11/19 George Saunders & Patrick Somerville
MICAH WEISS
I finished the George Saunders story
first and my immediate reaction was very positive. I enjoyed
the story, found it funny and sad, sometimes at the same time. One thing
that struck me as pretty amazing about the story is how much internal consistency
there was with the absurdity of the story. The world of the story makes
internal sense, even though there are ghosts, to say nothing of the setting,
those surreal/absurdest details fit with each other really well, and
required only a quick readjustment of my expectations of reality for
me to sink back into the story. I guess I want to use the word
verisimilitude, (something Saunders is begging me to do what with the
narrator's job description) the weirdness of the story was a shift of reality from
mine to the story's version of reality.
Another thing that elevated the story
for me was the humor, as I mentioned, and how there were still moments that
were touching and emotional. I felt really sad for the narrator and the
boss when they get drunk together, and sad for the ghost family, and
sympathetic at how genuine the narrator's love of his children are, and the the
narrator's general predicament. Though he lays down like a dog at the end
of the story, which I found disappointing, and sucked some of my
compassion away. BUt I think that's what I mean about the entire story, I
was involved in this unreal character, in this unreal world, in this unreal
circumstance, enough to lose compassion once earned by the author, enough to
be disappointed in the last paragraph.
That being said, I was left a little
empty where meaning and theme are concerned. If there was a
larger metaphor at work, something Faustian in hiring the
ex-soldier for security it was lost on me emotionally, and anything deeper and
I couldn't describe it, though it felt like something more was going on, that I
might have to reflect upon more.
But it was fun and funny, and
touching, and I did enjoy it.
After finishing the Somerville story
I had a very different reaction. The absurd details of that story had no
internal consistency, it was more like an actual dream than something crafted
to be surreal. Everything seemed random and yet the plot was contrived,
it never achieved humor or meaning, or emoted anything strong, the narrator
wasn't sympathetic or really hateful, just a blah-character with
who behaved too randomly to have any consistency in a
reality that was itself to random for me to get a hold on.
Food scientist a death blow, a wheelchair bound bird man, a 12
year old who can't tie his shoes, a 19th century mustache on a rude god, it was
all so random I found it boring, and I didn't trust that the author wasn't just
indulging himself the way David Lynch does at times. Ultimately, I just
didn't care, and except for one or two lines, the writing wasn't all that
compelling either, so it was a hard slog to get through.
And disappointing that I
read it after the Saunders piece, which I found effortless to get through, and
engaging.
MARY RAINEY
I really liked Patrick Somerville’s Trouble
and the Shadowy Deathblow. I did not read the comments at the beginning of
the story before I read it or had my five minutes of quiet time, but I would
agree with mostly what is said; “he had me a spray-on cheeses.” I thought the
story was very funny and it kept me wanting to turn the page, even before the
line “his cheese-man dad is a murderer.” I think what I liked about it most,
more than how interesting the story makes the manipulations of milk seem, is
the fact that his anger really comes out when someone sneezes on the back of
his head. He has clearly been boiling for a long time and been dissatisfied
with his life, but it wasn’t any of the larger mitigating factors in his life
that set him off, it was a total stranger displaying a complete disregard for
Jim as a person.
Okay, now I think that I like Civilwarland In Bad Decline even better. I
keep thinking of that poor little boy dressed as an accountant for Halloween
and being shot at. I really liked that visual. Both of these stories were
excellent and kept me wanting to read more. I think what I liked most about
both of these stories is that the main characters have very unusual jobs and
Civilwarland is an incredibly gimmicky place to set a story about murder and mayhem
in, but it works so well. I think they were so interesting because I was never
bored, the movements kept changing and kept me guessing, but it wasn’t
exhausting and it wasn’t like there was too much happening. Just enough.
SHEILA TRAUB
During the closing-the-eyes
exercise, I started thinking about too much knowledge re the Shadowy Deathblow
maneuver. The problem should be uniquely for someone whose moral
constraints are based only on the pragmatic. But knowing too much is a
growing problem for all us these days, regardless of our moral state: our
civilization has learned how to destroy our own planet. I wish sometimes
we could turn the clock back centuries and know far less and have done far less
damage to our fellow creatures and world; we are so disrupting the natural
order of things.
I love the cheesiness of this story
and how it was so perfectly placed in the author’s birth state of
Wisconsin. I reflected about how going to something totally of a time and
place as Sommerville does here can paradoxically let a really talented
writer do something immensely universal in theme. The
self-characterization the lead character gives himself of amorality (as opposed
to immorality) shows self-delusion that is utterly credible. Many
people justify their own immoral acts by seeking to convince themselves their
acts are “merely” amoral; this story is oddly true to life in showing
that.
This is a story that gets power from
its humor. A good many of the characters we have read about this
semester would probably offer up amorality as their own
condition. And they surely share the same banality that Sommerfield
so humorously captures.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline made me
remember that it’s George Saunders’ sense of humor that gets to me, far more than
Patrick Sommerfield’s. I think it’s because of what I think of as George
Saunders’ generosity and good-heartedness. He is incapable of being
mawkish, and he sees people with honesty and, I think, affection, despite how
inconsequential are their lives. Where Sommerfield’s protagonist
self-defines as being amoral, Saunders' character in CivilWarLand is a working
stiff (like Saunders was for a good while) who wants to care for his family --
both in this story and in his new The Semplicia Diaries, we might
add. His people get all caught up in the material and have messed up
values: I think of George Saunders as a brilliant fiction-writing Vance
Packard, but a whole lot more. This story is so great: I love his
little touches like Hatred Abatement Breathing (you can see the influence of
his Buddhism in it) and the way he talks about how Mr. A “has considerable
influence in Rotary.”
One thing in this story shocked me
with recognition. It’s where Saunders describes Quinn as “dirt-poor with
six kids” and Mr. A says "that’s a plus, as we’ll need someone between a
rock and a hard place.” I once worked for a multinational bank. I
was there early one evening when the news came of the death of a direct report
to the Comptroller; she suicided and her skeleton was found in a lock on
the river. This man sat on the edge of desk and told several of
us how he sometimes hires people like her seeing they are desperate; he
had seen desperation in her. He said he figured she would be likely to
give the firm her all well beyond reason. You know eventually they'll
self destruct, he said of that type of employee; you get a good run from them
before they do.
I know the Comptroller would not have
recognized himself in George Saunders’ story. I did. I thought, it’s
a pity he couldn’t magically be transported into Patrick Sommerville’s story.
I can imagine how maybe inside it he might have coughed on the
protagonist and received a shadowy deathblow. Were I designing the
action, I would have had it happen before he had risen enough to have the
power to hire.
The George Saunders’ podcast was
terrific. I was familiar already with the bones of what was said in the
interview until near the very end. I was comforted and interested with
the fact that the issues of plot and structure are such that they limit his
production to “one or two things a year,” which is part of why he also enjoys
doing some journalistic work where he can write for “almost anybody who can
read.”
SARA ARNELL
I love the realistic absurdity of
both stories....how fantasy situations occur in the "real" world.
With eyes closed, I thought about the
deathblow and the idea of sic-fi or supernatural martial arts and how much I
liked the coming together of fact and fiction to create a new world that, as the
reader, I really wanted to believe could exist in some way.
In the George Saunders podcast, i liked the part where he
talked about studying geology but recognizing that he came alive when reading
or writing. Then when he began to write, he struggled because he was
trying to write his version of Hemingway. He says that when, out of desperation
he finally gave himself permission to do what came naturally, he started being
a successful writer....this is a freeing moment I imagine every writer should
have.
JOE PFISTER
This is my second time reading
"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," and I have to say that this time
around, I was able to appreciate the humor a lot more. While this story
is bizarre—even by Saunders standards—it also exhibits an exceptionally humorous
exterior, but underneath, it's an surprisingly dark story: the narrator's
marriage is collapsing around him and Samuel, for all the humor he brings, is
actually a very damaged and disturbed Vietnam vet. Even the the MacKinnons,
while entertaining, have that horrific scene where they keep replaying the
moment when Mr. MacKinnon hacked them all to death. Having heard how much
Saunders labors over his stories—and particularly his endings—I'm still a
little surprised by this one. It almost comes out of left field in a way, even
though all of the "warning" signs were there.
I immensely enjoyed Somerville's
"Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow." (As a Wisconsin native, I was
predisposed to love it, i.e.: "Eric is at heart a good boy with a sharp
wit. There was a time, even that night, out in the yard, under the
stars—Wisconsin can be a wonderful place—when I believed he would grow into a
good man. Perhaps a strong man.") This is another story where humor plays
a significant role with a dark underside—after all, the story's
narrator kills two people (albeit in a funny way). I thought the first half of
the story stretched out a bit longer than I would've liked, but once he learned
the deathblow and started looking for Minkowski, I was completely onboard. The
scene in the bathroom is incredible, so good, in fact, that I forgave him a
rather lackluster ending. It almost seemed as if Somerville had taken te story
as far as it could possibly go and then couldn't find an adequate way to wrap
it all up. But, given the brilliance of that bathroom scene, I can't really
blame him. Almost anything would've been a letdown.
It was refreshing (and sort of heartening) to hear that
even the most well-established writers like Saunders suffered through failed
novels (so bad that even his wife couldn't finish it), the trials of the
working world, and occasionally swam in rivers filled with shit.
KEVIN ZAMBRANO
CivilWarLand
This is one of the darkest stories
I've ever read, in part because it's also one of the funniest. The humor serves
to highlight the disturbing, rather than alleviate it, but it also keeps you
from becoming depressed and not enjoying the read. The story seems to be about
how humanity is doomed—doomed because we cannot avoid the past (the McKinnons
miming their deaths over and over again and the end; the whole theme park based
around recreating the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history;
Sam's abusive childhood…I'm sure there are other examples). It shows a world
where the only way to change things is to destroy them, where things are pretty
much hopeless and humankind is beyond any chance of redemption.
I spent much of the five minutes
trying to think of a story that I think is darker or bleaker, and I couldn't. I
also thought about why the world of this story is still relatable even though
it's so exaggerated. I usually lose interest when things veer too far into
caricature. Some of Kurt Vonnegut's stories come to mind. Saunders pulled it
off I think because all of the strange things—the theme park, the ghosts, Sam's
killing spree, the characters' exaggerated qualities (esp. the wife and the
boss)—are 1) All only slightly stranger than something you'd find in real
life—it's their cumulative effect that makes the story seem very weird, 2)
crafted in believable enough detail so that if you weren't convinced that
something like CivilWarLand was a real thing, by the end it's vivid enough to
see.
Shadowy Deathblow
Something about this story was
unsatisfying. I guess it's because it wasn't all that surprising, in the end.
Don't get me wrong, it was terrifically well-written and I had a lot of fun
reading it, but toward the end…I don't know. I feel like there was nothing
unpredictable. The shadowy deathblow turning out to be an uncontrollable curse,
the homeless sneezing guy's return, the narrator fucking up his (remarkably
easy) chance at getting a job—nothing about it really caught me off guard.
Nothing important, at least. I was surprised at the parrots on the man's
shoulders (which seems weird in a highly realistic way, a really incredible
detail I think) or when he accidentally did the deathblow on his own foot, but
I wasn't taken aback by any important developments in the story, and I felt
like I wasn't in a different place either intellectually or emotionally than I
was when I set off.
All that being said I think that on a sentence-to-sentence
level, there's a lot to be learned here on how to write a captivating and
readable story, particularly with Somerville's knack for creating a very weird
but also very believable universe.
JOANNA BENJAMIN
Patrick Somerville "Trouble and
the Shadowy Deathblow":
I really enjoyed this story - it made
me laugh a lot and I found it bizarre in a wonderful way. As I was thinking
about it I was remembering lines and images that stuck out to me - Georgia
stroking the heads of both of his birds and saying not to make any sudden
movements "because of the birds." I thought that was hilarious, but
during the five minutes I was really conscious of how uninsightful I was being
by merely recalling moments like that. And then I got caught up in how
difficult I find this exercise to be, because I inevitably end up being far too
self-conscious of my thoughts and whether they are useful. In any case...
Another moment that stuck out for me
was when the narrator says "If you're going to survive, I thought, you
have to act. If you have a problem, you have to fix it." But pretty much
all of the "trouble" he finds himself in throughout the story is
directly caused by this assertion and his actions, starting with his decision
to confront Minkowski when he sneezes on him on the trolley. I also appreciated
the instances when Somerville brings in the second person - I think it goes a
long way in allowing me to accept the crazy things that happen in the story and
to identify with the narrator, who otherwise might have been just thoroughly
unlikable.
George Saunders "CivilWarLand in
Bad Decline":
I loved this story too! Something that I really appreciate
about George Saunders' work is that at the beginning of a lot of his stories I
feel like I've been thrown into a universe that is both the same and different
from my own, and I'm not sure exactly where I am and I have to kind of paddle
around for a page or so before I can sort out what's going on. It's
exhilarating. There's a sense of gradual widening in this story that I think is
really impressive. The story seems to start out so small and by the end it
feels like it's about everything: the cyclical nature of violence, the
corrupting influence of capitalism, the obligations of family and parenthood,
death. I don't understand how he does this without it being heavy-handed or
simplistic. Gah.
RYAN STRONG
1. Patrick Somerville's story was one
of the most enjoyable short stories I read this year. When I closed my eyes, I
thought about two aspects of the story. The undertone of
the masculinity and the narrator's son Eric. The jabs toward his
son's lack of masculinity (The world's all locusts and people like Eric
are corn) These sentences were witty and funny in a dark humor kind
of way. I realize, on the larger scale of the story, this was not
the focal-point of the story, but it stuck with me.
2. This week's assignment was my
first time reading anything by George Saunders. When I closed my eyes, I could
not think of one critical comment to about this piece. I thought it was
fantastic and I am looking forward to reading more of Saunders. If I could make
one suggestion, I think this story could be just as effective, perhaps more, if
it were structured differently and had more full page dialogue
scenes, like the first assignment.
3. As it turns out, George Saunders is from the
same Chicago suburb as myself. Oak Forest is (and mostly likely was) going
through a lot of racial and social tension. I am curious to know if this
has leaked into some of his other fiction.
BRITTNEY DECKER
BRITTNEY DECKER
Thinking about -Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow
This story made me think about how there are so many whack-jobs in the world. It’s scary to think that you never know when exactly you are going to encounter one of them. It’s even scarier to think that you might already be in contact with one of them and it’s only a matter of time until they crack. No matter how well you may think you know someone you may never really know them. It’s also possible that sometimes you don’t even know yourself. It seems like Jim Funkle always had the killing gene, but it took a certain event to trigger the crazy in him. Could this happen to anyone who gets to their breaking point? Probably to more than I’d like to think. You can never be too careful, so I never try not to set anyone off.
There were certain strange images that popped into my head. “I saw a vision of myself dying alone in a boxcar, drunk and emaciated, somewhere in southern Ohio. My dead body then rolled slowly towards the open door and fell out onto the tracks. It was sliced neatly in half by the caboose of the train.” “His penis was like a small white worm coming up from the cavernous fly.” “….I again took Harris’s shiny patent leather shoes into my hands and dragged him, his arms now up behind his head as though he were cheering at a Frank Sinatra concert….”
The safest thing to do is to never put anything past anyone. Remember that you never know what any one individual is capable of. Be polite to strangers. Try not to be too paranoid.
Thinking about- CivalWarLand in Bad Decline
I grew up in Rochester New York and used to ride my bike along the Erie Canal. My friends would go scumming off the locks. I heard horror stories of kids getting stuck in cow carcasses at the bottom of the canal where people used to dump them, and was too scared to ever jump in. I also remember going on field trips to places similar to Civil War Land. Reading this story was like having a nightmare about being trapped on one of those fieldtrips. The events are surreal, yet believable. This story will definitely stay with me. With my eyes closed thinking about it, the ending replayed over and over in my head. The McKinnons reenacting their deaths over and over and the flashing revelations the narrator experiences as he’s dying.
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