Response to "Dreams" by Jeremy Hare

The Japanese scene definitely seems like one you are comfortable thinking about, and that you enjoy writing about. I don't know much about Japanese names, but the three characters you have written about have names that sound naturally Japanese: Hikari, Sora, and Ryu. I think the story works well for several reasons. There is constant conflict between all three characters, which keeps the interest alive. The plot is simple, but it works because the conflict keeps the reader wondering what will happen next. Will Sora eventually defeat the master, Ryu? This does not seem likely at all, but nevertheless, there exists the possibility that this could happen.

            I had some trouble visualizing the characters, and I also found it difficult to connect to them on a deep level. The dialogue did not contribute to this difficulty, however; I would keep the dialogue, as it seems honest, moves the plot, and shows us the desires of the characters. However, I would add a little more description in the form of action. I would include more action to try to show the reader what exactly you are seeing in your mind. The dialogue tells the story well; I just would like to see more things. I’d like to see Sora and Ryu fighting, and some nice concrete details that could be inserted with that. I’d also like to visualize more of the interaction between Hikari and Sora.

            I’m eager to discuss the story in class, as I think that will offer a lot more insight from you about the things you are seeing when you wrote this story. I’m really interested in seeing this action, which is something I felt did not happen to my expectation. I also could imagine this story lengthening into something longer, something not necessarily of novel length, but at the very least a much longer short story. If you did this, I think it would be appropriate to, in addition to describing some action and visual details, include some background on the characters. I’d like to hear about Sora’s family and upbringing in particular. Was there something that happened that made him particularly susceptible to the bullying he has experienced?

Dialogue between Air Force ROTC student and another student

-Yeah I’m going deer hunting.

Uh they’re for sale. We’re getting this and Todd to live with us… Pretty sure I gave… dude I got to talk to three guys: Ben, Connor, Carter

-Connor, Carter

The tall guy…

-Collier

Brent and Sam and this guy called Budimier. They said that… we got to talking about…

-Engineering, study abroad.

I just told my roommate…

-It’s kinda weird Robert and Matthew are very social compared to… Ross and I are fine w/ just being in our room, doing h/w reading something else. I try to go out and talk but he’s just like… haha. A lot of times I feel like doing that, but…

-I got another guy, Matt…

Yeah, met him before. Yeah he’s very… I don’t know I say that but I don’t know. I always say that… No, he just doesn’t. I think he understands that he’s a bright guy. I asked him… and he doesn’t understand. It’s been cool watching him kinda grow. I don’t know I just have this feeling… mostly on Sunday nights… I’ll pray for ya.

-Did you ask for feedback on that Bible study.

…we need to, part of the reason why… guess that’s one reason why we have them…

-This summer me and three guys… what’s working for you. They asked us questions and their weren’t set answers. It’s really hard to do that… to like discover stuff about the gospel… so then we talked about, “So what does it look like to flee sin?” haha he turned and just busted.

No, no, no we have twelve to fifteen total, but 2 more showed up… today’s Thursday, so.

-Well I’m trying to start up something in the Air Force, and I’m not really sure how to start it…

1-900: Deep truths from a convoluted mind

When I finished “1-900” by Richard Bausch, the overwhelming feeling that filled me was disgust or annoyance toward the protagonist caller, John T. Bailey. I think his separated wife was correct when she said that he “twisted things around in [his] head,” coming to conclusions that hurt himself, leading to him blaming her for all their troubles. She also said he was a “morbid, convoluted son of a bitch,” which I also must agree with after finishing the story. At the end of the story, when the phone sex professional “Marilyn” says bye to John, he tells her enthusiastically that that was the sexy tone he had been searching for the whole time. Nothing turns him on more than the poor woman saying goodbye—surely John is a morbid, convoluted s.o.b.

Nevertheless, he brings us through some meaningful reflections during the course of his exchange with Marilyn. He opens the eyes of the reader to the twisted, backwards reality of professional sex. Like a normal person, John is not comfortable with being sexually involved (“intimate,” he says) with someone before even remotely knowing anything about her. Marilyn, in a complete ideological reversal of thought, only feels comfortable doing sex with someone she doesn’t remotely know. To her, comfort is found in the non-emotional, business-like way she handles her sex phone calls. When John says he wants to get to know her a little before they become intimate, she laughs and says, “Intimate? You’re kidding, right?”

Bausch uses these two characters with opposing ideologies to point out that sex can mean different things depending on the context. While, as John points out, Marilyn’s profession is completely unconventional, I find it hard to sympathize with John personally, because his thoughts are convoluted. At first, it seems like he is full of wisdom, and like he is leading us in a direction of important revelations and personal sexual ideas, but the story leaves us puzzled by John’s strangeness. While I completely agree that sex should be intimate, and should “mean something,” I can’t sympathize with John.

Apathy Emergency

            I think Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” is a story that describes the unpredictability of the world, about how what we think is true about the world is never as firmly true as we believe. Take, for example, the two characters in the short story: Georgie, the orderly, and the narrator, the clerk. When we think of hospitals, we think of places where everyone is a professional, everyone in the building is well-qualified to fulfill his or her position. This is clearly not the case with Georgie and the narrator, who go about the hospital high on pills. Georgie apparently haphazardly removes a hunting knife from a victim’s eye without warning anyone beforehand. As an orderly, he certainly has no qualifications to do that, sober or otherwise.

            The most incredible fact about the hospital is that no one really seems to care about anything. Like Georgie and the narrator, who are literally high, the other hospital staff we glimpse seem to operate as if in a dream, as if what happened to the patients was not truly important. The doctors don’t even have names—there is the brain man, the eye man, the Family Service person.

            When Georgie comes out of the operating room with the bloody knife in his hand, the hospital staff seem taken aback at first; however, in the next few lines, it becomes apparent that their speechlessness is really just apathy. The silence is finally broken when the I.C.U. nurse says, “Your shoelace is untied.”

            The epitome of apathy among the characters in the short story is perhaps best exemplified in a subtle thing the nurse tells the stab victim: “It’s just a miracle you didn’t end up sightless or at least dead.” Sightlessness is actually worse than death, if we take her words literally. We think of a hospital as the least apathetic of places, but Johnson is telling us that even the people who are perceived to be the most driven are not unaffected by apathy. We are most shocked by Georgie’s closing remark to the AWOL military recruit Hardee, when he tells him that he “saves lives” for a living. It is shocking because only at this point does it really sink in to us that we put our lives in the hands of people we don’t know, whose expertise we trust by faith.

Hoarders

Marge scrunched up her face and in her little voice said, “Ew, that’s disgusting! How could anyone let that happen?” What she was referring to, of course, were the images on the TV screen that showed a house littered with old junk and trash, mold growing on the walls, fungus devouring the refrigerator from the inside out, hundreds of roaches beneath every object, and rodent droppings that had collected in a corner of the house, so numerous that it looked like the dog had just tracked in a shower of dirt. The family that lived in this house were hoarders; they could not throw anything away, and therefore, they could not clean their house. After some professional house inspectors came in to assess the various problems, a therapist would visit the family to discuss with the homeowner, a 49-year-old divorced woman named Jeanette, how she was to overcome her acute anxiety about getting rid of old things she no longer needs.

James sat close to Marge on the couch, his heart and mind only half-way invested in this family’s hoarding struggles. Such gross hygienic neglect was undoubtedly interesting from a psychological viewpoint, and even sad, but certainly not something he wanted his mind to dwell on as he prepared for a comfortable, clean night of sleep and a productive day of work the next day.

James agreed with his wife: how could anyone let that happen? Years of breathing mold, piles of junk that made navigation through rooms a circus feat, floors and countertops so nasty, even a homeless man would shudder to touch anything with his bare skin. What could have happened in Jeanette’s life that made her so anxious that she was afraid to throw out anything or clean anything?

Marge couldn’t imagine how that kind of existence could be real. Yet it was a non-fiction, reality television show, based on the true lives of somebody, somewhere out there. Incredulous though it appeared, these kinds of things really do happen. They could even happen to her—Marge—if something traumatic enough were to set into motion that kind of behavior.

Maybe these things happen, James thought, but maybe TLC makes a lot more money if their “reality” television shows are highly dramaticized. It’s all about numbers—how many viewers can they get? We can’t know if the situation on this TV show is as bad as it looks, James thought, at least not in Jeanette’s situation.

“It is truly horrendous,” James replied to Marge. He could feel the warmth of her body just inches from his left arm, and his eyes grew heavy with sleep.

Television: postmodern solution to boredom

When I read Lydia Davis’s “Television,” a word that comes to mind before any other is postmodernism. The story is narrated through a vocabulary and a tone of voice that sounds bored and detached. The narrator talks in first person singular, first person plural, and second person singular to communicate a boredom that, in her eyes, is present in all of our lives. The television shows she watches with her husband are the alternate realities they participate in to escape from the tedious monotony of their own lives.

The beginning of section two opens with the narrator saying, “It’s not that I really think this show about Hawaiian policemen is very good, it’s just that it seems more real than my own life.” They have forgotten how to make their own lives exciting, so they have gotten into the habit of receiving their daily dose of thrill from imaginative television stories, from other people’s more exciting lives. The stories and the advertisements and the predictions of the next day’s weather are just enough to carry them through the evening until it is time for them to go to sleep. It seems that, for the narrator, sleep has become the goal; that is all she really wants, because she has given up believing there is excitement to be found in her own life.

In the third part, the narrator describes her own life as something that seems to escape from her grasp. Like the television shows, it seems to detach from her, so that she can only perceive it as if it were appearing to her from far away, through a screen. As a sort of detached series of images and events, her life becomes painfully predictable, just like the TV shows she watches where the handsome deaf man falls for the pretty speech therapist. The narrator’s tone of detachment from her own reality and boredom of the predictable, monotonous nature of life summarizes postmodern thought and calls to my mind the writings of Chuck Paluhniuk and David Foster Wallace.