Some fictions
posted 4 November 2007, 18:35 by Mike
I’ve done a very good job of reading nearly every single thing assigned to me this semester, even the stuff I knew was going to be terrible. And there was some terrible shit this semester. Thanks to internet technology, my professors have been scrambling to use electronic dissemination of materials in their curriculum so that they score perfectly on that part of their student evaluations and get their precious tenure. The by product is I get to share some gems among this semester’s syllabus, mostly excerpts from larger works. These are all PDF files.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the first chapter of a very interconnected book about a “precocious” 11-year-old New York boy whose father die in the WTC on 9/11, intertwined with the story of his grandparents’ strange relationship and experiences during the allied bombing of Dresden. He’s a know-it-all, almost autistic in his idiosyncrasies and desire to know and do nearly everything. In this excerpt he invents a limousine as long as a human life, writes to Stephen Hawking about a possible apprenticeship, and refers to a vagina as a “VJ”. [read it]
In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
A short story. Basically, the characters (human or otherwise) in television commercials occupy their own world and have their own awareness. A war breaks out between those who are abused in commercials for the sake of the products being endorsed and those who do the abusing. For instance, imagine the Trix rabbit outside of the commercials you see him in, forever compelled to fulfill an almost sexual desire for the forbidden fruitshaped wheat cereal, unable to understand where this desire comes from, let alone fight the urge to again subvert the cruel dictatorship the children hold over his precious desire. That doesn’t actually happen, but it’s a bit like that. [read it]
The Public Burning by Robert Coover
This is the strangest and best of the three I think. Something between a metaphor and a fantasy involving historical and folk figures, this chapter from the book involved Richard Nixon finding himself suddenly in front of a crowd of onlookers with his pants around his ankles, his ass red with lipstick, vigorously masturbating over the body of Ethel Rosenberg. I think the rest of the book explain the situation logically, but it works perfectly on it’s own. I really need to buy this book. [read it]
Comment
Let me show you to the self help isle. It must be to do with orange