Goldberg response

      Goldberg's Claim your Writing was a really interesting and pointed writing that has to do with not only tips for writing but tips for how to think about your writing. I like how each chapter has a specific title and idea and sticks to that. Such as in the "claim your writing" chapter it goes into much detail about how people need to realize the quality of their work. The author talks about teaching their class and says "Each student broke through resistance to a deeply felt piece of writing... I realized none of them had any awareness of what they had written." I found this to hit close to home for me because in my music writing I find that I often compare myself to one of the other undergrad students who is much farther along than I and knows much more of the musical traditions than I, but I remind myself that when I feel the emotion I put in one of the pieces I wrote then that is how I know it was successful. I feel the exact same way with my writing whether it be poetry, fiction, or even a research paper I know that if I injected some of my own emotions into the work then I succeeded.
      The concept of the chapter "the samurai" was interesting as well because this whole chapter was about thinking of what in your work is important and what doesn't need to be there. This chapter is really col in that it gets you across feeling uncomfortable with taking out large amounts of your work and saying that it is necessary. However, I agree with the "reading/rewriting" chapter when the author explains how when doing a writing you could redo it over and over days in a row and "reread them all and take the good parts and combine them." I feel like this goes strongly with the samurai idea of cutting but instead of just getting rid of the bad parts you are replacing the bad parts with more good parts that you have been writing on various days. I think it might be helpful to start from scratch when rewriting such as the author mentions because you wont be focusing on replacing it sentence by sentence but more organically coming up with better sentences to use. Although sometimes that dramatic of an action doesn't need to be taken.
      "I don't want to die" is a chapter with not only a striking title but is also a very short and to the point chapter that is very powerful. It talks about the man that created the San Francisco Zen Center and how when he was about to die his last words to his friend was "I don't want to die." This is so moving because it was somebody that was the master of zen and the one time he allowed himself to succumb to his emotions was to say that statement. It is very important for writers to listen to their emotions and really write just what you feel sometimes instead of writing what you think should be written in a circumstance. It sometimes can be more powerful to say what you feel than to say something planned and deliberate.

Response to Juice

      This book was an absolutely wonderful read. The meanings in it are so complex for me that I loved being able to think about what the story means and have that meaning adapt and be refined throughout my reading of it. These stories have way more to say than what can be concretely said in the same few amount of words that they are all written in. These stories inspire me in what I write and make me want to add some of this style to my own writing not to change how I write but to adapt new ideas to my style.    
      I found that this book talks to me about transcending time through means of isolation. I found it weird that these stories so often used the word "loneliness" until I realized that it was because loneliness for these stories is like a hinting reminder that these stories are about isolation. I know that stories aren't supposed to be puzzles that the author has the key to and that metaphors in these stories are meant to be interpreted freely but every time I come up with an idea I see a sentence that bends that idea. For example, in the story "Proportion Surviving" I kept having feelings about what the apple juice was a metaphor for. But the more I read I started combining the ideas of the story such as his obtaining of women and his writing of poems and felt like apple juice was specifically representing the passion of the poems that may have stemmed from his passion for women. He started talking about a place he was employed at but didn't work at and that was an interesting statement but anyways he said "I would walk in and find all kinds of juice on sale. Not to buy, but to stand next to." And later: "I had gotten in the way of improvised customer service to peruse the juice aisles without being noticed." It was at that point that I was positive his juice meant his passion for women. However, as the story went on I found that he talked a lot about his friends and how the main character I guess was sick and that his friends would visit him because of that. This story in my head screams isolation and I believe apple juice is a metaphor for a human emotional connection that he feels as though he has lost.
      I also would like to talk about "Translation" because I feel as though this is such a perfect example of isolation and there was no doubt in my mind what this story meant to me. This story for me was a story about somebody living in a loving village of people that couldn't feel their connections and was lost within a sea of people. This story is literally about somebody who is alone in the mountains and later talks about spirits. What strikes me is the introduction "The fact of everybody's disappearance, a conviction of flight and return, and a loneliness so startling that people will want to paint it." I love this introduction after I have already read this because in this story he talks about other people in his community all the time but in a past tense and speaks of having been alone for six years. The introduction is saying what the story is about and the conviction of flight and return and everybody's disappearance to me means his isolation and lack of connection from other people. And when he talks about a loneliness people will want to paint it is because nobody else accepts how lonely and isolated the main character is because it is too hard for them to understand. To me this story is about someone who is going through life and not being able to connect with all the people around him and is narrating his life as if he has been alone. The spirits he later talks about are all too serious and taunting him and he finds a way to communicate them and he "teaches them two things." I would like to think that this was his way of rebuilding some sort of connection to other people even though it felt like he was talking to spirits and that maybe the two things he taught them have to do with what he has learned from his isolation.

Fiction reading response

      I would like to start off with some general comments which I don't like doing because they tend to lack meaning. The thing I always do when reading is keep in the back of my head is that any story will have deeper meaning as long as you allow it to. For these writings I had to change that mindset. The literal aspect of these stories are on the surface so either insignificant or dull that there has to be an active mindset of creating thought and meaning behind every aspect of the text. The thing that makes these writings art is the provoking of thought that happens from a text that is unusual in comparison to the normal everyday thought process. 

      My favorite writings are the short "Mystery Stories" by Sharon Krinsky because each one of these stories are only about five sentences each yet provoke so much thought. I love cats so "The Talking Cat" grabbed my eye. I noticed that the entire first sentence is "I went to a performance." That sparked off something in my head that said this is a really important fact. A person there is talking about a woman and her cat and the main character meets the woman and the cat after the show and the cat tells the man that they have a very nice rapport. The woman was apparently jealous. This is really thought provoking for me I wonder what implications are there based on the fact that a person was talking about this woman and her cat at a "performance." I wonder maybe if it was a comedy routine and they were a part of a joke, or if it was a poem about them, or maybe he was playing music and just mentioned them in passing. And the stranger getting along with the cat made the woman jealous which I suppose is a normal reaction but it is also strange that the cat shook hands with the main character and talked to him. It is a very interesting writing.

      One of the stories I felt almost touching was "Morning News" by Jerome Stern. The reason why I say that I find it "almost touching" is because initially my mind filled in all the holes with a very romantic touching story but then I reread it and filled in the holes with something dreadful and less touching. To be specific the story is about a man who learns from a doctor that he has some terminal illness but that is only assumed by the reader based on what he says. This story does a wonderful job of leaving out every detail that is not essential for the idea of the story so that the reader will assume the rest. I thought it was touching because I assumed that he must have some sort of normal natural terminal health problem like cancer and he doesn't have long to live and now he has to tell his wife. But when I reread it I realized it could be anything such as liver failure from drug use and the drugs in his body will kill him soon or maybe he has an STD from cheating on his wife and he will die from it and has to explain it to her. However, these details don't change the overall meaning of the story but it is fascinating that an author can leave so much up to the reader.

      I loved the story called "Wallet" by Allen Woodman. I felt like this story was the most anecdotal out of all of the short fiction writings and yet it still managed to be more about the thought provoking aspects than the story itself. It was about an old man that lost his wallet from a pickpocket and decided to plant a decoy wallet in his pocket to set up the pickpocket to steal from the old man again so he can catch him. Once the pickpocket takes the wallet a security guard catches the thief and then finds the wallet to be empty so the old man got in a car with a driver ready for a get away. This is fascinating because the story is simple and quirky but the aspects of this story that the person that got robbed was the one that had a get away driver and had to get away from the security guard which is a huge juxtaposition between him and the actual thief. I also imagine this to be deeper than just a vigilante act and when I think of old men I think of people with a lot of regret in their life and they try to take action to make up for those feelings so in that regard I felt like the thief was ironically becoming the victim of this old man's pent up feeling all his life. I also like that these writings are all short and that my thoughts consist of at least ten times the amount of words than what are written in each story. I believe one word is worth a thousands others!

Response to "Fluorescence" Reading

      This is a book of poems by Jennifer K. Dick, and I have read the first half of the book and my overall reaction is that it seems to be very postmodern. I think that modern poetry strongly relies on old fashion structures with new ideas and that assumption is based on the fact that that is how modern music is. This work is published in 2004 which could be seen as being in a postmodern time period and the works of the poetry are definitely not reliant on old fashioned structures and use structure in very unique ways to possibly create a feeling of passing through time or maybe it wants the reader to fill in the space with their thoughts. I don't believe the spaces are just put in for looks.
      A theme that I noticed in the first half of this book is maybe nervousness, anxiety, or mania. On page four it says "The two violinists are wide-eyed. I can't see myself." Just in the language initially I feel like there is anxiety not to mention it is about an explosion which is a reoccurring theme and this explosion could be causing the anxiety. On page 11 it gives something that constantly repeats that it is going to begin the beginning and it even has some stuttering in it. This makes me think of somebody having a nervous breakdown and trying to find comfort in repeated words and not being able to articulate them-self well. On page 14 it mentions Ophelia who is a character from Shakespeare's Macbeth who had a nervous breakdown.
      Page 37 is really the part that grabs my attention. This is right at the end of the first half of the book and it has been talking about an explosion and has had thematic nervousness in the language and then this part on page 37 comes and really puts a pretty clear perspective on modern American society. The thing that strikes me the most is that every two words in the beginning brings up a huge idea in our society and they are all tied together by things that cause Americans anxiety. I just love reading this paragraph because it brings so many thoughts to my mind from every couple of words. All of these things lead up to the climactic moment where it talks about contemplating suicide and the thoughts that come with it like "would it work?" Then it proceeds to give reasons why any American will get depressed and again each one brings up a whole conversation and there are dozens of them in this poem. It ends with "or because of something no one could explain." And I like this because while it is giving examples it still doesn't exclude anything.
      I feel as though this book was designed for the writer to express her feelings in such a way that when other people read it they get the big picture of her feelings but have many holes to fill with their own feelings based on the spacing of the words where there are a lot of empty pages such as Page 5 that merely has the word "orange." And the abstract nature of the words and their loose connectivity gives this book huge opportunity for rereading and reinterpreting.

Introduction

I am Andy Thompson and I am a classical music composer. I have a passion for writing poetry and short stories and look forward to flexing my creativity by reading new works and making my own.