Saturday, February 4, 2012
stealing steak from shannon
i buy a snack size block of cracker barrel cheddar -- good fuckin' american-- cheese, and i'm a student at a university and on some level i want to be physically oppressed... so i try to eat the cheese discreetly, for what reason i don't know (because my neck tingles and someone behind me, someone is seeing me, someone behind me is watching me eat this block of cheese(i'm eating the cheese and it the person behind me sees me.)) come back down i've found this in childhood: shame and eating. yes, it's true, my god the humiliation of the event has power because i have yet to externalize admittance of it, but here it is, i stole some beef! stole some beef off my sister shannon's, my half sister shannon's, who's vietnamese, dinner plate. this is before memory or was buried in my memory but anyway i was young. this story survives because, interrupting conversation, shannon glanced down to see a hand, but, must i say, the hand of a cherub, yes what's called an angel is an angel, forking and reeling in her steak. operation failure. however some other time a sister either molly or shannon found me in the pantry closet with a chicken leg, victorious, fed... my current state of embarrassment is enthralling, my body responds to it with laughter, which translates into a great tool for many other defenses: ha, ya bastard i am laughing, if genuine i win.
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A few interesting stylistic choices here. One is the lack of capitalization. The reason for this is not readily apparent to me. Besides, the probably incorrect one: that it's an imitation of the timidity and shame described by the narrator. Im not a fan of parenthesis. They draw too much attention to themselves in a short piece like this. And the parenthetical here seems like it belongs in the whole of the piece anyways. The whole, also, is difficult to read. Many comma splices. If this was a conscious decision, I cannot assign meaning to it either. Regardless, I like this piece; I only cannot de-code some of what is being related here.
ReplyDeleteI find it truly interesting how you associate eating food with shame and embarrassment. Eating can be associated with shame because it outwardly shows our humanity. How one eats is also addressed here, the manner in which one eats is associated with class and privilege. I found it interesting that the main character broke the social norm and took food away from someone else and also was eating food in an unangelic way. I feel as if the profanity does not add to the piece because it just caught me off guard at the end.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to defend the parenthesis on the grounds that they have a certain zooming-into-consciousness effect that i think is totally necessary for the emotional arc of this particular piece. Though I do agree with Pat about parenthesis in general, I think the intention here is really cool and helps build the cadence that creates the kind of neurotic journey this narrator is taking. then again, perhaps a different kind of punctuation would work as well.
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