Sorry I was inactive during the workshop. In the following sentence there's a certain irony, because the man making this charge sounds himself university-adjacent:
“Yeah, but… well, if we’re talking about gendering1, that’s a surefire way to telegraph that you are a university-educated person.” I could see she wanted to protest, as she was educated at a college, which in Austria is a lot more job-oriented. “Whether it’s true or not.”
This sentence and the following dialogue has something sexual happening in the man and in the woman, but there's no "flesh" of prose around the dialogue, nothing descriptive about their actions or interacting with the surroundings that can convey what is happening on the man-to-woman level, the main character has desires and does she correspond them at all? Is this character by being such a cerebral chatterbox constantly putting himself in the proverbial "friendzone" --this is my impression because by the end of the story he is listening to her fuck another man in the room next door, he is witnessing the orgasms of other people. What does this do to him? Is he a living metaphor of the left being castrated by the cannibal right? If this is the personality of this character then I want to know more about his tragedy. Perhaps it is fine to have him be a constant opinionating-machine, I do not however see how the woman is stimulating or prompting his interactive monologue as she is not so intellectual, so in this case I want to see how the writer can make us more aware of the human foibles or patterns of a man who admires this woman but cannot see what kind of person is in front of him in other to have an interaction that goes beyond the cerebral and the river of opinions. In the sentences like "there's a contest to see who gets fucked in the ass hardest" or when they debate whether we can be the slaves of our desires or not there is finally the window for these real emotions and I want to see where it goes if it is anything. I am sorry if I sound like some kind of dating coach in my feedback and I do not pretend to mastery of such situations but maybe this character is effectively eliciting in me as a reader the urge to want to help him though I am hardly a qualified censei. What I want as a reader is to see some distance so as to get a clear insight in the prose as to this character being in a pathetic situation. Also, I notice you are playing with the violation of some progressive culture war bona fides, but never does it go hard in this direction. No bien-pensant person would be even vaguely offended reading these opinions. That violation almost happens with the group of foreign boys who taunt them to call immigration, but when she responds "what kind of argument is that?" it confuses me: are they telling her to call the immigration because they assume she is local and they are fed up? If she is not a very cerebral person herself (since she went to that Austrian job-vocational school as you explained and is now just flirting with activism) then I do not understand this character's response. Generally the cliché of "Show Don't Tell" applies to other situations, I think here some descriptive summing up of their exchange would work a little better in order to convey what I think you want to convey, her naive question about Hamas being leftist for example says a lot about her, but I don't see why this dialogue has to be completely "live streamed" to us instead of summarized in prose without as many paranthetical marks. In general when I talk to people about politics I try to do the opposite of what the average bienpensant does: I am more interested in knowing why people think what they think, rather than immediately rushing head-first into the wall of what they actually think, since the average person does not necessarily have very interesting opinions on contemporary political forces I want to know how they came to their world-view, what motivates them, who they are, whereas here there is an exchange of ideas between two fairly clever people that is dominating the prose when we want to know what is really going on.
“There’s also, like, nowadays there are people who are just competing about who’s getting fucked in the ass the hardest. Like, everyone wants to be part of some oppressed group!” he said.
“Oh, I get that! Don’t get me wrong, anything that divides the class is completely anathema to me!” she said, as we arrived back home. But he wasn’t feeling too well:
“Say, have you ever gotten, like, *the feeling of asphyxiating*?” he asked me. (Does she want to choke or be choked in sex?)
“Ah, no. You should probably smoke less.”
“No shit. A propos, where are my cigarettes?” she asked.
“Oh right!” he started looking as well.
“Not again! Can’t you just chill?” I was getting annoyed.
“But I need the cigarettes to chill!” she replied.
“Well, the idea is to disentangle the chilling and the cigarettes!”
Sorry I was inactive during the workshop. In the following sentence there's a certain irony, because the man making this charge sounds himself university-adjacent:
“Yeah, but… well, if we’re talking about gendering1, that’s a surefire way to telegraph that you are a university-educated person.” I could see she wanted to protest, as she was educated at a college, which in Austria is a lot more job-oriented. “Whether it’s true or not.”
This sentence and the following dialogue has something sexual happening in the man and in the woman, but there's no "flesh" of prose around the dialogue, nothing descriptive about their actions or interacting with the surroundings that can convey what is happening on the man-to-woman level, the main character has desires and does she correspond them at all? Is this character by being such a cerebral chatterbox constantly putting himself in the proverbial "friendzone" --this is my impression because by the end of the story he is listening to her fuck another man in the room next door, he is witnessing the orgasms of other people. What does this do to him? Is he a living metaphor of the left being castrated by the cannibal right? If this is the personality of this character then I want to know more about his tragedy. Perhaps it is fine to have him be a constant opinionating-machine, I do not however see how the woman is stimulating or prompting his interactive monologue as she is not so intellectual, so in this case I want to see how the writer can make us more aware of the human foibles or patterns of a man who admires this woman but cannot see what kind of person is in front of him in other to have an interaction that goes beyond the cerebral and the river of opinions. In the sentences like "there's a contest to see who gets fucked in the ass hardest" or when they debate whether we can be the slaves of our desires or not there is finally the window for these real emotions and I want to see where it goes if it is anything. I am sorry if I sound like some kind of dating coach in my feedback and I do not pretend to mastery of such situations but maybe this character is effectively eliciting in me as a reader the urge to want to help him though I am hardly a qualified censei. What I want as a reader is to see some distance so as to get a clear insight in the prose as to this character being in a pathetic situation. Also, I notice you are playing with the violation of some progressive culture war bona fides, but never does it go hard in this direction. No bien-pensant person would be even vaguely offended reading these opinions. That violation almost happens with the group of foreign boys who taunt them to call immigration, but when she responds "what kind of argument is that?" it confuses me: are they telling her to call the immigration because they assume she is local and they are fed up? If she is not a very cerebral person herself (since she went to that Austrian job-vocational school as you explained and is now just flirting with activism) then I do not understand this character's response. Generally the cliché of "Show Don't Tell" applies to other situations, I think here some descriptive summing up of their exchange would work a little better in order to convey what I think you want to convey, her naive question about Hamas being leftist for example says a lot about her, but I don't see why this dialogue has to be completely "live streamed" to us instead of summarized in prose without as many paranthetical marks. In general when I talk to people about politics I try to do the opposite of what the average bienpensant does: I am more interested in knowing why people think what they think, rather than immediately rushing head-first into the wall of what they actually think, since the average person does not necessarily have very interesting opinions on contemporary political forces I want to know how they came to their world-view, what motivates them, who they are, whereas here there is an exchange of ideas between two fairly clever people that is dominating the prose when we want to know what is really going on.
“There’s also, like, nowadays there are people who are just competing about who’s getting fucked in the ass the hardest. Like, everyone wants to be part of some oppressed group!” he said.
“Oh, I get that! Don’t get me wrong, anything that divides the class is completely anathema to me!” she said, as we arrived back home. But he wasn’t feeling too well:
“Say, have you ever gotten, like, *the feeling of asphyxiating*?” he asked me. (Does she want to choke or be choked in sex?)
“Ah, no. You should probably smoke less.”
“No shit. A propos, where are my cigarettes?” she asked.
“Oh right!” he started looking as well.
“Not again! Can’t you just chill?” I was getting annoyed.
“But I need the cigarettes to chill!” she replied.
“Well, the idea is to disentangle the chilling and the cigarettes!”
“And why would we want that?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’re slaves to our desires!”
“No, we can master them!”
“Why?”
“For pleasure.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s different.” she replied.
“Also for your health.”