Smooth Talk and The Golden Chariot

The "golden chariot" that Arnold Frined was driving in the story Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?, and the "golden chariot" that Arnold Friend was driving in the movie Smooth Talk usually would not have made me think twice about the color similiarity, but after I had thought about it and then realized that Hati had driven a golden chariot, it made more sense. The golden chariot is a sign of a bad person, or a bad character. The author can talk about the character they are describing, and subtally a person can determine if that person or character is good or evil just by these different linkes to other stories or myths. After makeing that connection I read the story of The Pied Piper of Tucson and in this story Charles Howard Schmid Jr. also known as Smitty, also drove a "golden chariot." Once I read about his car I was sure that he was the evil character in this story. The golden charoits that Arnold Friend drives, and the one that Smitty drive are different of course from the one that Hati drives, but they are similar in many ways.

The main similarity is the color, but the other similarities are about the feeling that the chariot gives off. The feeling like something dangerous and mysterous has just driven up beside you gives you shivers all up and down your back. Connie kind of gets this feeling and so do the girls that were associated with Smitty. That feeling is not just in books and movies, but when a person knows that they are doing something that they shouldn't be doing they also get that feeling. I think that this is one of the major feelings that all of these stories are trying to get across, the feeling that doing something off limits is adventerous.

Just like in this cartoon, Sam knows that serving sharks is off limits, and dangerous, but is feels so good to escape something like that so people do it time and time again.

Where are you Going, Where Have You Been?

In this story I really liked how Joyce Carol Oates made a mental picture of the "BAD GUY." She described him as just kind of a greeser. For example the sterotype bad guy with dark hair and mirror refelcting sunglasses. I couldn't tell from the begining what story this one was retelling, but by the end I could see that it was a retelling of many different stories, for example there is a wicked stepmother part like in Snow White, an evil sister part like in Cinderella, and a big bad wolf part like in The Three Little Pigs. Here is an example of what I picture a wicked stepmother, and the evil sister to look like.

I also liked this story because it is a story about something that your parents tell you not to do everyday while you are growing up, and that is NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS!!! I can't count the number of times that my parents told me this. I was just looking on the web about talking to strangers, and I found these lyrics about talking to strangers that are kind of interesting. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Never%20Talk%20to%20Strangers.

This story also ends with a very vague ending. It gives the reader the chance to think about what happens next, or what else could happen. I think that once Connie gets into the car she beats the crap out of Arnold Friend and his friend Ellie is afraid of what might happen to him so he drives off and leaves Arnold Friend for the police.

Little Red Riding Hood

The story that is called Wolfland By Tanith Lee was very interesting to me because it was so very different than the other Little Red Riding Hood storied. It is on page 624 in the Retellings book, and was written in 1983. By the way that the story started out I thought that it was going to be just like all of the other ones, where the little girl had to go and visit her grandman who lived deep in the woods of the forest just out of town, but by the middle of the story I realized that it was very different than the others. To start out the girl was not going to see her grandma because she was sick, she was going to see her because she wanted to inherit the fortune that her grandmother had. The biggest difference was that when she got to the house the grandmother was still alive and well. With these differences there were also many similarities. I didn't expect the ending to turn out the way that it did, but I am not sure if I am suposed to shair that with the rest of the class in case you haven't read it yet, so I will leave you with this image.

There was also another passage that I really liked. I liked the one on page 652, titled Littel Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. The author of this passage is Roland Dahl. It started out just like the rest, but in the end Red Riding Hood ends up wearing a Wolfskin Coat. This was great because I just thought to myself that "Yes, she is sticking it to the man!" I invision her looking something like this after she skinns the big bad wolf. When I say sticking it to the man, I mean that she shows him who is boss and she doesn't have to take his crap.

browsing the book

While browsing through the book I didn't really get a chance to look at every single page, but I did look at every single picture. I guess that evey picture is worth a thousand words, but to me I really just looked at them to decide if our professor was correct. At first I didn't agree with him that every story is a retelling, but after just looking at the pictures in the book I realized that he was right. For example the picture of the cover for the home alone movies, is a retelling of the painting done my Edvard Munch in 1893 called The Scream.

I also never realized that there were so many different tellings of the same story. I have never been exposed to these different tellings before monday, except for one time when I was really little, and The Little Mermaid had just came out my friend Laura had a different version of the movie than that of the one that I had seen. In her version Arial had blond hair and her mother was alive and part of the movie. In the Disney version Arial had red hair and her mother was dead, or not there. At the time I just thought that my friends' version was stupid, but it probably was just a different retelling of the story that I was used to. I wish know that I would have paid more attention to the different version of the story.