froggies315's blog

when there are no more words

For our final performance, Alexandra and I chose four artifacts which represented the gems of our learning from this semester in Literary Kinds.  The artifacts were:

1. sourdough bread
2. masks
3. twigs from a tree

My Bibbie invented Gabazoogoo the Talking Dog when his grandsons were little.  My sister and I, Bib’s first great-grandchildren, grew up with Gabazoogoo too.  Stories rolled effortlessly off of Bib’s tongue, and when he spoke, it felt like I could sit still for an eternity, mesmerized by wisdom.  I knew that Gabazoogoo was make believe, but Bib had knack for combining the fantastical with the very real, and I know his stories helped me to learn this world.  

Adaptation was entertaining.  Mostly, it seemed like a cautionary tale about the perils of telling other people’s stories, of what can happen when someone becomes so obsessed with telling a story that he becomes part of that story and truth and reality bend and everything is confusing and unclear.  In this way, I think this movie fits nicely with a lot of the conversations we’ve had in class.  Here’s something that I read this morning that I liked because it offers another way to think about how we tell and share stories:

My most persistent obsession is with summer camp.  I’ve been obsessed since age 12.  This obsession has taken different forms over the past decade, but it has always centered around a rocky hill in Vermont and moldy poster boards with song lyrics and guitar chords on them.  In some ways, my friends at school understand my obsession with camp.  At the very least, they know that I am obsessed...camp permeates from my pores.  I orchestrate ice breakers and ask for chek-ins and play the banjo and camp people come to visit and I try to convince school friends to work at camp.  I’m pretty open about this obsession.

After I finished reading Slaughterhouse Five on Sunday, I was mostly confused and just a little bit annoyed with Billy Pilgrim.  Throughout the week, I got successively more irritated with Billy...he became the epitome of the word pathetic.  In class today, I was thinking about Billy and all the other pathetic characters I’ve had to deal with in books and in life.  Mostly, I was irritated.  I would not let them question my understanding or my beliefs, I let their pathetic existence affirm me.  I told myself that sincerity is always better than satire.

At the end of class today, Anne asked us whether or not Barbie should be held accountable for the the terrible things that happened in the physical world as a result of her dream world...after all, Barbie, like all little girls, was just fulfilling her dream of becoming a princess, and that dream was the product of a collective society.  I struggle to accept this line of thinking because it makes me feel powerless.

A better title for this would be: "Your Brain on Stories," but still cool, I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?ref=todayspaper

In class, we agreed that A Game of You is scary because it shows us that the boundary we draw between the dream world and the real world is not as hard and fast as we like to think.  This doesn’t feel scary to me anymore.  Isn’t it exciting that the things that happen in our head have the ability to manifest themselves in the physical world? I know that my imaginings inform my choices and my identity and...that’s cool!   

1. Memory and Forgetting: For me, these stories beg questions about the point of telling non-fiction stories.  If we can never remember something with complete accuracy, why do we tell stories in the first place?  Does the third story answer this?  Is it good or bad that every time we remember something (tell a story) the memory takes us farther away from what actually happened?  Should we try to make technology so that we can remember stories accurately/does voice recording do this?  How has Henrietta Lacks’ story changed because of Skloot’s book and the BBC documentary?  How have our stories changed as we tell and re-tell them?