Limits

When I was ten years old I wanted to be an astronaut because I saw no limits.

When I was sixteen I wanted to be a rock star because I wanted to break the limits.

When I was 23 I joined an advertising firm because the limits dictated it.

When I was 31 I married and started a family because I was used to the limits.

When I was 45 I joined a country club and began living my life according to the limits.

When I was 60 I retired and shook my head at the youth, who reveled in their own disobedience, their stretching of the limits. They do not yet know, I thought.

When I was 73 I wanted to be an astronaut again because I no longer cared about the limits.

The Arizona Shadow Snake

There is a strange species of snake-
The Arizona Shadow Snake, Or
Tutus Unus
Reptilia.

To escape the intense desert sun,
The Arizona Shadow Snake
Burrows deep-
Only faintly aware of the warmth from above,
Too scared to surface-
Only coming out at midnight to eat
And weep.

The Arizona Shadow Snake
is also the longest living animal
on the planet.

Worm Dreams

I once had a dream
In which the world was flooded all over
And my second floor bedroom window
Lay just above the wet.
Everyone looked like me-
Gazing out in awe,
Blinking in the brilliant reflection of sun on waves.
Many were crowded on the rooftops-
Squinting, fanning, hiding from the blazing sun-
And I was suddenly reminded of the unlucky earthworms,
The ones I saw on my walks to school in the morning,
Just after a heavy spring rain,
Forced from their drowned homes,
Trapped, at the mercy of hungry, wheeling birds,
And baking in the sun.

I woke up to sound of lapping waves.

Final Fiction Reading Response-"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe

For my final fiction response I decided to write about "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe. The thing that most interested me about this piece was Poe's uncanny ability to craft character. Therefore, I will explore what Poe did to create a unique, complex psyche for Montresor.
Poe does a great job of using the first person. Since it is from Montresor's perspective, the reader is never actually told that he is crazy. Nevertheless, Poe is able to make this excessively clear in only a handful of pages. Being directly told that Montresor was insane would have lacked subtlety and simplified the piece. Instead, this undefined, complex, gradually revealed character adds ambiguity and entertainment. The character Poe weaves is unique, and this uniqueness continues to interest people to this day. Also, since everyone's brain works differently, the character's unique psyche increases realism as well. In contrast, a cliche characterization would have been boring and felt fake. That aside, how did Poe actually develop this character so well? I think that he does a great job using details and action, not narration, to craft Montresor. Over the course of the story these little (sometimes unconnected) details begin to add up, revealing Montresor's troubled psyche. The first thing I noticed was his immediate thoughts to draw out the process of the murder, so that he could enjoy it more thoroughly. Also, Montresor sadistically attempts to convince Fortunato to turn around over and over, knowing full well that he would never turn back again. Montresor's choice to chain him alive was so elaborate and tortuous that it clearly expressed his disturbance. As does the instance in which he takes a break from laying mortar in order to more fully enjoy Fortunato's screaming. There are also more subtle details that enhance the character. For example, Montresor keeps mentioning nitre, a seemingly insignificant detail, to the point where he is clearly deranged. He also showers Fortunato with praise just before he murders him, a clearly sick thing to do. In another instance, Montresor mentions the precise measurements of the final cask, indicating a strange attention to detail and that he had been planning the murder for a long time. Lastly, the denial of the real cause of his emotion and sickness, "My heart grew sick-on account of the dampness of the catacombs," adds another layer of complexity to the character. In this way Poe is able to craft such interesting, enduring characters.

2nd Fiction Reading Response-"The Memory Priest of the Creech People" by Paul Theroux

For my second fiction reading response I chose to examine the short selection by Paul Theroux entitled "The Memory Priest of the Creech People". What struck me about this piece, and what I will focus this analysis on, was the amount he could say in such a short piece.
In my first fiction response I explored Hannah Voskuil's "Currents" because of her ability to create such a meaningful work in so few words. Now again I explore how an author can do this, and find that Theroux's similar success derives from the same techniques, but in their most general way. Theroux, like Voskuil, uses style/tone and structure to make his short piece work effectively as a very short piece of literature. In the piece Theroux uses these two elements very closely together. He structures his story from the standpoint of an unbiased, objective outsider, almost like an anthropologist. However, he does this without any of the unneccesary details or assertions, which would be unneccesary and bog down the piece. This also allowed Theroux an excuse to exclude any objectiveness, direct action, or specifics. In this way he was able to include only what was important to his deeper message, as well as generalize Creech society, without sacrificing the integrity of the piece. At the same time the narrator is an outsider, but not specified, so he/she could be anyone. This makes the rest of the world, with its judgements, morals, etc., non-existant or irrelevant. Only the mention of a location in Sumatra connects the Creech people with the world, and even this is vague. The fact that the Creech people do not exist, allowed Theroux to take the story where he wanted with less limits. In short, Theroux deliberately uses his structure to create the world of the Creech seperate and unaffected by the rest of us, inducing an inherent element of mystery and fantasy. Therefore, Theroux naturally crafted a tone that felt like a legend being told. The lack of connection to reality makes the tribal people seem mythic and a product of the past, undisturbed by the modern world. The narrator's lack of response to, as well as generalization of, the Creech people also strengthen this mythic tone. Because legend's usually have little room for debate or variation, Theroux's tone is the sole authority, and includes no subjectivity. By generalizing the Creech, Theroux eliminates their individuality, which makes them even more mythic, and less susceptible to interpretation on the individual, humanistic level. This generaliztion, and lack of possible variations, gives the Creech people symbolic power. It is as if they are the human condition embodied in its purest form. This leads to my final point: the unique tone and structure of the piece allows Theroux to create a form of allegory. The "Ceremony of Purification" and its role players all become representative of the deeper message, and therefore, transform the story from isolation to universalism. What exactly the deep meaning is can be interpreted differently by every reader. Either way he was successful at packing a lot of literature into a hyper-condensed form.

Five Haiku

Cold barren swampland--
An ancient one-eyed vulture
Careens in circles.

Crisp brown sun-baked turf--
A whispering rattlesnake
Sifts like wind through reeds.

A wild June twilight
Electric, pulsing with life--
Cricket symphony

Blinding desert light--
A lone eagle sentinel
Gazes with dull cold eyes

Tempest surging night--
Manic midnight ocean waves
Churn heavy and slow

*For these haiku I tried to use the traditional 5-7-5 syllable per line structure. Also, like traditional haiku, I used nature as my primary topics. Lastly, I followed with the two-component structure: one line is a statement (at beginning or end), and the group of two lines is a phrase. This split is signified by "--".

Tracy Daugherty/Marjorie Sandor Public Fiction Reading

Last Thursday I attended a public reading for the fiction writers Tracy Daugherty and Marjorie Sandor, who are husband and wife. Because of this relationship I thought it would be interesting to focus my response around the comparison of their two styles.
I think that both writers did a great job of using details, images, objects, etc. to move their writing. They used these things to connect, relate, and explore the human psyche and emotions central to the piece. However, their approach to these techniques were different. In class we discussed resonant objects, making a specific thing (e.g. an object) "dense with literature", and Sandor was able to demonstrate this technique well. For example, she used a white cat (from the piece of the same name) as a complex metaphor for the theme of the piece: overlooking what is important in life. She also does this in another work when she uses the intense memory of a breakfast restaurant to explore the trivial things that become inexplicably sublime to us, as well as nostalgia and memory. In contrast, Daugherty's use of details, images, objects, etc. was more fleeting and flowing. Where Sandor used limited major metaphors to explore a complex concept or emotion, Daugherty used a stream of them. For example, he used the image of a "foal trying to stand" in "One Sound". Daugherty's tendency towards employing a host of images and metaphors also illuminates another difference in their styles. Daugherty is more of a storyteller; Sandor builds her pieces around the abstract. Where Daugherty is traditional and tells a narrative, Sandor is more driven by concepts than action. For instance, Sandor included very little dialogue. However, both writers focus their work on a deep concept. The difference is that Daugherty does not use one extended metaphor, but a host of images, metaphors, etc. that connect or explain some element of this complex concept. The two writers also differ in tone and topic choice. Sandor's voice is not intense or bold, but rather subtle and journalistic. At times she lays out necessary information as if for a newspaper, which reminded me of the writing of Mitch Albom. This subtle, straight forward style works surprisingly well with her topics of complex, intangible ideas. Daugherty's voice and topic choices reminded me of John Steinbeck. In general, his metaphors, setting, imagery, etc. is more realistic and concrete than Sandor, at least on the surface. He uses literal descriptions and attention to detail to convey the deeper meanings of his work. For example, nature is prevalent in his fiction. This reflects on his flowing, insistent voice. He relentlessly presents images, descriptions, related ideas, flashbacks, etc. that are all relevant to the overarching theme. Furthermore, his flowing style is enhanced by good use of repetition and varying sentence structure. For instance, in "Valley Winter" he uses rainfall to go from one image to the next (i.e. "The rain fell on...The rain fell on..."). A good metaphor for the difference in the two writer's voices is this: Sandor is an ocean being explored and Daugherty is a swift river.
Overall, I was both impressed and entertained by Daugherty and Sandor, and thought that the public reading was enjoyable.