Cafeteria Conversation

101 Dalmations.

     The real one?

No. The cartoon one all the way. I don’t associate the real one with Disney because Disney is Mulan, Pocahontas, Cinderella... Mulan is a hero, just like Pocahontas.  Such a boss.  She united two countries, she was introduced to John Smith, she wasn’t racist.

     That’s fantastic.

And that’s really important to me, because culture is important to me.  Let me think...Pixar is good but it’s not Disney.  They have some good movies like Finding Nemo...

     Toy Story? 

Toy story I consider Disney because it’s such a classic.

     That was still when they were kinda together too.

Yeah, and my first dog was named Woody and now my dog is named Belle.  I always have to have dogs named after disney characters.  Otherwise it’s not...

     Kosher.

Right!  Then it’s not a real dog.  Yeah, Finding Nemo was a great movie but it can be done without.  You know?

     So if you were, like, in charge of Disney, would you allow them to associate with all these other movies or would you make them strictly make cartoons like the classics?

Um, here’s the thing.  If I were in charge of Disney, I would own the world, and I would keep people like Pixar under my wing, but the name “Disney” would only go on so many things.  

     Gotcha.

ABC family?  You don’t see anything about Disney on there.  ESPN?  But let me tell you, Disney owns it.

     I know!  I know because I had to go to my sister’s dance competition at the ESPN Milkhouse or whatever.

Yeah!  Did it have a restaurant?

     Yeah! 

See, The Disney cruise that y’all should all go on with me has an ESPN sky bar. It’s really cool.

     By the way, I want to be counted in for softball.

Alright!  Man, I still forget you and Hannah are related.  Y’all don’t look anything alike.

     Yeah.

She was always really nice to me though.

     That’s good to hear.  I can bear living with her but I hate cleaning dishes and she hates when the sink is full.  But I use styrofoam most of the time.

You use styrofoam?  You should just was the dishes.  Styrofoam kills the environment.  Do you want to be the single person that tears down the forest?  That kills Pocahontas’s land?

     Just for you I am going to go buy a bottle of acetone and pour it all over my styrofoam plates so they disintegrate.

Why don’t you just wash dishes?  Dane washes dishes.  He washes his solo cups.

Response to Richard Bausch's "1-900"

I really enjoyed the all-dialogue aspect of this story.  The possibilities of using this in different contexts is now running through my mind.  What I enjoyed most is the role that is given to the reader.  Bausch hands us the opportunity to decipher why these two people would have such a conversation.  Why would John call a sex line so he could chat about his failing marriage?  And why would Marilyn/Sharon stay on the line for so long if she was truly irked by John’s desire to get to know her?  This kind of reaction to a short story is what proves its effectiveness.  

Had we been given a narrator, I would not have been able to last the whole 21 pages before I put the book down to do something else for a bit.  It would have done the work in trying to figure out the characters for me and the pace of the conversation, which also kept me reading, would have been much too slow.  Both of these characters wanted something.  John wanted to see his kids and Marilyn/Sharon wanted to hear her boyfriend tell her “I love you”.  These characters were dynamic and complicated and unexpected and fun to interpret.

I was confused about the title during the bulk of reading because I didn’t know what 1-900 numbers were.  Despite me not understanding it, I think the title is fit for this short story because it carries that sense of anonymity; the entire conversation I was skeptical of whether John and Marilyn/Sharon were actually telling the truth to each other and that brought so much more significance to the use of 1-900 as the title.  Even the specifics in the conversation were non-specific.  What an interesting way to make a statement about conversation being more intimate than sex.

Response to Denis Johnson's "Emergency"

The obvious part of this short story is that both Georgie and the narrator (whose name we never learn) are both on drugs.  We learn in the beginning that the both of them steal drugs from the E.R. they work in.  Since both of them are tripping for the entire story, we have a case of an unreliable narrator, which to me proved frustrating.  You do not find answers or reasons for these characters to act the way they do.  Neither do you find explanations of why Terrence Weber, the man who was stabbed in his eye by his wife, recovered or was even able to walk to the hospital, or if that even happened at all.  

Also, there were multiple religious references throughout the story.  Georgie said Jesus several times while crying when he was cleaning up blood that actually was not there and later when they were driving around in the car he said he wanted to go to a chapel and worship.  Then, the narrator describes a scene he thinks he sees in front of him of a graveyard and above it the sky was opened with angels descending.  But it turned out it wasn’t a graveyard; it was a drive in.  I can’t make much out of the reason for these references, if there is any.

Honestly, I did not enjoy reading the story because I couldn’t understand why it was written.  The very last line didn’t seem resonant with what I had learned about Georgie previously.  He told Hardee the hitchhiker that his job is saving lives.  He did seem  to save Terrence Weber’s life though, all he did was pull a knife out of him and he saved the baby bunnies from the dead mother only for them to be killed by the narrator.  I did, however, go back to read the beginning again to see if it would enlighten me any.

Couch Potato

It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even turn the lights on anymore.  From the minute he walks in the door to the minute his eyes fall closed the only light is the incandescent glow of the television screen and the only voices heard come from speakers mounted on the walls, surrounding him like an external consciousness.  Men who are stronger and slimmer and more talented than him tell him where he should eat, what he should drink, what kind of women he should date, what electronics he should buy...

All the while he becomes acutely aware of his flesh--the way his belly sits in his lap and how his muscles are hidden under ever storing lipids.  It’s as if all these characters are leaning over his still body, that’s strapped to a chair, staring intently at his exposed brain.  And they proceed to probe it: Dr. House telling him he’s unintelligent, Tom Brady telling him he’s weak, The Bachelor reminding him he is alone, and the televangelists screaming that he’s headed straight for Hell.  And he starts to think he is.  So he prays himself to sleep wondering if the anesthesia will ever wear off and asking if it is possible that he can ever be more than a couch potato.

Response to Lydia Davis's "Television"

A noticeable aspect of Lydia Davis's story is her use of “we” and “they” in the first section and into the second section.  In the very first lines she writes, “We have all these favorite shows coming on every evening.  They say it will be exciting and it always is.”  Without a specific person assigned to the “we” Davis is able to speak for the reader.  It seems like the “we” is assigned to the general public who has been sucked into watching television every night and the “they” are the producers of it who “force” or “influence” us to continue.  This device allows for any reader to feel as if they are the narrator.

Into the second section, Davis begins to use “I” but halfway down, she uses “you” in several lines.  She could be assigning the reader with feelings, or she may be allowing the reader to experience the narrator’s thoughts personally.  This actually sparked compassion in me for the narrator.  The mindless, hypnotism the television has “coaxed” the narrator into has caused them to do things they would rather not do, like watch shows all night long.  This use of non-specific pronouns is strategic to Davis’s story because had we been given specifics, the reader would have been more at an arm’s length away from the conflict.  The non-specifics are what allow any reader to see the conflict as theirs.

Also an interesting device was the story’s division into numbered sections.  Each section did start a new television show or group of shows that the narrator discussed but I do not believe that was her sole intention in using numbers.  As the numbers progress from one to three, the form of her paragraphs move from short, one sentence paragraphs, to paragraphs that aren’t indented, and finally to longer paragraphs with multiple sentences.  They reflect a progression of thought, or maybe understanding that the narrator has obtained.  Overall, the numbered sections give each stage of understanding the effects of television relevance and as the reader reaches the end of section three, they can conclude along with Davis that we have mistaken television for reality.