The Girl on the Plane by Mary Gaitskill

February 10, 2014Leave a comment

I’m a little behind on posting about my readings. Snow, electricity, and whatnot have been delaying everything in my life right now. I read this short story for class about a week ago (I believe the reading was due last Tuesday).

I actually really liked this story, despite what it was actually about. I’ve never actually been on a plane, but I’ve been on plenty of train/subway rides to know how awkward it is to sit next to a complete stranger and be unsure what to talk about if you even talk at all.

At the beginning of the story, I kind of liked the narrator, even though he was sort of a jerk. However, as the story progressed I felt really bad for the women in his life and couldn’t believe what he did to Patty, embarrassing her and then raping her, even if he thought that he wasn’t really raping her.

On a sidenote – that actually says a lot about rape culture, because clearly the girl in this story had been given some type of date rape drug and then man after man continued to have sex with her while she was basically passed out, and then the narrator thought it was okay for him to have sex with her after all of this because she didn’t seem like she was refusing anyone. It’s really terrible, and it upset me that this guy still didn’t fully realize that what he did was very wrong and that he did in fact rape this girl who was in love with him.

Anyway, the story was very strange and definitely shocking. Something that we talked about in class was the way that Mary Gaitskill used flashbacks to tell the story. My professor wanted to know if we thought the use of flashbacks was successful when, in all honesty, she could have just written the story about the narrator and Patty without the whole storyline with the girl on the plane.

I think that it was necessary to tell the story in flashbacks because the narrator needed that woman on the plane to trigger his memory of Patty. The girl on the plane also opened up to him about her alcoholism and that allowed him to remember getting drunk and pushing Patty away and drinking and raping her.

Overall, the story was interesting and definitely something different to read. I’m not exactly sure why all the stories that my professor assigns have some sort of sexual storyline, but maybe we’ll move away from that eventually.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger

January 29, 2014Leave a comment

I think that J.D. Salinger is a very good writer and that he succeeded with making the dialogue in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” really sharp, in order to make up for the lack of inner monologue. Not having that step into the characters’ heads really allowed for me to think about what was going on and figure things out for myself, which I really like. It also gave the reader a sense of mystery, I found myself wondering what was going to happen. I definitely did not expect that ending, but looking back it makes sense for him to die after talking to the little girl about how bananafish gorge themselves on bananas and then die.

I think that I knew something was wrong with the soldier when the girl’s mother kept asking her if she was okay and if he had done anything to her. At first it seemed like she was just an overbearing mother, and that is how the girl kind of portrayed her by blowing off all of her questions. However, it seemed like the mother was being serious and that she was really worried about her daughter.

I also found the conversation between the soldier and the little girl very interesting. I’m sure that it was meant to show that he could better communicate with children and that he felt more at ease around those who had not yet lost their innocence. This is definitely something that would make sense for a person who was probably suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder and could no longer relate to the “grown-ups” around him. However, in a modern day and age, and I guess my own modern views he bordered on creepy for me. I guess back then it was socially acceptable to leave your child on a beach alone and maybe for people to interact with that child, but the soldier kissing the child’s feet borderlined on pedophilia a bit too much for me. Maybe I’m just taking that the wrong way and its supposed to just be this sweet moment and last connection the soldier makes before he decides to kill himself.

Aunt Jemima’s Old-Fashioned Pancakes by Mary Miller

January 27, 2014Leave a comment

So, I really didn’t like this story. I’d love to hear from others who have read it, but to me it just didn’t have any literary quality whatsoever.

The storytelling was exactly like a stream of consciousness. When my creative writing teachers ask us to sit down and write this is exactly the kind of thing that I write. I guess that’s the point of this story, but its annoying and could have probably been a much better story if it was set up more like a story.

That’s confusing, but hopefully it made sense. I definitely see why my professor assigned us this story and how it relates to the last story, but I still hated it.

Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night by Thisbe Nissen

January 27, 2014Leave a comment

“Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night” was a very interesting short story to read for my Creative Acts class. So far, all of the stories that we’ve read have the element of sex in them. I think that it’s completely natural to have sex in a story that you are writing because it is something that everyone can relate to at some point.

In this story specifically, the sexual acts are happening between a girl in high school and her teacher. This is kind of an obvious fantasy for many people, I think. Nothing about this story made it very different or very interesting. It was just sort of a story about a girl who found out her friend had sex with her teacher.

It does say a lot about what will be said when girls go to the bathroom together. I guess since I’m a girl I can relate to going to the bathroom with a group of my girl friends and us gossiping about people that we’re with or telling each other things that we might not say out in the public where others can hear.

Overall, the story was okay. Nothing special or really eye-opening, just that a girl who acts like everybody wants her actually lets people have her.

Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice by Nam Le

January 22, 2014Leave a comment

“For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank Scotch near. How hard could it be? Things happened in this world all the time. All I had to do was record them.”
Nam Le. “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.”

In a creative writing class that I took a few semesters ago my professor told us that in short stories every line has to count. Nam Le definitely made every single line of “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” count.

The story showed the life of a struggling writer, how he struggles to find something to write about, and how he struggles with his relationships. He is unable to open up to his girlfriend, who very clearly cares a lot about him, and he is unable to relate to his father.

I think that the title definitely describes the relationship between the character and his father. That struggle between love and honor, pity and pride, and compassion and sacrifice. All of these themes are strong throughout his storytelling and make it a really great story to read.

Anyone can understand and relate to the struggles between a parent and a child. Parents give you life and raise you to be the person that you are, but you still struggle against them. You want to do things for yourself and have your own opinions and experiences without their input. Breaking away from your parents is an important part of growing up and becoming more independent. However, breaking away can sometimes leave you in a position where you aren’t comfortable. They still feel the need to take care of you and you still want to please them.

I think it would be really hard to express all of these feelings in a short story and Nam Le did a really good job doing that.

Pet Milk by Stuart Dybek

January 22, 2014Leave a comment

So, now that I am back in school I’m going to be doing a ton of assigned reading. Since this blog is, in theory, a way to keep track of everything that I read this year I’ve decided to include the stories that I read for class as well. By doing this, hopefully, it will also help me to remember what I’ve read and better discuss my feelings on the texts with my class.

This is the first reading that has been assigned to me by my Creative Acts professor. I think it was an interesting choice to have us read this for the first assignment of the semester, but I have to say I enjoyed it.

The narrator starts off discussing how he puts pet milk into his coffee and that it was something that his grandmother had done when she made coffee as well. I’m not going to lie, I thought that pet milk meant that it was milk from a domesticated animal like a cat or a dog. I grew up with cats and often my parents would buy cat milk to feed to the kittens that we had, so thinking that someone would put that in their coffee kind of grossed me out. I know now that it is PET milk and that it is just evaporated cow’s milk. I guess that makes me feel better.

I liked how the story started off with this anecdote of his grandmother and how he would watch the creamy PET milk blend into the coffee. If anything, this author is amazingly great at giving sensory details. I felt like I could relate to the smells and sights that he described so well because of the way he described them.

The way that the PET milk blended and swirled reminded him of a drink that he would have at a restaurant with his girlfriend at the time and then led the narrator to tell a story about the restaurant that he would frequent and the girl that he would go there with.

I really liked the ending, even though it left me wanting more. I guess with a story this short having an ending so quick makes sense, but I thought that the story was going somewhere else.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the story but I thought that it was too much like a stream of thoughts. There really wasn’t any theme to the story that held up from beginning to end. It felt sort of like he was making coffee, then thinking about his grandmother, and then the restaurant, and then this girl, and how he saw a boy begin to wave to him while he was on a train.

I’m interested to see what other people from my class thought about this one.

Kayla Cropper

Tag: short stories