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| Photo copyrighted by Robert Birnbaum |
I rub her shoulder, which is next to her foot.
"We loved you," I say.
"Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?" she says. "Why? Why was that?"
"I don't know," I say.
"Show your cock," she says, and dies again.
My past couple of evenings have included watching a couple episodes of Portlandia, a pretty funny, satirical, episodic show with settings that range from a women's bookstore to a cult of organic farmers to the office of the mayor of Portland. I'm going to adopt Alex Guarco's comments on George Saunders here: like Saunders, the show is "simultaneously fucked up, hilarious, realistic, and way-unrealistic"; it's also "fascinating" and "chaotic/sad/depressing." Yet for me, Portlandia is not in any way able to accomplish what George Saunders accomplishes in "Sea Oak" and other stories (please also read the other two in 3x33 to prepare for our discussion tomorrow). Portlandia elicits humorous groans and giggles, but "Sea Oak" actually makes me feel bad. Saunders makes me imagine a world in which raccoons nibble on rusty bikes and we take our kids to a car wash "to look at the last remaining farm." Saunders makes me imagine a world in which my sister and cousin (I have no real sister, but I'm able to imagine one) confuse "optometrist" with "optimist." Saunders makes me imagine a world in which some people get paid to be sex objects and others work meaningless jobs taking phone polls and being Greeter at DrugTown...wait, that last world is not, like, so dissimilar to our own.... Not to knock Portlandia, because it is a great TV show, but it only moves me mildly. It's not that the show is far-fetched, it's that it's cold, whereas Saunders burns with love when you get too close.
Well that was one hell of a ride. What do you even say to a story like this? I don’t want to spend the time talking about how simultaneously fucked up, hilarious, realistic, and way-unrealistic some of its parts were (though they were); or how fascinating “Joysticks” was with its hierarchical ranking system and ritualistic patterns (though it was); or about how chaotic/ sad/ depressing the characters were, especially Bernie (though they all were).
ReplyDeleteI don’t know. I’m struggling to feel confident enough with my understanding of this piece to offer any kind of legitimate commentary. Part of me wants to turn to the last lines of the story, which read “‘Why? Why did that happen?’ Every time I don’t know. And I don’t,” and use them to say that this story was just supposed to be a muddled, nonsensical blur. But I can’t be satisfied with that reading—this story has to be more than just that.
Is Bernie’s character supposed to tell us to “live life to its fullest and do what you want to do,” even if sex is all that you want to do? That hardly counts as a significant interpretation. I’m completely beating around the bush here and am speaking without conviction, because after everything Saunders throws out here, I’m stunned. White flag, Saunders, you win. I need some help with this one.
Wow. That was fucked up. I mean really. I really did not see that coming at all. Like, Alex, I'm not even sure where to begin. After the first few pages the thing I wanted to talk about the most is how the lives of these characters are comically depressing. The whole story is that way. It feels so over the top and exaggerated, yet I still can connect, I'm still along for the ride. Aimee Bender's intro for this story was great, "the reflection, ugly as it may be, inside the wince, is a clarity." I love the shows they watch, "How my child died violently" and "The worst that could happen." It's blatantly making fun of the trash we watch on tv, while also serving as a mirror to these people's lives.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I noticed is that the main character, for the longest time, never speaks. We never really see him in the story, just his thoughts and observations of what's going on around him. He seems completely static in his own life. Even when Freddie is calling him out for "stripping naked" we don't see any sort of response to that, it's like he's not even in the room. I think the first lines we hear him speak don't happen until more than half way through the story when the dead Aunt comes back. I thought the story was one thing, and then it totally just veers off that track. But back to what I was saying, I think finally having the main character speak really emphasizes that turn.
One last thing, I think maybe my favorite part, besides the Aunt's dying-again words being "show your cock," was on page 987. When the main character says "Maybe there's angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered in blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know?" For some reason that really struck me. Am I being bossed around by the angry dead? Maybe. And then those last lines, the ones Alex pointed out, are killer. Isn't that what we're all thinking all the time?
I don't think my post has helped to solve any of Alex's mysteries. I don't think this piece is a "muddled, nonsensical blur," but I also don't really have any answers for deciphering what it does mean.
Up until now, I had some mixed feelings about George Saunders. Not long ago, I picked up a copy of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and read a few pieces, including the titular story. I thought, here’s a guy who is doing some really weird, funny, unconventional stuff in his fiction. And I feel like I should be on his side because I hold a good sense of humor in very high esteem, and often I like things that are wild or out there, anything different as long as it’s still good. However, with those stories, I found that the weirdness was putting a distance between me and the work. I felt that I couldn’t wrap my head around what the rules were for the universe of each story. (Some readers, I imagine, will object here, saying, “But there are no rules, Will.” I refuse to believe that. There are always rules, even if the author didn’t intend them. Every piece has some rules, even if I can’t articulate them and only understand them by feeling. Even if I invent the rules and impose them on the story, the rules still exist.) The worlds of Saunders’s stories had ghosts, gang violence in theme parks, cows with windows in their sides so you can see their organs, etc. I absorbed the weirdness and didn’t feel much except bafflement.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I’m happy to report that “Sea Oak” was the first George Saunders story that I really, really liked. Kim already cited this, but what really won me over was what the characters watched on television. Those made-up shows are so perversely close to real-life “reality” programming that it makes me laugh while I take a hard look at what passes for entertainment—it’s a perfect example of satire. “Sea Oak” has a lot of the qualities that made me want to read more and more of Chuck Palahniuk for a while. (So far I’ve read four of his novels, and I don’t mind saying Fight Club is one of my favorite books and movies.) I’m really wearing my immature side on my sleeve, but the repetition of “show your cock” made me laugh out loud. I cite this example because, like much of Palahniuk’s writing, this story is vulgar, perverse, profane, humorous, satirical, fantastical, and absurd, and it comes to us from a sort of man-child narrator. Palahniuk and Saunders both have American pop culture in their sights so very often. I like when the funeral director says, “Last time I checked this was still American,” and when Ma’s boyfriend says, “It’s the freaking American way.” I love the part about the Stars-n-Flags the family eats, how the mysterious “they” uses sugar and caffeine to make them addictive. But, like Catherine says, this story had more to offer me than absurdist satire and cock jokes. I left the story feeling genuine sympathy for Bernie and the narrator. “Sea Oak” might achieve more sincere emotion, in my mind, than any of Palahniuk’s work, which often errs too far on the side of “fucked up” or “gross-out” to have that effect on the reader.
This was easily one of my favorite things we’ve read. Catherine has said to me previously (I think, I may be totally making this up) that I would particularly enjoy Saunders’ work and she was right (if it was her). In the previous posts people have mentioned how close Saunders’ world is to our own while at the same time being ridiculous. A show like How My Child Died Violently seems ludicrous when reading it but then you remember we live in a society where a POPULAR show was “When Animals Attack” and that was a decade ago. The other night FOX had their 25th anniversary show and I only caught like 5 minutes of it but what I did see was celebrating “When Animals Attack” and “Wildest Police Chases” and Ryan Seacrest talked about those shows like they were his departed relatives. Ryan Seacrest was reminiscing about a simpler time when the family could watch an elk spear a guy in the back. Is Saunders’ reality really different or does he just come up with different titles? Half of “Dateline” episodes could basically be called how my child died violently. I think my favorite of the fake TV was “The Worst that could happen” and it described someone getting hit by a train, knocked into a zoo, and then eaten by wolves. I will remember that image for a while for when I get sad.
ReplyDeleteThe stores names were also dead on. Joysticks, FoodKing, DrugTown, FunTimeZone. Funny, but very real. It was also interesting that he worked in real companies (FedEx in particular because it sounds like a lot of the fake stores. He also mentions JC Penny and Porsche) just to make it even more believable. For all I know I’ve already listed a real store as a fake store and I just don’t realize it. FoodKing has got to be real sometime soon. I also loved the drug laced “Stars ‘n Flags” which I just imagined as shaped cinnamon toast crunch, which is one of my favorite cereals. Now I’m pretty sure there’s coke in my CTC, thanks George Saunders.
I’m a little angry because my gang is also called The Big Scary Dawgz and now we have to change it. We just ordered the jackets.
The main thing I took away from this story is Saunders’ view on America. When Bernie comes back her most pointed piece of advice is to “show your cock”. She was nice and quiet and it left her completely disappointed. She’s advising her family to do whatever it takes, forget the shame, to grab some kind of happiness in life. That kind of philosophy may have been written for our current YouTube generation (now that I look at the name YouTube it seems like Saunders made it up.) Has there ever been a time where so many people are living up to the mantra “show your cock”. Not literally, of course, although there is a lot of internet porn. No, what I mean is my generation is one that will take to the internet with opinions, reviews, essays, pictures of themselves drunk, or high, or naked just for some attention. Just for the chance to be happy or to become rich and famous or preferably all three. Shame is becoming a thing of the past because people don’t want to end up in a shitty duplex with Min and Jade. And why not? Bernie (and many real people like her) did everything “right” and ended up with nothing and without an explanation why. I agree with her zombie’s advice; show your cock. Do what you have to do to take care of yourself and those around you. Everyone should show their cock. I know I will. Not literally. Thought I should make that clear again.
My initial response to George Saunders is just: what the hell. I had a really hard time with these stories. I started off with "Sea Oak" and couldn't get into it until the dinner after the funeral, at which point I could really hear the dialogue for the first time - I thought of my Jersey "white trash" side of the family, the garbled syntax, and I could hear their accents and finally understand everything a little better. And then Bernie came back and I lost it again. The parts of the story with reanimated Bernie were tough for me to read - they were gory, but they were presented flatly. They just were.
ReplyDeleteI was a bit more willing to go along with the fantastical elements of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" but struggled with the story overall because so much information would be packed into long, passing sentences. I felt like I kept missing things, or like their significance would pass right over me. I really liked what was done in the last paragraph of the story in and of itself. Overall, though, I felt like a lot of the story was disjointed, kind of glossed over.
We've talked at various points in class about being able to get away with ridiculous things so long as they're buried in solid writing. I struggled with both the fantastical elements of Saunders' stories and the writing, and therefore it was too much of a combined uphill climb, I think, for me to be able to enjoy them. There were moments that made me laugh, little details that I clung to, but I spent so much time being frustrated at the writing and being thrown off by the events that I couldn't really enjoy the stories.
"Winky" was really strange, too. The first page or so were great. Then the section in Winky's voice really threw me off. It made me uncomfortable, in a strange combination of strong characterization and over-the-top details. The culmination of Neil not being able to go through with his plan was really nicely done, I thought, and not too obvious. But the moments inside both characters' heads made me uncomfortable.
I just - I think I have a low tolerance for ridiculous elements. I can enjoy that kind of thing when "handled well," and for me that means that the writing style itself is something familiar, unobtrusive. I'm only willing to suspend my disbelief so far. Saunders kind of throws both at you at once. I kept wanting to enjoy what I was reading but couldn't. It was frustrating.
It’s been pretty well established this semester that I do not handle bizarre elements in stories very well. My personal writing style is deeply rooted in realistic fiction, and the stories I gravitate to are the ones that feel true to me, with characters I believe could exist in real life. So when I read the first two pages of “Sea Oak,” I was immediately let down. Just in the first paragraph, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around Joysticks and had to read it multiple times before I figured out, oh, they’re in some strip club-restaurant combo and not an airplane. When I’m disoriented by the first paragraph of a story, it’s really hard for me to keep reading.
ReplyDeleteAnd then the aunt dies and comes back as some weird zombie/ghost whose body is falling apart like the bad guy from the cartoon Anastasia movie. I guess maybe this is pointing towards what Alex said about living your life to the fullest, but I’m not sure the narrator does that in the end. I felt bad for Bernie when she died (the first time) because she hadn’t really done anything with her life. Then she came back as this creepily sexual zombie, and I found myself really not liking her, probably because of the absurdity factor. If she hadn’t come back as a zombie, I might’ve been able to care about her, but by the end of the story, I hadn’t gotten attached to any of the characters (except maybe the little kid who’s going to die in September because, you know, that’s sad).
Don’t even get me started on Min and Jade. They drove me crazy. I hated their dialogue and felt like I was getting stupider as I read it. I did like the parts about the strip club, though. The rating scale from Knockout to Stinker was entertaining! I guess I’m just confused about what I’m supposed to get from the story. I didn’t find anything I could apply to my own writing, and none of the characters made me care about them. Sorry this is a super pessimistic post…I guess Saunders just isn’t my guy.
"Touch her neck and see if you can feel that beating thing." Thank you Min for summing up this story for me. "that beating thing" Bernie's heart that continues to beat long after she dies, so that she comes back to look after her family. Despite her anger that leaves her "shaking and swearing" and despite the fact that they are scared and angry about her return she is still looking out for them. She is so self-sacrificing, so much the martyr that she has to come back from the grave to get something for herself, still leaves with nothing. "Some people get everything and I got nothing...Why? Why did that happen?" She let it happen.
ReplyDeleteSome of what I got out of this story is that the world sucks. Nice guys finish last, but with the real truth Aimee Bender talked about in her introduction. This aunt gave everything she had for this family, put on a cheery disposition even when she was demoted from a dead-end job she'd been working for 15 years. There was no karmic justice, no 'what goes around comes around' only a world where a kid has to near strip (and eventually actually strip) to help support a family his own mother seems to have left up to chance.
She doesn't give a shit. She got out and she did it by leaving her kids to her sister (I assumed this, not really sure if they were sisters). In the end they try to do right by Bernie, they try to give her a nice coffin and remember her fondly. Something about this realistic world, this "freaking American way-" where "you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole." It wont let Bernie be. It won't let the narrator be.
He has to strip and degrade himself or risk the money and becoming a "Stinker". Even Bernie gives him shit for not showing his cock. Okay, looking back i realize that most of what I got out of this story is that the world sucks. Maybe it was the quiet narrator, who only really entered the picture to clean up a mess or work, but I felt like there was an acceptance of this shitty world, or at least of the rules of this shitty world that seemed hopeful. That not-quiet-happiness. Rereading my post I sound sad and angry, and I do feel that way, but there is something in this story that makes perfect sense. Maybe it’s Bernie telling me to “show my cock” to do what’s necessary. Or maybe I just don’t want to end up like her, just like the narrator, but at the end of this piece I felt reinvigorated. Like I should go out there and not lay down in my dangerous craphole.
At first when I started reading I was really thrown off by the informality of the narrator’s voice. It was just not something I expected from an anthology that at this point to me feels fairly canonical. So I’ll say I wasn’t really feeling this story at first. Some things were so outlandish and rough-edged that I didn’t know how to react. Like their TV shows.
ReplyDelete“We watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher.” Really, what do you say to that? It’s just ridiculous.
But once Aunt Bernie showed up in the living room I couldn’t put it down. Even though it took a little bit to get to that point, I won’t say I was bored up until then. There was plenty of action going on. I was just kind of stuck in WTF mode. Maybe I just don’t like stories that teeter on the edge of reality and eccentricity. It’s kind of like that tug-of-war I was feeling with Ryan’s workshop story. But Aunt Bernie pulling an Easter on everyone threw any hope left of keeping this story grounded in the real world out the window. And yet, somehow the story didn’t feel any less grounded because of Dead Aunt Bernie pushing her way out the grave.
I made a note of how it was very imitative of the resurrection of Jesus, but not nearly as glorified. True Jesus did give his disciples specific directions to follow the way Aunt Bernie did. Not to mention, they were all huddled in the corner, the same way that the narrator and his family were huddled on the corner of the bed. But I don’t think the bible mentions anything about Jesus’s body decomposing and falling apart piece by piece. And I don’t think he was ranting about all the sex he never got to have. Although maybe that line, “Some people get everything and I got nothing," she says. "Why? Why did that happen?” is something like the “Lord why have you forsaken me?” thing. But I think I might be stretching this metaphor a little too much now.
So yeah, there were a lot of biblical parallels. But from what I’m gathering from his other works, taking such a glorified story as that and dropping it into a trashy lower class neighborhood seems like Saunders’s style to me. And I certainly can appreciate it.
This is in fact inspired by Saunders, although it might seem as not. I want to extend this in the future, so for now it's just the beginning of a short story.
ReplyDelete“This is the end, my only friend, the end.”
So I thought for a while, addiction poor decisions, I thought I’d hit rock bottom. Crack, Shrooms, Heroine, you name it, I did it. The time since I have been healed has given me time to think. I was the reason my life took a downward swing, but I wasn’t the reason my life was turned around. I used to believe the saying, ‘never regret anything, because at one time, that was exactly what you wanted to do.’ I’m not so sure anymore.
The day I met Buddy, was the day everything changed. I had finished high school, didn’t go to college, and lived at home. The drugs were too much on my mom, my dad simply yelled at me. Before I knew what hit me, I was on the streets.
It was Buddy who took me in and helped me heal and alter my destructive ways. I remember my first encounter with the cheerful fellow. He was a short man, kinda chubby with a U of dark brown hair, beginning above one ear, wrapping around his head and ending above his other ear.
“Hey there, sport,” he said. He was wearing dirty, oversized jeans, a torn, French-style dress shirt, with a pair of rainbow suspenders. Frankly, he looked like a clown.
“Go away,” I groaned at Buddy and turned over, pulling my Church World Service blanket over me, tucking it around my neck and shoulders. I had been lying on a green park bench. I was also experiencing withdrawal from more than one substance I had been abusing. At this point, I had no money to fund my destructive habits. I had no interest in conversing with anybody, seeing anybody, and for that matter, even responding to anyone.
“C’mon, son, brighten up a bit,” said Buddy and I finally rolled over to see the odd looking man.
“Fuck off,” I initially said to him, not the kindest of my reactions, but a reaction none the less.
“You’re an addict, I see it in your eyes,” was his speech that followed. I didn’t know what to say, how could I even respond?
“Let’s talk, work out some issues. What-da-ya-say?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but instead I began crying.
I feel like George Saunders is an acquired taste that once you like him you can’t get enough of his works. I don’t know what to say about “Sea Oaks” because although I wanted to read more, it really disturbed me. I guess part of it is how he satirizes the poor and the lazy with over the top characterizations. But mainly I was disturbed because of Bernie. I loved her and the story up to the point when Bernie came back alive. It confused me and completely threw me off, that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to ease into it or not. It took me a while to get into it again because the character was too extreme. It was hard enough as it is to try and understand what the characters were talking about.
ReplyDeleteThis story is very hard to explain in a couple of paragraphs or so because there is so much going on. I felt very intimated by George Saunders because he is able to satirize certain parts of the world and really pull it off. I tried it once and it takes a lot of skill to achieve what Saunders achieved in this story. But I honestly don’t know how he does it. But it is interesting to find the little techniques that he uses to a satire realistic.
One of the main things I had trouble with is the story’s pop culture references and what exactly the narrator’s job is. I understood that it was stripping but I only got that about halfway down the first page. I think the reference that really confused me was Drugtown where Bernie used to work. I have a feeling it is mocking how a lot of people who are poor use drugs but I also think it could be a pharmacy. I had a tough time trying to picture these places. But I guess that was the point of the piece to have really ridiculous places.
I think what is most disturbing about George Saunders is his subject matter which is definitely not for everyone. It both is interesting to me yet is horrifying to me. It is that combination that kept me reading and although there were some gross parts, I like the overall story. If I understood it properly. I think the story was about living life to the fullest and without regrets, which I think is true. I think it is interesting how this story can be an example in Baxter’s essay about happiness. Bernie is a relatively happy person who does nothing wrong in her life and then she dies so that the story doesn’t seem too boring. In fact this story seems to also be a satire of happiness because he brings back Bernie and really turns that happiness around to show what she is really feeling.
Sea Oaks was my introduction to reading George Saunders work and basically to this genre of fiction short story altogether. I enjoyed reading this story a lot more than I originally thought I would. Even though I was not at all prepared for the direction that it took, George Saunders made me believe it unquestionably. Of course the aunt who barely lived her life came back from the dead. Of course she held mystical powers and was crude and bossy and tried to instruct her young family on how to better their lives. In this world that Saunders created, that was all completely plausible.
ReplyDeleteI found Saunders character development kept me very interested as well. Min and Jade seemed to fit so well together as these bickering cousins and irresponsible mothers, where the narrator, who is a male stripper, seems to be extremely calm and thoughtful. This brings up the question of an unreliable narrator, but somehow that element seemed not as important to me as how the family all acted when they were together. Probably the best scene to display their interaction is the lunch that takes place after Aunt Bernie’s funeral. We see Min and Jade, the trashy girls who can’t comprehend the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” let alone act it out. There’s the neglectful Ma and her pretentious boyfriend Freddy, who attempts to pass on meaningful life lessons to people who are dying to pick a fight. Then there’s our narrator, who the audience couldn’t help but feel bad for when he was voted Stinker for the first time at Joysticks.