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| (The cover of the book via the Untextbook) |
I decided to finish the unit that I started earlier this week instead of starting a new one, because I really enjoyed the stories in the last half! This half actually had a lot more stories with animals in them, and they all (or most of them, at least) seemed to be stories about little things that get passed from person to person and then at the end they've become a huge thing and gotten out of hand--until the narrator makes a wry comment, and makes the whole thing seem absurd! This actually occurred to me to be a really good metaphor for the perils of gossip, and that's probably what I would write about if I were writing any more stories this week...but instead I'll just talk about some of the other stories that weren't like the ones I described, because those were pretty good too...
The Language of Animals: I can actually sympathize a lot with the main character from this one, because he goes through 10 years of school far away (although at the end of it his teachers say they don't have any more to teach him, and I doubt that would ever happen for me!) only to go back to his family and find out that the stuff he's learned isn't, in a lot of cases, appreciated. Most people don't appreciate me yammering at them about what I've learned during the semester, or whatever, so a lot of the time what I've learned goes unsaid until someone needs an answer for things, and then I can't help myself and I shout out the answer! So basically what I'm saying is that I would make this story into a modern-day college/grad student story, because I think that would both be very amusing, in a slightly terrifying and true way.
An Incident in Rome: this is what happens when you go underground in Rome! Just kidding, kind of...actually, what I would probably do is set this story in an underground in Rome. Why do I like modern retellings so much? I guess I'll never know...anyway, this story had some potential for both the comic (I read somewhere that having two people who are both really set on their dialectically-opposed goals is one of the best recipes for comedy, and I agree) and the tragic (reading forever is probably hard on your eyes, and being the person that sentenced Jesus to be crucified probably is not the easiest thing, especially when you're being eternally punished for it)....
Source: Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Frederick Crane (1885). Untextbook.
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