Reading as a Writer: "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

"The Things He Carried"

Weston walked through the garden he and his mom planted a couple years ago. The weeds had taken over a long time ago, and he couldn't be bothered to keep up with the work anymore. He came across a few bushes of Rose of Sharon that desperately needed pruning. Below them, dandelions sprung up like gray hairs on a youthful head.

He didn't have any shears with him. There were things he didn't carry anymore.

The things he carried changed after she died. Now, in the lining of his leather wallet he got when he joined the boy scouts, was a photo of her at her wedding. In the photo, she is smiling. She was blissfully ignorant of the cancerous marble inside her left breast.

He sat down in the garden and dumped out the rest of his possessions: a moleskin journal, a change of clothes, a Swiss army knife, a few energy bars, an eighth of marijuana, rolling papers, and a lighter.

The journal was for jotting down short poems or ideas, quotes he overheard while eavesdropping, or just little doodles. He hadn't written in his journal since she passed away, but he always kept it with him, just in case.

The change of clothes was in case his father broke out in another alcoholic rage and kicked him out of the house again. He was so unstable after his wife passed away.

The Swiss army knife was something he never left home without. He had been given that knife as a gift on his tenth birthday by his grandfather.

The energy bars were peanut butter and chocolate chip, his favorite. They were just for emergencies, especially if he was to be thrown out of his house.

The rest was for the sole purpose of forgetting it all.

Notes from Observation - 2/25

Selections from the "I Am A Camera" exercise:

A little girl in a bright pink shirt runs around the fountain. Tiny hands, tiny explorer. Students writing.  Students in groups writing. Students pretending to write. Students alone writing. Tangerines writing.

"Nikki, close your legs!" a sorority girl shouts to her sister as she is photographed.

A pregnant woman and her young boy at the fountain. She stares at her smart phone, unaware of his wonderful discovery of this fountain and the way the light of the sun plays with the water. Is she prepared to pop out another one?

"What kind of computer sings?" one girls asks another. "A Dell!"

The pregnant woman and her son sit in the grass near me. He falls after losing his balance. He stares at me, probably wondering what I am dong as his mom plucks blades of grass from the earth, unsure of what to do with her hands in the absence of her phone. She takes it out from her pocket. Makes a phone call. Her son tries to get her attention.

Finally, mother and son share a real, present moment. She holds his hands and spins him around in a circle. His feet leave the ground. The sensation of flying. "Are you dizzy?" "Yes, I am SO dizzy!" He laughs. The mom says she is dizzy, too. "Grab your hat, mister!" A woman in blue named Aunt Jojo arrives. They leave.

A beautiful tree bursting with bright oranges. I wonder how they taste.

Reading as a Writer: "Roy Spivey" by Miranda July

"Roy Spivey" by Miranda July is a clever story about a woman who meets a famous movie star on an airplane, and the two hit it off rather quickly. The star, who July dubs "Roy Spivey" as to preserve his anonymity, gives the narrator his phone number and asks her to remember the last digit: 4. As the story progresses, the reader learns that the narrator has used this magic number as a way to get through some of the most difficult parts of her life.



But what, you may ask, makes this story good writing?

First and foremost, I think the popularity surrounding this story is due to July's unique writing style, blending witty and clever humor with events in her story that are almost too bizarre to be real, yet there they are, grounded in reality.

Take, for example, this bit of the text:

He stared at my arm in front of his chest for a moment, then he growled and bit it. Then he laughed. I laughed, too, but I did not know what this was, this biting of my arm.

“What was that?”

“That means I like you!”

It seemed unlikely that someone who had just bitten and been bitten by a celebrity would have this kind of problem.

This sort of encounter seems rather unbelievable. First, we must accept that this narrator actually met a celebrity on a plane. I think this is believable enough. I've seen a celebrity boarding a plane before. But then, the reader is expected to believe that this famous celebrity actually bit our narrator. Incredulous!

Yet, July's genius is that she grounds these seemingly unbelievable situations in the very believable, the mundane. She writes, "We adjusted our seat backs and tray tables" when referring to the landing. Everything about the plane ride is very mundane, very real. This setting keeps us grounded, even when the ride gets a little strange.

July's quirky humor pops up throughout the piece ("'It's Febreze.'" "'Oh, I've heard about that.'"), but ultimately, what sells this piece is the sense of loss at the end. There is a deep sense of regret after the narrator tries to call the phone number and it is disconnected. At the same time, there is an acceptance of where the narrator is in life. She's certainly not the same woman she used to be when she met Roy Spivey. And he is not the same, either.

Finally, I think what makes this story so popular is that July blurs the line between non-fiction and fiction. The story, with an unnamed narrator and a first-person perspective, comes across as rather true. Thus, the reader spends their time thinking about who this mysterious celebrity could be, and if something as ludicrous as this situation could happen to them.

Shout-outs to favorite lines:

"I shut mine again and right away opened them, slowly, and he opened his, slowly, and our eyes met, and it seemed as if we had woken from a single sleep, from the dream of our entire lives." Simply beautiful, even if it's a con.

"We walked down the tunnel between the plane and real life." Wow, this line was so cool! I've always felt that being on a plane feels like something different than real life, suspended far above the trifles of the busy world. What a way to name this feeling.

Rough Draft - "Bob the Clown"

Here's the beginnings of a weird story. This evolved from my previous post titled "The Time Traveler."

"Bob the Clown"

“We’re going to have to ask you to leave our campus, sir,” a strange woman in neon pink and a pixie cut said to an even stranger man, dressed as a clown. Sort of.

“WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE,” the clown said, picking up his cherry plum nose off the ground and adhering it to his sweaty face. His make-up was smeared from the August heat and his wig was falling off. What a mess.

“I’m going to have to call campus security,” the woman said, and I caught a flash of her name tag. She was the dean of students at this university.

“Look, man, I’m here because clowns are not respected in our society,” the clown said. “This is a protest.”

“I hate clowns,” I finally said. I noticed that no one had noticed me up until now. I suddenly felt more naked than I was, and, well, I was pretty naked, sporting only a backpack, tight shorts, and some running shoes. The university had the best gym that I could get in for free, and the girls were pretty hot, too. #gymrat

“Don’t clowns eat children?”

This visibly upset the frustrated clown. “Who said that? That’s just in the movies, man. That is why we’re here. To change the way our society perceives clowns, once and for all.”

“Does he know he is by himself?” I whispered to the dean of students.

“I’m calling campus security.”

“Okay.”

“CLOWN LIVES MATTER.”

“Aw, dude, that’s totally appropriating an entirely valid movement,” I told him.

“I MATTER.”

“That’s better,” I said. “I think.”

“Alright, fella,” a man from campus police said. “You gotta get lost. You’re disrupting the peace.”

Then the clown did the funniest thing I’ve ever seen a clown do. He pulled out that flower thing that all clowns have, and he used it to squirt water right in the face of the campus security officer. This surprised the officer, who started chasing after the clown, but man, was that clown fast. I knew I had to chase after him so I could ask him a few questions. He made me laugh. The first clown to ever make me laugh.

***

I found Bob the Clown on the corner of two busy streets, a couple hundred yards away from main campus. He was smoking a cigarette and crying. The rest of his makeup had all washed away. His wig was hanging at the back of his head.

“Dude, what you did back there,” I said, taking a deep breath after just having chased down this clown. “That shit was hilarious.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, fighting through teary eyes.

“What’s your name, dude?” I asked him.

“Bob,” he said. “Bob the Clown.”

“Alright, Bob the Clown. I wouldn’t usually ask this, but like, would you want to come to my party on Friday?”

The clown’s frown turned upside down. He said in a weird voice: “Is it a birthday party?”

“Don’t use that voice.”

“Is it a birthday party?” He coughed, exhaling smoke into my face.

“No, it’s a college party.”

“I’ve never performed at a college party before,” Bob the Clown said. There was something in his eyes that suggested that I should probably retract my offer. But this was exactly what I needed to impress my friends after what happened last semester that got me expelled.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll see you on Friday. 9 o’clock.”

Bob the Clown just smiled at me, his cigarette hanging out of his mouth. As I walked away from him, he never stopped staring. What a guy. This party was going to be amazing. Bob the Clown would be a hit with everyone. I just knew it.

The Time Traveler

Okay, maybe I only picked this picture because of Zac Efron's stunning physique, but I'm sure there's a story here. Oh, God, I can't think of a story to write. But no. No. You cannot go back up and change it now. You picked this one. You're stuck with it. You can change it, you know. No. This will be your challenge. You can do it.

What is Zac Efron doing with a backpack and orange short shorts? This is an interesting picture. You can do this. And there's a guy dressed up like a clown, well, almost a clown, and a woman in pink with strands of pink hair. She looks pregnant. They're at Braxton University, but what if they were somewhere else? Can I do that? Is that allowed?

That pregnant woman looks stuck in time, like stuck in the 80s or 90s or something. I don't think I'm doing this assignment right at all. My name is Zac, and I came to party.

Yeah, you did.

Gay pride parades are not what they used to be.

I can't really write a story right now. This picture is just too bizarre. Why did I choose it again? God damn it, Rob, it's because of shirtless Zac Efron again, isn't it? You always do this.

-"Look, I'm here because clowns are not respected in our society."
-"What is this, a clowns' rights movement?"
-"I'm here because I heard there would be quinoa."
-"What the Hell is keen-woo?"
-"You're all just drunk."
-"Clowns don't eat quinoa. They eat little children."
-"That's just in the movies, man. This is why we're here. To change the way our society perceives clowns, once and for all."
-"I thought this was a gay pride parade."
-"Maybe we're time travelers."

Braxton was that kind of university.

Now this is getting too confusing for me. I'm sorry, I didn't know you wrote experimentally.

"I'm not even a clown, man. I just dress like one." "And I'm not really pregnant. This is just a bowling ball."

But wait? What are they looking at? I think that's really the question.

Reading as a Writer: "Emergency" by Denis Johnson

I admire the craft of writing shown in Denis Johnson's "Emergency." Johnson demonstrates a clear command of language without ever becoming convoluted. He brings a story that is as fresh as it is erratic -- patchy, even -- but all in aims at conveying a few themes and a wild, trippy tale that seems to have sprung out from the drug-luvin' counterculture of the late 60s.

Abstraction or Reality

To me, this story is really about abstraction and reality (in a literary sense), and as an extension, fantasy versus reality (in a symbolic sense). What we want may rarely be what we get, and we see that in this story. For example, Georgie is a character who, at heart it seems, really cares for others and wants to save them. This can be seen from his work in the hospital, as well as when he and Fuckhead run over a mother rabbit and cut the babies from inside her. Georgie desperately wants to feed them sugar and milk to save them. This, however, never becomes a reality -- mainly due to the characters' drug use and consequential negligence. This is one of the core elements of the story that dominates throughout: the fantasy/abstraction is that Georgie wants to be a savior, a healer, but the reality is that he is addicted to drugs and cannot actualize his desires.

Abstraction and reality can be seen in Johnson's writing as well. Where does the author draw the line between fantasy and reality? The story begins in relative abstraction: Georgie is mopping up the floor, which he sees as being stained with blood. To our narrator, appropriately christened "Fuckhead," the floor appears clean. Immediately, Johnson brings us into this world of what is real and what is not real, based on the perception of the characters and their hallucinations. It was a different time. Doing drugs was totally cool if you worked in a hospital.

The erratic writing style employed by Johnson helps to convey the sense of being stoned on whatever pharmaceutical cocktail the two main characters swallowed. Short sections dominate the first part of the story, shifting perspectives and introducing us to the lives of the characters. I really liked the disjointed nature of the different scenes. It threw me into the story.

When a man walks into the ER with a hunting knife lodged in his eye, the scene is relatively calm. One would expect that there would be some kind of panic, but the calm nature of all the characters is what really stuck out to me. This surprising feature of the scene made the story more memorable for me.

Surprising Language

On a closing note, I wanted to mention that Johnson's surprising language was something that I took away from this story. Throughout reading this short story, I found myself in awe of a few lines because of their bizarre-ness or because they made me laugh and were done well. Here are a couple of gold-star winners:

• "We'll get some milk and sugar and all that, and we'll raise them ourselves. They'll get as big as gorillas." (page 52) Whaaaaat?!! Rabbits as big as gorillas? I want some of what these guys are having.
• "A bull elk stood still in the pasture beyond the fence, giving off an air of authority and stupidity." (page 54) I just love the contrast here of "authority" and "stupidity." Somehow, this makes sense.