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.

Kafka's dreamlike qualities

We talked in class about the "dreamlike" nature of Kafka's prose. The similarity, as we discussed, comes from the fact that in The Metamorphoses, at least, everything seems realistic except for one bizarre change, which everyone accepts unquestioningly. This occurs in dreams as well. Now, the transposition of dreams into waking life is what interests me, because Gregor "awakes FROM troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant cockroach." It's made very clear that this is no dream, and yet, the connection between this... incident and the troubled dreams that he had been having during its occurrence is unmistakable. Was he dreaming about becoming a cockroach and being late to work because of it? Sounds like a dream I'd have. So is The Metamorphoses simply a tale about waking up to find that your dream has crossed into the waking world? I think so. Really, the only thing separating this from being a dream, at this point, is the fact that it's stated (not by Gregor, but by the omniscient narrator) that it is not a dream. What makes it not-a-dream? It's an unheimlich doppelganger of reality in which the fantastic is accepted as the ordinary; the only difference is that it's not occurring in someone's head. Of necessity, then, Gregor should be able to interact with the other humans. But the involvement of others, and their cooperation with dream-logic, means that either they're either figments of his imagination (i.e. dream creations) or else possibly fellow not-dreamers or some such. We're told very clearly that this is not a dream, so even when daddy issues come up in a big way (another sign that one is dreaming) we have to assume that the minds of his compatriots have been changed somehow from normal alert human thought processes to reflect a state of mind identical to that of projections of others that we see in dreams.

Food for thought, I guess.

Why Gregor is totally and inarguably definitely a cockroach

First off, let's throw this talk of entomologists right out. Kafka was an insurance clerk, not an entomologist. He did not study bugs for a living or as a hobby. This talk of domed stomachs is all very sketchy anyways, given the lack of detail in the text and the presumed inability of Gregor to view his stomach with any sort of clarity, being, you know, a freaking cockroach with compound eyes and a neck that doesn't bend and good stuff like that.

Now, put yourself in Kafka's place. He was a city boy, life-long. What arthropod lives in urban areas? That's right, cockroaches. Kafka would have had mucho contact with the buggers, but very little with other kinds of beetle-things. Furthermore, cockroaches belong in Kafkaesque narratives because they're mundane and everyday. A giant cockroach fills us with unease and other Kafkaey emotions, but a big shiny beetle with wings and stuff would actually be kind of cool, and at least a little awe-inspiring. Only a cockroach yields the correct vibe of ridiculousness and bleakness. Cockroaches are repulsive and uninspiring, and beetles aren't either.

Gregor the insect, while he's alienated, is also alienated in a very particular way; everyone accepts him as part of their society, even if he doesn't quite fit in. There's nothing of the exotic or extraordinary here.

That Whirring Sound

What's that? Coming from over there? Oh, that's right! It's Hemingway turning over in his grave. Repeatedly. At great speed.

First they label the man a repressed homosexual. True or not, he can't be happy about that one. Then they go and ban bullfighting in Catalonia. I get it, Catalans, you don't like Spain or Spanish culture. You've got a major stick up your collective ass about the whole occupation thing, and that's cool. But did you really have to do a thing like that- and supposedly for the sake of "animal rights" or whatever? Oh, it's fine to castrate them and raise them in factories by their de-balled thousands so that we can process their flanks into steaks and their anuses into Big Macs, but God forbid that we kill them in a spectacle of monumental cultural significance and awe-inspiring grandeur and dignity. I see it, fundamentally, as a triumph of the feminine over the masculine. Those uxorious Catalans have finally made "civilized" the be-all and end-all. Well, to hell with them, and to hell with the rest of the whiny PETA bastards out to sanitize and civilize and feminize every grand and barbaric triumph of humanity. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got about three hours of youtube bullfighting queued up and an excess of aficion.

Jake's Injury

So, Jake's injury. At first, I thought for some reason that he was like, castrated (the funny Italian word would be castrati or whatever) by flying shrapnel. This gave me a whole different perspective on the book.  In fact, the damage appears to be to the actual penis rather than the testes, which really changes things an astonishing amount. When I realized, in class, that this made more sense, I actually said to myself, "Oh! No big deal then." Really, I could almost understand laughing at that injury for a minute there, so great was my relief for Jake.

When Freud talks about castration anxiety, I am confident that he's talking about more than losing the ability to make love- apparently the only thing that Jake lacks. Jake essentially has a bad case of E.D., which is tragic, sure, but nowhere near the worse-than-death sympathetic-thigh-clenching horrendousness of actual castration; it's not simply the loss of ability to grow facial hair, or any of the outward effects, but rather the loss of ability to even be considered a man. However much our attitudes may be culturally influenced, one feels that to lose the hormones we so rely on is to become a different person. Being unable to consummate desire is bad, but the presence of aggression, of a sex drive, is what in many ways defines our characters. I can't imagine my thought processes being the same sans primal urges. You'd be alive, yes, but would it really be you?

So what's the tl;dr? Jake is right to be tough and bluff about his injury. Every time night rolls around, he needs to remind himself that while he's greatly inconvenienced in the women department, some poor sap in the same hospital probably got it two inches lower and, for all intents and purposes, died.

The Hours

There was a lot to this movie, and trying to completely understand it after one relatively half-assed viewing wouldn't work out great. Mostly, I worried away at one aspect of it-- the connection between timelines.

You've got the obvious connections, of course-- Richard's the kid, his mom reads Mrs. Dalloway on the day in question, Clarissa is called Mrs. Dalloway by him, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa's flowers and party-- but it goes a little deeper as well. First of all, the suicide. In the middle story, it's the housewife (it's almost comical how much animosity these artistic types have for the '50s; relative economic stability and public well-being is evidently so boring to write about that ennui-stricken and repressed housewives, artists, and troubled young people hardly ever stop hanging themselves and popping too many pills in various surreal and/or meta settings in modern works about the period). In the first, it's Virginia. In the third, it's Richard. The "visionaries" (Virginia and Richard) go through with it, while the Clarissa characters don't (modern Clarissa goes the "Mrs. Dalloway" route and never shows herself considering it, while Laura the housewife thinks about it and goes back- making Laura a metaphor, not for Clarissa Dalloway as she appears in Mrs. Dalloway, but for the character as it evolved along with the novel-- the character that Virginia is musing over throughout the course of the movie.

Richard is obviously the counterpart to Septimus. The question, then, is where Virginia falls. Is she Mrs. Dalloway or Septimus? In Mrs. Dalloway, I believe that she's Mrs. Dalloway-- after all, she doesn't end up killing herself; she gets through it for another decade or so. In The Hours, however, she's definitely Septimus the visionary/writer, because from a historical perspective we know that she's going to snuff the candle later in life.

Illness as a Result of Shock

So, in the clip/movie/whatever that we watched today, it said that Woolf got sick after she got married, and the English Professor that they were interviewing seemed very sure that her nearly life-threatening illness was the result of shock, which came from her "having to become a sexual person" or some such. Now, I'm no doctor, but the level of matter-of-fact assuredness with which this was said seems out of place to me. Why is it that only literary women from the eighteenth, nineteenth,  and early twentieth centuries are susceptible to these deadly maladies? You can hardly read an Austen novel without some girl taking a walk in the rain and then getting pneumonia, or hearing that her little sister ran off with a scoundrel and then falling deathly ill, and so forth. I'd always chalked it up to Austen's poor understanding of medical science, but apparently it carries over into real life as well. I've never heard of a modern (as in, 21st century) woman falling physically ill because of "shock" or what have you, but for some reason the only time when women from a certain era find themselves sick is when there's a very obvious and recent psychological cause for it. I'm certain that books could be written commenting on what this says about the traditional view of mind and body as more connected, or comparing it to certain Buddhist philosophies, or using it to critique the drug-fixated modern medical establishment, but for some reason, no one but me sees it as in the least odd.

The end of Mrs. Dalloway

In my mind, the ending of Mrs. Dalloway  was the better for its lack of suicide. All deep character-defining characteristics aside, a suicide there would just be too expected. "Ennui-filled housewife commits suicide" is so New Yorker; it's almost a cliché, honestly. You can't build a great novel around such a specific and tired premise. The ending as it stands actually makes us think. The conclusion we arrived at in class-- that is, that the ending is in many ways a celebration of life-- makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm more than a little enamored of Clarissa's Joie de vivre. In class, a couple of people intimated that perhaps Clarissa was supposed to be a superficial character, and that her "deep" thoughts were merely Woolf's way of showing that even the most shallow people think about death and so forth. Nonsense, in my opinion; we're given a number of flashbacks to her having almost tragically "modern" and "deep" conversations with Peter and so forth. She might appear superficial superficially, but she's a smart girl, and this makes the fact that she ends up with such a healthy and positive outlook really nice and quite unexpected.

Septimus's Jump

Septimus finds himself jumping to his death when approached by human nature in the form of Dr. Holmes. We know that he's already threatened to kill himself once, but Woolf never quite gives a reason- insane or otherwise- as to why he wants to end his life. In the end, it seems somehow connected to Holmes's appearance; perhaps he simply doesn't want to face Holmes's gregarious buck-upitude? Or perhaps he doesn't want to be rest-cured? That doesn't square, however, with the feel that we get in earlier references to the suicide he's threatening, because I, at least, got the impression that he was going to kill himself out of some kind of crazy theory- so that he'd arise jesus-style  because "there is no death"? At any rate, it certainly doesn't seem like Septimus is depressed earlier in the novel, because he marvels at such great length about the beauty around him and so forth. He's at a disconnect, certainly, and I could see him killing himself for either reason- so perhaps it's both? Had Holmes not shown up, would Septimus still have jumped at that moment? If he'd been in a more rational state of mind at the time (I, at least, got the impression that he'd already slipped out of the Old-Septimus groove he got into with Rezia for a bit) would he still have chosen to escape human nature?

So Many Words

Mr. Dalloway finds himself, at one point in the novel, incapable of telling Clarissa that he loves her in so many words. The flowers are well-received, and perhaps the message gets across (I don't know how Clarissa manages to miss the connection between flowers and old flames coming back to town, but what the hey). But what's interesting here is how well we can relate to Richard's plight, even today- it's hard to say things in so many words, whether it be "I love you" or "You owe me money" or what have you.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that Richard's cowardice is utterly relatable. He's afraid, not of rejection alone, but merely of voicing his feelings. He can't tell his own wife he loves her? Weak. But it's got to be the most common failing in the world to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in one's hair. What's really terrible about it is that it doesn't happen to everyone- the Admirable Hugh, for instance, probably never has to deal with it. He buys jewelry all the time. His is a relatively simple courage- but not entirely different from that which Septimus possesses during his "Manly" phase. It's just a smaller-scale lack of sensitivity, even if it expresses itself via "I love you"s and so forth. Modern novels love to tell you that true courage is feeling fear and then overcoming it, but in Woolf's day they didn't hold with such nonsense- true courage was when you bloody well did what you set out to do in a bluff, straightforward manner. Sure, Septimus goes a little mad, and Hugh Whitbread is an utterly inadmirable character when you get right down to it, but never is their manliness itself called into question- and given the other male characters present in Mrs. Dalloway (Who wants to be Peter? ... Anyone?), I'm not at all sure that they're the worst options.

Woolf's take on Insanity

One of my favorite things about Mrs. Dalloway thus far has been Septimus' voice. I always love it when great authors write from the viewpoint of a madman, because it often gives them a chance to really cut loose and say things that are far too awesome to be constrained by "grammar" or "sanity." Ask anyone- Rorschach's mutterings of nonsense are the best part of Watchmen.

And Woolf, although most of what I've read so far in Mrs. Dalloway is very restrained, very structured prose, does a fantastic job with Septimus Smith, departing ever-so-slightly from the stately tone that Clarissa brings to the novel and reveling just a bit in a more poetic flow of thoughts. Listen for the difference:

So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right — and she had too — not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably — silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her — perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.


Distinctively Woolf, yes, and undoubtedly great writing, but compare:


Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.


Yes, there's something a little stream-of-consciousness there, and the obvious comparison is to Joyce- but the contemporary whom I'm reminded more forcefully of by that passage is actually H.P. Lovecraft. It might seem ridiculous at first glance- After all, one of them was recognized as a titan of American Literature in her own time, and one was writing for the pulps, when they would have him- but  there is something Lovecraftian about the pieces of brightly-colored, boldly-drawn images that reflect and refract off of Septimus' fractured mind. Everything's very grand ("Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society"), and everything has ancient power and significance, but in an eerie, half-understood book-of-Revelations way. Similes come thick and fast, but with archetypes and weird images, rather than familiar things, acting as the vehicles ("raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure"). The language is straightforward enough, but it's luxurious, as Baker would say; she doesn't take it easy on the adjectives. Lovecraft was paid by the word- what's Woolf's excuse?

On the Indicated Passage

Howie's repulsion is predictable and simple enough; who among us, sitting in such comforting surroundings (milk and cookies, for chrissake) wouldn't find himself adopting an "Accentuate the Positive" view of existence? The question, then, is whether Howie would always- or at least often- give this response. He does seem, as we said in class, quite "well-adjusted" and happy despite his idiosyncrasies, but he also has frustrations and problems- he thinks about quitting his job quite often, apparently, and takes unusual amounts of umbrage at things like hot-air hand-driers. It's not hard to imagine a despondent Howie sitting on the corner of his bed, holding a scratched record or non-stapled bag, wondering if L will ever call him back, shoelaces untied, thinking about just how temporary and devoid of meaning life on earth is.

I don't think, therefore, that Howie's point-of-view or love of the mundane things in life is necessarily a cure for ennui. The passage doesn't have any great meaning to me. It's just an anecdote about how it's hard to be a downer when you're sitting in the sunshine with milk and cookies- Howie thinks a number of times every year, we know, about how happy sunshine makes you- and how viewpoints like Aurelius' seem utterly wrong then. Nothing we didn't already know, nothing about the nature of man, just a funny and clever little digression in a book of funny and clever digressions.