Exhibiting an understanding of "Slipstream" literature as part of this course requires using three particular stories incorporating subjective selections from the three pieces exemplifying the thesis as follows. These three stories include Jeffrey Ford's "Bright Morning", Benjamin Rosenbloom's "Biographical Notes to a Discourse 'On the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes'", and Howard Waldrop's "The Lions Are Asleep This Night". The following discourse explores and defines a personal and subjective understanding of Slipstream as literature asking the reader to look at the world in a strangely different and often possibly legitimate manner through the eyes of the authors - whether the reader agrees with that perspective, or not.
Jeffery Ford - "Bright Morning"
The assumption the narrator 'is" Jeffery Ford is cleared up within the story because Jeffery Ford becomes the narrator's literary rival. The framework of the story circles around a serious hunt Kafka's story called "Bright Morning". Subjectively, what makes the Ford story Slipstream-esque connects to the manner Ford carries the reader through some memoirs, literary criticism, and autobiographical material with intertwining sidebars creating a bit of folklore. The Slipstream experience moves through the different characters the narrator encounters. Bettleman stands out as pivotal introducing the violet covered Kafka book to the narrator in their youth. The narrator's story culminates clarifying (purely mystical) the enigma of Bettleman according to the perspective of both the author and the narrator respectively. Jeffery writes, "Bettleman was smiling like Toad of Toad Hall Then Bettleman croaked and the bidding resumed" (179). Within this paragraph, those two connective phrases pull the reader into another perspective of the world according to Jeffrey the writer and possibly the "process" his creativity undergoes in writing Slipstream literature.
Benjamin Rosenbloom -"Biographical Notes to a Discourse 'On the Nature of Causality, with Airplanes'"
Howard Waldrop - "The Lions Are Asleep This Night"
Of the three stories presented in this academic dialogue "The Lions Are Asleep This Night" provides a most critical thought provoking "what if" and completely fits the thesis of this exploration as an alternative perspective of history. This is the most entertaining of the stories - because the ability of the author pulling the reader into "his" reality lends what lay in the subjective view that most people want to believe that righteousness rules the endings of the stories of humanity - when rarely it does - or it takes generations. Waldrop's story Slipstreams (used as an adverb) to another African reality never existing as the author writes, "Then the wrath of Mother Africa turned on those Arabs and Egyptians who had helped the White Man in his enslavement of the black' (264). The connection to a different, although historically incorrect, yet satisfying alternative reality, "Now they are all gone as powers from our continent and only carry on the kinds of commerce with us which put all the advantages to Africa" (264).
Concluding thoughts on these three examples of Slipstream literature directs to the common identification how each author - from a purely subjective point of view - makes this reader look at the world in a strangely different with sprinkles of legitimacy through the eyes of the authors when I sometimes agreed with them and sometimes not.
Works Cited
Ford, Jeffrey. "Bright Morning". Feeling Very Strange. 2006 [159-180]
Rosenbloom, Benjamin. "Biographical Notes to a Discourse 'On the Nature of Causality, with
Airplanes'" Feeling Very Strange. 2006. [185-207]
Waldrop, Howard. “The Lions Are Asleep This Night". Feeling Very Strange. 2006. [250-271]
