Fluorescence

Oh my gosh was Fluorescence difficult to keep my attention on. Many of the poems use extremely repetitive language which is both hard to keep straight and rather boring. On page 11 Dick writes, “I want to begin at the beginning the beginning of begin and just begin…” By the end of that short sentence my mind was screaming “JUST GET ON WITH IT!”. On the next page Dick uses another technique that quickly looses my attention. Her sentences seem incomplete (and by traditional grammar rules, they are). She ends one sentence with a blank line. Another ends with the word ‘in” without any punctuation. These are a couple reasons, and examples, of why I found Fluorescence very difficult to read.

Next I would like to point out the title itself. Fluorescence as a word has a few definitions. It can mean the emission of radiation, especially of visible light, by a substance during exposure to external radiation, as light or x-rays, or the property possessed by a substance capable of such emission or the radiation so produced (thank you Dictionary.com). This ends up being consistent with many of the titles of the pieces inside. A couple of poem titles are Anatomy, Ellipses, and Rain. At least to me, these are all related. Dick doesn’t title the book Fluorescence and then title her poems, Zombie, Suicide, and so on. They’re mostly organic in nature.

Page 40 drove me nuts. To be exact, page 41 drove me nuts despite it not being numbered. I did not understand why there was a blank page in the middle of the book with a random two tone bar at the top. To me, I saw no relation to the section (or poem) titled Four. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this poem also does not have a solid ending like the poem I mentioned in my first paragraph.

An End to Wreckage of Reason

This week I will touch on the short stories in Wreckage of Reason. The first one is called Cottage Life. I loved the first line of this, “I cracked time the same way I cracked you.” I just thought it was a beautifully written opening line that really grabs the readers’ attention. Overall, the story kind of lost me, but the insecurity the narrator suggests was something I could relate to easily. The Women by Shope was my next story. I will start off by saying that this is not one that I enjoyed. Again it stems back to my comments about poetry, I don’t like “disorderly” writing so it greatly bothers me that many of her sentences do not begin with a capital letter. I have difficulty getting past visual styles like these and it become very difficult to like the story at all because I end up being so annoyed.

You A love (crossed out) War story was adorable just for the title. The title itself sort of foreshadows a change of heart by the end of the story. Despite the (at times) strange setup, I liked this story. I was able to get into it because the beginning was set up like a “normal” short story. I was even able to relate to the narrator with the lines, “You fell asleep right away. You’re prone to it. I stayed up reading my disappointing novel until my eyelids dropped. Then I turned off the bedside lamp and went to sleep.” That pretty much described myself (the reader) and my boyfriend (the one who can be asleep in 30 seconds). In this one, I also really liked page 268 section 9 where it had in parenthesis a descriptor to indicate how something was said. I just thought it was neat.

Black Wings was interesting. I’m not sure if I missed the point or not but I liked it nonetheless. I thought it was interesting watching their relationship, seeing inside one of their heads. My main question regarding this is about the asexuality. It didn’t really make sense to me why in the beginning it said, “I want to know what it is like to be asexual…I have met someone and asked him if we can just read books together. To my surprise he has agreed.” So did she want a plutonic relationship or what? To me that was basically just asking for him to be her friend. I also didn’t get the random comments about having seen the woman drop her child and having done nothing. All in all, I focused on the pair’s relationship to one another, which seemed to be not that close, mostly like any friendship. So I liked it, but I ended with the feeling of “I missed something”.

Everson

Today (both in class and here) I focused on Brian Evenson’s Internal. At the top of the copy it says “from Contagion. Now, I recently saw the movie Contagion, so this what my mind set going into the story. For those not familiar with this movie (it’s a fairly recent movie that has been out on DVD for a while) it’s basically about how the world would respond to a mass epidemic of near global proportion. The people who get sick die fairly quickly and (obviously) the disease is highly contagious. Looking back between the movie and the short story I’m not sure that they have to do with one another but even then, they do have similarities. I felt that the short story was one depicting a person’s decent into madness. It seemed to be a sort of ‘what you study, you become’ situation.

I definitely thought that the use of italics and quotations was deliberate. Italics seemed to be thoughts about whatever. Quotations seemed much more complex. In some cases it seemed to be sarcastic like on page 55 where it says “hardly the typical intern”. The one line that I think is the most sarcastic is on page 63, “Write nothing,” he said (not his exact words). “The only notebook you need,” he said, tapping me on the temple, “is the ‘notebook’ within your skull.” This particular line also seemed off in another way. If you were to say that to someone, would you tap them on the temple? I wouldn’t. If you were saying it to a mentally unstable person, would you tap them on the temple? I absolutely wouldn’t! (In nursing we’re actually trained to almost never touch a patient). 

I also think the structure of the writing is a symbol of the decent into madness (or further decent into madness). The paragraphs get shorter as you read. A great example of this is on page 62 where the “types” are listed. The first item on the list is “the nervous type”. This seems to be a reasonable personality type. Then at the bottom it has “the Siamese-tarp type”.  I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know tarp is a type. My last comment is on page 69. To me, the section Sharp clearly says that the narrator has become (or always was) mentally disturbed. If you’ve been trained to work with disturbed people you’ll have the tools to deal with patients, so the desire to stab him in the eye is ridiculous. The thought that he’s thinking the same thing is less ridiculous (sometimes you really need to watch your back). Overall, I wasn’t too into the story just because I don’t like stories about mental instability because I have seen too much of it myself already.

The First of the Fiction Packets

The first story I want to mention from the first short fiction packet is the very first story. I really loved Survivors by Kim Addonizia. I have been around homosexuals for the majority of my life (as far as I know – all of it) so it was very easy to feel bad for these characters. I can understand their pain of rejection, although no one I know has had a parent try to beat their sexuality out of them with a belt. I really did like in this story how the character went from wanting to die first so he wouldn’t have to deal with his lover’s parents to wanting to die first so he wouldn’t have to be alone. “dear God, he thought, let me die first, don’t let me survive him.” This was a beautiful line to me. I know I would want to die before my loved one (though I bet I’d die soon after of a broken heart) just so I wouldn’t have to be alone.

Two other stories made me chuckle. The first was Misdemeanors by Sherman Alexi. It’s just pretty funny to picture an old man robbing a place and emerging with his pants around his knees because the pockets are filled with coins. The second that I really loved that made me laugh was The Talking Cat by Sharon Krinsky. This was a ridiculously short story, and the title gave it away, but “The woman seems jealous” was wonderful. You expect the cat to talk but you don’t expect the woman to be jealous of their rapport.

The last one that I really enjoyed was Wallet by Allen Woodman. I feel like this story does have an overall deeper meaning than I got, but I found it extremely amusing. I’d love to play a prank on someone who was trying to steal my wallet. I did however like that the man didn’t expect anyone to go after the person who took his wallet. I don’t know if this is supposed to suggest that we think the worst of people and forget to see the good or not, but it’s kind of what I took from it.

Ed Roberson Finale

To start off this second bit about Ed Roberson I will begin with a short discussion of today’s class session. I thought everyone had wonderful ideas revolving Roberson’s poetry. It’s always fun to hear about what others think because they always come up with things that I have yet to think of. Height and Deep Song was talked (although I think it might have been the lecture prior to today’s). The comments on this poem were insane. The line, “but unable to jump strapped in” was intriguing. I did not see this as a suicide poem, but more of a ‘trapped in your own body/mind sort of poem. I definitely did enjoy this poem though solely for the controversy and discussion that ensued post inspection.

Spontaneous Supremacies was also discussed today. This one was like taking dozens of tiny needles and trying to perform self acupuncture on my brain with no instruction or guidebook. “it isn’t as its equal it in anything,” is the perfect line to end with if you want your reader’s brain to implode. I re-read this poem several times after it was brought up and I still had zero interpretations. It’s almost like Roberson used small words (like it, its, and in) so many times in one poem that it became a force shutdown command for my mind. I still don’t understand this poem and so I shall move on to another.

The “State as Body” Aspect of Eunuch Rule was a wonderful, albeit dark, poem. I loved the opening lines, “I want to kill for my incapacity to feel. To feel I feel want as want. to kill. I’ll be simple.” It starts off sounding sort of like it’s a poem about insanity or maybe inside the mind of a murderer. I think it’s more a metaphor for escaping the bonds of oneself. I thought this was represented with Roberson’s lines, “’til I no longer have body with which to want the crossroad’s saddle of milepost that multiples the earth.”

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the second half of Roberson’s book much more than the first half. The second half of the poems seemed to have a more “normal” structure which my eyes and mind found easier to read. I loved the whole section Ornithology just because of all the bird references. I’m pretty big into animals and nature, so naturally I’m more into poems that use nature and animals. After talking about Roberson’s poems I ended up liking them more than when I read them on my own; however, his work is still something I wouldn’t necessarily read by my own choice.