[It's crazy that this is so unbelievably late, I realised that I'd only saved this post, not published it. So here goes...]
So as I was reading our assignment sheet and flicking through “Welcome to the Monkey House”, trying to figure out which one of them was my favourite, I came to the conclusion that it was absolutely impossible to decide, that there were too many I liked. So, I added into my other posts some shorter reviews of a couple of the best science-fiction oriented stories, and here I would like to tell you about a story which I found incredibly moving, “Who Am I This Time?”.
The protagonist of the story is a quiet, painfully shy, receding man named Harry Nash, who happens to an absolutely incredible actor. He is the star of every play which the town puts on, always replying to the director’s requests, rather sadly, with “Who am I this time?”. And every time he delivers perfectly on the, completely becoming the character he is playing for the duration of rehearsals and the show, before disappearing immediately afterwards, never enjoying the compliments or any friendship with the other actors/resses.
One spring he is asked to play Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, at the same time as a girl working for a phone company is transferred to the town for 8 weeks, the same time as she has spent in every other town the company has sent her over the last 2 years. The narrator asks her to be in his play and she agrees, shocked at the first offer of friendship she’s gotten in any new town.
The two begin to rehearse the play together, and become so good at it that the rest of the cast can only watch in awe as the two spend every second of each rehearsal entirely being their characters. However, as they get closer and closer to performance, the narrator starts to realise that the woman is falling in love with Harry, or rather, Harry’s portrayal of Marlon Brando, as she never sees him as anything but. He tries to talk to her about it, and another woman tells her of a time when she fell in love with one of Harry’s characters, only to find the man underneath completely different. Of course, she denies all her feelings.
Come performance, they both perform explosively, with Harry in fact having to keep up with her. Afterwards Harry tries to sneak off the way he always does after a performance, hating compliments and attention as much as he does. However she stops him, and gives him a book: “Romeo and Juliet”, asking him to read one of Romeo’s lines to her. They leave together, and within months they are married. People wonder at their strange relationship, because when they are together, they are never themselves, they simply move from the characters from one play to the next, for one moment Romeo and Juliet, the next Abe and Maria, never stopping. The girl believes herself to be the luckiest woman on Earth. “I am married to Odysseus, Romeo, [...] who could be happier?”
Now when they are asked to be in the town plays, they reply, “Who are we this time?”
It’s an absoluty fantastic story, and I highly recommend it.
There are so many writers that I adore, that this blog is very very difficult.I could write reams and reams about Anne McCaffrey, Jennifer Donnely, George R.R. Martin, Bill Bryson, and so many others.
But I’ve limited myself to just one, (although I know Mr. Neal won’t agree with me ). She’s special in that I don’t just love one or a few of their books, I love ALL of them. Even the ones I didn’t particularly enjoy I still admire as a writer for the skill taken to write them.
The writer is legend and goddess Jane Austen. Not just a writer of beautiful books, but one who writes fun books about love, that don’t take themselves too seriously. I know you don’t like her Mr. Neal, but there’s something about her writing that I, being basically the shallow teenage girl that I am, absolutely love and adore. Her language is beautiful without being as difficult as say Shakespeare, her plots are entertaining and believable, and more than anything her books are relatable. Almost any teenage girl today can pick up an Austen book written in the 1800s and say “YES. I know EXACTLY what she means-it happened to me too!”
And of course, what would an Austen book be without its Mr. Darcys, its Edmund Bertrams, and its Edward Ferrars? If you’ve never read an Austen book, think Edward, only without the sparkling, the wanting to kill the protagonist and all the utter stupidity. Her characters are deeply flawed, and oh-so-human. I love them.
Unfortunately the video I want has “Embedding disabled by request”, so here is the Youtube link. The pictures are kind of lame, but it’s Greensleeves and it’s Jane Austen quotes. So It’s wonderful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxnUbMab_-0
And since we are supposed to have a video, here’s another cute little thing:
1. Keep open-minded. Listen, watch, and feel everything about your day as if you’ve never done so before and will never do it again.
Good writers take what happens all around them in their lives and show it to other people in new ways. So to be a good writer, you have to live a little differently to other people. You have to EXPERIENCE as much as you can in as much detail as you can. Allow yourself to be inspired by anything. Live each day like it’s your last. And it doesn’t hurt that that’s a great philosophy for life in general.
2. Write the most random rubbish that pops into your head.
I hate doing this. It makes me feel like a terrible writer, and when I go back over and I read it I feel like crying at the utter stupidity that fills my brain. HOWEVER. We don’t get better unless we practice! And not even the best writers write good stuff all the time. They just WRITE. WRITEWRITEWRITEWRITEWRITE.
3. Reviiiiise the hell out of that randomness.
Once you have a page or 3 pages or 10 pages of utter tripe, read it again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again until you can’t bear to look at it again for fear that you may in fact vomit. Then read it 10 more times. Take it completely apart, and put it together again as many times as you can. Throw out the “nice”s and the “good”s and the “happiness”s and the “sadness”. Replace abstract language with concrete, and FIX THOSE APOSTROPHES.
And then maybe. MAYBE. You might have something which you don’t quite feel like throwing out the window. But probably not.
So do it again. Because good writers don’t give up.
This is a really strange blog prompt, but it’s interesting. An infinite moment. It’s such a personal thing, a moment like that, it’s hard to share, even on a blog.
To be honest, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to think of one. Moments that other people might think of just don’t really work for me. I could lie and say it was when I was standing front row at a Reel Big Fish, completely and utterly part of the music. But I wasn’t. There was a rather large part of me that was very very scared of being crushed to death, and another part trying to fend off the creeper behind me with my elbow. I could also say it was when I first kissed my ex-boyfriend, but to be honest that was just really awkward. We were saying goodbye, and his parents were watching.
Thinking about it I’m actually getting incredibly depressed that I haven’t had a moment like that for a long time, but there is one.
The summer before 8th grade. Viktoria Pretzman, one of the most unique and incredible people I’ve ever had the privelge of meeting, who I still miss so freaking much, was my best friend at the time. We would lie on park benches or tables outside in the Siedlung, a pot of Betty Crocker’s icing each, and play Would You Rather or make up stories or just talk. And I swear to god, sometimes I’d just lie there with icing in my mouth and sun on my face and her laughing in my ear, and think I’d never been happier, and it couldn’t possibly ever end.
But of course it did. She moved after 8th grade and I haven’t seen her since.
It’s hard to list all the writing skills I learnt from reading this short story anthology. It helped, however, that I had a stack of Post-It’s on hand while reading it.
To start with, there were many things which I saw mirrored in the collection from our Creative Writing class, for example Vonnegut’s use of unusual adjectives: “The woman shouted again, a high, ragged, poisonous, shout”, without having to use metaphors, which I tend to rely on in my own writing. The use of detail in instant settings was also familiar from our class (albeit slightly more unusal settings), such as in the introduction to one of my favourite stories, “Welcome to the Monkey House”: “So Pete Crocker, the sheriff of Barnsatable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis on May afternoon-and she told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren’t to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believe headed for the Cape.” I tried this in my story “Cherry syrup”, with my setting of the street where my main character was running, but I definitely need to work on instant characterisation as well as setting.
One skill I definitely learnt from this anthology was that to form realistic characters, it’s necessary to enter completely into the mind of that character, thinking as they think, and writing dialogue exactly as they would speak, including colloquialisms, and that a knowledge of different cultures, languages, and dialects is vital for this.
Something which I found particularly intriguing was actually stated in one of the stories, and I think is absolutely vital for a science fiction writer of novels or short stories to understand, is that “scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.” Thus science fiction writers should take what we see as silly, meaningless ideas today and make them real. As I really love science fiction reading and writing, this is an extremely important skill which I learnt from Vonnegut.
“Welcome to the Monkey House”, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is like nothing I have ever read before. For a start, it is a collection of short stories, not something usually confronted by the average reader. Secondly, it has within it’s covers some of the most imaginative plotlines, endearing characters, and memorable quotes that I have ever come across in any movie, novel, or poem to this day.
To sum up “Welcome to the Monkey House”, I would call it a commentary on humanity, and an extremely moving and entertaining one at that. The story of the “amphibians”, people who have shed their “parasites that have to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time” (i.e. their bodies) and now consist solely of their minds (“Unready to Wear”) delves into the issue of whether humanity is defined by the body or the mind. The tale of the discovery of the “Euphio”, a portable machine which generates happiness (“The Euphio Question) asks the question of whether happiness should be bought or worked for. Throughout, Vonnegut’s insight and imagination never ceases to amaze.
However, not all of the stories contained in this anthology are of the science fiction genre. For example, any readers must be touched by the story of Grace McClellan, a wife obsessed with interior decorating who has every piece and particle of her house in a filing cabinet. Every shade of wallpaper, every fabric for every sofa cover and blueprints for every room, all mapping out what her house will look like someday. However, her and her husband have no money to do so, until a distant relative dies and she is in hospital with an infection. With the help of their two neighbours, her husband George re-does the entire house exactly the way she dreamed it, with the only discrepancy being that the sofa is a slightly lighter colour of yellow than Grace had planned. Only to find when she comes home that her only remarks are to say thank you for the roses and to wonder how the sofa, after holding its colour for so many years, could fade so suddenly in just a few weeks.
Every single story in the collection had a message about some aspect of human nature, or the government, or the world, expressed in a droll, fresh and encaptivating way, with detail and realistic setting and characterisation.
The only possible critique of the anthology might be, however, that the details of setting when the stories were in “modern times”, being set almost entirely in America during the 1950′s, while giving an interesting “Zeitgeist” insight into that time and area, could be very hard to follow with those not familiar with them.
I am beautiful and popular, and head of the cheerleading squad.
I am hated, I am envied, and I am called a bitch at least twice a day.
I have dated the hottest guys. I have slept with the most sought-after guys. I even kissed a girl once, on a drunk dare.
But I am never, ever, allowed to fall in love. How could I?
I am the girl who gets dumped for the nerd. The one who gets shown up as The Bitch at parties, by my own boyfriends none-the-less. I am the girl who ends up screaming at the “quiet, nice” girl at the end of the night, with punch in my hair and mascara running down my face. I am the one who guys realise they “never really wanted to be with”, with their arms wrapped around the math geek, the drama freak, the girl with “inner beauty”.
I am the bad guy.
So when do I find the one who breaks down my walls, gets under my skin, and sees me for me? Isn’t that what everyone says is supposed to happen? What they say everyone deserves?
I’m really sorry Josefin, but I’m going to have to steal (share?) one from you. I would love love love love to take pictures just by blinking my eyes, because I absolutely fail at having my camera around when anything good is happening. I would also be able to take photos of criminals in the middle of the act, so they would have to be prosecuted in court. ^^
Now to get to the criminals doing criminally things, I would have to fly, because lets face it, who doesnt want to fly?? I just couldn’t imagine anytihng superpowery I would rather do than be able fly. Jetpacks anyone?
My weakness would be…charming bad guys. I’m such a sucker for charismatic people, I’d probably just end up helping them with whatever they were doing… -_-
Hah. So yes, I’d be The Flying, Photo-Taking Wonder Woman.
Wow…my perfect world…I almost don’t want to do this, because I know it’ll just make me depressed about how unperfect the world really is.
Anywho who’s ever spoken to me between November and March knows that I loathe, despise and abhore the winter and being cold. So in my perfect world it would be summer practically all the time, with some days of late spring mixed in so that I wouldn’t get bored. It would always be sunny and warm, and everyone would spend their days wearing short, tank tops and flip flops.
In my perfect world there would also be no homework, no tests, and…you know what? There just wouldn’t be ANY school at ALL. Everyone would spend the first 18 years of their life having fun, partying, socialising, being with friends, reading, taking walks, doing sports and just doing things which make them happy. At the age of 18 there would be a massive ceremony, and the person would eat a chocolate chip cookie. And in this cookie would be embedded every thought, idea and piece of knowledge which humans have thus far discovered. One delicious and smooshyful chocolate chip would be English Literature, one crumbly chunk of dough would be Maths, and so on and so on.
Then, after devouring this scrumscious cookie, the person could decide what interested them and go into that career, already an expert, and spend their lives adding to that section of the Cookie of Knowledge.
Wow, well I guess I can’t actually answer this question all that well, because I don’t know what I want to be. I’ve had times in the past when I’ve known for sure exactly what I wanted to be, and it’s always changed, so I’m hesitant now about dedicating myself completely to one option for my life. I can tell you that my choices of what to study are between History, English and Psychology, possibly plus Creative Writing. The career choices I’m considering include Historian, Psychologist, English or History teacher, and Writer.
Wow, that came out sounding incredibly serious.
I don’t really want to think about career choices right now. Far too stressful.
