Today is Friday! That used to seem a lot more significant to me when I "worked for a living." Of course, now I still work, but the work is private until some editor decides it's worthy of publication. Last night we had Week 5 of Short Story I. This class has been worthwhile from the theoretical standpoint, but has been a lot less fun overall than the "Writing the Horror Story" class. It's not Nancy's fault--she puts a lot of effort into making the class work. But the students, for the most part, seem to be a lot less passionate about their work, and it shows in the kinds of stories they turn in. Mostly, these are introspective, pseudo-memoirs, of the dry, literary sort.

For example, there's the little old Jewish lady whose story starts out, "Sally wondered how she ended up lost on the top of a Greek island." Apparently it's based on a real-life adventure she had in 1968, but the adventure has mostly been stripped from the story. Then there was the one about the mother at a school PTA-type meeting. *yawns* Or the one about the girl whose car was stolen. Or the one by the loudmouthed psychologist in the group, who apparently has a problem with an absentee father (the kid in the story goes wandering around Mexico City by himself and discovers his long-lost dad).

Last night's stories were a bit better. One, called "Boy," centered around a young runaway, who took care of horses on Mr. Dougherty's ranch. It was told in first-person, in a hick dialect of indeterminate origin. Another story was drawn straight from "Wonder Years," about a kid who has to face down a bully. The last one, called "Funeral Homes," was the weakest. All three stories were told in first person, but the "I" of "Homes" was indistinct. We, the readers, never even got to know his name.

My story will be anything but bland and will shake things up a bit. I only hope Nancy doesn't blow the reading! Meanwhile, here's the essay I did on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" for the class:

Plotting in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

"Heart of Darkness" is a novella, and as such has a plot structure a bit more complex than most short stories. The action doesn't boil down to "a single incident that happened once," but it rather an episodic and epic journey from the Nellie on the placid Thames, to Belgium, and deep into the Belgian Congo. The return trip, as traced by Marlow in his frame narrative, proceeds back up the Congo River, through the jungle, to that "Sepulchral City" (Brussels) and back onto the Nellie. Each waypoint incident on this journey into darkness is like an island in the vast and flowing stream of the narrative.

There are aspects to the story's construction that, while hardly innovative, might seem so to a novice reader (or writer). One is the frame narrative, invented by the Arabs, honed by Chaucer and Bocaccio, and used often in contemporary films and novels. Screenwriters call this technique "bookending," where a narrator starts the story in some kind of "present," but reminisces of some past incident, then returns to the "present" at the end of the story. This technique was used in Amadeus, for example.

Each island of narrative in "Heart of Darkness" builds on the tension of the previous one, until Kurtz's climactic "The horror. The horror." A plot diagram of Conrad's story might look more like the "death spiral" of a moth auguring into a candle flame than the classic, if oversimplified, "rising and falling action." The depth of this work has impressed me more and more since I first read it in the 8th grade, and I would take away from it, as a lesson in plotting, not to fear depth and complexity, even when attempting a work of commercial accessibility.

Another day, another Sunday. Another Chargers game--let's hope they win today!

Other news: My battle with IHSS is temporarily over. They agreed to a conditional withdrawal of my appeal, and Susan Moreno, the appeals worker, is sending the case back to the County. Turns out, as I insisted all along, I belong in the so-called "250 Working Disabled" program, meaning my IHSS should never have been cut off. Would have helped if Angela Knoll, my IHSS worker, had not left county service the day after she mailed me the cutoff notice.

I sent off two stories yesterday, to web zines. We'll see what happens. While there's a story in queue, there's hope!

Here's a brief review of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" I recently did for Short Story I:

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

On the offhand, I'd say this story has a great line of progeny, most notably almost every other "Twilight Zone" episode, and Stephen King's "Children of the Corn." The "universal truth" centering the story is the unending willingness of humans to sacrifice for some common good. If the sacrifice involves bloodshed, all the better! And if it involves ganging up on the weak, there's nothing amiss therewith, from the subjective view of the mob. Most disturbingly, the "common good" can be vague, unusual, half forgotten; the ritual subsumes the goal. Certainly in the '40s when "Lottery" was written, the world had seen ample examples of all of the behaviors mentioned above: Fascism, Nazism, Communism. And we're not bereft of modern examples, including the near stoning of the woman in Nigeria a few weeks ago.

This is very much an "external" narrative. Without going into specifics (too hard to lug that gigantic book around), "The Lottery" is almost a stage piece. Everything, the crowd, the children, the stones, the box, has its starting point almost etched out in the dusty town square. Visually, one can imagine a pan shot as the camera descends from a high level view of the town to the street level. Then it pans again to crowds, faces, and actions. The narrator truly is the camera's eye in this setting.

I've been doing these little reports on various short stories assigned to us in Nancy's class. Eventually I'll post them all; here's the most recent one (for tonight's class):

A Short Look at Characterization in Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"

When thinking of "Babylon Revisited," one cannot help but think of the American relationship with Paris over the years. Since the '30s depicted in the story, the glitter, the charm, the art and the decadence of the City of Light have all been surpassed by one US city or another; the most monstrous domestic concoction of all those qualities (excepting the "art") being La Vegas, with its Paris Hotel and Casino towering over the denizens of the strip like a neon-lit avatar of Montaigne's Gargantua. Yet Paris remains, eternally elusive and alluring to the "stranger." Characterization in "Babylon Revisited" grows out of setting.

Charlie Wales is the quintessential "American in Paris," surviving in the post-crash depression era as best he can. He's a man who's "made mistakes," lived high and fallen low, only to begin digging himself out again. The narrator focuses on Charlie's view of the world, and sometimes we, the collective readers, have to wonder how reliable this viewpoint is. Charlie's vocabulary is striking for its use of "I." One senses Charlie still longs for his days of drunken "royalty" in the following passage:

"But it was nice while it lasted.... We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon"--he stumbled, seeing his mistake--"there wasn't a man I knew."

Does he really want Honoria to live with him for her good, or his own? The steadfast but bourgeois Peters family have made good guardians for the child. With the brash intrusion of Charlie's former drinking buddies into the Peterson home, the reader can't help but sense a certain foreboding that Charlie eventually will succumb again to Babylon's glittering charms. The sadness he feels at the end is the sadness of a man both facing, and running from, the delinquencies of his past. The final sentence brings Charlie's piquant, self-inflicted misfortune into perspective: "He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone." In the end, Honoria is the prop upon which Charlie hopes to hang his ego, not a fully fleshed human being who would benefit equally from her relationship to her father.

Last Tuesday, we the citizens of the once mighty State of California managed to turn participatory democracy into a circus sideshow. We now have a governor-elect who believes Native American tribes are "special interests" but thinks it's ok to take $300,000 in contributions from land-developer magnate and Chargers owner Alex Spanos. The media-corporate oligarchy has managed to finally throw aside any pretense at good government. This has been the greatest usurpation of a weak central government by an Austrian since Odoacer ripped the crown from the feeble head of Romulus Augustulus.

If I were a Republican (which I most assuredly am not), I would have voted for McClintock, who at least gives the faintest impression of knowing what he's talking about. Even if there's no way in HELL he or Arnold could balance the budget by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse." These Neanderthals (and I take the term lightly, as otherwise using it would be an insult to our thick-browed forebearers) have no problem with looting the public treasury for corporate givaways. And people like Jay Leno with his 150 cars and Arnold with his garageful of Hummers whine about the vehicle tax. I say, if the tax is so damn onerous, why don't they sell a few of their prestigemobiles? And speaking of Leno--I used to be a big fan of his before he became Schwarzenegger's semi-offical campaign spokesman. Hey Jay! Wake the hell up! It's no longer 1998! You can cut with the Clinton jokes now! If there's a place in one of the inner circles of hell for commedians, I hope Leno winds up spending eternity with Jerry Lewis and Roseanne Barr. If Schwarzenegger wants to inaugurate "hydrogen highways" so badly, why doesn't he just drill a friggen hole in the side of his head and let the hot gas out?

So, let's all get out our Bear Flags and dance around the campfire to the Horst Wessel song. All hail the Fuhrenator! (and pay no attention to the midget behind the curtain--it's not Gary Coleman, it's Pete Wilson).

Here are a few notes and whatnot from my Short Story 1 class at UCSD. You can read them or skip them, if you find literary ramblings to be boring.

I was brainstorming about the characteristics of some of my favorite SF stories. These are some of the factors I came up with:

"Nightfall"
- Global scale
- Suspense builds
- Sense of history
- Night falls

"Rapaccini's Daughter"
- Scientist
-- daughter
-- narrator-
Disease/Death-
Perfection-
Inability of man to overcome decay and death

"Nine Million Names of God"
- Technological progress has unintended consequences

"The Veldt"
- What we get is not always what we want
- Generation gap in use of technology