the main idea was explained. It was easy for me to swallow that whole metaphysical discussion because the tone Jonathan Carroll used in the explanation was one that was easily and unmistakably Beizer.

Banana Yoshimoto’s Moonlight Shadow, however, was a lot harder to swallow. First was the tone Satsuki spoke in. It was overly sappy and sentimental and I didn’t feel satisfied with it. But finding it corny was merely my initial reaction. When I proceeded to analyzing the situation the main character was in, I began to accept that Satsuki had every right to speak and think and mope around that way. After all, sentimentality and repetitiveness is something one should expect from a person who has suffered the death of a loved-one. I remembered one of my close friends, who suffered not a death of the loved-one, but the death of a love, and she was so emotional, and she repeated her whinings to the point of my boredom and irritation.

After I got over the sappiness of the tone of the story, I tried to look at it as it was. When Hitoshi’s brother was introduced, I thought the rest of the story would be about Satsuki and Hiiragi getting together by the end of the tale. When I read further though, I realized that it was about the acceptance of loss, the recovery period one needs to go through after suffering that kind of painful blow. The “event” which Urara predicted was expected, so the suspense that the author was trying to create wasn’t really that strong. It could also be just me, having watched all those Japanese horror films, so Hitoshi’s apparition was not so surprising.

What really ticked me off was Satsuki’s letter to Hitoshi by the very end of the story. The entire text before that was sappy enough, I believe the sappier letter would have been better scrapped. If the story had ended with Hiiragi’s laughter, it may have looked a little open-ended, but I would have felt a lot better, and without any feeling that I have been left hanging. The letter, which I guess was the author’s way of providing closure, just made the whole story look so overdone.

Beizer and Satsuki may differ in how they dealt with their loss, but what was common to them was that they were both searching for that one thing which will commemorate the presence and absence of that which they possessed but lost.

LOSSES, FINDS

2004-07-12T10:20:00.001+08:00

Banana Yoshimoto’s Moonlight Shadow:

When I came to the part of the story where Satsuki sees Hitoshi after his death, I felt—and knew—somehow, its inevitability. Satsuki’s suffering, her sadness, the emptiness she felt because of her loss: these pains had to lead her to some place in time where she would find what it was that she was searching for, what it was that she wanted most.
Things like this happen to us at some point in our lives, though the circumstances are seldom alike. It may take months, years, even decades before it reveals itself to us—the answer to a question, a long-lost person, a sought-after dream—but it is sure to come our way some time. At times, we don’t recognize the very thing we have been looking for even as it stares us in the face. At other times, we don’t realize that we have already found it until much, much later. In Satsuki’s case, she was lucky to have seen come true at a sooner time the one wish that she had prayed for. Perhaps the intensity of her feelings made this possible; or the mysterious intervention of Urara; or simply chance with its seldom-discernible designs. Hiiragi’s experience echoes those of Satsuki’s.
The part of the story that stirred me most was Satsuki’s coming upon the very place where Hitoshi died. I was able to feel the impact that moment must have had for her. In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity: yes, that must be how it would feel like. It must be as if time freezes and we are confronted with a gamut of emotions; when the most intangible questions materialize in front of us. In that instance, Satsuki underwent an episode akin to stupor. Hiiragi had to give her a punch on the shoulder to rouse her from it.
As for Urara, I left her in the shadows on purpose. I felt that a character like her would best be perceived the way she must have been intended to be by the writer—enigmatic, half-concealed. To know that she was the bridge through which Satsuki could cross her wide river—that was all I needed. Attempting to figure her out would have meant softening her potency, depriving her of the veil of mist with which she is wrapped most becomingly.

Jonathan Carroll’s A Wheel In The Desert, The Moon On Some Swings

Norman Beizer’s passion for life can be construed quite consistently throughout the story. Not once does he falter in this zest, this energy, even as he knew he was already going blind, which is something remarkable in itself. He was told he was going blind and what did he do? He marched into a shop and looked for a camera. His foremost concern was to be able to capture whatever it was in life that would help him remember when he could no longer see. Beizer was determined to remember, to hold on to the life he so lived with vitality, even—and especially—with the knowledge that a part of him was already starting to fail and will, eventually, cease altogether.
The idea of a camera being able to deliver images in the way Jeremy Flynn’s camera does is a fascinating and, at the same time, spooky one. I mean, if you knew a camera could do that, would you want your pictures to be taken with it? I certainly would have doubts before agreeing to that. What if my pictures tell me things I would not have wanted to know? The truth does hurt most of the time. But then again, it would be interesting to see in what images my soul will by rendered by such a camera.
In the story is a person who is looking for a way to “teach his memory to remember.” The images he sees in the pictures enlighten his mind and lead him to see those which would stay most clingingly in his recollections, “the part of him that was universal and curious.”

One Step-by-Step Manual on Moving On Please

2004-07-11T16:31:00.000+08:00

I liked the vivid descriptions in Yoshimoto's story. They weren’t just easy to picture, they were also colored with whatever the persona was feeling. If Satsuki was feeling like crap, it didn’t matter if flowers were in bloom or the stars twinkled like Christmas lights. To her they looked like crap. I liked quality of the story. I also found the characters endearing and sympathetic, especially because of their thoughts and reactions. I hadn’t expected such emotional expressiveness and eloquence from Japanese characters. I’d always thought of them to be kind of emotionally bereft, and my assumption was strengthened by their suicide rates. I especially liked the ability of the characters to express grief without being melodramatic. I wouldn’t call it detachment, but there is a kind of reserve in Satsuki when she talks about Hitoshi. She expresses her pain but I know it must be deeper than she makes it appear. I know people who stay sane by doing that.

Despite the length of the story, I was compelled to read it until the end because (and I know almost everyone in the class will say this) I saw a little of myself in the characters. I even saw myself in Hiiragi the cross-dresser. Despite (or because of) the Japanese’s outrageous taste in clothing, I didn’t find his method of dealing with his grief laughable. Sometimes we cling to the most unlikely things with no guarantee of happiness just to keep from staying where we are. Wearing Yumiko’s uniform was Hiiragi’s way of clawing out of pain and back into normalcy.

Having a dying soul isn’t all bad all the time, as Satsuki’s ability to smile shows. In the midst of pain there are real moments of joy, but they come at a high price because they’re often reminders of how less sorrowful life was before. But then again, memories are always better than reality, aren’t they? Bienvenido Santos even said the best memories are those that never happened. We have a tendency to long for the past even if it wasn’t all that good whenever the present becomes unbearable.

The difference between people stuck in eternal grief and people who move on is choice. Sometimes being stuck and static is easier because you get used to the pain and learn to live with a certain level of it. Choosing to move on entails so much effort and upheaval. The highs and lows of finding your way back to the living are so emotionally and physically draining that a lot simply choose to return to their rut of grief. At least they already know what’s waiting for them there. During the process of moving on, you sometimes don’t recognize yourself anymore so you’d rather take solace in what you know: pain. As I said, it’s easier because you know what to expect.

Satsuki, Urara, and Hiiragi were lucky. Some have no outlets for grief, people who genuinely know what the grieving are going through, and certainly no convenient means of closure. They don’t come across people and events that aid and quicken the healing process. Satsuki’s sickness was the ultimate expression of grief, its grand purging. Urara and Hiiragi’s presence was Satsuki’s crutch when she couldn’t move forward. She had these people around her who were going through what she was. The ‘Weaver Festival Phenomenon’ closed their wounds, if not healed them completely. In real life, not everyone is so lucky, or loved. But then again, this is fiction, no matter how strange.

I'm not Sure about the Story...

2004-07-11T16:26:00.000+08:00

I had mixed feelings about A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings. I found it odd, at times annoying, relatable (if such a word exists), and thought-provoking. I'm still not sure if I liked it.

I guess what I found strange about Beizer was what he did after being told he'd be going blind: buying a camera. His explanation of using photography to embed images in his brain just didn't fly. I couldn't understand how taking pictures would help him after he went blind. He certainly wouldn't be able to look at them then. If I were to go blind, I'd start recording people's voices so I could listen to them when I lost my sight. In my opinion they'd be better triggers of memory.

I didn't think taking pictures was about capturing the moment for Beizer either. He got over the idea of photography so quickly that I knew the story had only begun. What I liked about his view of photography, however, was his decision to savor the whole process. He just couldn’t resign himself to his fate. Instead of wallowing in what was to be his future, he couldn’t help but savor what life had to offer him. In his selectiveness of the pictures he’d take I found a person not just trying to make the best of what he had but someone who still wanted to be special, to make a mark. Even if I didn’t agree with his methods I liked that about him.

Beizer's decisions to take pictures and have his pictures taken were what rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know if what he did struck me as selfish or silly or stupid; I just know I thought he was wasting his time. Maybe because it was unorthodox and strange, or maybe because it was extravagant of him to shell out so much just to see what he would look like in the future. Or maybe it’s because I just don’t understand how precious sight is, even if I wear glasses as thick as the bottom of Coke bottles and even if reading is my life.

There was so much to relate to in the story that I kept reading even if I didn’t exactly like it. The things I related to weren’t even actual experiences but descriptions written by the author. The part about Beizer’s friends being pessimists and self-pity experts hit me hard because I’m like that now. I’ve forgotten to do anything in the present because I’m always looking for the answer in tomorrow. There was also the part about our efforts to preserve our memories. I learned somewhere that as we learn something new, we forget something old because our brains just don’t have the capacity to hold everything in. I hate, hate, hate, hate that. It’s like helplessly watching something precious slip away. I hate not being able to choose what I’d like to remember.

The new idea of the soul surprised me. Although I’d always thought of my soul as an eternal, dynamic receptacle of everything that’s good in me, I never thought that it has a life of its own. I’d kind of believed that the soul was what it was because of what I did. I never considered the idea that I might be the receptacle for my soul, a temporary, finite receptacle. That was unsettling because my soul is mine, yet this story showed me that I could merely be a fleeting piece of it. Talk about a few self-esteem points down the drain.

A wheel in the desert and Moonlight shadow

2004-07-11T14:02:00.000+08:00

A wheel in the desert:

I like the way the author handles the story. Perhaps it has something to do with the tone or mood, I'm not quite sure. The thing is, the story starts with being ordinary and then the strangeness just creeps in little by little.

In this story, Beizer searches for that thing that would remind him of life but then realizes that he doesn't need it for he will always experience that life within him. Meaning,I guess: one has to live life so as not to miss it.

There's a part in the story that says about leaving behind imprints, which I guess reflects Beizer's desire to be remembered. Here I remembered that poem entitled Brilliance, by Mark Doty, I think, which basically says that one gains immortality by loving.

In The Rememberer: a guy who is always sad 'devolves', here: when one is too good one goes blind. Tsk.Tsk. Our parents are right when they say that too much of something is bad for one's health and well-being.

Moonlight Shadow:

First of all, my copy is lacking a page.

Second of all, this is mushy stuff...well, not really that mushy, let us just say almost. And I think it's one of the strength of this piece. She (I'm assuming Banana is a woman's name), the author, is able to handle a subject, death of a lover, which I think has a tendency to be melodramatic, with restraint.

Third of all, what's with the little bell? Perhaps there's something in the story that I didn't get or missed out. Anyway. The little bell, I think, was given to much weight in the story without it being developed. I mean the story starts with the narrator saying that a little bell always accompanied Hitoshi when the guy was still alive and she goes on saying that "it was destined to remain at his side until the last." Because of that word, destined, I was somehow expecting something about the bell, but I didn't see any development of it.

She-Who-Writes-Her-Second-Reading-Journal

2004-07-10T20:00:00.000+08:00

Jonathan Carroll is a familiar name, even though I’ve never read any of his works yet, because of the fact that my favorite author Neil Gaiman sings praises about this man. So in reading “A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings,” I was expecting something from a master storyteller, a writer who would take me places I never expected to.

Carroll writes with a very casual, very ordinary voice – he allows the reader to be immersed in the mundanity of the world he is creating before slamming into your face the strangeness of the situation. And it is only when you get to that point that you realize you’ve been waiting with bated breath for what he was about to reveal all along.

Beizer is a character whose altruism I can understand and empathize with to a certain degree. And the choice of images that Carroll chose to represent this man who was about to become blind – and sight is certainly incredibly important, particularly if you one of those people who prefer to drink the world in – seems pretty apt, for some strange reason I cannot quite explain. He makes Beizer sound like a character who is at the cusp of something monumental, where an impending loss is turned into a last blessing.

And I enjoyed the attitude Beizer had while going through the motions of anticipating the loss of sight. He was neither bitter nor depressed – though I’m sure a part of him died as soon as he heard the doctor’s news. It was bittersweet: his search for the perfect picture that would capture himself, and how he saw the world. The photographs taken of him, in the end, was so much more than he had hoped.

And I loved this line: “Poems are as personal as fingerprints. Steal one, and you instantly give up your own identity; as if you were actually giving up the lines on your fingers or the features on your face.” As someone who writes poetry, aside from the fact that it’s a slap in the face of plagiarists, it was a good description of the process of writing, of leaving an imprint of your soul on paper. It’s amazing how we find our identity in objects and symbols, as if there is a special association between us as human beings and the things around us. It’s a throwback to primitive times, when the natives would paint tattoos on their bodies to symbolize a particular characteristic or quality that will identify them; or when the American Indians would call themselves She-Who-Rides-With-The-Wind or Bear-Killing-Machine or something like that. Beizer can probably name himself A-Wheel-In-The-Desert, if he wanted. ^_^

I think that the whole story is all about identity and immortality. Beizer is undergoing a great change – what would be represented in the tarot deck as the Death card – a profound alternation of himself that will result in a thousand little changes and will ultimately affect the way he lives the rest of his life. And whenever people go through something of this magnitude, there will always be that tendency to grasp at straws, to be able to assert one’s individuality, to consider one’s identity, to ultimately answer the question Who am I? because then that answer will become the anchor that one will hold on to as the change occurs.

Bittersweet Partings

2004-07-10T19:59:00.000+08:00

I think that women will always love more than men. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, or maybe it’s because most of my guy friends are callous, overwhelmingly dense entities built out of flesh. (Golems react better than them.) But it’s the same story all over again – it will always be the man who leaves, and the woman who is left behind.

Okay, I’ll try not to be bitter here. If I am, you have every right to rein me in.

Banana Yoshimoto’s “Moonlight Shadow” is a story about final goodbyes, about love and loss and letting go. Satsuki’s character is someone I can readily identify with, down to the sleepless nights and the need for movement in order to tire the body out. I would walk around our neighborhood until early morning, my legs complaining loudly, just so that when I would collapse into bed I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep anymore. In some ways, I think that death is the kindlier option than parting, though it still is a separation of some sort.

Her love for Hitoshi echoes Romeo and Juliet, sans suicide. There is that transcendence of time and space and what we perceive as real. This kind of love can never be fully captured by poetry, by mere letters on a page. And so her loss is as painful and as profound – I can almost feel her gasping for air, waking up every day and wishing that she was just dead.

Digression: blame me for being a romantic, but a love like this cannot exist in this day and age. I have yet to meet a man who is both pragmatic and romantic, sort of like a 21st century gentleman who is perfectly willing to fall in love and with all the trappings and adventures that go along with it, instead of always complaining about how much of an effort it takes to make a girl happy.

At any rate, Satsuki’s “guardian angel” of sorts, Urara, was at first the strange character that I thought the story would coalesce around. But it ended up that the final realization was Satsuki’s – that she had to move on. And with the ghost of Hitoshi saying goodbye from across the lake that misty morning, she does. As Urara said over tea after that experience, “But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can’t believe you’ll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman’s energies.” That line almost made me laugh out loud – this is the universe telling me to move on and let go.

I have so much more people to meet, and so many places to see.

Impossible vs. Mundane

2004-07-09T01:59:00.000+08:00

Welcome aboard, Steph. And now, here are a few more story endings, from Alice, Jen and Kelly. As I said, I'm pretty happy with the way you guys handled this assignment. I'll have to think of a harder one next time, mwahahaha.

Hope you all have your copies of the two stories I assigned last Wednesday by now. It'll be very interesting to see how you guys react to Banana Yoshimoto's "Moonlight Shadow" and Jonathan Carroll's "A Wheel in the Desert..." Am reading a Jonathan Carroll novel right now, The Wooden Sea. Excellent stuff. Not many people collide the mundane with the impossible quite so appealingly as Carroll. His work combines elements of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, but in the end it might be closest to magical realism, if we're looking for labels. It's generally hard to find his stuff, but keep an eye out for it at Book Sales and the P99 stacks at National (that's where I found this one).

Carroll's got some stories online, but I don't think they represent his best work. It's his novels I like most -- The Land of Laughs and From the Teeth of Angels especially.

*

Alice:

Extraordinary thing: a microchip of pre-programmed music that can be stored in the human brain so that one can listen to it anytime and anywhere.
Mundane place: the streets of Tondo

Guada could hear the loud music in her ears, disturbed and miserable, just like everything else around her. Outside their exhausted house, she can hear again the monotonous noise of a mobile patrol car chasing the most recent burglary suspects, the deafening howl of a pot-bellied father cursing at the wrong brand of cigarette his son had bought for him, the ales flocked in the sari-sari store across the street hopeful of another fresh rumor about Kristine Hermosa and Jericho Rosales. And of course, the hysterical voice of her mother as she tried to appease her drunkard husband.
She sat by the wide opened window and inhaled the toxic air created by the exodus of vehicles in the street. Inside her head, the loud MP3 was now playing the soft music that was telling the story of a love that was lost. Her stepfather yelled at her, asking for a bottle of gin. But she didn't heed to his growling. She didn’t hear him. Or maybe she did but somewhat chose to ignore. She plucked her guitar strings and tried to synchronize the chords with the music constantly playing over her numb head. The echo created in the hollow body of the instrument was a balsam to her distraught soul, taking her away from her dejected situation. She won't run out of good music, and bad music as well. She had been storing them in that microchip implanted deep beneath her brain every day, for the nineteen years of her life that ran out of tune.

*

Kelly:

Ok, the one I got is Steph’s impossible object and I chose the tampon that would give a girl an orgasm. I got the mundane setting from Jen, it is set at Glorietta. This could be a challenge for me since I’m not really familiar with Glorietta and much more with a tampon. But anyway, I gave it a try and came up with this quite-lousy story.

Balloons and Fountains

A few months after his operation, Troy-now-turned-Trish goes to Glorietta where he can only buy "TampOrgasm", an orgasm-giving tampon. He-now-turned-she wears a red silk dress that defines her firm breasts, her slim waist and her perfect J-Lo buttocks. As she walks towards the mall entrance, men in business suits glance at her, old women glare at her from top to bottom and young men in school uniform whistle at the moment she passes their way. At the entrance, she removes her sunglasses and puts it on her head, making it a hand band for her newly rebounded long hair. She walks straight towards the stall in front of Marks and Spencer where she can buy the product. She then heads towards the escalator and to the second floor where she can have a good view at the Atrium below. The central hall is as usual, filled with people. Men and women of different ages sit beside the water features, some children were glaring at the shooting fountain, different couples walk by, and of course, Gerald is there, busy selling balloons.

Trish smiles and goes down to the ground floor. She then heads straight to the women’s CR and confirms her femininity. She goes inside an empty cubicle and sits on the toilet bowl. She opens her hand bag and looks for "TampOrgasm". Before she opens the wrapper, she reads the instruction over and over again, and checks for possible side effects. The scent of the piece of cotton smells like laundry bleach. She carefully puts the special tampon inside her new sexual organ and she smiles.

"One, two, three," she whispers and pulls the tampon’s string.

Trish stares at the cubicle door, waiting for something to happen. She reaches for the tampon on the floor and smells it, and checks at the wrapper if she has done a mistake in using the product. She reads the instruction over and over again until she is convinced that she used the product right. But then, she realizes she did make a mistake because the instruction reads: "For women only."

Walking outside the comfort room, Trish paces towards the Atrium and sits on a bench. She stares at the fountain, waiting for the water to shoot. She then glances at Gerald who is selling a red balloon to a little child. But, the girl accidentally lets go of the balloon while the fountain shoots water upward. The fountain shot is so high, but it never touches the red balloon, that flies to the roof.

*

Jen:

Impossible object: eyeglasses that can read thoughts
Mundane setting: carpark

SANDY

She could no longer take it. she rushed out of the car, unable to let frank finish his stories. she did not bother to talk to him anymore, neither to look back at him as he called upon her.

"Sandy! where are you going? come back here!"

she continued to walk fast. she was almost running, still not looking back. she knew frank was behind her. she walked a little faster. she wanted to leave that carpark immediately, away from frank and all his pretensions. she no longer cared about the afternoon heat making her sweat all over. she had to get out of that place. now. she called for the first taxi she saw passing by to bring her home. from behind, she saw frank still calling her, and with the puzzlement in his face.

inside the taxi, she removed her eyeglasses and stared at it. she knew this was what she wanted, to test if those eyeglasses would work on frank. and it did. she was successful in reading his thoughts, but only to cause her so much pain afterwards. she heard him say "I love you" to her, she was sure. he even kissed her. but she was also sure of one thing: frank had other person in mind when he did all those things to her.

she refused to cry, not because of the embarassment she would get from the taxi driver. she did not want to cry because she knew she only got what she deserved. tonight, frank would surely be her visitor. and she already knew what to do. the truth would set both of them free.

AT LONG LAST

2004-07-08T23:14:00.000+08:00

Hi everyone,

I don't really have anything important to say, except that I'd love to share my euphoria with you due to my success in becoming less of an IT idiot. My initial post (I placed its title on the body - give me a break, it's my FIRST post)and this post show it all. I am so dang happy! Now, I won't have to e-mail Sir K at night time. Enough of the crap, I'll see you guys around!

Love,
STEPH

2004-07-08T22:49:00.000+08:00

For my mundane setting, I got Room 211 of Ilang-Ilang Residence Hall. For my impossible object, I got “a jellyfish that produces yellow jelly from its tentacles”.
To tell you frankly, when I got the two pieces of paper, only one word paraded its banner inside my head: BORING. I would’ve loved writing about Gabby’s posh lavatory inside a five-star hotel (I wrote it down as my mundane setting) and omniscient headband, or my orgasmic tampon. But since I’m stuck with these two, I might as well start turning iron into gold.

Pet Feast

He regrets not having chosen the seahorse instead. Now, his blue couch is overhauled with yellow dots of jelly, and his girlfriend is knocking on his pad’s door.

“You fish whore! Why’d you have to do that now?!” He switches off the TV, picks up his pet jellyfish and hurls it to the sink. “I told you to stop watching my Hentai DVDs!”

“Ouch! Why’d you have to do that?!” It climbs up to the edge of the sink. “I can sue you for animal abuse, you know.”

“Hubby, I said I’m here already! Open the door,” his girlfriend calls out.

“Schmoe! Kirsten’s here. What do you suppose she’s gonna think when she sees this mess? That I’m a pig?” The stamp of his slippered feet on the wooden floor to the bathroom and back to the couch is in sync with his girlfriend’s muffled invocations.

“Yeah! Oh, c’mon, quit the name-calling. You sound like a girl. It’s not like you’re the only one licensed to soil the furniture.”

“That’s it plankton. I’m sautéing you tonight.” He finishes wiping the yellow jelly off the couch, and heads to the pantry to get a bottle of vinegar.

The jellyfish alights on his head, and fastens its tentacles around it. “That is, if you can get me off your head.”

“You, you, horny mass of glop! Get off my dreadlocks!” He struggles with both hands to pull it off his head.

“Hubby, what’s happening in there? Open the door!”

“Just a minute, Wifey! I’m still in the shower!” He shouts at the direction of the wooden door as he gets hold of the bottle of vinegar and twists open its cap. “Now for the marinade.”

That night, he drives his girlfriend to Ilang-Ilang Residence Hall, where she stays at room number 211, after having dinner at his pad’s penthouse in Katipunan. She thanks him for cooking squid, her favorite, kisses him goodnight, and before stepping out of his coupe, asks him, “Uh, Hubby, what shampoo do you use?”.

Mr. Molecular Man

2004-07-07T07:50:00.000+08:00

MR. MOLECULAR MAN

“Why did you wash my jacket with baby soap?” Norman bellowed, flailing his arms. “Now, it won’t work because you washed it with baby soap! Did you not remember me telling you to wash it with Mr. Clean?”
The maid only bowed her head and blinked. “Eh sir, there’s no more Mr. Clean. Baby soap was all I found.”
Norman gritted his teeth and gave up what was to be a stupid argument. He left the kitchen, went to his room and again tried the jacket on. No, there was still nothing of that bubbly, tinkling sound which preceded every molecular transformation. He searched the jacket, hoping to find some tag or print that would give solution to garment problems. He dug into the pockets then felt something – paper. He drew the crumbly, damp sheet out and unfolded it carefully lest it tore. Its print was already blotched but still readable:

Brand:
/ Mr. Clean detergent [wear jacket as jacket]
x Dove [wear jacket as wings]
x Baby soap (Tender Care, etc.) [wear jacket as diapers]
x Papaya (Likas, etc.) [wear jacket around the face]

“What in the . . .” Norman scratched his head, staring at the paper. Suddenly, the jacket’s zipper glowed a bright orange. Help was needed! In the jacket’s tiny screen, a house near the Binondo wet market was burning, and a girl was trapped inside! No one else but the extraordinary size-reducing capabilities of M3 could go through nooks and retrieve the victim.
He had no time to think and no time to read the postscript written at the bottom of the paper. He was too engrossed predicting what the media will say about him saving the day again. The cameras! The headlines! He grabbed a safety pin, wound the jacket around his buttocks wrapping the jacket like a diaper and off Mr. Molecular Man went!
The postscript read: In the occurrence of laundry problems, invisibility and speed brought by molecular transformation takes place thirty minutes after putting jacket on.
Norman had not paid much attention to the children’s laughter when he went out of the house, looking more like a weirdo than a hero with a jacket in the wrong place. He did not even know he was not invisible nor fast anymore, he was just picturing his handsome beaming face on the television.
The next morning, he was so eager to read the morning paper. He sat on the breakfast table, spread the paper out, and spewed the coffee out of his mouth when he saw the headlines. It went – “Mr. Molecular Man – in diapers!”

(sorry, wala pang title)

2004-07-07T07:47:00.000+08:00

object: socket
setting: jupiter

Kbzzzt… bzzt! The radio dies. “What the…? God Damn it, what the hell just happened? Picture’s gone, no visuals, no sound! Damn it!” Panic finally overwhelms the screaming cool – cat captain. “Damage report, people… now!”

“Captain, the communications are totally down… all of ‘em! The collision probably did it, sir!” Marquez answers. “The main socket’s also crushed sir!”

“Could you do something about it, private? We have to have contact with earth, immediately!!!”

“Impossible, sir. Circuits are fried… and the sockets… everything’s in flames as of the moment sir. But… but we’ll try, captain… Jesus, controls in wing – A just exploded!!!”

Panic turns into despair. The captain knows hope for him and the crew is slipping away, the fact that the Great Red Spot is fast approaching their ship is not of any help either. The captain arises from his seat, approaches the main controls… punching keys, pressing buttonsm, pulling levers… trying desperately, ‘Anything, anything. Just to make contact!’ He stops, then a series of thoughts run through his already battered mind; their tranquil journey home. A hero’s welcome at Times Square. In bed, asleep beside his wife. Promotion. A loud explosion slaps the captain in his face and brings him back to reality. He finds himself back again to a ship swarming with red lights and loud sirens, a picture of an alien fleet crushing earth clouds his mind. He knows now, that his warning of the destruction of earth will never reach his fellow human beings.

“Marquez here… kbzzzt… sir! God, everything’s ablaze!!! The main socket! Just freakin’ exploded! Men, put out the fire, put it out!!! Kbbzzzzt.”

calleja, sam
0178595
cw111

Paul's Closet

2004-07-06T23:08:00.000+08:00

“No-no! Please don’t!”
Sarah pushed Paul down to the rail, and he fell, almost. He gripped on the hard, cold, cemented floor. His hands almost slipping because of sweat, and his glasses were almost fogged with fright emanating from his teary eyes.
Sarah just stared down on him.
“I can’t do it! Not this time!” Paul’s one hand slipped, and he trembled at the sight of the enormous, long rails.
“Tick, tick, tick.” The midnight breeze whipped Sarah’s hair in a sinister wave. She kept on ticking, lowering her face closely to Paul’s face that was painted with the coldness and heaviness of fear. “Don’t you want to summon that closet of yours? You don’t want to bore me with your pleading. You should know by now.”
“I tell you, I can’t –”
Sarah stumped over his right hand, and Paul gave in to the hardness of the rail. A side of his head was bleeding. With one wave of her hand, he was hurled into the air, and pinned, standing between the rails. “Don’t you even want to try calling upon it? I mean, it’s your closet. It’s almost a part of you.”
It is a part of me, Paul thought.
“I’m tired of waiting.” Sarah waved again.
Paul saw two bright lights from a far. All he could see was light until the edges of a moving train became clear.
“It’s either that and you’re gone, or the closet and I’m gone to the fourth dimension… for real.” Sarah said.
Paul looked at the train, and it was moving so fast now, so eager to kill him. As he closed his eyes, his mind was racing like wild fire eating up an old house, and he couldn’t think straight. He had a choice not to give her the closet, but it was no good.
A shiny, silver disk appeared, reeling, until it became a door of a closet.
The train disappeared in an instant.
“Just in time,” Sarah said.
Paul fell on his knees when Sarah let go of her hold on him. I feel so thirsty, he said, but this has to end.
“Don’t worry, it will. Once I get in, you’ll doze off and this is all a bad dream.” Sarah’s eyes glittered with menace.
Paul summoned all the might of his mind, and the closet shone fiery red until it exploded into tiny discs of light like sharp shards of glass. Sarah was turned into ashes, blown by the wind.
Paul found himself lying on the foot of the security guard of the MRT Station.
“Are you okay?” The guard asked, fixing his protruding baton on his waist.
I felt reborn, Paul thought.

ACCESSORY

2004-07-06T12:59:00.000+08:00

If it could only make me forget, she blurted out one day while zipping up her white jacket, not really referring to anything. She had suddenly thought of something that suddenly escaped her mind right after she said that.
Olivia loved going to Masagana and back. She couldn't understand why the other jeepney passengers hated traveling on Taft Avenue. As for her, she adored the busy street.
What's that thick dark smoke, she asked herself. I can't seem to smell it.
What's a pool doing in the middle of the street, she asked the driver. Where's the street?
That store, Olivia said to her friend one day, it only sells stationeries and jackets. Weird, she said, but that's where I bought this jacket.
You're not wearing a jacket.
I told you that store's weird. You can't even see the jacket.
Weird, her friend said.
Who's he, Olivia said, looking across the street.
You have really nice skin now, said her friend. What happened to your pimples?
Did I have any?
And your nose, the friend said, did you have it operated?
It was always this way.
You seem to have grown three inches.
I've always been 5'8".
Are you on a crash diet? You seem to be losing some nutrients.
I eat regularly. Who's he?
The one smilimg? You cut him out of your memory already? That fast, huh?
I don't know him. Where are we?
Still in Taft, waiting for a ride home. Or have you forgotten?
What's that thick smoke?
Exhaust from jeepneys.
You don't seem to like it.
Neither did you, until now.
It doesn't smell bad.
The make-up on your eyelids are changing colors.
Oh, I changed them to blue. I didn't like green anymore.
I swear you've changed.
Like my make-up?
You seem to be wearing some protection. Like second skin.

Impossible object: a jacket that changes into different outfits
Mundane setting: Taft Avenue

The Callers

2004-07-06T11:50:00.000+08:00

Carlotta's hands were clammy, cold. She tried to keep her glassy gaze plastered on her half-finished plate of food. Still, the dark-blue 5510 stared at her with such magnetism that Carlotta felt compelled to look at it. It's peeling cover reminded her of the gamine she met on her way to school two Mondays ago, who offered her the mobile phone for seven hundred pesos. She badly needed the money, the girl had said. To Carlotta, the deal had seemed a dubious one, but she could not resist the bargain, nor the pleading look in the skinny girl's dark-circled eyes. She wished, now, that she had.
That it had served for her to be able to communicate with her dead boyfriend- and ask the questions she most wanted answered- seemed a paltry thing compared to the constant fear and unease she now lived with. They-those now on the other side-had, through the 5510, found her and made her the unwilling link to the life that was no longer theirs.
She remembered their calls, the questions asked in eerie monotones; calls from total strangers- macabre strangers. Their ghastly echoes crept from the phone(like cold mist) and into her brain, so that her mind since had been full of death-like reverberations.
She shuddered at the memory. But no, it was not just a memory. It was with her, now. And she knew she had to do something about it.
Squaring her shoulders, Carlotta swiftly picked up the gruesome phone and stood up from her seat. She raced her way out of the nearly empty Katag, as if a ghost was at her heels; she went straight to the trash bin and flung the phone into it.
Walking away, she heard it ringing and she froze in her tracks. They were calling her again.

The Hat

2004-07-06T00:11:00.000+08:00

“Oh, Mr. Burton, sir. We didn’t know you were coming,” the store manager said feebly, while straightening out his tie. The old man replied, “Bring the Ritz out. The First Lady wants to have the ring immediately. I will personally be delivering it to her.” The store manager disappeared for a while then came back with a small black box. He handed the box to the old man, who stored the box in his jacket pocket. Mr. Burton nodded to the store manager then went out into the street and blended in with the five o’clock throng.

About a block away from Burton & Co., the old man turned to a tiny side-street. He removed his hat and released the smile he had been suppressing.

After hastily combing his fingers through his thick black hair, Luke Lee emerged from the side-street and headed straight to the restaurant where his best girl was waiting with a look of expectation on her face.

Karma's a Bitch Named Jessica (Impossible Object, Mundane Setting Exercise)

2004-07-05T00:12:00.000+08:00

OBJECT: A wallet that would fill up with whatever amount of money I needed whenever I needed it to do so
SETTING: The beach

This is the life. I’m young, I got a bottomless pit of cash thanks to my miracle wallet, I’m boozed up, and getting ready to party with my easy lay on the beach. If I weren’t buried neck-deep in sand I’d rub my hands together. Jessica, the blonde chick I met a while ago, led me to this secluded spot on the beach so we could go play in private. Giving me nothing but her first name and the promise of a good time, Jessie and I shared around three or eight beers before she got me into this hole. I’m not sure what she’s planning to do next though. Something naughty but not too kinky I hope. Don’t get me wrong. I’m as game as the best of them but this is starting to get a little uncomfortable. Damn, the sand in my shorts is rubbing me the wrong way, pardon the pun.

I called to Jessica, who was rifling through my backpack, “Hey Jesh—Jesh—Jessssie, got an itch in my shorsh-no, lemme try again, my shorsh—shortsh. Wanna scrash—scratch it?” In my head I sounded perfectly sexy. I winked as she glanced at me.

“Oh, yeah. Maybe later, Nicky. I’m just looking at your things. You have some really cool stuff, like this cell phone…” I stopped listening. Babes make better company when they’re not yapping, but since they almost always are, the best thing to do is just shut them out. Like little Jessie here, who’s got legs up to her armpits, hair that’d sure feel nice on my skin, and the biggest set of—“…your wallet.” Did she just say my wallet? God please not my wallet.

I swallowed with difficulty when I saw her tuck my brand-spanking new phone into her cleavage, which didn’t look so sexy anymore. Dammit, my buddies would laugh me off the beach when they found out I got conned by a chick I picked up. “Put it back, Jessica. It’s just a stupid wallet.” I cringed when I heard the whine in my voice. At least I’m not slurring anymore. That she might know how the wallet works sobered me up pretty good.

She went on like she didn’t hear me. “It’s a really nice wallet though. Leather?” As she started to open it I closed my eyes and did what I did whenever I needed the wallet to cough up some cash. I cleared my mind—or at least tried to since the sand in my shorts was becoming more aggravating—and pictured the wallet in my mind’s eye. I usually imagine it filling with a thick wad of cash so it would do so in reality but I did the complete opposite of that. In my mind the wallet is completely empty. God, please let my wallet be empty.

I opened my eyes to find Jessica, who’d gone from hottie to ho in my eyes, frowning as she turned the wallet upside down. Yes! I did it! The wallet’s empty! That's one point for the Nickster! As my eyes met her narrowed ones, I replied cheerfully, “Yep, it’s—” Crap! Wrong goddamn answer!

Her once kissable-looking lips curled up in a smile that made me wish I’d choke on my own foot and die. “Hey—hey wait! Don’t leave me here! The tide’s rising! I’m hungry! I’ve sand in my shorts you skanky thief! Come back here! Hey!” As she started to walk away, I began wishing for the wallet to grow fangs and bite her hand off but I wasn’t drunk enough to believe it would.

After walking a few feet, she suddenly stopped, and hope burst inside me. She’d turn to me and laugh and say it was all a joke and—“Here,” she turned to me, tossed me a stick no bigger than my middle finger, and said, “start digging.”

Impossible object exercise

2004-07-04T13:18:00.000+08:00

The impossible object I got: a spinning wheel that creates smoke and tells the future. The mundane place: Seattle's Best Coffee, Katipunan Avenue.

The two friends hobbled out of the coffee shop, one supported by a crutch, the other dragging his twisted, bandaged right leg. They had it with trying to be superheroes. Finally, after everything that happened, reality sank in on them: the future was not for them to change.

"So what do we do next?" asked Jim.

Earl considered for a moment. "What do you say to a makeshift stand right beside Quiapo church that says 'Genuine Fortune Telling'. At least that way we earn some cash."

"There are already a lot of Manangs there that tell the future. Besides, this thing shows nothing but accidents and misfortunes, who would want--"

Jim stopped. Their attention fell on a girl in purple shirt flagging down a jeep. She looked oddly familiar.

"Isn't she--"

"Yes. That's her!" Jim said who was now running (as fast as his good left leg could permit)and shouting at the jeep to stop. Earl followed thinking, Damn that thing!

Heads Will Roll

2004-07-03T18:03:00.000+08:00

Hello, everyone!

Just got back from Free Comic Book Day at CCHQ, and figured that I might as well get a-cracking on this exercise Mr. K assigned us. For my mundane environment, I got a posh bathroom, the ones usually found in five-star hotels. For my strange object, I got an headband that answers all questions that comes to mind anytime it's worn.

The ending of this "story" is a bit long, and feels like it's coming from a young adult story. But anyway, here it is for your perusal.

-----

Mitchie stormed into the ladies’ room of the Edsa Shangri-la Hotel clutching fistfuls of her skirt and with tears in her eyes. Ignoring the janitor who glanced at her with raised eyebrows, she flopped onto the couch and threw the pink cotton headband onto the floor. Her prom night was ruined. The headband wasn’t lying. Jeff was seeing someone else behind her back.

Her vision swam, as if a curtain of rain was drawn around her so that all she could see was a wash of color and light melting together. She knew that mascara would be dripping down her cheeks, but she didn’t care. The world had gone cold and tear-stained.

Unsure of what she was doing, she bent down and picked up the headband again. The fabric felt worn and comfortable in her hands, like a piece cut out from her favorite childhood blanket. Wiping away the tears and mascara stains from her eyes, Mitchie slipped the headband back on, and closed her eyes.

Does he still love me? The question floated like a swan’s feather in her mind, alone and drifting, echoing in the dark space of her mind.

Yes, came the answer – that familiar, cotton-candy voice that she had always associated with the headband. Yes. Yes. Yes.

She opened her eyes again, and stared at her reflection in the mirror. A pale face, stark in contrast with the sunbursts of rouge on her cheeks and the dark trails of mascara that ran from her eyes, stared back at her. Mitchie stood up and walked towards one of the toilet cubicles, crumpling up the cloth headband in her perfectly manicured fingers. The door swung open easily. She stared at the pristine white porcelain of the toilet, and with one swift motion, dropped the headband into the toilet and then pressed the flush. There was a grim sort of satisfaction in watching the candyfloss pink material swirl and spin into the water funnel, finally disappearing into the shadows of the sewers.

The Enormous Radio and The Remember...Finally

2004-06-29T13:20:00.000+08:00

Two whole weeks must be enough time to understand these two stories. First up: THE REMEMBERER. The first interpretation that comes into mind is that Ben the ape/turtle/baboon/slamander left his lover (the narrator). Since it is the woman who is narrating, the readers see Ben from her perspective. My interpretation of Ben's reverse evolution: It's the main character's way of getting over him. First she reduces him to an ape - cunning, yet a lower level mammal. She reduces him from a lover to a mere pet. Then he transforms into a turtle - wise, yet not really human. Then to a mere baboon - how low can he get? Lastly, he becomes a salamander - something the lover can just leave in one corner and forget. The main character completes her getting-over-him stage by releasing Ben into the ocean. This should've been the end of that phase in her life, and the readers finally get the sense that she's over him, but she ends the narration by telling the readers that maybe one day, Ben will be washed ashore - Ben who has been to reverse evolution and back. The reading I get from this is that at the back of her mind, she's still hoping that Ben the human will come back to her.
I think the story becomes believable because of the tragic elements in it. The readers seem to focus more on the story itself rather than on the fantastical elements in the story. That's partly the reason why the readers won't question the "realness" of the story.

THE ENORMOUS RADIO
I have read other stories such as this one. The character sees other people's faults first before his own. This one is just like that. The radio becomes her medium in finding out other people's imperfections. Through this, she sees how other people act when in the privacy of their own backyards. The pretensions are dropped and what she sees (hears, actually) are the real people and their issues. These should've been enough to tell the readers that a confrontation is coming. The character and her husband are portrayed as "perfect" people, as the perfect couple, but soon after, this image is shattered when the wife starts getting addicted to the radio. Slowly, she makes way for the realization that her life is not perfect. She realizes that like all the other people in her neighborhood, she also has her pretensions, and that she has to drop them sometime soon. The husband telling her of their financial problems is one of the things that confirms the "imperfectness" of her life. LIke all the others, they are not perfect.

Remembering the Shape-Shifter

2004-06-23T22:08:00.000+08:00

At first, I thought that the story The Rememberer was a smart one because it was a love story told in a very "defamiliarizing" way, so different from other love stories where lovers meet, like and love each other, and it ends either in sheer happiness and contentment or tragedy, or bitterness. SCIENCE meets LOVE for the first time, literally, at least for me. The evolution-devolution theory in science was used to portray unconditional love. The man devolves into an ape, then a babboon, a turtle, and a salamander, but the woman still feels strong love for him. She said, "...I (Annie) wanted to meet the ape too, to take care of my lover like a son, a pet; I wanted to know him every possible way but I didn't realize he wasn't coming back." Like any person who's in love, Annie wanted to understand the different faces of the person she loves. Every inch of him. Every space of her man's flesh she kissed to prove it. The result is a renewed feeling of sentiments of lost, resignation, sadness and hopefulness. But is it?

You see, we have a male character who, for me, is trying to be romantic. With his lines, "Annie, don't you see? We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries upand dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart... Like us, Annie, we think far too much," he sounded so poetic, so philosophical, to the extent that the character was histrionic. Even in Annie's recollection, "Another time he woke me up in the middle of the night, lifted me off the pale blue sheets, led me outside to the stars and whispered: Look, Annie, look - there is no space for anything but dreaming," the man was so overly romantic. The conversation about poetry after the sex was so theatrical. In short, the man's faking it, even if it breaks the stereotype that men are the more rational gender. So what does this say about Annie? She comes out more realistic, at least in her narration. She says, "I sat down. I remembered how the first time we had sex, I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open, and concentrated really hard on letting go..." Instead of saying, "the first we made love", she casually says, "the first time we had sex" and that shows sincerity and honesty. In this passage, "I (Annie) tried to dream up to the stars, but I didn't know how to do that. I tried to find a star no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if I did," the woman tried to be romantic, but she ended up thinking a reason why she would. She also admits it was her job to remember once her man is gone. It wasn't natural for her to remember. She was clear. It was her job.
The juxtaposition of the main characters are good, but I just don't get it why did the woman still think that her man was still her man when he devolved. She dripped tears into the pan where her lover was when she saw him staring at her. Even before she saw him when he turned into ape, she knew right away it was him because he gave her his same, sad look. She was hopeful in the end that she would find her man, washed up and lying naked on the shore. Isn't this so romantic, and yet she was presented as the opposite? Why would she want to remember a shape-shifter anyway?

Enormous Radio has something Enormous to say...

2004-06-23T19:37:00.000+08:00

Things are not what they seem or look like: beyond a "normal" appearance, the very face of cruelty lies. I'm tempted to say that John Cheever was working on this cliche in his Enormous Radio, and honestly, I think, he was. At first, Jim and Irene Westcott was a portrait of a normal couple. John Cheever spent his first two paragraphs in describing how typical the couple was. It started saying, "Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor and respectability..." The Westcott family was just like any other family in the neighborhood - they go to movies, listen to music and have an old radio. They seemed to have no financial, personal and marital problems, until the day Jim Westcott bought the Enormous Radio.

In Cheever's story, this enormous radio was used as a device to deviate the story from the "normalness" of the Westcott couple to what was underneath that "normalness". It says, "She (Irene Westcott) was struck at once with the living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder." Not only this passage shows a flaw in Irene's character (because of her vanity), it also shows a foreshadowing of what to expect in the end - the radio would become an intruder, revealing the other side of the Westcott couple - Irene would become so interested (engrossed) in listening to her neighbors to the extent that she would be saddened, and his husband wouldn't hold back his grievance much longer about Irene's extravagance.

In recognizing Cheever's transition from the "normalness" of the Westcott family to what was underneath it, I found myself asking, "What's with the radio picking up interferences from mechanical devices? Why didn't the story go directly to the part where Irene get to hear the conversations of her neighbors?" In short, what's the significance of this detail to the whole story? The answer is, I think, the mechanical devices are there to show the reality that the story was set - everything happens and everyone are mechanical, including the Westcott family. They were as mechanical as "the rattling of the elevator cables and the opening and closing of the elevator doors". Life is a routine for these people, and just like when you hear a sudden interference while you're listening to music, it's beyond annoying. Its's sickening. But eventually, when human voices interfere the music, Irene was not irritated. Her interest to her neighbors' lives paved the way for her to doubt her relationship with Jim, and also paved the way for Jim's revelation about how cruel and cold-blooded Irene was used to be.

And so, even though the theme of the Enormous Radio is a cliche, using the radio was John Cheever's saving grace. Because of that, it's worth reading.

Wednesday

2004-06-23T14:08:00.000+08:00

Hello, class. Apologies for being unable to meet you today. The good news is, it seems that almost all of you have finally been able to sign up for our blog (though some of you have reported problems with posting). Anyway, I have been very pleased to read your reactions to "The Rememberer" and "The Enormous Radio"; we'll be discussing those stories in more depth next Wednesday.

Glad to see the posts from -- in order -- Charm, Kurt, Kelly, Gabby, Shan, Zanne, Sam and Clyde. As for Anamer, Jillian, Jen and Steph, I got your reading journals via e-mail and have included them in this post. Which leaves Rica, KG, Cris, and Alice: I hope to see your posts (or receive your e-mails) regarding the two stories before the end of the day. NOTE: As much as possible, for those of you e-mailing, please include the journal entry in the body of the e-mail, rather than as an attachment. Thanks.

See you all next Wednesday!

*

Anamer:

SKELETONS

Everyone has skeletons in the closet. I had my first one at age 5 (but that's another story). I just hope it doesn't get too crowded in there or I'd have to evict some of them to make room. After all, I can't afford to buy myself a bigger closet. By the end of the "Enormous Radio", Irene hopefully discovered why it's impolite--what a tepid but totally fitting word for her-- to listen in on conversations, talk about other people's lives without their consent or knowledge, and generally invade others' privacy. Okay, I admit, I've been guilty of every one of these, but the difference between Irene and me is I know when to stop. Even though I believe in the philosophies of 'to each his own' and 'do unto others', I sometimes find it difficult because gossip is addictive. It doesn't matter if it's about an uninteresting neighbor or a stranger seated at the next table in a restaurant; as long as it's about someone else, we're willing to talk (or eavesdrop). In one of her posts Gabby talked about karma and I agree with what she said. Boy, did it bite Irene hard in the ass. Not that anyone in the story heard Jim's litany of her sins, but we (the readers) read him loud and clear.

Reading fiction is similar to eavesdropping, I think. When we try to leave our lives for a while, we immerse ourselves in a world not ours and make ourselves at home in some character's life, we experience the same 'thrill' we get when we gossip. It seems like a stretch I know, but sometimes when I'm reading a story I almost feel sorry for the characters because their life is so open to me. A part of me felt sorry for Irene when Jim began revealing her sins, but I felt she deserved it. Though I didn't get the sense that she was a hypocrite, I did think she was in denial. I'm not sure I blame her for that, and I don't think I have the right. Like her there are lies I tell myself just to get through the day without losing my mind. I guess I'm blaming her only for not knowing when to stop invading people's privacy. There are, after all, limits. Sometimes we tend to forget that ourselves.

WE THINK FAR TOO MUCH (and RANDOM MUSINGS)
"We think far too much."

Ben hit home with that. Gosh, I used to be such a happy kid. I don't know when I started to overanalyze every single detail of my life (no matter how pathetic or inconsequential), but I realized I have to chill. My thinking far too much is why I'm as sad about the world as Ben is (or was, whatever). I'm not going to wax poetic about stopping to smell the roses, but I just want to say we all need to do that at least once a week. I just hope we don't have to turn into sea turtles and salamanders to appreciate what we have. We tend to get wrapped up in our own worlds that we fail to realize that no matter how hellish we think our lives are, there's always someone out there more miserable.

Unlike Annie, I'm very specific with my wishes. She's probably right about being general, but then again what I choose to do in my life is, well, my choice. I wish I could go back to being content with general wishes ('I want to be happy' and the like), but this thinking far too much (as Ben put it) has made it more and more difficult to do so.

I found the story funny and poignant, reminding me of the things I take for granted, like being able to open our fridge, or being gifted with the ability to use a remote control, or just being able to breathe. Although I have a newfound appreciation for them, I don't know if I'll be patting myself on the back whenever I get something from the fridge or change the channel, but I do know that I've been reminded, and knowing just how much I'll lose if I forget again is enough to scare me straight. No need to turn me into a member of the animal kingdom. Really.

*

Jillian:

The Rememberer

The story was odd, though I found it cute in a way. It was a strange story and I had a lot of questions after I finished reading the piece. I was able to follow the flow; it’s just that a number of situations on what happened next weren’t fully supported by details. I was looking for the cause of Ben’s transformation from one creature to the other. I think it was the author’s way to make the readers guess what attributed to the occurrence of such, but I guess it would be better if he just pointed it out in the story. Moreover, the way it was presented was somehow unlikely. The beginning of the story already told the conclusion (of Ben, becoming a sea turtle) but when the story was put to an end (or the mere way it was ended) it’s as if it was open-ended. All in all, the story was good but not too good. It really made me think.

The Enormous Radio

I was quite fascinated with the story. I like how it was told and the way it was presented. But the story itself was the main thing that grabbed by attention. It was out of the ordinary (the radio itself), and I could say that reading such sort for the first time was not a bad thing after all. Though it was kind of magical or a bit peculiar, it has pointed real life situations and lessons. Gossiping and prying with other people’s affairs were taken in a different kind of light that made the whole story amusing. Using a particular instrument as the main character to make the story flow has produced a nice effect. It enabled an issue (prying) to sound light, with a unique twist. Well I like it!

*

Jen:

The Rememberer and The Enormous Radio in general are stories of failed marriages/relationships told in two different manners. The Enormous Radio started out as funny but ended in a not so happy way. On the other hand, The Rememberer was sad from the very beginning and it was maintained all through out the story. This was clearly evident from how the rememberer reminisced and she was voicing out her memories.

I actually had a hard time figuring out what The Rememberer was trying to tell me as a reader. At first, I could not understand how in the world could you have an ape as a lover. And worse, the ape became a sea turtle, then a salamander. I felt uncomfortable with the mixing of reality and fantasy (that was how I thought at first). Instead, I wanted to think that the wife of Ben meant another thing when she constantly referred him to the animals mentioned. There was seemingly an underlying meaning to the kind of relationship that the couple had in the story for her to call him that way.

From how I understood it, the story says that it is good to learn how to hold on to a relationship/marriage. But we should also know our limits in holding on. No matter how much we want to stay in the relationship and keep it working, we should also learn to let go. As they say, too much love can kill you, and when it does, you have no other way but to let go. I first got irritated with the wife because she was a bit pathetic. She kept on bitterly remembering Ben, to the point of seeing him even their household pets. I thought she would be like that until the end. But the scene at the sea, when she let go of the salamander into the water, served as the turning point. It appeared to me as a metaphor for the wife’s act of letting go not just of the human Ben, but also the memories of him. And I guess it was also the redeeming factor for the wife (although it was implied that she was still hoping that Ben would come back).

As a whole, I liked the story. Although it has an ordinary theme, the author is able to give it a different perspective by applying a different technique/approach in telling the story to me. The sentiment is old, but the manner it was told to the readers was new, which makes it a good short story for me.

On the other hand, The Enormous Radio was also a story of marriage but in a different context. As I have said, it started out as funny for me and I thought it would also end that way, something funny/happy. So the ending of the story came as a surprise to me.

In general, I found the story too long, yet I realized its message was only simple: in a marriage, what other people would say is not so much of great importance. The couple should not let other people meddle with their affair. What is more important is the two of you, and how you trust each other. The beginning of the story - the long description of the Wescotts - was seemingly too long, yet I did not find how it had helped in the development of the story (or did I just overlook it?). But if only for the funny side of the story, I would consider a good one as well.

*

Steph:

THE RADIO EVERYONE OWNS
A Review Of John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”

The enormous radio is not exclusive to the Westcotts. In fact, everyone owns one - I myself own one. It first plays the classical ones or music one is, or chooses to be, accustomed to listen to. Then its antenna becomes extra sensitive when one feels bored in settling safe on middle ground or the gray area. It picks up all sorts of signal whenever one feels to be the only one drenched in misery. Since the radio airs other people’s lives - all parallel in that they contain misery - to its listeners who are miserable in their own ways, its manufacturer’s slogan is probably we’ll keep you company, which refutes what sensationalism has succeeded in tricking humans to believe - that there are those who do not have problems, who live perfect lives. Just like the life Jim and Irene Westcott have convinced themselves and others that they are living. They are shaken from this lie by the radio built enormous enough for the purpose - the pleasure they derive from eavesdropping on other people’s lives last until they realize that the voices they hear on the radio are the same as theirs.

FOOD FOR THE HOPELESS ROMANTIC/FEMINIST
A Review Of Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer”

Ask me as a hopeless romantic and I’ll answer, it’s all about growing apart and letting go, which is quite common to long-term relationships. That Ben is a metaphor for a long time partner who reversely evolves from ape to sea turtle to salamander - the different sides of Ben Annie can’t quite live with so she decides to let go. But since the love is still there, she still waits for him to come back, but realizes that she no longer needs him in her life - the way she places her hands around her skull at night, and realizes that even if Ben evolved to grow out of it, he no longer serves her a purpose.

Ask me as a bitter ex and I’ll sneer back that it’s quite amusing to find a female giving a male a dose of his species’ own medicine - treating the relationship as a business. Since the business didn’t pull in the expected revenue - the reason why it was put up in the first place - it was shut down. Talk about the brain getting bigger and bigger, or the female’s brain being bigger than what the male expected of it. Thus, the title “The Rememberer” - a female smart enough to remember to never go back.

T.S. Eliot had been gracious enough to coin me an apt appellation for the couple Jim and Irene Westcott - “hollow men”, or with respect to gender, hollow humans. Humans who have managed to settle safe on middle ground or the gray area.

UNIQUE!!!

2004-06-23T01:04:00.000+08:00

THE ENORMOUS RADIO
John Cheever's language is simply great. The first sentence is proof of that, for it is also in that statement that the reader is given a hint of the Westcott couple: they "strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability..." But by so consciously stating they are average, the text already says that they are actually not. This we see in their encounter with the peculiar radio.

The story ends with how the Wescotts end up becoming exactly like the people they heard over the radio. Irene, who after listening, got so worried about life being sordid, also became like the people she did not want to become.

One last thing about "The Enormous Radio," the dialogues are wonderfully constructed. Cheever makes it all sound so real.

THE REMEMBERER
The first thing that struck me about the story was the humor and originality of the whole concept of a reverse evolution. Well, I never thought of that, evolving back in time. Evolution of course, is a forward thing, how something becomes more complex to adapt to a changing environment. In this story, Ben evolves back in time, taking every form the human being must have passed before reaching his present state.

The tone is the exact opposite of the story's content. And well, it is precisely there that I was able to fully appreciate the craft and wit with which the story is wrought. The story is superficially funny, but the tone is serious and melancholy. The sad tone perfectly complements the comical situation of a reverse evolution.

where can i buy this radio?

2004-06-22T16:36:00.001+08:00

The Enormous Radio reminds me of a favorite book, a collection of short stories entitled The Playboy Book of Short Stories on Horror and the Supernatural... or something like that. but unlike the book, this story does not involve any vampires, ghosts or demons... although it does present to us an altogether different but equally dangerous demon...us. i liked the story, these are the kinds that i love to read (and try to write). i liked the way the author presented to us the human mind or psyche, particularly its weakness and inability to control itself when overwhelmed / gifted with power. i don't know but i saw the radio either as a boon or bane, a gift or a curse... probably it was more of a curse because it got them. the machine got inside their heads, and screwed them bigtime, particularly the wife.

the couple were like gods / God, omniscient beings in their small unvierse that is their building. with their radio they could do the things neighbors usually do... pry into other people's lives, laugh at other people's misfortune, gossip around etc. (at the same time overlooking their own imperfections). but that power proved too much for them to handle.

if i remember correctly, there was this scene, at the latter part of the story where the husband was already screaming insults at the wife... now that was a scene, i think that was the part where it showed that the radio really, really messed them up.

calleja, sam
0178595
cw 111

where can i buy this radio?

2004-06-22T16:36:00.000+08:00

the sick boyfriend

2004-06-22T16:13:00.000+08:00

I have to admit my small brain dried out when i read this particular story. i did not get it at first, i had to review it a couple of times more for me to digest it. i was torn on whether i would take the story at face value and really think that her lover was transforming and de - evolutionizing literally, or consider his morphing as something symbolical. prima face (tama ba spelling?), the story is entertaining enough. you could just imagine the look on the girl's face everytime his boyfriend turns into a primate or an amphibian. but still i searched for deeper meaning or interpretation. i had to, i did not know why but i had to. and so with a little help from a friend i came to believe that the man was a schizophrenic, or was undergoing mental decay... some sort of degeneration.

generally i liked the story, it allowed us to have a peek inside the mind of a girl struggling and dealing with an (unusual) imperfect and challenging relationship.the author's use of animals and Darwin's principle as symbols was for me, smart. it was different and fresh, well at least for me. the story was also successful in not trying to be too mushy. but as all love story goes/are, it had those "AAAAWWWWW..." moments. like the part where the boyfriend, on his last few days as a human being said something about having TOO MUCH THOUGHT, NOT ENOUGH HEART.

the only thing that bothered me was the lack of emotion from the girl. she seemed not to care, she seemed too comfortable with the situation and the changes...

calleja, sam
0178595
cw 111

The Enormous Radio and The Rememberer

2004-06-22T00:12:00.000+08:00

The Enormous Radio is a well-written short story about a couple who pretended they have it all, hiding the reality of their situation, and too fixated on themselves.

I like the fact that Cheever made the story revolve on the Enormous Radio to show how good people were at pretending that everything was well with them that nobody could detect what was really going on. In a way, not only did Cheever use the radio to show us Irene, it also showed the transformation of Irene because of the radio - from a woman so engrossed with herself to a woman awakened by the truth that she was not the only one trying to tell the world that her little world was perfect. Clearly, Cheever, through The Enormous radio was saying that nothing is what it seemed it is.

I had a problem digesting The Rememberer though. The story was good, but I couldn't understand some of the details.

I believe that the story was about relationships. The Ben-turtle, I think, represented a coward who was so afraid to face the world and was contented to stay covered by his shell. Maybe this man experienced a lot of pain that he had trouble reaching out to the woman who, somehow, helped him come out of his protective wall. Because of the woman, ben-turtle transformed into a ben-salamander - a slimy creature. I guess, this could mean that he became a man not worthy of the woman's trust that she began to fear the possible consequence. And she let him go.

Insight and Puzzlement

2004-06-21T13:56:00.000+08:00

The Enormous Radio
The radio, which Irene initially sees as an "aggressive intruder", becomes the window through which she loooks at the world, from her otherwise "simple and sheltered" life.

Through it, she finds out about the lives led by other people; she becomes privy to their secrets. Simultaneously, she discovers in herself the capacity for concern about other people's welfare and, along with it, her own human frailty--the inclination to judge and condemn. These are consequences of her newfound discernment. She begins to look at things differently, and behaves accordingly.

This surge of discovery eventually leads her to depression, as she becomes wary of her own life. She seeks affirmation from Jim, that theirs is a good life and that they are good, decent people.

The reader finds out, towards the end, that this plea for affirmation is, in fact, a cover for denial. When Jim confronts Irene about the reality of their life-of her life-it becomes unbearable for her. She then, turns to the radio for solace; solace stemming from the knowledge that other people are just as bad-ifnot worse-than she is. The enormous radio(in a paradoxical sense) has become, for her, a means of escaping reality.

The Rememberer
I am honestly a bit puzzled by this story. I am unsure as to the appropriate approach to be employed in tackling it. Should I take it at face value, simply for what it is saying? Or do I look for concepts/insight entrenched between the lines, conjuring up possible implications "visible" only in the unsaid?

In comparison with "The Enormous Radio", I find "The Rememberer" much more difficult to swallow. This may be primarily because of the fact that I have not been exposed to a substantial enough volume of magical realistic fiction, save for several novels and short stories by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende. (Incidentally, I would like to ask if Milan Kundera belongs to this category of writers). This may also have stemmed from the "newness", the incredulity of envisioning a man actually becoming an ape, then a turtle, then a salamander, which is just too much for my psyche to accept. Things like these take quite some getting used to. I am hoping, though, that my take on this eventually changes.

The author, though, succeeds in giving this reader the impression that he/she is narrating the story "with a straight face" from beginning to end. And, from what I know, that is one of the criteria for one to be able to call a story magical realism.

Reading between the lines, I see a man's need to return to, or at least be in touch with his roots, his origins. Ben's "reverse evolution" is symbolic of a human being's connection-or inherent need of one-with his own natural history. His melancholy nature, his brooding sadness reflects, or perhaps reiterates this need, this restlessness.

On his last day as a human, he says something about "too much thought and not enough heart". This concept is (or perhaps one of) the catalyst(s) to his extraordinary (for me) transformation.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

2004-06-20T12:27:00.000+08:00

“The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender is a sweet, poignant little tale about a woman and her lover who is experiencing a haywire sort of evolution. Remember that complaint women have about men? “Men are such animals.” Well, here’s the result.

The story offers no explanation regarding Ben’s sudden fall down the Darwinian ladder. And yet, I don’t think it was really necessary; it’s how his lover Annie copes with his changes, and her limits regarding Ben’s drastic and dramatic devolution.

I can’t really say how or why this story was so beautiful for me. There was something sweetly sad about it, about a woman who is letting go of a man she loves because she also has limits: she doesn’t want to wake up one morning and realize that he has disappeared from her life completely, that she cannot see him anymore – he has been reduced to an organism invisible to the naked eye. What a metaphor for all romantic relationships, that concept of release.

Annie chooses to let go of salamander-Ben (see the change: at the beginning of the story, he was turtle-Ben; now he has morphed in another creature) and release him into the ocean, while she can still see him, while he can still perhaps remember. And she has hope that he will come back, that he will find his way back to her.

And I love these lines: “I tried to dream up to the stars, but I didn’t know how to do that. I tried to find a star no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if I did.” I found Annie to be such a wonderful and true character, never mind that Ben was taking the backwards route of evolution. She reminds me of one of those women who love because of sadness, of finding beauty in loss, of tears becoming crystal as they fall.

On Meddling Neighbors and Other Foul, Loathsome Creatures

2004-06-20T12:25:00.000+08:00

If there’s one thing that really, really, seriously irritates me, it’s your neighbors who smile sweetly at you and ask to borrow a cup of sugar, and then as soon as your back is turned, they start spreading gossip about you – gossip that’s not necessarily true. I mean, it’s not as if their track record is all that squeaky-clean, either: worst comes to worst, you’re living with a mass murderer next door.

John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” succeeds in putting a new spin to this sort of situation because of the mysterious properties of the Westcotts’ new radio. Irene Westcott, in particular, becomes victim to this most innocent of pastimes – overhearing the conversations of their neighbors and realizing that the façade they present to other people is not necessarily the truth.

Jim and Irene were introduced as your average, ordinary couple with children. He goes to work, she stays at home. Nothing about them steps over the line of normalcy. And you’d think that Irene, who becomes so emotionally attached to the voices she hears over the radio that she panics when she overhears a husband battering his wife, reacts that way because of her innocence.

But then, that is the clincher of the story – no one is innocent. Jim makes that perfectly clear when he points out her materialistic side, her overspending, and her past. That was what made my blood run cold by the end of the story. I was so convinced that Irene was the fragile type of woman, someone who could break easily when exposed to the reality of life. And yet when Jim harshly reminds her of her abortion, and the way she calmly sauntered into the clinic to kill her unborn child, I could feel the little hairs at the back of my neck stand up.

Irene’s hypocrisy struck a chord. People have absolutely no right to sound all high-and-mighty and self-righteous when they themselves cannot accept the fact that they are flawed, that they have also made mistakes. It’s the same attitude that runs through the matapobre ladies of high society and those old women who go to church everyday and yet when they go home they beat the crap out of their household help. It’s the universal law of karma: whatever goes around, comes around.

Review: The Enormous Radio and The Rememberer (sorry, can't think of a good title right now)

2004-06-19T17:40:00.000+08:00

The Enormous Radio

If every Filipino home have the enormous radio as presented in John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio", then we will likely turn our television off from watching "The Buzz" or Kris Aquino's morning show, and listen to the more intriguing lives of our neighbors. Personally, "The Enormous Radio" is a fun story. I believe that Irene deserves what happened to her towards the end as a price from meddling the lives of other people. Well for me, I would like that same situation to happen to all the "tsismosa" people in our society.

Basically, the story is very well written because it is good in presenting details and describing the setting which includes the interiors and exteriors of the Westcott residential apartment. The description of the radio being enormous and outdated from the furniture around the house is also a good device in emphasizing the role of the radio in the life of the Westcotts. With regards to the description, the author sometimes uses the tone of humor for the reader's interest and this also adds to the hilarity of the story ("Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike the satisfactory average of income, endeavor and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins"). Although I do have a problem with the characterization of Jim towards the end because of his sudden shift from being a gentle and descent husband to an angry, hot-headed one. I believe that this shift was not very well developed in the beginning and the reader is not ready for it. Another thing is the predictability of the story, although I'm not really sure if it is a problem or not. But aside from these problem(s), I can still say that it is a good story since it presents the hypocrisy of the society and the use of the enormous radio as a metaphor for the irresponsible role of the media is very strategic. Heheheheh.

The Rememberer

Personally, what I do like about "strange fiction" is the fact that it sticks to your mind because of its "strangeness". You may forgot the characters and the minimal details about a certain story but atleast you can remember how the strange things happen. Looking at "The Rememberer", you may forgot the animals that are involved in the transformation of Ben, but you'll do remember that the story is about Annie and her lover Ben who experiences reverse evolution. For me, the story achieves to stick in the mind of the reader through the 'strangeness' that is in it, and the reader easily accepts it.

What I do like about "The Rememberer" is its tone which is full of pity and at the same time, it is also full of passion ("This is the limit of my limits: here it is...I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all..."). What is also good about it is its language which is very poetic ("...and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me"). Although the story is short, the author successfully developed the characters in the story by giving out details that helps the reader understand the past lives of the characters, as for example, we can see Ben's life before his transformation ("At first, people called on the phone and asked me where was Ben...why did he miss the lunch date with those clients?..."). Finally, what really strikes me about the story is its power to shake the reader's shoulders and tells us to wake up and think. I don't know how is this done (maybe the use of the 1st POV?), but aside for the fact that I feel sympathy for Annie, I also feel the pity and sympathy for myself (Hmmm... am I devolving too?)

The enormous Radio & The rememberer

2004-06-19T08:54:00.000+08:00

The Enormous Radio:
The enormous radio reminds me of the story entitled the Possibility of evil, wherein a seemingly nice old lady thinks of herself as the paragon of virtue and so has the right (so her logic goes)to meddle with other people's lives, by sending them malicious and anonymous letters. In the end she's found out and her reputation crumbles. Irene (in The Enormous Radio) is similar to that old lady in that they both develop an 'addiction' for eavesdropping. The radio serves as a realization for the Westcotts, especially to Irene, that their lives are much better than their neighbors and so she begins to think of herself (and her family) as more Christly, to use Jim's term, than them. But of course this isn't true because by listening to other people's problem twentyfour-seven, Irene fails to see that they also have their own problems and are probably no more different than their neighbors.
The radio is described as enormous not only because its size (an ugly "large gumwood cabinet") but also because of its function--the broadcasting of other people's atrocious behaviors. I just found out that in Webster's 1994 dictionary, enormous also means exceedingly wicked. So in this story, we could also say that it's the radio who's bad and not the self-righteous & eavesdropping Irene; who could probably be just the victim of the enormous radio (ha! so much for my comparing her to the wicked old lady in The Possibility of Evil).
The Rememberer:
tsk!tsk! poor guy, so that's what happens to people who are always sad. Anyway the lady has a sadder plight for she feels that it's her obligation to remember the guy who's totally forgotten all about her(talk about unrequited love). Come to think of it reverse evolution and remembering are nice ingredients for poetry.
Salman Rushdie in his book The Satanic Verses talks of another kind of transformation (I really don't know what's this got to do with The rememberer but please allow me). This apparently is the formula for becoming either a demon or an angel:
Man + denial of one's self = satan
Man + paranoia = angel

Noitulove

2004-06-18T02:05:00.000+08:00

A friend and I were discussing "The Rememberer" and he told me that it was the male character who evolved back into the most primitive life form because that's what men are: animals. I definitely agree (although I didn't tell him that). Men are animals. So are women. So why did it have to be Ben who had to evolve? Why not Annie? I complained inwardly about how the best things that happen happen to males, very rarely to females. I would've wanted to have been the one who went back to the most basic form of life. Being a one-celled organism, one is emancipated from all the worries humanity is plagued with. I would happily turn into a salamander any time, if that would mean freedom from poverty, frustration from not being able to tune my guitar correctly, and split ends. What to wear the next day would be the least of my worries. So obviously, I didn't view Ben's regression as something bad. I didn't feel that usual "he-deserved-it" reaction, because in the story, Ben had been a good lover, at least in my standards. My reaction was rather, "Ben's a lucky guy." Ben is freed from all the worries humans have. It is Annie who is left with all the questions as to why and how Ben evolved backwards, and there's also the loss of the lover (and the gain of a pet, for a time at least).

Aimee Bender's "The Rememberer" is the ultimate mushy story. Funny, yes, but mushy. And I'm not saying that with distaste on my tongue. I, the lover of mush, loved the weird love story. Annie is a noble lover. She loved Ben til the end, even when he was reduced to a mere one-celled organism which is most probably incapable of love, meaning Annie loved Ben without hoping for reciprocity. She did hope however for Ben's return, and that is very admirable because the situation is that of uncertainty: will Ben be evolving back into his human form? And if he does, will he be returning to the same continent? If that happens, will he be the same person, with the same memories? Will he be returning to Annie? Will Annie still be alive if he does (decide to) evolve back? The answers are as easy to find as a a one-celled organism in the wide, polluted ocean.

By the way, in case you still haven't found the meaning of the title of the post, it's "evolution" spelled in reverse.

Da Enormus Reydyo

2004-06-18T00:28:00.000+08:00

If I had a radio like the one John Cheever created, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I could act all self-righteous and say that I'd turn it over to the police so that they would be able to listen in into conversations involving criminal personalities. I could also give it to the media in exchange for their promise that they would broadcast whatever important sounds they receive through the magic radio. I could also just auction it off on eBay and then buy an iPod Mini from the proceeds. Bottom line is that I wouldn't want to eavesdrop on other people's conversations, especially those between people who I'm personally acquainted with. I might just hear terrible stuff about me, and end up feeling hurt, when all the time they were being tactful by not saying those bad things to my face. I don't want to sound prissy but listening in on other people's talks isn't really my thing. There are stuff that are not meant to be heard outside the walls of one room. If the things they are talking about are meant to be heard by our ears, the information will eventually reach us. If we eavesdrop, we might just end up getting hurt or embarrassed, and we wouldn't have a right to feel so.

Now, Cheever's story is somewhat like that. Irene Westcott might not have been directly hurt by the sounds she heard on their new radio, but the aftereffects of listening to all those noises made her neurotic. An evening with one person pouring her whole life's grievances out to you isn't something you would pick over a Marinara episode, but at least it's something "survivable". However, if you multiply that depressed person's story twenty times, and listen to ramblings of that kind twenty four hours a day, the outcome would be an episode with the psychiatrist nearest you. Irene's paranoia ate up most of her being, and here comes her husband Jim, who only aggravated the situation with his bickering, when Irene even pleaded with him not to fight with her. Indeed, they had the radio repaired, but where the technical problem ended, their marital problem began, all because of a cursed radio and an incurable gossip. The characterization of Irene is similar to those of many other women in English literature. Why are women almost always shown as characters who can't resist gossip? There are those who just have to call or call on their girlfriends after a dance, a heartbreak or a tabloid expose. How many stories have we seen that are propelled by information gathered by eavesdropping ladies? Well, maybe it is true. Women are inherently "chismosas", a trait which often leads to humiliation, violence, insanity and even death.

What Not To Write

2004-06-15T17:11:00.000+08:00

Hi there, Gabby, good to see you posting! Welcome to Steph, Rica, and KG, as well. As for the rest, I hope they all sign up soon; I'll be expecting your first reading journal entries some time after tomorrow's class. :)

I was checking out the Submissions Guidelines for various publications (always a good thing for writers to be doing; am happy to see that more magazines are accepting e-mail submissions now, instead of insisting on the whole snail-mail-please-provide-an-SASE process). Strange Horizons, "a weekly speculative fiction magazine," provides a list of "Stories We See Too Often" -- basically, hackneyed plots that should probably be steered well clear of. It's amusing and instructive; here are a few particularly annoying ones:

- Person is (metaphorically) at point A, wants to be at point B. Looks at point B, says "I want to be at point B." Walks to point B, encountering no meaningful obstacles or difficulties. The end. (A.k.a. the linear plot.)

- Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real.

a. In the end, it turns out it was all in virtual reality.

b. In the end, it turns out the protagonist is insane.

c. In the end, it turns out the protagonist is writing a novel and the events we've seen are part of the novel.

-Protagonist is given wise and mystical advice by Holy Simple Native Folk.

So please try not to submit any stories like these, if you value my sanity. Of course, as the Strange Horizons editors point out, "It's not impossible to write a good story with one of these plots or themes; it's not that these are inherently bad plots, merely that we see too many stories that use them."

See you all tomorrow!

welcome to heaven

2004-06-12T01:16:00.000+08:00

Hello. Gabby here.

I'm no stranger to the blogging world, since I maintain a blog of my own - Sundial Girl, if y'all want to check it out - but I am quite excited about this course in stranger fiction. Being a veteran of several writers' workshops, it was forever drilled into us the canonical way of writing fiction: as in introduction, exposition, climax, denoument.

I am so excited to start experimenting outside the box of tradition. See you guys around.

The Balloon of Perhaps

2004-06-11T03:25:00.000+08:00

Greetings to Sam and Kelly; glad to see you guys have signed up! Feel free to post.

There's a lot of great Stranger Fiction online. Check out Barthelmismo, which features the works of one of my favorite authors, Donald Barthelme. According to the guy who runs the site, Barthelme is "the father of postmodern fiction and funny as all hell." Particular favorites of mine include "The Glass Mountain," a fractured fairy tale told in the form of a list of 100 items, "The Great Hug," a tale delirious with invention and the joy of names, about The Balloon Man and The Pin Lady and their inevitable explosive encounter, and "Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby", the most amusing story about an execution that I've ever read:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.

Also of interest is Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, now available for free download here.

Ryan, a shy, caffeine-addicted university student, can turn into a fly. Cassandra, a waitress at a greasy spoon, can make things disappear. They were made for each other... and to battle the forces of evil! Inspired by Sailor Moon, Flyboy and Ms. Place take on the villains who inhabit their world: cigarette barons, redneck tabloid newspapers, and the patriarchy.

"Jim Munroe has written the first novel to harness the energy, idealism and cartoon inspired playfulness of the new wave of culture jammers. It's about time we have some superheroes to save us after the post-irony meltdown -- forces of corporate darkness, beware." -Naomi Klein, No Logo

Just downloaded it yesterday; haven't finished it yet, but it's good so far.

Take note, none of this is required reading; it is fun stuff, however. And as I said, the only rule you have to follow when trying to become a writer is: "Read. Read. Read."

Stranger Fiction

2004-06-10T07:58:00.000+08:00

Hello, all. This is our CW 111 blog. I am your supposed teacher, Mr. Luis Katigbak.

According to the course description from the English Department, CW 111 teaches one how to write "experimental fiction," and involves forms such as magical realism, metafiction, and 'sudden' fiction. Rather than refer to the material as "experimental" -- which somehow conjures notions of unreadable prose, of soulless demonstrations of technique -- I will call it, simply, "stranger fiction," a term vague and evocative enough to encompass Auster and Atwood, Barth and Barthelme, Gamalinda and Garcia-Marquez, Murakami and McCormack.

Stranger than the mainstream, stranger than the CW 110 stuff, these are stories that contain entire worlds, that are told in mobius strips and phone conversations, stories where a businessman can befriend a giant talking frog. The idea is to explore the possibilities embodied in stranger fiction, to learn that no subject matter is too ambitious or unusual, that no technique is off-limits, as long as the writer knows what he or she is doing. It is also hoped that we will develop a sense of when certain techniques are appropriate or unnecessary, and that we learn that "stranger" doesn't mean "easier" -- that there are stories written this way because there was no other way to adequately tell them, and not because it's a hassle to write "realistic."

Welcome aboard!