Monday, February 1, 2010
Gang Aft A-Gley (WW #4, Marmot Gladiators)
The noise died and a soft breeze picked up, flinging the sand of the desert and the dirt of the trees into the air, creating tiny imperfections in the white light streaming down from the sun, causing the green light on the forest floor to twinkle quietly until the wind had moved on and the dust had settled back down. The prickly pear continued to grow and the world refused to listen.
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The writing in the beginning of this piece and the quotations both work really well and give a good introduction to the character and the scene.
ReplyDeleteI want this to be more grounded in reality. I like the character and I like how we start in the middle of the action, but everything's a little too mysterious. The scene with the bird is supposed to contrast with the rest of the piece, which it does to an extent, but it would contrast even more if there were more details before and especially after. You can end on your craziness because the last part is cool, I just want a return to reality for a moment before that. Kind of like a life flashing before your eyes type of thing, except only in that you'd notice every detail of your surroundings. If you do this, then you don't have to try so hard to make the bird part oddly literary and supernatural.
I also think the gate is a really awesome idea and I want more description of the gate itself which could give it more metaphorical meaning if you can figure out how to do that. Choose your details carefully.
There's also a bit of time confusion here. At the beginning, the character's talking about how everything was okay until he was attacked by a dog, but then he gets attacked by a dog later. We think he dies, but then apparently he doesn't if he gets back to the place he started and then is reflecting? I don't really know what to take from that or how the piece is supposed to start, and I think details would help to get rid of some of the unnecessary confusion. You can leave time or surrounding ambiguous, but when you start to leave both out, it gets a little too crazy. I would know.
okkk so i dont even know what to do with this piece.... to start i wouldnt have even thought this was even remotely nonfiction until sammy explained what it was based on, in such case i still think consider this to be fictional... but that's not literarily egregious.
ReplyDeletethe entire piece comes off to me as partially ridiculous and partially tripped out. like, im drawing blanks at connecting the sections of the story you're getting at. is the traveler's warning an allusion? i dont think it is. i don't know who this old man is, nor what that antique land is... the entire setting sounds like a synthetic, ubiquitous middle eastern-set movie. im guessing you actually did find some gate (of which the only description we get is that it's rusty and in ruins, which is dissatisfying), which apparently set dogs running after you. not sure why your legs hurt so much, apparently slapping your hand against it kinda killed your leg. but apparently they arent that much of a threat either because your standing around drinking from canteens, and then they fade from thought once you see a bird, of which its song seems to have little connection to getting chased by dogs, and at the end im left with some vaguely developed motif of motion, something about cats and dogs, something about beauty being a distraction from mortality, and a mess of allusions from greece and more modern literature and what not only loosely connected by images that seem kind of strewn there because you happened to be talking about birds and dogs at the time. and then you get bitten in the throat in a matter of a sentence, which isn't much of a problem either since you're retelling this story. cool.
and the title's confusing me too. so life is rough? i guess that works with some parts of the story, so i guess i should be thinking about mortality mostly. i guess if i think about it really hard i might say that you're getting at how life sucks and the beautiful things of life are distractions to our mortality, but im really just going off on a limb here and its a totally dissatisfying and underdeveloped conclusion. what do i do now?
in other words, i just am not getting anything of interest out of this piece because its going everywhere at once, and its full of frustrating inconsistencies and characterized throughout the piece by a confusing & otherworldly, yet at the same time trite & underdeveloped, descriptive style. it seems to me like you're trying too hard to sound deep.
OK so.
ReplyDeleteI like this story to the extent that it took me from where I was, a rather boring cafeteria belonging to vermilion highschool, and threw me into some sort of desert. I have to agree with Omar though, the desert feels like a generic middle eastern scene, though I am not really sure how you can create an image in my head that differs from this (the middle eastern scene). I also like the quotes. Basically I like the construction of the spoken/thought writing contained between the "".
So then I look at how to evaluate the piece. When I first read it I found myself entirely confused. I will admit this is largely due to factors outside the dominion of the actual writing.
Allow me to clarify this point. I know this has been written for a creative non-fiction class. I also have preconceptions regarding the people in the class, none of which place any of the students in the middle of the desert, alone, having previously ridden a camel, and running from a dog. Additionally a leather canteen seems entirely incongruent with the types of items a Hawken student is likely to own.
So I am confused about exactly what is happening. This is compounded by the fact that the protagonist has his vocal cords ripped from his throat by a dog a the end of the piece.
At least I get some context knowing this person is a foreigner, probably from the USA, based on the fact the phrase "Katy bar the door" is mainly used in the USA. This helps because before this point the image I create in my head is of a lanky tan middle eastern boy (SEE: Omar's comment about middle eastern scene problem).
This isn't all bad though.
When I read again I can see how many parts of the piece could be understood as metaphor. This is the only way I can rationalize the piece while recognizing my preconceptions regarding the nature of the writing and its possible authors. Even so, the author doesn't do enough work clarifying what metaphors should be made. At best I construct a storyline in which the author has received advice which was not taken, and found him/herself in a bad situation as result. Aside from reading the bird as a siren metaphor I really have no way to evaluate its contribution to the piece.
Even with this in mind I am pretty confused about what is going on. Omar says he had no idea until he read Sammy's comment; I have read it three times and do not see what he is talking about.
I resolve to read this piece as an abstraction of a conflict the author has experienced but is reluctant to speak about directly. The writing is fine, but the meaning is muddled.
:)
p.s. evan i didnt learn from sammys comment, i asked her.
ReplyDelete