Daily Themes Week 6
hehe... one of these is revising and another is Haruki Murakami butttt had fun!! fun fun. have a good week!
2/24
Prompt 5: Revise a theme from a previous week.
Revised:
Day on the Farm
Mothers should bring home the bacon. Instead of taking care of children, a mother should spend the day on the farm, doing real work. Rising early with the sun, they should don Wranglers and plaid button ups instead of worn house clothes. Instead of preparing lunch bags, organizing homework strewn about, laying out children’s outfits, waking the kids up, making the kids’ beds, stuffing their kids into coats they don’t want to wear, and chauffeuring them to school when they miss the bus, they should be corralling mature pigs to the slaughterhouse. Making coffee for the husband is still acceptable.
Mothers should not be worrying about the diet of their child, or what they will eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or if they are deficient in vitamins, or if they are eating too much or too little, or if her son leaves food on his plate because he is not hungry or if she is a bad cook. All they should care about is how best to gut and flay the pigs, where to discard the trotters and sinew for hot dog production, and how to preserve the tender flesh of the belly. Mothers should be concerned with the feed silos and the corn ratio in pig food, so when they slice into the marbled fat and muscle of the real money maker (that valuable belly!), the adipose slabs of meat glimmer with the promise of deliciousness. They’ll wait a while as the bacon cures in nitrates, and if they wanted, they could even take a sow ear and sew it into a silk purse as a leisure activity.
Then a mother should return home (not past suppertime) and immediately start preparing the bacon too. When men arrive home from keeping the lights on and putting food on the table, they are often tired and need sustenance. Everyone in the household should sit down for family dinner. Then the teenage vegetarian daughter should turn up her nose.
I worked on some things we talked about last session, like creating more exhaustive descriptions for the regular mother’s daily life (instead of preparing lunch bags… and mothers should not be worrying about the diet of their child …)
One major thing I changed was the word “woman” to “mother”... not sure how it works but I liked the specificity of it, and that it gave me some kind of clearish routine to base my ideas on top of, rather than the amorphous concept of “the life of a woman”
I really like rewriting this one! I hope it is more clear now? Or has a clearer message?
Original:
Day on the Farm
Women should bring home the bacon. They should stop taking care of kids or whatever they do all day and instead don Wranglers and plaid button ups. Instead of packing crustless sandwiches and juice boxes, they should rise with the sun every morning and get to work filling the feed silos and water troughs. They should stop spending all that time sending the kids to school and, rather, after checking the pigs to make sure they are all prim and porky, should siphon off the mature ones to the slaughterhouse. When women would normally go do their passion projects or go to their time-wasting “jobs,” they should now get to the real business. They should gut and flay the pigs, discarding the trotters and sinew for hot dog production, and make sure to preserve the tender flesh of the belly. Then, they can strip the skin of any spiky hairs (yuck!) and slice the marbled fat and muscle into thick slabs of glimmering meat. They’ll wait a while as the bacon cures in nitrates, and if they wanted, they could even take the sows’ ears and sew them into a silk purse as a leisure activity.
Then women should return home (not past suppertime) and immediately start preparing the bacon too. When men arrive home from making the real bacon, they are often tired, and need sustenance. Everyone in the household should sit down to sup on a woman’s labors. Then the family’s teenage vegetarian daughter should turn up her nose.
2/23
Prompt 4: write a micro-memoir – a tiny true story – based on something you wanted recently and tried a number of times and/or in a number of ways to obtain. Be sure that everything you include actually happened, but feel free to omit any and all material that doesn’t contribute to your narrative’s structure and function.
I met Alain in my Dutch Art class. He told me to describe him in the same way he sees himself: well-dressed, smart, and good looking. I wanted to be his friend from the first time I met him.
Alain is 63, and extremely French. He is somehow “in” with this group of seniors that I know. Cool recognizes cool, or something. In the lecture hall, we always sit in the same row, in pretty much the same seats. So I can predict what happens when he walks in—he undoes his scarf, unbuttons his coat, removes his hat, and sets all of them on the seat in front of him. And then he says hi to our friends, and pulls out a notebook and pen from his crossbody bag.
The class after I first met him, I wore my coolest clothes— my red and white varsity jacket, bowling shoes, plaid skirt, and embroidered button up. I hoped that he would see that I had taste, and then we could go thrifting together, where he would dress me like him, which is to say, a European man who still owns workwear from the 80s. He just laughed when he saw me in that outfit.
I also tried to impress him with my profuse knowledge on the subject of Netherlandish culture.
I leaned over to whisper at him during lecture one day, “Do you know the difference between kraakporselein and delftware?”
He just pulled out his iPad and googled, “What is the difference between kraakporselein and delftware?”, and that pretty much settled it.
He never talked to me much. He’d always be whispering to someone else in the group, making some joke in French, referencing the Caravaggio class he was taking at the same time.
On Tuesday, he whispered to our friend Zawar, “I’m a big fan of Camille.” And I heard it, and was beaming all big and happy-like. I’ll tell him next week that it’s reciprocal.
2/22
Prompt 3:
Type out the first 250 to 300 words of a favorite short story. If you don’t have a current favorite, you might use one of the stories referred to in this week’s lecture.
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami, translated to English by Alfred Birnbaum
Exposition
Action
Original, annotated:
I met her three years ago at a friend’s wedding reception, here in Tokyo, and we got to know each other. There was nearly a dozen years’ age difference between us, she being twenty and I thirty-one. Not that it mattered much. I had a lot else on my mind then, and didn’t have time to worry about things like age. Plus, I was married, but that didn’t seem to bother her either.
She was studying with a famous mime, and working as an advertising model to make ends meet. But she usually found it too much trouble to go out on the modeling assignments she was given, so her income didn’t amount to much. What it didn’t cover, her boyfriends made up. Of course, I don’t know for sure. But things she said, seemed to hint at that kind of arrangement.
As I mentioned, when I first met her she told me she was studying mime. One night, we were out at a bar, and she showed me the Tangerine Peeling. As the name says, it involves peeling a tangerine. On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea. Actually, there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling.
Rearranged:
She was studying with a famous mime, and working as an advertising model to make ends meet. But she usually found it too much trouble to go out on the modeling assignments she was given, so her income didn’t amount to much. What it didn’t cover, her boyfriends made up. Of course, I don’t know for sure. But things she said, seemed to hint at that kind of arrangement. I was married, but that didn’t seem to bother her either.
As I mentioned, when I first met her she told me she was studying mime. One night, we were out at a bar, and she showed me the Tangerine Peeling. As the name says, it involves peeling a tangerine. On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea. Actually, there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d finished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or twenty minutes (almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you.
I met her three years ago at a friend’s wedding reception, here in Tokyo, and we got to know each other. There was nearly a dozen years’ age difference between us, she being twenty and I thirty-one. Not that it mattered much. I had a lot else on my mind then, and didn’t have time to worry about things like age. It’s a very strange feeling.
2/21
Prompt 2: Write a character sketch of someone you have known but with whom you no longer are in contact with.
Julian is very tall, very skinny, and a white man. When I first met him, he always wore those horrible Comme des Garcons red heart Converse shoes, but when other kids at school started wearing them too, he retired them immediately. Almost all my friends said he was arrogant, stuck up, or some version of up his own ass. A teacher once told me to “go forth with Julian’s caucasity” as a means of telling me to be more bold.
He thought that his nose was crooked, and hated wearing glasses, even when he needed them. I would be comfortable saying he is the vainest person I have ever met. He is also the smartest. I think I measure intelligence by wit and humor, and he had jokes, if nothing else, in spades. He liked art in a very public way. Julian would often shame anyone that disagreed with his taste in capital-A-Art, and prided himself in knowing all the things that people didn’t know about architecture, and clothing, and art history. He was also extremely beautiful.
He liked Fran Leibowitz, Joan Didion, Stephen Fry, and the architect Philip Johnson. He always seemed to be reading things from one generation before, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or A Clockwork Orange. I suspect this is because he just read whatever his parents read in college. He never borrowed anything, including books, and he bought every song he listened to on iTunes. Julian never liked meeting new people. I don’t know how he’s faring in college. He went far away from all of our friends. He was my best friend in the whole wide world.
Prompt 1: Outline a narrative, then write one.
A:
Camille (me)
She wants to eat the green bean dish that she used to have at the restaurant by her grandma’s house.
Her mom tries to cook the green bean dish at home, but it’s too healthy and doesn’t taste right.
The whole family goes to a Chinese restaurant and orders the dish, but they make it too spicy, and with not enough meat.
They go back to the restaurant near her grandma’s house, but it’s changed owners, and no longer serves green beans.
No, I do not get what I wanted
I’ve realized that I’m just picky, or that all of it tasted the same the whole time.
B:
My parents told me I was always a picky eater. I disliked all the stereotypically disliked foods: peas, broccoli, fish, whole-wheat bread. But I adored green beans. My love wasn’t all consuming, and I never ate them in casseroles or roasted or steamed. I actually only ever ate them at this restaurant near my grandma’s house called “Seafood Palace.”
Everything was so white tablecloth there— the waiters (the same ones, every time) would wear these trim bowties and chalk stripe vests, and hold a cloth napkin under the lip of the water pitcher when they refilled your glass. So it was just funny to see them serve a plate of these green beans, always burning hot when they arrived, smooth green bean skin puckered with the heat of searing oil, angry red chilis strewn amongst bits of ground pork, all of it swimming in an unctuous and murky sauce. It was just a matchstick pile of beans on a plate.
But I loved them, and ate them any chance I got. My grandma died when I was twelve or something, and we stopped going to Seafood Palace, stopped visiting her torrid, AC-less house, stopped lying on the linoleum floor to cool off, stopped eating the green beans.
I asked my mom to make them. When she did, however, she never liked to fry things, so the beans were always squeaky and smooth-skinned.
When my family and I went out to eat at restaurants, I would ask for a green bean dish, and it would come out too salty, too chili-y, too bland, too hot. And I would write down every time we went to a restaurant and ordered the green beans, so I could keep track of my disappointments. This went on for years and years. There are 23 logs in my green bean diary.
We recently went back to Seafood Palace, but it had come under new management in the time I spent chewing on all those stalks. I thought going back there would be some kind of pilgrimage, a homecoming, maybe. But the waiters came out in their black vests and water napkins, with different faces and menus, and finally laid down the green beans, bright green on stark white. They were too oily.
Maybe I’ve just always been picky.