those three we had to read over the weekend?

i never did a reflection post on them! although... maybe that's 'cuz i didn't really like/get/whatever any of them. MAYBE. or i just slacked. that too.

a good scent from a strange mountain:
this story was... rather interesting. butler ties the smell of sugar on ho's hands throughout the story to weave a semi-consistent motif (if you will) kinda showing the fluidity of time in the narrator's mind. in relation to yearning... hrm. dao (the narrator) yearned for unity in his family while ho yearned for unity in his country. the line that really sticks with me is the very ending, where dao finally realizes that ho came maybe not only to say goodbye, but to understand him as well. dao knew that "you had to understand everything or you would be incomplete forever." i addressed this point in class, but i'm not so sure how well it got across. so... here we go. life is a giant kitchen. everything you come in contact with is one of the smells. dao came in contact with ho. he "got" him for awhile, but after they parted ways, not so much. ho became one of the smells dao no longer understood, and he was incomplete. before dao passed away, ho appeared to try and understand their time apart and their time together, thereby making the ho-smell (um... that didn't come out well) understandable to dao. since he was finally complete, he was able to pass away. but that's my perspective?

robert kennedy saved from drowning:
i personally didn't like this story. i know it shows bits and pieces of the main character through many different situations, but... i think i like a character that is gradually revealed to me (not like this though?). when it's bits and pieces, i have to do the hard work of piecing them together to get the whole picture. like i said before, i'm a big-picture guy, fitting together many little pictures doesn't work so well for me.

fiesta, 1980:
this one, although it was by junot diaz (finally realized i was spelling his name wrong, ops) i liked this one. it wasn't quite as coarse as nilda, and also we saw a return of some of the same characters (i love it when that happens!), letting us see another facet of them. in nilda, we saw rafa as just kind of this dude who got the chicks, was compassionate in his own way, and then... that was it. i felt like i liked the characters better in this short than in nilda. i'm not exactly sure what the main character yearned for... maybe a stronger stomach?