Seeing as there was no class on Tuesday, I don’t have a prompt to go off of.  In this unique case I will take the liberty to share some of the more pressing matters in my life with all of you.

1.

Thank god Obama won, John McCain was terribly out of touch with reality and the people of the US.  His campaign was shameless and filthy.  I’m also extremely liberal.  Rock on Keith Oberman. 

2. 

My current scrabble rating is 1658, good enough still to compete at nationals, but a far cry from my high of 1819.  I think the problem is my lack of focus, I haven’t studied the dictionary or my word lists in months.  On the other hand, my strategy and defense have been impeccable.  I recently played jutting on a triple word alley with the J on a double letter tile, also making the word ilex horizontally in the triple word alley, for a grand total of 116 points.  Other recent and notable plays include dodgier and zoeae for about a hundred points apiece.

3.

I spoke again with Holden Caufield last night, I think I’m going to use the idea of objective reality and free will for the main platforms of my paper.  The idea of the human condition is so intangible and quicksilver it would be hard to write a nice cohesive paper based on it.  I also plan to use Baudrillard as a main point, his essays are truly incredible and I suggest him to everybody. 

4.

I’ll be going to Pittsburgh this weekend for a juggling festival if anyone wants to come.

5.

I really enjoyed the finish of Cloud Atlas, it was quite an undertaking and his form lived up to the reviews.  It’s kind of scary how insatiably history repeats itself, how there has always been some form of oppressed people nearly everywhere.  I peronally am thinking about running for King.

6.

I’m working a musthird, originally it was a musthalf but I shaved my philtrum, or as I prefer, my philein.  It’s going OK but I think if I were further into my post pubescent years it would come in thicker, possibly even more grand.  Currently it resides on my better side in the form of a molesthird, scrawny and docile.  It feels promising but, as Octobeard was a huge failure, I’m not getting my hopes up just yet. 

7. 

I forgot to move my car last night and got a ticket.  It was so upsetting I reread Uses of Enchantment.  Twice.

8.

The Name of the world is an incredible novel.  Jesus’ son is a masterwork as well.

9.

I can’t decide if I like newcastle or heineken better.  Or why there is a corporate giant in our camelot room, across even from Starbucks.  What the fuck is that all about?  So that when rich parents come through wondering if they should send their kids here, they can recognize these signs.  And god bless Aramark, throwing away millions of calories of food every night, even loaves of unopened bread!  Toilet papering the tree is a little hysterical, do you remember the environmental clubs’ party in the dark, where they handed out glowsticks?  I think we should host a styrofoam peanut party and watch violent television, is nudity still illegal?  If we served beer in the camelot people could observe how to drink responsibly, instead of hiding it away for binge drinking and alcoholism.

10.

I ran into an exgirlfriend this past weekend, who approached me and said, “excuse me, this might sound weird but, ummm…I…ummm…I know you.”  Which was in fact the weirdest thing she could have said, she hasn’t lost a step. 

11.

GO OMABA!

Phone Call to Holden:

For this post I decided to simply record a conversation I recently had with Holden Caufeild.  I called on him after Wednesday’s class to help hash things out about my paper.

Hey Holden it’s Brandon, I was just wondering if you still wanted to get together to help me with my Fate of the Novel Class?

Oh Brandon!  Hey of course, god it’s been years, how have you been?  Are you still with Mary?

I’m good, No, we broke up about a Year ago

Oh, sorry to hear

It’s for the best

Oh

Anyway Holden, So, I need to talk about the fate of the novel, more or less

Well, what did you have in mind.  What do you want to talk about?

I think I’m going to talk about the human condition, how there is something intangible in a novel that has the capacity to change the reader, I’ve kind of split this into three veins of thought.

Sorry, just coughed in your ear…

It’s ok

Go on,

So I think I’m going to try to describe the human condition under three modes, the idea of free will being crippling, that it is a curse and a burden and it is what seperates us from the natural world

Are you going to talk about James and Hobbes and Hume and the like?

Haven’t decided, I don’t particularly want to get into a philosophical rap session

What’s rap

Never mind it came after you, but anyway I’ll look to my peers.  Also, in talking about the human condition, I’ll engage with the idea of objective reality.  That, it of course is impossible and as thinking beings we struggle terribly with that, that without our presence, there is no reality. Do you know?

Of course I know Brandon

Thanks Holden

What else do you have?

Mostly just that, and, that a novel is an instrument of change.  With getting political or Marxist on a broad spectrum of a novel’s impact, that self reflection and appreciation, understanding or gripping even slightly our roles as people can be catalyzed uniquely by the novel.

You know, a lot has already been written on me, well about me, you know?

It’s true

—-long pause—-

I’m not really sure how I’m going to weed through millions of articles on you, about you, and find what I need to describe my own thoughts more clearly and open up my arument for further synthesis and description.

Well, I think you should have a real good grip on your own argument.  I would suggest you read me again, and without worrying too much on what the scholarly floodgates may hold, write down why it’s meant so much to you.  How you think the novel itself is cpapble of encapsulating the human condition and delivering, unlocking it, for the reader.

Wow Holden, I think that’s really going to help get me started

Anytime Brandon

You’re the best

No you’re the best

Oh!  And say hi to Franny for me

Already done, you’ve been on speakerphone

Hi Franny!

Brandon, it’s been so long, I just want you to know, I still love you

Oh Fran

Call me…

I will, but I have to go write a post

Goodluck Brandon!

I love you Brandon!

Thanks Holden…

I love you too Fran…

Consuming Soma…

Cloud Atlas is starting to do funny things.  While I had a lot of faith in the book from pretty early on, it has certainly become more engrossing. 

I especially enjoy, with our impending Palin Presidency (vote), the ideas we’ve seen in the last two chapters about free will, slavery, colonization, culture, and god.  The idea of Sonmi working incredible shifts as a clone and not being able to see natural sunlight is certainly a bold suggestion about our future, even our present situation.  I think a lot of people may read this book, and at this juncture, wonder about our future state of affairs.  In fact though, isn’t this what we see out of corporations like Nike and Coke?  Workers in South America and Korea might as well be the half android emotionally killed labor commodities. 

In Somni, there is a division between the naturally born, and the created units of labor.  Also a myth that the andoid folks have no feelings.  How do you think Neville Isdell or Mark Parker feal about plant workers in South America,  India, or China?  Places today where workers are killed for speaking up about their hazardous drone quality lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbtdvtke3w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl7vDZ-jF8

This chapter represents wonderful social commentary for me, not just a futurisitc and telling device, but as a current social catalyst.  I’m not particularly saying this book is A Brave New World but surely there is as much socio-political motivation in the book as there is for the form of the novel.  The waitress we get an interview from might as well work at a McDonalds, we get her account of how disastrously the corporate world has dealt with its workers.  In Alex’s post her mentions this chapter as being insightful of the distant but not so distant future, I believe it is.  I also think though that this chapter is relavant from the late nineteenth century on in the field of corporate overtakings.  As infantile as they were at the time, the last hundred and some odd years are a drop in the bucket, have drastically changed the quality of life all over the world. 

Staying in touch with out novel, I feel we are looking at different forms of colonization (for lack of a better word), through the eyes of various colonizers/colonized.  And isn’t the diner a colonizing aparatus?  Jameson is right again, the marxist critique is compelled throughout!

I also like the theme of the writer as a strong undercurrent in our novel.  The reversion to story telling being the only viable means left for getting information passed is nice too.  With this in mind though, I kind of wish this book would have started in Medieval times so that the narrative could have started with a scope and come full circle. 

 

Aside-

I’ll bring a cup of coffee (Or cookie. Hey its your choice!) to anyone who knows the word defined below, without the internet of course.

Noun- an unstimulating, low-wage job with few benefits, esp. in a service industry, little or no chance for advancement.

cloudy

So far Cloud Atlas looks promising.

I understand there is a sort of linked history we’ll approach to later define; each chapter will lie on the coattails of the previous novella.  I wonder now though, early in the narratives, if each chapter is a veritable novella (and therefore a self justified story), or if each is simply a precursor/successor, which proliferates on the basis that the novel will justify its means.  Mitchell’s undertaking is certainly full of an assimilating pitfall (scheme?).  His dissociative narrative may infact be unbinding.

In Ghostwritten, Mitchell’s first great work, we have a similar promise of seemingly unrelated narratives, which must tie together an expression of his eclectic literary/political/social ideologies to be successful.  Instead though, Genghis Khan, the history of the physical earth, and the history of modern rock music seem to have very little in common.  Mitchell’s literary trump card (in Cloud Atlas) is a long list of accolades and reviews, the Booker Prize an unfathomable endorsement.

The novel itself seems to be taking off slowly.  I was not as interested in the first chapter as I hoped to be.  But!  This is not to say that I was dissapointed, simply nodding off.  I’ve found myself having to reread page after page to keep any semblance of plot in my mind.  What does this tell for our reading?  Since we have decidedly expressed as our main concern, that a successful novel can be socially/historically merit worthy.

If our novel is not immediately captivating, what kind of anthropolitcal concerns can it address to the masses?  Is this not the concern though, who do you think this novel is written for?  And!  Is that an activist group?  What is the role of the target group, for a novel written to such an esoteric social mob?

If it we did not read further than these two chapters, this represents an exercise in failing social devices.  I willcontinue because of many reasons; this class, a peer review, the Booker Prize, several cover reviews I trust, my knowledge of its goals in plot and structure…

I love the book we’re reading!!!

I.  Complete this sentence: “A novel should make the reader…”  [Use an example---positive or negative---from the Julavits novel.]

1. change majors

2. drink heavily

3. write a letter to their senator

4. get divorced

5. people watch

6. write

7. vote

8. visit the free clinic

9. act like Hunter S.

10. write a blog

Virginia Woolf:

1. I believe that all novels…deal with character, and that it is to express character—not preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.

After reading this I can’t help but think about Fyodor Dostoevsky and his various journeys through the psyche, through the world.  A really great novel to me has nothing to do with the aforementioned fraudulent qualities that ruin literature.  I.E. the British Empire, preachers, Julavits, and singers to name a few.  The greatest novels ever written often have a wonderful simplicity about their depiction of character.  There is no need for example, when reading Heart of Darkness, to pull out my post-colonial kaleidascope and ruin what Conrad wrote.  Indeed I also don’t need it to understand Caliban and his woes.  The greatest power of the novel is it’s ability to transcend things like facts, not bring them to light.  A great novel doesn’t toil in the environment it was written, it examines those inside of it. 

Now of course, this is not to say that setting for example is not important, that there aren’t thousands of aspects, tools rather, importantly weilded in describing the human condition.  In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut says something to the effect of, “[Every great work is about what a bummer it is to be human].”  This is what sets us apart from the rest of the living world–the human condition.  This is what novels are all about. 

Coming back to Woolf’s take on the novel, character is the locus of the human condition.  Character is how we describe each’s own condition.  When thinking about Beloved I am less drawn to the atrocity of slavery as a whole than I am to the atrocity of school teacher singularly.  By using any other lens than character and emotion is to try to regulate a novel.  The power of language is not quantifiable, so why the fuck do we use so much math in our meticulous breakdowns of authors’ works.  There is no need.  The sensation of character is what makes a novel timeless–they have all been written by human beings, about human beings.  

It will not be important in one hundred years for people to read The Old Man and the Sea and look up Joe Dimaggio or even Gregorio Fuentes to grip the power of the book.  It is about the human condition, it is about the character of the young boy who doesn’t leave and its about the character of the old man who wishes for salt and to catch a marlin.  The brilliance in a good novel comes out when at the end, you may put the book down after having looked down into the well of another person’s psyche and thought …I’m alive too, and what a dangerous predicament that is… 

 

 

 

 

The Novel seems to be falling to the wayside in terms of it’s functionality, as a tool of social criticism and change, it’s losing favor to third cinema and even more recently the internet, where everyone is a blog star.  To me this a travesty.  I think of our writer who wishes he could explain he is better than Michael Crighton but runs in circles and fails to be profound.  Where is Gore Vidal today?

The novel is one of the most powerful weapons at our disposal, but we haven’t really fired one in years.  That being said there is almost a sardonic quality in hearing Vidal talk about a nuclear holocaust, famine, and environmental breakdown, all from his seat in 1968.  In Myra we get glimpses of a multitude of our failures as a culture and a democracy.   John Paul Sartre, one of the greatest revolutionaries of all time, claimed fiction was the most far reaching tool of criticism and change.  To me, this is a novel.  It is arresting.

Sorry for the short post I suddenly have to run, more to come tonight.

Brandon

Now that we’ve all read the harbinger of camp sexuality novels, I’m going to try to talk about it like a grown up.  I like to think Vidal had a grand plan for Myra as a social critic.  I think he was too large a political figure, drawing from too many aspects of his own life (and his inherent surroundings) to produce such an odd fiction piece without a message and an agenda.  So what are we to make of Myra as a commentator? 

This is the diary of a transexual female, though castrated and essentially void of sex.  So who does this figure represent in a late 60′s society?  We see her cover every bit of sexual and gender taboo possible.  She describes her (uncle?) Buck Loner as a loving and full of life man, one she will soon possess.  We know she will never be possessed.  We also know this all comes from the peculiar mind of a male, sex changed, and ready for the revolution.  Indeed the novel is littered with short blasts of sharp commentary on politics, war, america, and film.  This is all aside from the largest theme, a sexual umbrella covering rape, sex change, feminism, sexuality, the list goes on and on. 

As someone mentioned in class (forgive me for who), this sexual irrevorance and anything goes–all topics covered approach also makes it a very sexless novel.  By sex being ever present, the focus in some ways shifts to other more pressing issues, like world war two.  To be honest though, I have no idea what Myra reporesents, as a public defender or moderator of her world, and Gore’s world. 

I tried laying out all of the facts in a stenno to try to make simple and clear sense of who or what major character roles may represent.  Sadly though I didn’t get too much out of this.  The great all American boy is terribly raped and changes his sexuality.  Myra is a guy who cannot be possessed by other men, who craves to emasculate/sleep with every person around. 

Sorry if this all was directionless, I want to see this novel as a political satire (given the author and time) but am struggling.  Any thoughts on who people represent?

If Rush Limbaugh and Ru Paul collarborated, they couldn’t touch this novel.

My breasts are perfect

Myra, Myra, Myra…

So where do we begin?  Alex noted that while her narrative is not trustworthy, it may be better classified as unstable.  As we’ve seen thus far she dances back and forth between her vain ramblings, her storyline, and hard observations.  In a way this is an original in gonzo journalism, though laudibly from a fictitious character.

There is great irony in Myra’s righteous goal of displaying the truth, while she is busy exaggerating and whimsically interpreting herself.  Surely Vidal had a lot of fun with this depiction, being smart to entertain and speak both above and below the audience at times.  The framing of the novel is loose and fast, but much of the rhetoric and allusions are hard to follow.  Even for the 1968 audience, a great deal of the satirical commentary came in the way of pot shots aimed at an audience he thought unknowing and simple.  The audience is oddly captivated while reading this, at times they are reading about themselves.  There is great attention given to the workings of cinema, age, sexuality, sex, the self, and reality, to name a few.  So far I rather like this book, Vidal is pretty out of control and the narrative is sharp and poignant.

Vidal was a very peculiar guy, no?  While reading Beloved I marveled at how long the manuscript must have taken.  While reading this I can nearly laugh out loud about what the writing process must have been.  Vidal bragged it took him a month.  I imagine he locked himself into a room and wrote for hours in stalkings smoking cigarettes with a loop of static grade black and white commercials in the background.  I don’t think it’s impossible he secured silicone breasts to himself with electrical tape for best marveling.

Beloved in Modernism

Original Sources:

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited.  Cythia Dobbs, African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998) 563-578

        This article spends a lot of time defining, and redefining (using Morrison among others) what is Modernism.  Using T.S. Eliot as a kind of father for Modernism, Dobbs makes a perimeter of modernism which includes: personal madness, cultural madness, physical identity, and metaphysical identity.  Throughout the article we see modernism as a kind of denial of the suspicious other world (for slaves this is the white bourgeois) where as the later modernism of Pound and Eliot is defined by  radical self identification through recent wars.  The idea of casting the body and the mind against the alternative world, in a harmonial self is the driving citation in Beloved.  We see this with Paul D and his chain gang in their unfied rescue of language, their poetry of speaking without words.  We also see this in Baby Suggs’ clearing sermon.  Where he communication is half her own, half the crowds.  And is also half done in rhetoric, half in non verbals, music and body.  There are recurring ideas about pain.  Pain in the body, outside the body, and leaving the body.  Sethe’s tree certainly stands out in this article as a fulcrum for transforming the violence of remembrance, into something much kinder.  This like many other examples must go through a certain sifting of real vs. corporeal dialogue with itself, its creator. 

Is Morrison Also Among the Prophets?:  “Psychoanalitic” strategies in Beloved.  Lyunolu Osagie.  African American Review. Volume 28, Number 3 (1994).

          Lyunolu deals a lot with the intrerior and exterior of experience and past.  Taking time to examine what has happened, versus what has occured.  The happened is the event inside or affecting someone.  The occured is the objective realm of history.  Again this idea is pitted against the self and the wicked.  Whether this wicked is the community at large, or a version of the self that attacks…the self.  We get a good glimpse of this in Beloved on page 55 when Beloved is wildly drinking water while Sethe pees at the same rate.  Lyunolu points to this as the symbolic birthing of Sethe’s own child, the breaking of her water.  In the end, this is her giving birth to her painful self.  We see Beloved as an oppositional other to all the other characters.  Like we talked about in class, the projecting screen, or as Lewis calls it “a condition” and as Lyunolu calls “the other” quoting Morrison’s own term as well, “just weather” (437).  The thought I take from this is section, as well as an overall regard for the journal in the frame of modernism is Beloved as an account of inner weather.  Told curiously from the inside, and the outside. 

Part II: Secondary Sources

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conciousness. Cambridge: Harvard, 1993.

      Gilroy plays around with Modernism vs. Black modernism in an attempt to help each describe one another.  A true modern paradox.  Beloved  is both the internal struggle of the self, and the internal struggle of the masses as they bought quarrel with their worlds internally. 

Scarry, Elaine.  The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford, 1985.

     This journal examines how the language of Beloved is broken down just as the characters are.  For Morrison to represent the horrific scenes and emotions properly, such a toll must also be taken out on the written words themselves.  A great deal of this article is pits the narrative against the text as they assist and qualify eachother.  Very modern.

Common Names

Eliot

Pound

Whitman

Freud

Faulkner

Questions Asked/Answered

How does the body affect the mind, and other?

How does the story affect the prose?

How do the community and the self interact, both outside and inside the body?

How is modernity defined?

WHat are the real/corporeal ramifications of self evaluation, communal evaluation?

Common Passages

Baby Suggs in the clearing

Paul D with his chain gang

Paul D coming to the house

Paul D banishing Beloved

The opening of the novel

Sethe and her Chokecherry tree

The community at large

Beloved’s several broken narratives

to sixty million? to more?

When I get lost or disgruntled with Morrison over some odd symbolism or metaphor, it goes to the sixty million.  I have come to accept Beloved as the haunting legacy of dead slaves.  Also though, I understand that she is the most acute manifestation of Sethe’s daughter.  So where does this leave me?  Why does Morrison use a young slave murdered by her own mother?  Also, since Beloved is a danger to the whole black community, why is the exorcism lead by one figure?   Toward the end it is Ella who rallies the town to banish  Beloved.  At the same time, she’s pregnant so … to the sixty million…

As the novel comes to a close I’m trying hard to consolidate  Morrison’s powerful stream  of messages.  As Dr. Middleton noted in class, we do have expert training in literature.  While none of it helps me immensely, I’ve had two recurring sensations from my critical theory class while reading Beloved (rememories?).  The first, which is the more fleeting of the two, is Beloved always representing the uncanny.

In Latin, the uncanny comes from  locus suspectus.  I think this is exactly the feel of the character, and even book, Beloved.  The locus can be a physical place, a state of mind, or mean the center/boundary, whole or lack of something.  Suspectus is easy enough anything which raises guard or draws dramatic attention to.  A great example by Freud explaining the uncanny is something everyone can attest to, an uncomfortable look.  This can be mild, or as severe as in a dark alley.  The uncanny here is a fear of the self, a fear of our secret intentions exercised in paranoia and past.

My favorite meaning given to the uncanny though is described by Schelling.  The uncanny is not foreign, on the contrary it is something very near.  To me this is Beloved’s death, this is slavery, this is the sudden mob of townspeople and Denver’s impossible departure.  As Schelling describes, the uncanny is “that which should have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light” (429). This is like the curious cousin who lands on your doorstep.  What are they  doing here?   It’s not uncanny because they are far, instead it is something very retrievable and possibly even dear.  In this way Beloved lands on me like the righteous history books of my elementary school did not.  I think a lot of the power in Beloved comes from a previously unique absence, to now being strangely caddy corner to our own lives.

The second and maybe even more lucid association I’ve been having with Beloved in terms of drawing on old texts is with Jean Baudrillard’s Reversion of History. Unfortunately,  this  could take me pages and  pages to write , and I can’t find  the essay now.  But !  I highly recommend anyone to read this short but brilliant (if not a little too playful with his own ideological musings– Ahh the French) piece on history.  His dismantling of everything linear and exploration into proper change, has a similar feel to Morrison’s lesson from the past as a freedom for the future cause.  I think this novel would certainly live up to his call to arms for a tangential present.