Atlas

Maps to anywhere has proven to be a rather difficult read on the eyes due to small font size and a heavy contrast. out of the many wunderbar stories this piece of literature I have to turn my focus unto The End of Manners just a page before "the house of the future" section. On a separate note I despise the lack of page numbers in this book.

The End of Manners is a small one page, two paragraph piece of work but goes into great detail about its subject. Paragraph one describes a girl, a columnist named Emily Post, and details what she's wearing and what the environment she is in is like. The rain then comes crashing down.

The second paragraph describes a young boy half a continent away described as a rebel. the kid misbehaves and plays with his food, during the time of our window into his life he seems to be metaphorically lifting up into the air. These brief glimpses into these peoples lives pass on, and a reader can feel like they knew them yet didn't at all, an odd feeling of maybe maybe not.

"A house of cards will fall if any piece is removed." - Anon

I got bored and tired and repetitive

This will be a quick review of writing down the bones and my take away from it. I enjoyed that each chapter had a piece of good advice in it. At the end there was usually a good short sentence or two that summed up what should be taken away from each chapter. I particularly like the messages from "trust yourself" and "The Samurai".

"Trust yourself" provided a story on just going with your gut but give the feeling time to stay. The end message was to be patient with your writing  and wait to see if it still holds the same feeling. It is rather good advice and in more than just writing.

"The Samurai" Goldberg gives a story about the analysis of pieces in a group and analyzing what works and what doesn't. What parts should someone take a katana to and cut out, what pieces convey what is needed. One good sentence is worth more than a thousand average sentences.

"We convince ourselves of the illusion because we don't want to handle the reality." - Anon

Fiction Packet. 3?

Well I am out of ideas. At this point I don't know what else I can say about fiction. Each piece is a different story, from a different perspective, with a different outlook. To each their own, classifying fiction to specifics detracts from the original creative purpose. It is like trying to explain to a blind (biologically, from birth) person what a color looks like, describing an abstract concept with abstract terminology keeps it coherent but loses ability in making those not in the know understand.

So far the stories have been about two to three pages each in this packet and they all bore me. I find no connection to any of these characters, though some stories carry a good message, and they lack any significant room to improve or develop. To be brutally honest, if I wanted to read a compilation of stories like this I would have read lesser mythologies or other supernatural stories. Those actually are something I find interesting.

Well if I have to talk about the packet I might as well mention the first two stories, aka the ones I had read before my interest waned. I liked how in the first story the two brothers were portrayed as being deviants, doing what everyone else did not. I feel it helped shed a subtle light on the joy of freedom and individuality. It also struck a chord with me and made me remember my childhood with my brother; Twins- can't separate them. As far as the second story, If one does not think almost entirely in metaphors then this story can come across a little... Weird... I'm done here, I just seem to lack a substantial amount of meat in this weeks response material.

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." - Simone Weil

Fiction. Again.

I stand by the fact that fiction is a platform of the imagination. Every concept and thought, every idea and expression can be found within. It is the ability to make such inexpiable and emotional things into text that makes it so challenging, yet it has the ability to be anything. Unfortunately, the ability to be anything is a double-edged sword with a barbed and spiked handle. There is bad fiction and good fiction (in a sense of grammar and pace), there is fiction that can make you laugh till you are gasping for air and fiction that can shatter your heart to pieces, and some times you have the fiction you love and hate at the same time; A catch-22. Oates' Blackened Eye is a good example.

Oates is undoubtedly a good writer and knows the English language, but the unique lens we get to use as a reader is unique from the general format of books. Fiction stories are complex and most authors will make it a mix of first-person and narration followed in a relatively chronological format, Oates follows a reflective form, as if reading a journal entree, to tell the story. The tone used to make it reflective, the word choice and parentheses (and parenthesis) that all come together and help make the story feel unstintingly finite, and with the story topic being abduction, rape, and abuse it can make the reader very tense.

I find the story to be a perfect example of an I-Love-It-I-Hate-It story. The way it is written is fantastic, the character is developed and personified, the plot is described as the character would/would be able to describe it, and uses the same World-Laws to keep it seemingly real. Yet the topic is dark and troubling, a reader can easily feel their gut twist with what is written and can forget what text is in front of them is fiction.

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."-Stephen Fry