The Story of a Suicide Response

I liked the way that this was worded. It came off somewhat as a newspaper article, as did both of these pieces really, but I liked this one's use of language more. It felt more like the author was trying to make it feel less like an article and more like a story. It had emotions in it and it was a lot more compelling than just the facts stated as they might be in something like this. That inclusion made it work a lot more than it might have otherwise. What's especially interesting is that I had heard this story before, but never in such detail (SO MUCH detail, too. Why was it so long? Why were either of them so long? It got boring way before the half-way point). Although it certainly wasn't one of the most compelling things I've read (I struggled keeping focus on it, in all honesty) it wasn't horrid.  There were definitely aspects of it that I found appealing and other things that I didn't like as much, but isn't that how it goes?

In Which There is Physical Description

She's shorter than I am, perhaps about five foot six inches, although she doesn't like to wear shoes and oftentimes goes around in her bare feet. She maintains her hair short, above her shoulders but below her chin, and it looks golden brown in the light of the sun, but flatter under dull florescent. I don't think it's her real hair color, but who am I to judge? It's soft, too, when you touch it, which I haven't, but I know people who have. When she looks at you, her eyes are blue, with hints of green around her pupils. There's always a hint of teasing, or joy. You wouldn't want to see her crying. When she's drowned out that sense of wonder, you know that something is horribly wrong. And she always smells inexplicably of pastries, although I've yet to see her baking or spending inordinate amounts of time in bakeries or coffee shops.

When she speaks, she has people entranced. The words that she says don't matter as much in light of the beauty that is her voice. She doesn't say good things; rather, she's cruel and vicious. She doesn't know when to stop, or where he boundaries are. She's mean. But it doesn't matter, because people fall for the tone of her voice, like she's an angel and these are merely her battle hymns. She doesn't like people, but people like her. She could rule a kingdom with an iron fist, and she could bring it down without much thought to herself. She'd just keep on the way she always has, oblivious and self-absorbed.

The American Male at Age Ten Response

I'm not sure I would call this piece 'effective'. The sentence structure was boring. It was the same sentence over and over again "We would..." and it didn't hold my attention, and then when that was over "He is..." for another paragraph. I think that was a downfall. I can see how it could have worked, if the piece was written in that child-like tone, but I think that it really failed here. Although, I do think that some of the humor worked well for it, but the writing itself felt really underwhelming and boring. It was a good idea, but it wasn't executed well with the style or tone of the story. I believe what I'm trying to say in a roundabout, long enough for the word count required way, is that I did not like this piece. I don't think that it worked so I would be hard pressed to write about how it was effective, because I don't believe that it was.

Response to January

What I found interesting about this story is that it did a subtle switch from present tense to past tense, and then it just ended. I didn't catch it until the second time I was reading through it, and it jumped out at me how subtle it was (which doesn't make the most sense, but I'm going with it). Another thing was that it just reminded me of home. When I go home, all my family talks about is the barn, and their horses. My mother and my little sister love their horses, and my mom and my stepdad fight all the time about the horses. It consumes their lives, so I think that even if I didn't understand first hand what she was talking about during certain parts of the story ("If you live with horses, you soon get used to the feel of a line lying across your palm and fingers...") I think that I can at least understand what it looks like in other people.

It was a short piece, and even after two read throughs, I'm still not entirely sure what it was about.

Muskgrass Chara

I found the sheer amount of detail in this piece to remind me of Ryan's piece. Both of them had an abundance of details that could just put you in the moment, and it really brought them together. There were differences, because Ryan's was in a specific scene, but Moore's focused on a lot of smells that came together in a story that worked out. Moore's piece was very poetic and beautifully written. Both of the pieces flowed like someone's thoughts, but worked in the same way that careful word choice does. And there was an emotional undercurrent that really held them together, and made them work.

Response: Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

While not entirely similar, reading this story made me think back to Camille's untitled work. It was that similar sense of disappointment in the men in their lives, although they do have distinct differences. They both have a sense of growing up with that disappointment, and learning to live with it, even if they can't accept it.They do have those fundamental differences. Where Camille expresses this outright inability to accept what she's grown up with, Allison has a more subvert way of doing the same thing. She acts as though she can accept it, much as Camille does to her mother, and then at the end, she prays and hopes that she won't end up like her family. Even she has a hard time accepting it, and it's such a vulnerable thing to explore and put out there that they end up feeling very similar in that aspect.

The Lantern Bearers: Response

Perhaps it's not a response to the metaphor itself, but more what he was trying to say. I love a message in stories that I read, especially in non-fiction, but not so overt as this. There is a difference between trying to convey something that you've learned and trying to show it through writing and trying to tell people what they feel and how they should act. The essay makes quite a few generalizations (not to mention saying that all poets are men, which I understand is a product of the time, but makes me much less likely to take the rest of his advice, as misguided as that may be.

Rather than just telling a personal story and showing the readers what he has learned, Stevenson seems to be trying to make a rather large statement about what all people are like, what all people feel. "In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life;..." I disagree, but he's stating this opinion as though it's fact. And 'nobler' is vague enough that I can't fully get what he means. Does he mean that they comply to his moral standards? That they write well? And the emotions that people feel are only 'like the emotions of life'? Does this emotion somehow differ from actually feeling something? No. A book, not even particularly well written, can make us feel emotions as if we were going through something to provoke it. It's the wonder of human sympathy.

I understand that a lot of this is time and the differing of societies, but this essay is so far from a personal essay to me. It's a man preaching to people how they should act and feel, and trying to shove his personal life in there almost as an afterthought. It's not particularly well done, and the story isn't compelling. I could barely force myself to read up to the point where he actually mentioned his life, let alone to the part where he finally started forcing this metaphor on us. It's cheesy, overdone, and not well executed. I don't think that the motive for writing this seems to be that he wanted to talk about an event in his life and see how it could help others, it was that he wanted to impose his own ideals on others. It's okay if it's done well, if it's presented as an option, as a revelation of the author's rather than an explicit order on how to behave.

The metaphor, then, wasn't something that seemed to come naturally. It was a way for him to go about this, it was a way that he was trying to disguise this as something other than what it was.