11/13/13 Lenses and Maps To Anywhere

Lenses first started out as this little kid who liked to look at things through binoculars and telescopes. Then it moved on to her liking to look through this microscope at tiny pond water creatures and algae. She was fascinated how they would dry up and die by her control of the lamp under them. It was like she enjoyed playing God and controlling their lives. The story then changes and becomes about swans and how the girl is older and likes to watch them. My favorite sentence is at the part where she talks about the Daleville Pond, "I used to haunt the place because I loved it; I still do." This sentence kind of contradicts itself with the dark type of word "haunt" and the lighter/happier type of word "love" and how she put them together in a sentence. That way she put them together is almost in sense as if she is obsessed with the pond. She goes on about how beautiful the swans are in their natural habitats and how they change from white swans in front of the mountains into black swans in the sky. This gives a calming sense of how beauty lives on it's own and can't be controlled like some science experiment.

Maps To Anywhere is an interesting collections of short fragments of the author's life. The beginning was fun to read about how people had a hard time remembering his name and that he could never find anything in stores that ever had his name on it. All of that reminded me about my own childhood, I had the same problem, wishing that my mom would have given me a simpler name that was common to everyone. It wouldn't be until I was older that I learned to love it's uniqueness. "The Miracle Chicken" made me think of actual miracles like how could it still possibly live, but by the end of that part I wondered if it actually was alive or not since the doctor said it has life in the tissue yet he can't say whether it's dead or actually alive.

What I found interesting in "On The Air" was how everybody does assume that in the future, our cities will be high up above Earth, floating in the sky. Bernard talked about Louis was living ahead of his time, he looked forward to the time where everywhere was some perfect little utopia. This story about futuristic talk of life and utopia kind of foreshadowed the story "Utopia," yet he isn't in the future his life is kind of like a utopia. He does a routine every day: work, market, home. Then he goes on about how he wanted to visit the library, but it burned down and he doesn't want to go to another library because it would be out of his realm of norm.

11/06/13 Fiction Packet

When It Rains It Rains A River is a confusing story about these boys out in the rain. They love to play out in the rain, there's even this part that they eat the mud, which I find pretty disgusting. They begin to make Girls out of the mud. They describe how these girls make them want to stay on their knees as if to pray/give thanks to having girls made. When they say how the girls look at the boys and realize they are made from them, I think of the story of Adam and Eve and how Eve was made from the ribs of Adam. The boys show true love for the girls when they see the stars in their eyes and when they mention how what girls say is always right.

The Singing Fish is about the boys and their obsessions with the Girl again. The Girl's body turns into a cave where the boys go into and find paintings on the wall. These paintings are of fish that have arms and legs, which seems really confusing and weird. Then, the stick figure fish turn into words, which turn into the cave/Girl and then into the boys. The boys in turn place their hands upon the wall and start making these philosophical ideas of how everything is basically connected in some strange way.

The Falling Girl starts out with this girl looking out beyond her balcony and just falls over the railing. At first it seems to be some sort of suicidal attempt, but you find out it isn't later in the story. She falls into what seems to be this fancy illusion of life at first, where there is this beautiful music playing, guys appreciated her, everything was glorious around her, and she felt good about herself. This makes me think of the illusions Alice has while falling down the rabbit hole, she seems frightened at first, but then feels comfortable with everything going on around her. Some might think this falling for the women is some sort of mid-life crisis they go through, but why would they begin it at the age of 19? I believe she is just going through the phases of womanhood and she is simply missing some of the things going on around her because she is focusing so much on herself and not really living in the now.

Bryant & Kearney

Radio is the first story in The Black Automaton and it describes how people love the radio and everything that comes out of it, whether it's good or bad, at least this is what I imagine for the first poem. It describes how radio means blood, this could mean that a lot of songs and raps on the radio are about violence and how it gives you power. Radio means love and it lures you in means that there are tons of love songs out there and people enjoy them so much because it brings them comfort in their relationship or it makes people want to fall in love even more. The poem also says it was the first black you had dreams about and it fucks you every night could mean that many songs are about sex now a days or that we keep the radio throughout the night to bring us comfort and make it easier to sleep.

The rest of his work seems to deal with the negativeness for being black in the old days. When the poems reaches the part about the lions, each one has their own little meaning. The black lion seems to be a fool by trying to be something bigger in life. It says that the black lion is a rook passing for a king and that he is a circus act gone wrong. The red lion seems to be some type of machine of destruction, this is seen in his quote, "I move and don't live, what made me?" It also says that every time he works there is a city of skeletons and that he basically brings chaos and destruction. The yellow lion is the one that just goes on with his life without showing expressions of being annoyed and tired and that he just needs a drink to get rid of all the stress going on in his life, to just escape from it all.

Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence seems to talk about African Americans too, but in a way that they seem to be in a movie. In the story Darling a black man tries to be a doppelganger of this beautiful blonde actress, and people ask him if Diana, who he is trying to be, has changed. In When London Burns... Violet Is Blue  the story starts out again as a movie. Sammy is sleeping with an American photographer and then they end up running through the house and the police arrive and shoot the black woman.  Danny meets Rosie and describes to how hard African Americans have it. Another scene closer to the end has yet another black woman shot while the white women get laid. At the end, Danny's royalty associated with his color is lost and Violet's name doesn't even appear in the credits. This shows how African Americans still had a hard time in these days.