Mystory Exercise

Seinfeld source: 

1.  The curiously-coiffed Kramer (Michael Richards) rounds up the group as Jerry’s over-the-top imaginative and often-mysterious neighbor, who has no visible means of support and an uncanny knack for opening doors to opportunities he has no business being near.

2. His childhood best friend, George Castanza ( Jason Alexander), could be deemed the quintessential loser; he can never hold a job or keep a romance.. although he has more than enough schemes to make either happen.

3. Seinfeld earned a well-deserved reputation for generating water-cooler conversation with brilliantly spun storylines about Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, oft-repeated conversation snippets… unapologetic glee for a revolving lineup of quirky friends’ relatives, dates and urbanities.

4.  ‘The Contest,’

Vegas

1.  Drove cross-country in a Uhaul truck where the CB wire draped over the seat, shorted out, smoked, reeked.

2.  My dad gave me silver dollars for every hour he gambled; I had 31 by the end of our first weekend there.

3.  There was a sphere suspended from the ceiling of the casino and someone was riding a bike around inside it, upside down, sideways, round and round.  (I don’t know if this is true and yet it is there in the memory nonetheless.)

4.  I bought a wooden heart-shaped box for my father.  On the top there was a black marble held in place by what looked like small gold leaves that clamped around it.  Written on the lid were the words “World’s Greatest Dad.”

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

1.  Highly crafted with use of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as model along w/ her concepts of stream of consciousness, and choice of subject matter: a day, one day, any day, in the life of a woman.

2.  Fractured or rather almost superimposed narratives.  Cunningham takes Woolf’s idea of one day in the life of one woman and morphs it into one day in the life of three women, the same day though experienced in vastly different ways, and taking place in vastly different eras, and yet there is a universality to the experience.

3.  Made into a movie featuring Nicole Kidman w/ a prosthetic nose as Woolf.

4.  Novel quote:

“There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined…. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

Unifier: I deliberately tried to isolate my thinking for each area, meaning I worried about generating links instead of the links generating of themselves.  So, there are several links that cross between two genres but only one that crosses between all three: Odds.  (Contest in Seinfeld, gambling in the narrative, and “against all odds” in the novel.)

I suspect I might’ve screwed this up since I have a word and not an image, but maybe a word is my image since I experience printed words more intimately than I experience most things.  Visually, I suppose I could do this: