Focusing on Lee Smith

This blog might get dry at times and I'm a big fan of image bookmarking websites. I actually discovered Adam Lowe when I was waiting to get my food ready at a local Quiznos. The Barnes and Nobles near our campus is a great resource for design magazine and you get to read for free. Adam Lowe's illustrations reminds me of Egon Schiele's raw drawings. I love the lifeless muted colors and how you can see the energy with every stroke. His server is down as of now, but definitely check him out here.

I've been reading a lot of short stories on Social Realism. It was mentioned in class once, but the portraits that was taken that period got me interested. “Bubba Stories” by Lee Smith shows the narrator, Charlene, making up a fictional brother named Bubba in order to impress her girlfriends. She hopes to be accepted by her friends since they were very popular in school. The narrator which is Charlene tends to avoid a lot of things in her life such as her family due to her insecurities. Charlene uses Bubba as a decoy to get attention and avoid talking about her family. She already has a mother who has been confined to a mental institution, an uncle with Down syndrome who is referred to as a Mongolian idiot and an Aunt Dee, who wore her yellow hair in a beehive and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. She was a dismal failure in her writing class since her teacher always tells her to write what she knows. But she had no intention of writing a word about her family. Also her lack of self-esteem has led her to have peculiar mishaps in college with the opposite sex and an affair with a married man. Even though she goes through many obstacles, she finally matures at the end of the story.

When I first read this story I felt that the character was very pathetic, but as the story progressed I found myself rooting for her. At times, she would have this sense of self sabotage. At times I feel like I do have these tendencies. I try to hide when some things in my life tends to be too good to be true. This might have to do sometimes with being jaded or having no grounds of complacency. Things would be going fine in Charlene's life, then she ruins it by telling little white lies. Usually the things she does blows up in her face, I admire her innocence and naivete ways. But she always falls victim due to a lack of confidence. The moral of the story for me was about self discovery by embracing failure. Most people always say failure is not an option. I believe you have to fail in order to learn from mistakes. Also it makes you appreciate what is in front of you.