I’m currently poring over some rudimentary annotation (mostly just underlining) that I did with a browser extension while we were reading “Overview of ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man'” in Wednesday’s class, and the sheer size of “POWER OF STORIES/IMAGINATIOI [sic]” scrawled in the margin of the final paragraph makes me laugh. It’s a potential that I strongly connect with as a former “professional escapist” through media. I just hesitated to use the term “escape artist” in a word-playing sort of fashion, but I was that too! Interpretation is an art form, 100% !!
My screenshot of the notes I took is slightly cut off, but it looks as though when I wrote the above, it was beside a box I made around Raymond Williams’ quote re: ‘suspending disbelief when interfacing with literature because rationality is limited when it comes to the human experience’, which I obviously agree with. It’s about immersion, about self-inserting and empathizing even when it doesn’t make sense to Make It Make Sense — enjoying reading and writing about reading, that is!
“Expect the magical, take advantage of the miraculous when it arrives at your doorstep”… “The Handsomest Drowned Man” and indulging the fullest extents of creative, if esoteric thought both embody that in spades. That’s why I think this short story was chosen for the course’s first — it’s a good Introduction to Literature- my god I can’t make that the last sentence without acknowledging how corny it is-!
A partly-related to this current subject, personal experience that’s not part of the word count under read more, and hopefully it works! EDIT: it does not seem to work! mayhaps because “read mores” are opened by default when looking at “full posts”. I’ll make a Pastebin link next time, probably.
Remember that English textbook I mentioned in my last post? Well I can’t find it and I’m sad about that, but I’m 90% sure that “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was in it, because where else would I have read the story? (I suppose attached to “The Handsomest Drowned Man” but I mean before this course.)
It colored my first impression of a second “tale for children” by García Márquez — I’ll be honest, I was expecting it to be rather dire, at the level of a sickly-winged old man who can’t speak Latin getting stones thrown at him in a backyard enclosure, and I suppose the initial setting was that sort of desolate! But it didn’t stay that way, which threw me for a loop, made my heart thrum a tune, as it were. Maybe that very old man didn’t fall and hit a tree the moment he wasn’t visible on the horizon. Maybe he was found again, and if not venerated, then at least allowed peace. Perhaps the end of the story isn’t the end of the world..!
Guh, not sure how to end this particular rambling, but I guess since it’s not graded and just something I had to write in order to not pop like a grape, that’s okay.
One thought on “Madelyn Diaz Discussion 2”
Madelyn, feel free to ramble until you pop like a grape. What you wrote in enormous letters in your notes is exactly my reason for assigning this story first: POWER OF STORIES/IMAGINATION!