The experience of writing a blog

Well, overall, the experience of writing a blog has been pretty good. I've certainly enjoyed writing a lot of the things I wrote, even if they didn't net me great grades, but even if the structure is a little more formal and the standards a little higher than I initially thought, I've enjoyed the blog because doing unedited writing on whatever I feel like is a great time. I've always been a little pressed for posts, and a little personal responsibility might have helped it be even more fun; I think my parents would be a little astounded if they saw the time of night I posted most of my entries.

Frankly, I'd still much rather this than a written journal, because even if the expectations here are necessarily much harsher, I'd rather write semi-polished things with a keyboard than non-polished things with pencil and paper. It's hard to explain just how much I hate long periods of pencil-writing. My hand starts to hurt and my pencil gets dull and my handwriting gets sloppier and sloppier and terrible things happen.

Milkman's upbringing

So Milkman's presented as almost fatally unsavvy in this latest chapter; he comes into the town, insults all of the poor country folk with his city-slicker shtick, and gets cut up for his trouble. Sheltered upbringing, we're told. He doesn't know how to handle himself. But I'd like to point out that he kind of hulks out here. It takes courage--maybe not the poetic kind of courage that Morrison would like to see, but still courage--to go toe-to-toe with a guy who has a knife like that. I mean, the man does not miss a beat. He straight launches into the fight, and takes his cuts. Sheltered upbringing and all, a little respect is in order here, to Milkman, and also to Morrison for playing it straight; I don't think I've ever seen this dynamic portrayed in a way at once favorable and unfavorable to our outsider protagonist.

An interesting theme which I believe is present in Song of Solomon

We're all smart englishy people, so I don't have to explain to you what an archetype is, nor do I have to explain the importance of archetypes to a complete understanding of the narrative. After all, a number of you spent a great deal of time poring over theories far less concrete and evidenced in text than the one I'm about to present.

Essentially, I'm pretty sure that Hagar, Reba, and Pilate are Morrison's modernization and interpretation of the classic archetype of the three witches or three fates. I'm not going to organize my thoughts in any super-serious way here, but basically:

-The first time we meet them, they're grouped around a cauldron, singing beautifully. Granted, their potion is moonshine, but any literary aficionados will recall similar scenes in any number of works; most famously Macbeth, but also, off the top of my head, The Black Cauldron, all those Discworld books, Sandman, and lord knows what else; reach a little farther from center and you find whatever the Norns or the Fates are in, i.e. everything.

-There are three of them: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. This triple-generational female dealio thingamajiggy (I believe "triple goddess" is the term these days) is a central figure of Wicca (ew ew ew did I just say that like it was a real religion EWWWW) and other witchcrafty traditions, and, according to wikipedia, "it continues to be an influence on feminism,literature, Jungian psychology and literary criticism."


-They're definitely mad occult. Check out Pilate's focus on names, her chats with her dead father, the far-out biblical names, the whole "liberated women living on the edge of town in poverty" thing (which, according to Mr. Butler, is how witchcraft myths started in the first place), and the bag of bones hanging from the ceiling. The free-love attitude towards sex is one often attributed to witches (fun fact: broomsticks are phallic symbols in the context of witchcraft. You will never think of halloween in the same way again).


What do we do with this? What, exactly, does it add to our understanding of their characters? I don't know, man, but I just hit you with some knowledge.

Happy Ending

Mr. Rochester comes back from Jamaica worn down by the tragic insanity of his wife. She then burns his house to the ground, blinding him. He does, however, manage to hook up with Jane Eyre, live in perfect concord, and regain his sight, while generally being happy nestled in the bosom of his mother country. Get at the kid! Much as Rhys might dislike him (I get the feeling that she dislikes most men) she really can't take away the good old happy ending.  Depressing book, overall, but really it was quite uplifting for me, because the only character I really sympathized with--poor put-upon Rochester, tricked into marrying a madwoman and then raped and maligned at length by his rapists--manages, I know, to awake from the seemingly inescapable nightmare that is Jamaica and its aftereffects. It's almost like a Lovecraft story; the monster arises, we get twenty pages about just how existentially horrifying it is, and then it dies. The voodoo from Jamaica seems like it would end all chance at happiness Rochester might have had (I'd bet you anything that Rhys would love to add a smug epilogue about how the guilt over Bertha ate away at him until he died, afraid and alone) but a fine western woman solves all of that in a jiffy. Really life-affirming stuff.

Christophine's Amazing Ju-Ju Luv Magic

This may be slightly tangential. I recall a class discussion nearer the beginning of the year where Mr. Mitchell  gave me the impression that as long as you started with the book and kept it somewhat relevant, you could talk about whatever you wanted on these blog-journals. 

Anyways, I had a conversation about this with Soren a few weeks ago about this in reference to a different work of literature. What, scientifically speaking, is the difference between a "love potion" of the kind that Christophine brews for Antoinette and a date-rape drug? I mean, Antoinette literally lures Rochester into her room, gets him a little drunk, and then slips him something so that she can take advantage of him sexually in his vulnerable state, and so that he'll forget all about it in the morning. If the ads on the MTD bus I take every morning are true, rape is rape even in the context of marriage. We're not offended--and I hate to be the one doing the gender-flip thing, but bear with me--because it's girl-on-guy rape. It's still mad rapey. If a Jamaican dude wasn't getting any from his Brit wife, and he brewed himself up some Roofies, we'd be appalled. 'S essentially the same thing. Rochester ACTS all tough, but he's probably emotionally scarred for life and stuff.

Jean Rhys

I first heard about Wide Sargasso Sea maybe five or six years ago. Some girl from my middle school was reading it, and when she introduced the concept to me, it seemed a little silly. As a rule, I don't hold with "in the same universe as" stories, or unofficial sequels, or what have you. This book, of course is a little different; it has a  lot more class than Peter Pan in Red or The Wheel of Time (yeah, I went there) or whatever. I think that if this book had been written by a new author, I'd be a little puzzled by it, because it's difficult to see why someone would have the arrogance to assume that they could... "add on"? I guess? To a great work of art like Jane Eyre and have their contribution also be great art. It's fanfiction, essentially.

The only way that such a novel could ever be pulled off is by a writer from the Lost Generation who retired to anonymity for forty years and then spent a decade working obsessively on it because of an actual and obvious connection to the part of the novel they were "expanding." Jean Rhys is legit. What can I say? The Mezzanine's goodness was hard to explain, but  not nearly so much as that of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Discursive and Unproductive

The Stranger is not so much a novel as a philosophy textbook. Early on, it seems to have plot and narrative structure, but by the second part, Camus drops all pretense of that, shifts the tone radically, and asks over and over again, in the most unsubtle way he can, the same tired questions about judgment, purpose, morality, etc. Quite frankly, I'm not interested. The book and the criticism surrounding the book embody everything I hate about "philosophy" as such; the book, short as it is, takes very simple questions and attaches an awkward plot to them, and then the critics whip each other up into new heights of pretention, acting as if the book has thousands of pages' worth of hidden meanings in it and as if it took twelve years of useless study to understand what Camus was saying, and making up new words for the half-baked "philosophies" they invent while they're at it.

 Here's what the Stranger says:

1) Absolute morality does not exist

2) Judging the actions of those on a different moral "plane" than us/those with a different system of values is futile and not fundamentally just

3) Life is absurd/purposeless/whatever

4) There's no reason to follow or not follow societal mores

There we go. I just summarized a good two weeks of class discussion. If I missed any significant points, I apologize. A quick anecdote for each of those points would be more than sufficient to communicate the point; after all, these are all questions that a good chunk of the population has asked themselves already and considered in the necessary depth by the age of 15. They've been done. No one discusses these things except stoners and pseudo-intellectual middle schoolers, because we've all been there. The only context in which we see these questions these days is

A) In jokes (the sled or wagon rides in Calvin and Hobbes)

B) From idiots determined to "blow your mind, man"

Camus wrote this in '42. Existentialism/Absurdism, to the best of my understanding, was in its infancy. The idea that there was no purpose to life and that everything was ridiculous was probably new and shiny (although it must have been considered in private by any number of intelligent people who didn't label themselves "philosophers" or whatever). Perhaps it was worth a book to drive the point home. But I don't think that I gained a single thing from reading The Stranger, other than a new source to quote when I want to do pretentious arguments.

A good example of the type of people who "get" this book-

Listen to that. The guy is literally just recounting the scene from Chapter 6 in his best angsty voice while some OK music plays in the background.

He literally says "I'm The Stranger... Killing an arab" like 4 times. But oh, if you were a Cure fan who'd read Camus, wouldn't you be thrilled that you got it? If you didn't get it at first and then went and read The Stranger, wouldn't you appreciate how intellectual the cure was? I mean, look at all the hidden meanings in that song! See, when he says

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I chose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

He's recounting what was explained to us in The Stranger, which is that life being absurd and all, the path you take makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, or even to you, since you don't care about how you live or when you die. How complex! That really did need its own song.