Maybe you can point us to the first sentence you don't understand and we can tell you what they mean (to us).
If many understand the same thing, then she is a good writer. If we all think we understood different things, then you are a good reader.
If many understand the same thing, then she is a good writer. If we all think we understood different things, then you are a good reader.
> the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said
Threw me off. I read the comments first which suggested this was something about changing desires in life. But three days into an interview she wanted she seems to have changed her mind? With no further explanation. I guess we assume she didn't get this job, but it's not clear why she lost her enthusiasm so quickly and months before the rest of this story.
After that there's an explanation of plots in fairy tales that switches jarringly again into another line I'm not totally sure how to interpret about bread. Its also the title, I expect it to be important.
Tying the fairy tale plot lines back to her sons pointless work was interestingly done. But i feel like I missed how it fit into the bigger picture of this article.
> “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me,
This I don't really get how she goes from wheat to needing machete to cut it to questioning why they want a job
> I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory
I didn't get this reference, so I think a lot of the last paragraph was lost on me.
I asked my girlfriend to read it, she really liked it and thought it was well done.
The other paragraph is mind wandering. Her mind goes back to processing hiring process and her loosing it again and again.
But the description of a "beautiful, made-up reason" and the text around it makes it sound like "no" was accurate, which seems really jarring. I couldn't stop thinking about it through the rest of the story, because it confuses the context especially without any more explanation.
Specifically, in this case, the arbitrary and pointless (and impossible?) tasks in the fairytales are related to the arbitrary and pointless interview process. The author wonders what happens to her story when she fails the tasks, just like the characters who fail the tasks and then unceremoniously fall off the narrative map. But she's not a character, she's a real person who goes on living. But that living stops making sense in terms of the narrative that she was following before.
I don't totally get the connection with the bread myself. But part of figurative writing is leaving room for ambiguity and further thought.
Does this have a name? I don't know what to google to read more about it.
It is thoughtfully ambiguous. It's thought provoking in part because it is unclear. You, as the reader, are an active participant in giving it meaning. What makes it "well done" is that many readers succeed in giving it meaning they find insightful or entertaining.
It is fertile soil for your imagination.
> But three days into an interview she wanted she seems to have changed her mind?
There are two time periods in this line at once. "I wish I had said" is talking about what she wishes now that she had said to him at the time. The tip off is the "had said" is referring to the time period in which she responds to the dean and is in past tense, and "I wish" is present.
> After that there's an explanation of plots in fairy tales that switches jarringly again into another line I'm not totally sure how to interpret about bread. Its also the title, I expect it to be important.
"Fuck the bread" is literally something her mother said to her, but also subtextually saying "fuck academia" (and maybe even the more broad "fuck societal standards of success"). This is the chain of associations that builds up the metaphor:
1. In fairytales, the characters are given impossible tasks. <List of examples>
2. In the fairytales, completing these tasks defines their worth. Characters who do not complete the tasks drop out of the story.
3. Getting a job in academia requires her to complete a list of impossible tasks. She cannot complete it.
4. Even basic tasks in society are impossible during the pandemic, like bread making. These basic tasks are part of appearing successful.
5. "Fuck the bread" == fuck 3, fuck 4, define yourself outside of impossible tasks and do not be a bit character in a fairytale.
> This I don't really get how she goes from wheat to needing machete to cut it to questioning why they want a job
Given the rest of the piece talking about how working in academia was a useless task, I think this is about wasting her time on something so frivolous instead of her basic needs (bread?). But that does go against the title. I'm comparatively pretty unsure about this association.
- She's struggling with finding bread, the main task that is defining her at that moment (the writer goes around the idea that on fairy tales the task is what the defines the character, and no fulfillment of task means no character), so she's struggling with the definition of herself too
> “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me,
- For me this means that she wants to get bread and she discovers that for obtaining the wheat you need something to cut it, like a machete. A machete is a tool for cutting, for removing obstacles. And she doesn't have a machete, so she cannot remove those obstacles for the position, like the universities interviews, so she cannot reach the position as she cannot get the bread.
Putting it the other way around: you cannot just beg to the wheat to get the bread, you need a machete. She doesn't have it. She doesn't have what is needed to get the position.
I think the relation is not too obvious and I may be wrong, but I interpret it this way.
But in this case it does seem purposeful, and I'd imagine your analysis is correct.
I call a naked king here: if a text allows different interpretations, its just a bad text, not a smart one.
I learned English first (American), but I don't understand grammar well enough to explain what language rules were broken. I hate when ESL friends ask about this. In Chinese they don't really modify the verb words, they just add other words. Does anyone ever break rules in Spanish for poetry? I don't know.
This author uses present tenses to talk about the past. Is it hopeless or deterministic? I'm curious.
Consider the emotional difference between:
> It is summer, and the ice cream is melting.
> It was summer, and the ice cream melted.
These types of literary choices are a core part of writing prose at an advanced level the same way that camera angles and color palettes are a part of cinematography. Grammar "rules" don't really exist in creative prose, it's ultimately about using words to convey meaning however you can.
The French language even goes as far as to have special grammatical tenses for different literary uses:
This line works for service manuals; but for art, personal interpretation can be an even better outcome than singularity of understanding amongst readers.
If I may be a bit dogmatic, I think literary writing is the polar opposite of technical writing. Technical writing must be as precise and unambiguous as possible so that every reader unerstands the same thing on reading; even if it takes careful, even painstaking reading, even if it takes a large amount of background knowledge to actually be able to understand what is written (think of difficult and convoluted mathematical proofs of theories in obscure sub-fields of which there are very few experts).
Literary writing on the other hand, fails if it invokes the same feelings and images in more than one person. Good literary writing should be different for every reader, so that the relation between the reader and the written piece becomes something unique and personal for every separate reader.
This last point is lost in the way that literature is taught at schools. At school, the teacher reads a passage from some literary work, asks the students for their interpretation, then proceeds to (more or less subtly) teach the "right" interpretation. This is horribly confusing to anyone who really likes reading exactly for the freedom to interpret everything as they like, and to form their own, their very own, emotions and images.
I remember this from high school. We were given reading assignments of books such as "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" or "The Little Prince" and then spent a couple of lectures disucssing them in the format above. For me, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was all about the society of sea birds and other animals. I remember wondering, "how do the seagulls know how an owl's mind works. How about eagles"? But the book was clearly written by an author who had an entirely different idea in mind. And it was taught by a teacher who also had a completely different one, also. But somehow everybody missed the point: we're all sweeping our eyes over the same text, but each one of us is reading a different story. This attempt to shoehorn everyone's mind into boring conformity irked me back then and I rebelled against it, of course.
Anyway, what I'm saying is the OP may be under the spell of the literary teachers who try to tell you, you should always read something specific in literary writing. You shouldn't. If you don't find anything in a piece of writing, then there wasn't anything there for you. Try somewhere else. Somewhere, someone has left something just for you. Probably. If not, oh well. Life goes on.