Fiction Packet 3

"When It Rains It Rains a River" and "The Singing Fish" are two stories from Peter Markus's book The Singing Fish. I thought these were the most excruciatingly annoying stories/poems we've read so far. We've talked about repetition and how it is good, but these stories take repetition to a whole new level. "Us brothers," we got it the first time, you're brothers, it's done. All the mud, we get it, you have a weirdo mud fetish. The Girl, you made a girl out of the mud because your weirdo mud fetish. Okay. Got it. Can we move on? I liked the beginning  of "What Our Mother Always Told Us" and was disappointed to find that we never learn what their mother came running at "US BROTHERS" with… aww. Too bad. It was probably mud anyway.

"The Falling Girl" by Dino Buzzati is so full of gorgeous detail. It would have to be - it's 5 pages about falling from a skyscraper, something that can't take more than 15 seconds (my guess…I won't pretend to know anything about…is it physics?) I found it odd that the story says that it is mostly girls who jump from skyscrapers. I've always read that men are the ones who commit dramatic suicides, like jumping from buildings and bridges, shooting themselves, etc., and women commit quiet suicides, like taking pills or hanging themselves. Ugh, this just got depressing. Anyway.

It's not even about falling from a skyscraper. Once the other women, the high class women, joined the free fall, and the man on the 28th floor mentioned that only old women pass those windows, this is life. Or a bad decision that changed the path of life. Or a good decision. Leaning over the railing, that's all it takes.

Because it lost and extensively confused me, I have only one word for "August 25, 1983" by Jorge Luis Borges, and that word is: Inception. I guess I have two word. The other is "What?" It felt somewhat like an exercise given in high school to "Write a letter to yourself, 5 years from now" or 5 years ago. Tell yourself things that you want now and make sure older you achieves them, or tell about will happen to young you and how to deal with them. I would be interested to know when Borges wrote this. Was he the 61-year-old, or the 84-year-old when he wrote this? So I googled it, and it was published in 1983 - and he died from liver cancer in 1986. Hmm. I'm not sure what I just learned.