Tall Girl, Short Stories

Okay, everyone. Over the past few days I have developed extremely strong feelings about Junot Diaz's story "Aurora" and now y'all can read them in no particular order. Also, many pop culture references are included in this post because it is largely a rant and I'm not editing them out because that would feel inauthentic. The essence of my point is this: It's a love story. A shitty love story, but a love story. 1. The "romance" genre never ever tells stories about healthy relationships. Or, okay, that's definitely not true but the really iconic stories that are known first and foremost as love stories are not healthy. Romeo and Juliet ? Impulsive kids who are infatuated with each other, don't listen to their parents, and die. Not healthy. The Notebook ? The only reason she goes on a date with him in the first place is because he threatens to kill himself and they fight ALL THE TIME. Titanic ? Okay actually Jack was pretty much the Perfect M

James Baldwin's "Previous Condition" covers a lot of ground. Peter, the protagonist, operates as an artist who rejects black culture and influence but is constantly shut out of white opportunities. His resentment of his racial community is interesting for a lot of reasons, as are his interactions with his white "minority" friends. Peter lives in New York City in the 1940s, a time when black success in the arts was thriving and evolving through jazz. But Peter's a stage actor, a field which often relies more on looking the part than having the talent for it. Peter's existence seems founded in anger, at one point saying "I resented praise and I resented pity," and it seems like there's truly no way for him to feel at ease. It makes sense. As an actor, it would be frustrating to be constantly told that he had the talent but not the skin for success. It would be frustrating to never have a positive black role model, but always be reminded of

In "Down at the Dinghy," Salinger's child characters prove once again the impact of a kid's innocence. Lionel's habit of running away is maybe an immature act, but Salinger writes it in a very profound way. Lionel flees situations where he feels insulted or hurt by the words of others. Running away from problems is a pretty logical response for a 4 year old to have in uncomfortable and/or confrontational situations, though maybe not to the extreme that Lionel exhibits. I guess he doesn't know that he puts his life in danger when he runs away. However, the example Boo Boo gives of him in February, when he hid "half-frozen to death" after 11 PM after a kid told him he stank, shows that he puts emotional security over his physical comfort. "You stink" is an easy insult to understand, which makes it harder for a small child to hear than something with deeper meanings and cultural complexities, like a racial slur. Lionel overhears Sandra call

Most of Salinger’s stories that we've read in class focused on the relationship between children and adults and how the presence of children creates a comfortable environment for adults to let their guard down and show their soft side. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a good example of this. If we judge Seymour solely based on the bits of the story that didn't include Sybil, we can conclude he's kind of a kooky person. Muriel and her mom’s conversation set up the possibility that perhaps he isn't quite right in the head, whether or not you choose to believe the mom’s persistent hints that Seymour’s a lil crazy. Later, during the only scene that depicts him interacting with another adult, Seymour makes a random paranoid comment about the woman looking at his feet. This interaction is definitely weird, but maybe Seymour just wins the award for most awkward person of the year? I’ve been there, I can’t judge. By the end of the story, though, there's no d

I really enjoyed Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried . Or, at least, I really wanted to. There was a consensus in our class of feeling hurt and betrayed by the almost-nonfiction narrative O'Brien delivers. I guess I'm part of the mob. I'm mad at O'Brien, too. I'm not mad that he fudged the truth of his Vietnam experiences in a book of fiction. In almost every story, he tells us that we aren't reading factual information. What I'm mad about is that he didn't stick to the whole meaning of war stories that was pushed throughout the book. O'Brien's Basic War Story consists of who, where, and what The Narrator saw. Usually, readers are left to figure out the meaning, if there was one at all. In "Spin," we are told that "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end." These stories aren't supposed to have a structure. They're just moments. Memories. The narrator