Not a huge fan of the stories this week. They were alright, but nothing mind blowing. I was entertained, but don’t feel as if I will remember most of them for longer than a few months. The only exception to these feelings is “Harrison Bergeron”. Now that I think of it though one is a third of the stories I have read this week as I have yet to read the last of the week. I will still stand with my judgment though, as with a title like “The Yellow Wallpaper” I do not have the highest of expectations for the story I will surely read tomorrow in one of my frees. Now I will get back to the seven foot tall dude.

A story about a seven foot tall fourteen year old trying to take down a fascist regime can’t miss; or at least not completely miss, just mostly, as five pages is not nearly enough to do such an idea justice even if Vonnegut got across the message he wanted to send. I really don’t care for Vonnegut’s message, I would rather the story be epic. It should be epic in the sense that there is more drama, more action, and a few hundred more pages. He could still stress his whole extreme uniformity vs. extraordinary selfish power idea, but he could have Harrison destroy a few more people and possibly robots, zombies, etc. in the process. This just goes back to my hate for endings and to have one come so soon with a concept this good is just painful.

How I would fix it

More about Harrison, much more. I want to know how he got to where he is in the story. How would anyone possibly get that smart and strong throughout their life with all the handicaps? Do they teach them, just to have all the knowledge made useless by the handicaps? I want to know Harrison’s goals. I have to believe that he would have some better plan and means for executing his take over of the world, than the pitiful attempt that we see at the studio. I want to see a revolution, as people remove their handicaps and have to realize their own capabilities. I want to see the rise and the fall of Harrison as he takes this new freedom so far that everyone is once again a slave, but this time to the most superior rather than to the least common denominator.

There could be a reversal of the technology making everyone as powerful as everyone else bringing about another world of the same people. Harrison and his perfect Empress could have an imperfect child, a weak heir to the throne of the world causing new strife as the old muscle is thrown the curb by the new muscle. Maybe there would be mental affects from removing handicaps, causing some to go nuts, or some to get super powers, or something else cool like that. The story would end the same way. Harrison would be killed as that is the only real way to end a story about a man of such power. He would have accomplished more, we would have loved him, we would have hated him, and he would have been a superhuman, but die like any other man. The world would be better without him, but would have been worse without him.

This probably sounds horrible as I wrote it and I am not a writer, but Vonnegut was. He should have written it. Instead of dieing he should have lived so he could take it back and fix it so I wouldn’t be so frustrated. A movie might fix some aspects of it. There is one with SAMWISE GAMGEE????? Playing Harrison; haven’t seen it doesn’t sound like it would fix much. What needs to happen is for Michael Bay to make a film trilogy out of the story. It would rock, it would have product placement, and it would rock. (666)

Women can change the face of the world, or at least the faces of the males of the world. Through the use of attitude and physique a woman can control a room, or in the case of “A&P”, a grocery store. It doesn’t matter that one of the girls who enters the store is “chunky” and another has “a chin that was too long” all that matters is that the queen was glorious with “long white prima-donna legs” and her swim suit straps “off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and as a result the suit had slipped a little on her”. This queen bee character is the person who is unavoidable. The person we know it might not be proper to be staring at, but we all do anyways. She works the aisles of the grocery store as if they were a run way and works all of those around her as if they were an audience. She may not be trying to, but she may as well be. Shopping for just one 49 cent can of Kingfish Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream, Queenie doesn’t only capture the attention of all those at the A&P she captures the attention of everyone who reads this story and pictures such a woman completely out of place strutting around a grocery store.

I’m not in a place to completely understand “Revelation”. Being a non-believer in things such as God and karma, no matter how nice I think it would be if there were such powers to accomplish what no one else can, I couldn’t seem to relate to this story at all. I think Mrs. Turpin is a bitch on a pedestal. I think Mary Grace is a little bit crazy and a little bit genius. The story as a whole I find to be mean spirited even if it is meant to have a moral. When Mrs. Turpin is hit in the face with the book I enjoyed it, just Mary should not be carted off to wherever they may have taken her. They should praise her for her assault on such a judgmental evil woman. Turpin isn’t the only bad person in the story, I find the white trash woman almost as despicable as being white trash is no excuse for speaking the way she does. The only characters I actually respect at all as real people are Claud and the white trash woman’s son, who at least appear to just want to get on with life and pay little attention to the blabbering of the women, although I wish they would have knocked some sense into them. I guess none of this is really the point at all, but Ill allow someone else to write about that because I don’t feel qualified and or the need to talk about the mush that is religion in this story.

Holy %$&@ not what I was expecting. This Flannery chick has a dark side and a darker side and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is definitely darker than I would have ever supposed her to go. The family Flann-O presents to us seems well mannered enough, with the few quirks that should be expected of all families. There is foreshadowing and I even heard it was dark and there would be some deaths, but I was still no where near ready for what happened next. The BBQ joint is pretty awesome, strange however it is that they have a monkey in Georgia. Red Sam is a good man who may be slightly overly trusting as his wife points out, but just another good old southern boy. When the story turns it turns hard and rolls over a few times like the family car before getting shot to pieces like what was left of the family. We don’t even get a chance to think of how much trouble the family is in with their car being destroyed and many of them being injured when the fate of this family trip is sealed with the arrival of a gentleman without many manners. He speaks like the genteel should; he just has the little problem of killing folks without much reason to go along with his well-balanced demeanor. So he kills them all. Grandma, aka grand master *&$%-up, almost has a moment with him, but three holes in the chest is not quite considered a break through even when it is with the craziest B to ever roam the south. After reading through FlanFlan’s story I felt pretty bad for the family, but what really intrigued me was what made Mr. Misfit into the beast that kills men women and children for fun. We are given snippets of his story, but not enough to put together exactly what went wrong with this man who comes from a seemingly above average family. I would have liked more, even though nothing could justify what Misfit did, which I guess means I liked the story, which hopefully doesn’t mean I’m some part crazy. (845)

9/10-9/14

“A Rose for Emily” is awesome. Awesome, being a word that I rarely use in describing a piece of literature, is quite a compliment; especially for a story about the South, a place I’d rather not describe. It is awesome due to the fact that I was not able to tell what was going on until it was all revealed. This is not how I read. I find most stories, especially those read in English classes, to be painfully predictable. This story should have been just as predictable when I look back on it, but I was completely off. Maybe I read it too late at night or just wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t even put the whole story together after finishing it. With the order of events as they were, my head could not put such a puzzle together. This was humiliating, but enjoyable as I could pretend that all the wholes filled by my peers were never there to begin with and that I was just as much on top of it as anyone else. I think I was just beat by this Faulkner dude and so I must admit that A “Rose for Emily” is awesome. Faulkner got me to enjoy a period story from a period that I despise. Now I actually look forward to reading more from him I only hope to be as pleasantly surprised as I was while and after reading “A Rose for Emily”.


“Everyday Use” is pretty funny. Not Eddie Murphy funny, not Jon Stewart funny. Just the past is a funny thing funny. It may have been meant to be looked at more seriously when it was written, but with the passing of time it has become a historical piece that is now very entertaining due to the generalization in most readers’ minds that sophistication is always a good thing. Through Dee (Wangero) I saw Alice Walker showing what she thought to be a false sense of sophistication setting her even below her mother and sister who were grounded enough to accept what had become of their daughter/sister. This acceptance is an amazing thing, as Dee has in the past been rather disrespectful to the way of life that her mother and sister choose to live. It is only the persistence of this disrespect that causes her mother to decide that enough is enough and give Dee a thorough telling off. None of these events are funny. What is funny is who is doing what. The college educated woman acts as a dirt farming southern hick should, and the southern hick acts like a real woman. Thus the story is pretty funny.

“Teenage Wasteland” is sort of horrible. Not horrible in the sense that it is written badly or on subject that should be stayed away from, just horrible in the sense that no enjoyment can come out of reading this story. Now maybe I’m wrong and some people enjoy reading about extraordinary mental pain, such as how there are those who enjoy watching or reading about physical pain in the genre of horror, but what Donny and his mother go through in this story will darken just about any reader’s day. Maybe I lack something that would make me understand why this story is necessary to be read ever or it just frightens me as I know many of the events are all too real in households around the world. It’s artistic I guess. Now I’m even more suspicious of the effectiveness of counselors. The great song “Baba O’Riley” will now bring back the sour memory of this story. I guess it had an effect on me. Not a particularly good one. I hope I will soon forget this story and never have to read it again.

"Interpreter of Maladies" is quite pointless. This story of unhappy marriage and dysfunctional families has been told so many times exactly like this that I really don’t care. Yes it is a different culture this time, but the problem is exactly the same. Married man wants married woman; married woman wants her previous problems to be alleviated. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see at all why Mrs. Das would think that Mr. Kapasi could help her and why Mr. Kapasi would find anything attractive about this wretched woman. She is lazy, slow, and very unappreciative and he is just a translator. Why write this. The only people I feel for at all are the children and Mr. Das who have to put up with Mrs. Das’ misbehavior and untrustworthiness. Its incredibly difficult for me to believe that Mr. Kapasi would still after hearing of her misdeeds be attracted to her in the least no matter how difficult his home life has become. Kapasi hopefully figures out that unfaithfulness will only bring more agony such as that of Mrs. Das, but we will never know. (816)