Bernard Cooper's Maps To Anywhere

      Maps to Anywhere is a compilation of short essays that I believe revolve around the ideas of reality and life. He discusses and illustrates different scenarios of experiences throughout his childhood into his adulthood that have sculpted his life. I think it's the more personal stories that seem to make the story more meaningful to the reader.
    For example, one of the first sections that stood out to me was: The Biggest, Most Beautiful Balcony in the Wind. In this section Cooper explains how he and his niece would play a game in which she would have to say what the most ugly, pretty, saddest, funniest, loudest, ect., thing in the world would be. he describes how she would strain to branch her mind out to think of all the recesses of the world to discover what could be the single aspect of their topic.  Cooper then tells us of how she soon out-grows the game to think of almost materialistic ideals. In a way, I think it's sad because she lost the idea of not being caged in thought. He mentions a scene he comes upon. "But yesterday I saw the saddest balcony in the world, a lone balcony jutting out from a stucco apartment building. It overlooked an alley and parking lot, the pavement potholed, lumpy and littered, flanked by trash bins painted a flaking industrial green and caution orange, like large abandoned barges. People wandered through the lot, argued, kissed, talked, and gestured unabashedly among themselves, as if only the immediate mattered: a sharp word or a hungry wink." The most I get out of this paragraph is the reality of life. It's not always pretty, but there is always movement. He paints a harsh picture, a scene unwanted; however, people are still somehow able to love and experience reality.
    As it is nearly the summer season (only a couple of weeks away!) it only makes sense that Under Water would be the next section I discuss. Here, Cooper describes a playful scene where he and his parents are playing a game of who can't laugh first while acting silly under water. I remember doing something similar quite often years ago. Well, who am I kidding? I still do that now! The passage that I thought most comical reads as follows: "Sure, Father looked plenty funny. A formidable man on dry land, he paled to baby blue, his swim trunks puffed like diapers. And mother's hair came undone. Strands meandered like seaweed." He goes on to  say, " It hurt to see their big bodies flail, wrestling with pressure, using up oxygen running out of time." Sure, it's possible Cooper is trying to get a bigger message across here but I just see a happy scene between a family. Why make it more complex? Why would it hurt to see them flail if he knows they are playing a game? We can't breath underwater? Duh! I feel like he's trying to get us to reach into some branched out ideal of thinking when I just don't get it.
    The End of Manners was one of the other sections that caught my fancy. My gathering of what Cooper is discussing is the idea of growing up too quickly, hence the mention of Peter Pan. If someone doesn't recall, Peter Pan was a play written by J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan was a boy who lived in Neverland and never grew up. He led the lost boys into many adventures against the evil Captain Hook! Of course this is every child's dream right? But, there are those children that have to grow up sooner than they should. Take for example the boy Cooper describes - "... a boy sent to bed for playing with his food...". As he dreams of no longer being stuck in a life of what the proper child/adult should be, he is "lifted from the dinner table toward the ceiling by some mysterious force... No more the mandatory 'May I,' the folded hands, the Thank You notes. He'll eat with his fingers, never bathe or behave. Rebel joy, loud as a fly, escalates within him. High and higher. He owns the air."  It would be nice to not have to have to have to always follow the rules, and be carefree. What Cooper forgets to mention is that in the end we all miss the stability rules bring to our lives. If only we could have that moment to fly, and not have terrible repercussions. It's a nice idea, just not realistic. Or, maybe that's the pessimist within me - I don't know.
     Overall, Bernard Cooper has many short essays that evoke different emotions through the use of imagery. He definitely masters a skill to paint a picture through the use of words to tell a story. I enjoyed most of his writings.
  

Readings from Lamott

The reading for Lamott discusses the building of character, plot and dialogue in an interesting fashion. The first part of the reading starts off with Polaroids. This section indicates that "writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop." To paraphrase what Lamott is saying, we write and don't always know the whole picture until is fully developed.  I suppose that is true in a way. I sometimes write little stories in my spare time, and I typically have some sort of outline as to how I want the story line to flow but I don't always know what I want to put in the middle for details. He continues in describing that as the polaroid develops, you will see more of what wasn't initially seen. Writing is similar to this concept. You can write your first draft and you see what the full picture could be. You then go back and add and edit to create a full depiction of what you are trying to tell.

            The next section of the reading is Character. One part that caught my attention was when Lamott mentioned that he asked  Ethan Canin to tell him what the most valuable think he knew about writing. Canin's response was, " Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better." I agree to some extent. I think most writers write to have the main character liked by most readers. But if the story line is crappy, well you can lose interest real quickly if the author doesn't keep the account moving along.

               The next portion is Plot. A section that really was so truthful was a statement by Carolyn Chute. " I feel like a lot of the time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decoration. But no tree. Your going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon." Lamott says that a lot of their writings start in this fashion.  I can see where a lot of writers would feel this way. I have a few novels that I work on in my spare time, and I have all of these notes of what I want to happen and in some form of an order, but I can't seem to connect the ideas right away.

            The final section by Lamott is Dialogue. The most that I got out of this section is that we are supposed to not let your writing sound too uptight. He explains how some of his student's will read a section of their writing and then will be surprised because "the dialogue looked Okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi." I think that good writing usually comes when the writer fully describes the scene occurring. When the reader can fully imagine the scene being illustrated he/she can understand the dialogue much more.

 

Juice

Juice, by Renee Gladman, is a novel of an experience of a narrator, who I’m assuming to be a girl due to her mentioning “drying my hair in the hot part of the forest”.  My impression of the story line is that the narrator is questioning who she is and why she does and says the things she does. My take on the short fiction is that it’s definitely a question of self.

                Gladman begins her story telling the reader about the narrator in snap-shots. She was an archeology student, or rather the narrator was in an “archeological gang”. I suppose interest may have been produced since her mother’s “lover” was the leader of the gang. Together, they were to “explore the facts” of their history. Her ancestors left a tyrannical nation in order to start over in the mountains. The people are now free and are “nobody’s conquerors”.

She lives in statues that the “sky illuminates”. People believe that she lives in the south because of how the narrator describes the mountains, whether it’s the description or her dialect. She was taught to speak of herself “peripherally”, which I would assume allowed her to connect with the surroundings, people and the earth. It is possible to conclude that due to her archeological process of thinking and the way she was brought to “mature by impression alone” led her to a life of brokenness. She mentions that she has “grown to think of people for physical pleasure”. People are more than just bodies. They have minds and feelings that govern their conscience.  I think this is part of why she had made a connection with her home. When everyone disappears, she realizes her loss and even mentions, “… you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you”. It has a romantic feel for her love of her home. It’s a picturesque moment, but it crumbles when she finds that her home “exists without you”. She asks the reader to “contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.”. It’s a terribly sad story! To imagine that you fit in an certain place and to find that you don’t is crushing to the ego.

First Portion of Fictional Readings

Kim Addonizio's Survivors discusses the role of a male who doesn't want to lose his lover. Both have AIDS and are on the brink of death, as mentioned in the statement, "He and his lover were down to their last few T cells ...". The main character seems to be materialistic and harsh when he says that he doesn't want to take care of "his lover's parrot or deal with his lover's family". However, later in the short story we find that he is just saying that he's gone through so many troubles in his life that the idea of his partner dying is so uncomfortably painful. He humanizes his relationship with his partner by describing their apartment and all it's knickknacks. By doing this the author allows us to understand the disarray of thoughts that the main character is experiencing. He's going through his last moments reminiscing their lives together and knows that any second without his lover is an eternity of sorrow. For those who've are in love, and even those who haven't found their loved one, can understand his predicament. We can comprehend the impact of what he is saying within the lines.

                Sherman Alex's Misdemeanors is about an "Old Man" who acts all tough and mighty when he recounts his thievery. It's a bit comical because the "Waitress" explains that is was a bowling alley that he stole from and it was only pennies that he took. The imagery the author uses is hilarious. For example, "... Here comes the police and they find the Old Mane barefoot, with his socks in his hand like gloves, and his pants hanging down to his knees because his pockets are full of pennies." You can totally imagine the scene the police came upon and it's so funny.  Really, the only thing "tough" that he did was punch the window in order to get into the bowling alley.

             Sharon Krinsky's Poetry was a short little statement about how a girl gives someone her poems to read and his reaction. He places them in a "plastic cup", but she believes they should be in a "china cup". Clearly, she is saying that she feels that her thoughts and works are so important that they should be treasured like a delicate china cup would be. I understand where she is coming from. When you pass something along that you feel is important, you want others to treat it the same way.