I’ve been keeping a list of phrases that jump out at me:
a farty ditch, grapplewrapped, yolky rug, stewy air, white chocolate throat, melony sun, sour aunt, moon-gray cat, bubonic zits, Russian-secretary glasses, brown-polish-on-black-suede skins, bad doe eyes, superheated flies grandprixed, tail-chasing wail
(in no particular order.)
I really like this about Mitchell’s writing-- he uses such strange descriptions! There are certainly easier, more conventional ways to describe each of these things, but his choices are so eye-catching and perfectly descriptive that they really keep my attention. I think if I were teaching this book I might make a note of that, for the purposes of a writing lesson: the advantages of creative word choice. I think this is a great model for that.
A lot of the food-related descriptors on this list come from around the incident with Dawn Madden on page 85, which I found rather interesting; I’m curious as to whether the white chocolate throat, the melony sun, were meant to foreshadow or lead into the business with the danish somehow.
Also, there’s a lot of sex in this section! Interesting to see how disconnected it seems from all the sexual innuendo that gets flung around in the first chapter. Does Jason make a connection between calling someone a “fat orgasm” and seeing someone have an orgasm? He seems pretty aware of how intensely attracted he is to Dawn, but he generally verbalizes it in strange, indirect ways: “She must use gel. I’d love to gel her gel in for her.” It’s interesting that after his very charged, utterly failed experience with her, he watches Tom Yew and Debbie Crombie having sex and feels “Not proud and not pleased and not like I ever wanted to do that.” There’s a disconnect between feeling and seeing, which I suppose might be why he replied to Dawn the way he did. I couldn’t help but laugh at that. He’s clueless and well-informed at the same time. Paired with all the tension and accusations of homosexuality that fly among the boys, I’m curious to see how all this pans out.
[I know this isn’t the full set of chapters for Monday, I just wanted to break my posts up a bit more so I didn’t forget anything I’d wanted to talk about.]
a farty ditch, grapplewrapped, yolky rug, stewy air, white chocolate throat, melony sun, sour aunt, moon-gray cat, bubonic zits, Russian-secretary glasses, brown-polish-on-black-suede skins, bad doe eyes, superheated flies grandprixed, tail-chasing wail
(in no particular order.)
I really like this about Mitchell’s writing-- he uses such strange descriptions! There are certainly easier, more conventional ways to describe each of these things, but his choices are so eye-catching and perfectly descriptive that they really keep my attention. I think if I were teaching this book I might make a note of that, for the purposes of a writing lesson: the advantages of creative word choice. I think this is a great model for that.
A lot of the food-related descriptors on this list come from around the incident with Dawn Madden on page 85, which I found rather interesting; I’m curious as to whether the white chocolate throat, the melony sun, were meant to foreshadow or lead into the business with the danish somehow.
Also, there’s a lot of sex in this section! Interesting to see how disconnected it seems from all the sexual innuendo that gets flung around in the first chapter. Does Jason make a connection between calling someone a “fat orgasm” and seeing someone have an orgasm? He seems pretty aware of how intensely attracted he is to Dawn, but he generally verbalizes it in strange, indirect ways: “She must use gel. I’d love to gel her gel in for her.” It’s interesting that after his very charged, utterly failed experience with her, he watches Tom Yew and Debbie Crombie having sex and feels “Not proud and not pleased and not like I ever wanted to do that.” There’s a disconnect between feeling and seeing, which I suppose might be why he replied to Dawn the way he did. I couldn’t help but laugh at that. He’s clueless and well-informed at the same time. Paired with all the tension and accusations of homosexuality that fly among the boys, I’m curious to see how all this pans out.
[I know this isn’t the full set of chapters for Monday, I just wanted to break my posts up a bit more so I didn’t forget anything I’d wanted to talk about.]
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