"Greasy Lake"

I thought that Boyle's "Greasy Lake" contained a load of good metaphors. For instance, when the main character is fleeing the man that he knocked out, he swims into a floating dead body, which turns out to be Al, the owner of the parked motorcycle. When this happens, he says, "it gave like a rubber duck, it gave like flesh." This takes us from the initial perception of a 19 year old to the shocking revelation that that is a dead human corpse. Another metaphor in "Greasy Lake" is "I spilled in the grass - in the dark, rank mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet." Water is used as a metaphor for car keys. Spilled refers to the car keys and puddled is used to describe the darkness of the night. Very cool. Two thumbs up for Boyle.

Por que?

I decided to do my blogpost on Diaz's masterpiece. Overall, I enjoyed reading the story, but there were various parts that caused me to lose a little interest. First off, I understand that Diaz was ethnically proud, but all the same, I do not think that the combination of English and Spanish kept the flow. When I read this short story, I was not near a computer or the Spanish dictionary that I normally carry with me when I initially read an unfamiliar short story, so I ended up feeling a little salty every time I read something Spanish and didn't know whether I just missed a significant detail. Next, I was a little confused about the details behind the Puerto Rican woman. I didn't understand why the father was having an affair and telling the children about it. These are children, or ninos, and the father decides to tell them about it? From my understanding of reality, I don't think that children are capable of holding onto a secret like that. It's just unrealistic that a father would tell two children about the affair he is having and not run a high risk of the mother finding out. It is

Good work, Printer.

I think that there are not really significant differences between Beckette’s text version and the video. The text was almost no different from the video. I have watched it three times, one of which I read along with the text. The only big textual difference I noticed was that Printer had a severe issue with saying “get going.” Through the play, he just changed the text from “get going” to “go on”… 4 times. Apparently somebody has an issue with the word get. In fact, I noticed that the word get appears 4 times in the text, and sure enough it’s the 4 times that were removed in the video. I don’t know what to think about that, but I’m at a loss. Apparently Harold Printer has a hard time grasping the notion of rationality. It had a severely adverse impact on my ability to comprehend this play. I’m glad I never paid money to see that video, because sometimes the worst things in life are free. I’m just kidding. I thought it was a good play and really didn’t notice any differences aside from the “get going" and a few insignificant textual altercations.