commonplace

a plethora of quotations relevant to our class...


Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.


Zora Neale Hurston

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.


L. Frank Baum

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.


Orson Welles

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.


Flannery O'Connor

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.


Henry James

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.


Vladimir Nabokov

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.


Jim Jarmusch

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake--only his first book was legitimately published.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films--although I think they do have plots--but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.


Ralph Ellison

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.


William Faulkner

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.


and finally...

The Great and Powerful Oz

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

wilted

Today was the first day for presentations, and lo and behold, I was scheduled to perform. For any interested, I've posted my paper in its entirety--concerning Citizen Kane and solving the mystery of Rosebud--below.

(If you're really bored, click here to check out my paper for the other class I'm taking from Dr. Sexson this semester. The class is Biblical Foundations of Literature, and the paper explores possible meanings of the title of Isaac Singer's Nobel prize winning novel, "The Slave.")

Wilted

According to Dr. Sexson, Citizen Kane was the first American movie ever made to begin with the end of the storyline. Orson Welles knew he could get away with such an unusual chronology because viewers of the film would be so intrigued to solve the mystery of Rosebud that they are not too concerned with knowing that—surprise—Mr. Kane’s life ends in, well, death. The joke, however, is on the viewers. At the conclusion of the film, reporter Mr. Thompson can only define the word he has been investigating throughout the entire movie as “a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece” (Welles). The viewer does have a slight advantage over Mr. Thompson—in the scene following this character’s concluding remarks, we see the word “Rosebud” beautifully inscribed on a wooden sled. However, as all good analytical college students (in Dr. Sexson’s American Lit II class, especially) are already painfully aware of, Rosebud is so much more than a sled.

American texts are often infused with themes and symbols of innocence, depicting America at its start. Citizen Kane is no exception. Charles Foster Kane, as evidenced by the original title of this film and by a quote from the myth himself, is an American. Welles throws this statement at us near the very beginning of the film in order to alert us that Kane is to be perceived as the general American. Of course, every American is not born with silver spoons of quite so many karats in their mouths, but America as a whole certainly began as an innocent. Puritans sailed the Atlantic to leave the corrupted ways of their former church and country altogether and begin anew with a clean slate. Without reaching quite so far back in this country’s short history, the years preceding the Great Depression were also considered an innocent time for our nation. These years were the very years that little Charlie Kane built white snowmen and gleefully slid down white, snow-covered hills on his beloved sled.

Young Kane soon meets the banker, and the inexperienced youth seems to recognize in this man all that his innocence resists—an excess of both greed and years, and a serious deficiency in any humor whatsoever. (If Shakespeare had written Citizen Kane, this would have been the character that tells another to turn the music down at some point in the script.) Charles has no patience for misers, so—in the key interaction that enables first-time viewers to recall there being a sled at all when it shows up again in the ending scene—he thrusts the symbol of his childhood innocence into the old man’s stomach.

Though raised by capitalism, Kane manages to maintain a sense of innocence for a while. He launches into the newspaper business because, as he tells his disgusted guardian, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper” (Welles). (It is also worth mentioning that this message was relayed by letter, possibly suggesting that even though Charlie had been raised by greed, his youth remained in tact thanks to his distancing himself from it.) Even in his budding business career, Kane continues to impress with his published “Declaration of Principles,” which he uses to declare his newspaper’s and his own commitment to fairness and honesty—and as viewers, we believe him. But not for long.

If capitalism itself was not enough to corrupt the naïve, the ambition required to succeed in a capitalistic society surely is. Kane hires a staff of men formerly employed by the Chronicle in a bold step to make his own newspaper succeed. We only see these men in two different shots, in both of which they sit stiff-backed in perfect, orderly rows looking very aged and stern. These men know how to sell papers and, more importantly, how to make money. Each of them seems to embody Charlie’s banker guardian all over again, but this time, Charlie is not keeping such men at a distance. After all, he needs to sell newspapers, and these men know how to get that done. Kane’s intentions certainly appear honorable enough; how is the fairness and honesty he pledged going to improve anyone’s lives if they never pick up one of his papers? Still, Leland understands the danger of Charlie’s situation, and he prophesizes that “[the men from the Chronicle] will change Mr. Kane—without his knowing it” (Welles). Kane’s ambition gets the best of him. In one of the simplest and most brilliant scenes of the film, the dark, prophetic, and usually correct Leland demands of Charles, “You still eating?” Kane replies simply, “I’m still hungry” (Welles).

Futile attempts to regain innocence cycle throughout Kane’s life. The banker buys young Charlie a new sled at an apparently loveless Christmas. Charles himself even goes to look at his mother’s things in storage—in his words—“in search of my youth” (Welles). Kane never makes it to Western Manhattan Warehouse, but he does marry the innocent that interrupts his journey. Kane’s second wife is Kane’s attempt to get back to innocence himself for at least the second time, but this girl later appears to have become thoroughly corrupted as she lies in bed delirious after a drug overdose to make her husband’s overbearing ambitions for her stop.

Bernstein’s hypothesis concerning Charles’ dying word rings true; “[Rosebud] was something he lost” (Welles). Kane’s Rosebud parallels Bernstein’s youthful beauty wearing a white dress and holding a white parasol. Rosebud was no sled; Rosebud was beauty, and Rosebud was innocence. But Rosebud—for Charles Foster Kane, and perhaps for America—had bloomed, withered, and died.

Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, and Joseph Cotton. Warner Home Video, 1941.

dead and immortal

Dr. Sexson gave us the deceivingly simple assignment, "Blog page 280 of Lolita." Yeah... there's a lot of stuff crammed into that page. So here we go.

"She and the dog saw me off." Humbert Humbert has been metaphorically referring to himself as Lolita's dog throughout much of this novel, so this sentence is key to show that Lolita has a new dog now, and H.H. officially feels replaced and unnecessary.

"I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent." Has Lo's strange and tragic child hood left her permanently stuck in the attitude of perpetual indifference usually characterized by early teens? Or this really just how she inherently is?

"'One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that [...] some day, any day, you will not come to live with me?'" What? But she's not a nymphet anymore--H.H. just told us that a couple of pages ago. Even though Lo has lost her tan and has grown into a woman, does H.H. actually still love her? Did he ever love her? Or is this one of those instances of an unreliable narrator lying to his reader so that the novel ends on a note that makes us like him? And if he's telling the truth, why no explanation for why he wants to live with Lo despite her growing out of the nymphet stage?

"'No,' she said smiling, 'no.'" Why is Lolita--who is always very honest with her words, facial expressions, etc.--acting so kindly to H.H. here? Shouldn't she hate him for screwing up her childhood or something? Does she actually pity him here? Why can't I get answers when I want them?

"Then I pulled out my automatic--" This part I did not expect to happen, so I'm hoping that means I'm not the "fool reader" that H.H. was referring to. If he was telling the truth throughout the entirety of this chapter, he actually loves Lo, and killing her really would be the last thing on his mind.

"...for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this." Achieving immortality through literature is no new theme; Shakespeare devoted more than one sonnet to this topic. However, Humbert's wanting to make Lolita immortal is one of very few things that this character does to make me almost feel for him. Maybe he actually did end up in love with her? Do I really want to give the creep that much credit?

"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears." I just wanted to include this line in my discussion of this page because I liked it. Leave it to Nabokov to take the tired old rain/tears analogy and make it new, touching, and smart again.

modern child of the night

Normally, when I reference lyrics on this blog, I link to the lyrics on another page. However, these ones are just too perfect--so perfect, in fact, that I inserted page numbers referenced in the book in parenthesis after the lines that reference them.

The band is Elefant. The song is Lolita.

Can you tell me what you're thinking? (284)
I just melt inside your eyes
Kiss me like they do in movies (48)
Modern child of the night (49)

I was watching you for hours
Standing there beside the pool (42)
When you wear those pretty dresses (58)
I forget the girl in you

Run away (245)
Run away

Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more
Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more

Am I wrong for loving Lola?
Am I wrong for what I think?
She is such a wicked child

Painted lips (57)
Dirty knees

Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more
Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more

I hear the devil calling
He's waiting for my move
I shall allow the beater
You are my heart and soul (9)

My Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more
Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more

My Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more
My Lola is on the floor
She's wanting more, she's wanting more


(lyrics borrowed from this webpage)

To listen to the song, click here to go to Elefant's official site and choose "Lolita" from the music player in the upper-right hand corner of your screen.

mooo

(Flying to Germany! See you next week, and happy Thanksgiving!)

and these are my lilies

Dr. Sexson asked us to find an exceptional part of Lolita that strikes us for whatever reason (although he hinted that our reasons should probably have something to do with style.) The hardest part of this assignment, truly, is to narrow it down to just one. So I won't! Below are a few passages I jotted down the page numbers for that I thought were fantastic.

pg. 35, noted for the fantastic metaphor
"...a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down--possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."

pg. 40, noted for how perfectly this line sets up Charlotte's attitude toward Lo
"'That was my Lo,' she said, 'and these are my lilies.'"

pg. 118, noted partly because the H.H./dog metaphor that runs throughout the novel is brilliant, partly because the whole sentence is simply beautiful
"Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on Charlotte's grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door, and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags."

pg. 284, noted because I have not been able to get this line out of my head since I read it for the first time
"...my Lolita remarked: 'You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.'"

End scene.

testing 1, 2, 3

Merry Test #2 Day! (Wishing you all the picture to the left.)

framing butterflies

Today we finished our Stevens podcast and reviewed for our test. Was anyone else taken aback at Dr. Sexson's request that Claire read her Stevens' poem "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" in its entirety? That's the very poem that he forbid her from quoting from aloud in September 21's class, right? Did something change? Or was this strategically saved for the conclusion of our dealings with Mr. Wallace Stevens?

A quick significant aside was Dr. Sexson's mentioning that Lolita should be read as the catching of a butterfly in order to frame it, thus killing it. (Reminds me of a couple of lines from one of my favorite Counting Crows songs.) This should be an interesting read.

One of the questions on the upcoming test is what poem Isaac's father refers to in "The Bear." I thought it was about time to post that poem; I read it in high school and have a bit of a soft spot for it. For the full text, click here.

election day

Happy voting!

podcast

Wow! You know those great ideas that people have in class that are thrown around for a whlie, forgotten about, and eventually disappear? I have to admit, I suspected that our Stevens podcast was fated to end as one of those doomed ideas. I am very glad that I was 100% incorrect.

So, did anyone else think the podcast went incredibly, amazingly, surprisingly well? I thought that was great. Great format--everything moved along at a great pace with no lulls--and great input from those I'm happy to call my peers. Everyone did so well; bravo. Here were a few of my favorite tidbits that I took away from our discussion:

When Stevens addresses anyone in one of his poems with affection, odds are that he's addresses a muse.

Stevens uses the gaity of language to redeem ordinariness and the finality of even death, especially in "The Emperor of Ice-Cream."

"Sunday Morning" asks the question, do we really want perfection? Stevens suggests that the imperfect is our paradise. This claim is evidenced by what we were talking about clear back in September concerning the kind of man typically desired by women in stories. Refresh your memory by clicking here.

Quotidian is the daily routine of things, and Stevens portrays this as a disease.

And--my personal favorite--the word for "heart" is the same word for "dormant volcano" in Spanish.

just like the old man

We were asked to google the lyrics of "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police. View the complete lyrics by clicking here. View the stanza of the lyrics relating to our class by looking below.

Loose talk in the classroom
To hurt they try and try
Strong words in the staffroom
The accusations fly
It's no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov

So the song most often stuck in people's heads is "If I Only Had a Brain," huh? That's tragic. I have a friend that gets the "Here she comes, just a-walkin' down the street" song just about every time he walks down a street. Now that's just funny.

jazzy

Dr. Sexson was kind enough to suggest two term paper topics sufficient for both ENGL 219 and ENGL 211. I have something else in mind for my topic for my Biblical Foundations paper, but making connections between Invisible Man and the Bible as a whole would make for a pretty interesting paper. Concerning the whole incident with Jim Trueblood... can anybody say Lot and his daughters?

We also talked about how Invisible Man is a series of literary improvisations based on jazz improvisations. This is a concept more abstract than what I usually prefer (can you imagine writing a paper to prove a concept like that?), but at the same time, it makes sense. How else would one describe the stream of consciousness segments, the drastic changes in style (even within the same chapter), and the poetic language dispersed throughout the entire novel? I like the advice given in class, "Don't try to understand this novel; experience it."

blake abducts blake

Dr. Sexson asked us to reproduce an example of flyting from our personal lives... and if I could remember one well enough to transcribe it here, I absolutely would! But if you want an very amusing cinematic example, go to the brilliant Martin Scorsese film currently in theaters, The Departed. There's a fantastically entertaining exchange between Mark Walberg and Alec Baldwin's character. (It may actually be the only time those two characters talk to each other in the entire script, so it's pretty hard to miss.) Disclaimer: if excessive violence and language isn't your cup of tea, this movie isn't either. Great performances, though.

I love the idea of Stockholm Syndrome brought up by Valerie's "Dead Man" presentation today. If you're willing to go along with saying that Johnny Depp's character was abducted by the poet William Blake, "Bill Blake" most certainly identified with his captor. (Given the line, "Have you read my poetry?", I'd say this was a fairly literal identification.)

the initiation of william blake

In conjunction with our extensive (and rather grotesque--anyone for a "blood cake"?) discussion of primal initiations today, Dr. Sexson asked if Johnny Depp's character's initiation was a complete, successful one. My first thought was, "Does it matter?" It strikes me as way more important that his initiation was a *positive* one than one that was completed. And, in Depp's case, I'm just not sure that's the case. He went from the leader of a quiet life back East to a dying murderer running from hitmen and the law out West. It would be easy to assume that he never really lived in his previous life in Cleveland, but we know nothing about Blake's life before the train.

Anyway, back to Sexson's original question, what exactly is Blake being initiated into? Turning into the poet William Blake? Guess I'm with Ebert on this movie. I just don't get it. Bill Blake did seem to undergo some sort of change concerning imagination. He was very literal at the beginning of the movie. When Thel asks what her paper rose smells like, he replies, "Paper." By the middle of the movie, he's making purely symbolic gestures like painting his body with the blood of a dead fawn. Is that the initiation we were talking about?

We also talked about Invisible Man and an analogy I do understand. In the last sentence of the prologue of the novel, the unnamed narrator tells us, "Bear with me." I love the metaphor of this narrator as a bear in hibernation. Of course, this also implies that he's going to emerge from his cave at some point, and--in the pages of the novel, anyway--we never see that happen. This is the incomplete heroic cycle that Dr. Sexson discussed; he was born, he went on his journey, he descended... why hasn't he come back up?

I do find it odd that we always discuss the Prologue of Invisible Man in class, but we seem to ignore most of what's said in the Epilogue. Yes, the heroic cycle is incomplete at the conclusion of Chapter 25, but the narrator tells us point-blank that he's coming out of hibernation on the last page of the Epilogue. If this book was a Hollywood film that made some money in theaters, I bet we could expect an Invisible Man 2...

indistinct

We were asked to Wiki the following terms, so click on any of them to go to the corresponding Wiki pages:

initiation
William Faulkner
Ralph Ellison
Bildungsroman
Dead Man

Someone objected to the subtitles in Dead Man simply reading "Dialect" when Nobody was speaking in the film. Due to my take on the purpose of subtitles, I didn't find this offensive. Though subtitles are handy to flip on whenever you can't understand what someone is saying, I've always thought they really just exist for the hearing impaired. I guess I've always thought that they're not supposed to give you any more information than what you would get from the movie if it wasn't on mute. (To me, this is the same theory behind the subtitles displaying "Indistinct" when the talkative hitman was mumbling something that the audience couldn't understand.) Since the average person isn't going to know anything more specific than that Nobody is speaking in a Native American dialect, I don't find it offensive at all that that's also all the info the subtitles provide.

Also in the course of our class discussion-fueled talk about Dead Man, someone asked why the script called for Cole stepping on the head of a corpse and having it split down the middle when this so obviously defied reality. I think the explanation that this was to illustrate to the audience that we're not dealing with realism is a feasible one, but I also think this may have been to reveal something more about Cole's character. Cole complains that how the body has fallen looks "religious." We seem to get the idea that even Depp's character's murders are beautiful, and more specifically, poetic. Cole is the foil to beauty and poetry. Cole is the guy that will kill you and knaw on the flesh of your arm in the next scene. Cole objects to anything beautiful, so it fits his nature to decimate a body that's lying a bit too prettily for his taste. (Cole is also portrayed as the ultimate villain in this movie, so adding "decimation of dead bodies" to the his list of taboo sins already including rape, incest, and cannibalism isn't too surprising of a choice for Dead Man's pretty over-the-top writer/director.)

Dr. Sexson also briefly mentioned Roger Ebert's review of this movie. I'm a big Ebert fan, so if you'd like to check out his complete Dead Man review, click here. I think it's a good one.

odysseus meets dante

I rented Dead Man to watch in its entirety today. Did the guitar annoy anyone else? All right, you got Neil Young to do the music for your movie--that's great. Do you have to make the guitar infinetly louder than the dialogue?

I did think Johnny Depp did well, as usual. The movie seemed to want to portray his character as some sort of cross between Odysseus (note his meeting the character--and punning the character's name--"Nobody") and Dante (a sort of journey through the Underworld.) And if Dante's guide was the poet Virgil, William Blake's guide was the poet of the same name.

Nobody (the character) seems to take pity on Depp's character because he can relate to being far away from home in a strange land. The actor that played Nobody was fantastic, and oddly enough, I just saw him in another movie shortly after watching this one. (I just remembered that movie was titled "The Score," if anyone cares.)

Overall, I didn't love this movie, and I felt like I was missing out on a lot of inside jokes (jokes? Is that the right word?) due to not being intimately familiar with the poetry and life of William Blake. Anyway, those were my initial impressions of Dead Man. More to come, I'm sure.

white noise

We talked about synethesia today. If you're interested in the neurological condition of this name, check out Wiki's article (linked in the previous sentence) for lots of info.

As far as synesthesia in lit goes, however, I learned about this phenomenon for the first time in my first year of college at Billings, and one of the examples my professor gave was the cliche pictured to your left (not to mention, featured as the title of this blog entry.) I consulted Wikipedia for more literary examples, and you can follow the link to check them out yourself if interested. Note the two books Wiki listed from our very own Vladimir Nabokov for your reading pleasure.

=)

Merry Test #1 Day!

prologues to what is possible

Disclaimer: This is far-fetched. That's what Dr. Sexson wants, right?

The first part of "Prologues to What is Possible" is an elaborate metaphor that builds on itself more and more until any sane reader is no longer able to make any sense of the point that the metaphor was originally trying to make. The topic of this out-of-control analogy results in a man in a boat. The kicker, however, is that Part One's metaphor does not begin with the reality of a man; it begins with the reality of "an ease of mind." (As an aside, the "ease of mind" described is ironic, since the metaphor eventually spins out of control to the point of stirring fear in the poem's main character.) Only after the author's imagination creates a hypothetical boat carrying hypothetical rowers pulling hypothetical oars through a hypothetical sea is there any mention of this "he" standing in the imaginary boat. Still, "he" is just as real as the "ease of mind" the metaphor started out describing, while the boat, rowers, and sea all seem to be figments of the author's imagination. (Note the line, "As he traveled alone.")

Why should this guy be any more real than the boat or the sea? Note Stevens' theme in "The Idea of Order at Key West" of creation by the spoken word. According to Dr. Sexson, that poem is a secular version of the first Creation story in Genesis. Perhaps Stevens is following a Biblical pattern here once again by not only creating this man, boat, etc. simply by writing them into his imagined metaphor, but also by giving the man created more value than Stevens' other "creations"--thus, letting the man continue in the poem as a part of reality and restricting the oars, rowers, etc. to remaining as figments of the imagination.

Part Two of "Prologues" addresses the whole point of Part One's metaphor, as well as the theme of the poem itself--self-discovery using only the tool of one's own imagination. The key lines in this poem are featured in the last stanza:

The way some first thing coming into Northern trees
Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South

The man in this poem is wonders "What self [...] did he contain that had not yet been loosed." He knows there is more to himself than he will ever be able to understand thinking only in terms of the literal. This is where adding the vocabulary of the South (stevens' setting symbolizing the imagination) comes in. He can only discover who he is by applying his imagination to himself. After all, he was created by the word in the first place. He now must use creative, imaginative word constructs (like the similes and metaphors from Part One) to assuage "his fear" mentioned at the start of Part Two--the fear of not completely understanding who exactly he is.

***

I know, there's something still flawed about my logic in that last paragraph. The "meaning" of this poem is still successfully evading me. If anyone has any tips on this text, feel free to throw them my way.

the snow man

Class was mostly test review today, but there were two points definitely worth blogging. The first is not mine (though I wish I had come up with it!), but one of my fellow bloggers'.

1) The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Seriously, how could I have never figured this out?

2) The title of Stevens' poem about winter is not "The Snowman," but "The Snow Man." This may seem insignificant out of context, but this seems to be Stevens' way of telling his reader that this poem is not about three balls of packed snow stacked on top of one another but serves as a metaphor for the man with the "mind of winter." This strikes me as ironic; even though Stevens is writing about the total absence of imagination, he's still using a metaphor (that which requires imagination to understand) to do it. By no means am I holding that against him; this is a brilliant move on Stevens' part to remind of the necessity of imagination, even in deconstructing one's vision until you're able to see truly nothing ("The Snow Man") or to see what's truly there--and nothing else ("Study of Two Pears.")

so much depends on...

The last name of the creator of The Wizard of Oz is Baum. Baum means "tree" in German. The last name of the creator of this blog entry is Strauch. Strauch means "shrub" in German. What are the odds? One in... well... you know the rest.

We were instructed to wiki a whole bunch of terms for Tuesday, so I'll blog the links to them here:

Henry James
Flannery O'Connor
Wallace Stevens
Zora Neale Hurston
Citizen Kane
The Wizard of Oz (film version)

We were supposed to look up "redemption" and "grace" for our blogs too, so check out some findings below.

redemption
dictionary definition
Wikipedia page
relevant quote from Bible

grace
dictionary definition
Wikipedia page
relevant quote from Bible

I was also very interested in the two imagist poems mentioned in class today. Check both of them out on one site (they're the first two listed) by clicking here.

dark side of the...

As a Lit major, I should be ashamed to say that today was the first day I had ever heard the story of Kublah Khan. I was extremely glad to hear it because, once again, it explained a reference in one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, according to Wikipedia. In the Seinfeld episode "The Voice," Jerry refers to George's private restroom at Play Now as "Xanadu."

In today's lecture, we also discussed page xvii of Mules and Men. The book's author tells us, "It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment." Dr. Sexson interpreted this passage as Hurston saying that she only understood her roots once she went to college and talked about them. And actually now that I look at the sentence following the one I quoted above ("Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that"), I can see how that is definitely part of it. I interpreted the first part of this passage differently, though; to me, she's saying that you don't really know who you are until you're surrounded by that which you're not. And I agree.

Finally, the quote of the day from today's class--concerning Pink Floyd, The Wizard of Oz, and... well... the title of my entire blog for this class--is:

"It's creepy if it's coincidental, and it's even creepier if it's not."

Good times.

similes à la o'connor

Dr. Sexson asked us to find five grotesque similes from Wise Blood. (As it turns out, that's not too tough of a task to accomplish.) Here are a few I stumbled across:

(pg. 18) "The knobs framed her face like dark toadstools."

(pg. 19) "In him half-sleep he thought where he was lying was like a coffin."

(pg. 60) "Mrs. Watt's grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle."

(pg. 68) "His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded."

(pg. 68) "The sky was like a piece of this polished silver with a dark sour-looking sun in one corner of it."

come see the softer side of stevens

The easiest way for a professor to get me to check something out is to proclaim his or her disgust for it. That said, I was very interested to look up Stevens' "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"--the one poem of Stevens that Dr. Sexson says we were not allowed to quote from today. So... why that one? The only thing I can figure is how overtly sappy the poem is compared to the rest of Stevens' works. From what I gather from the poems we've focused on in class so far, Stevens is one of the few poets that does not constantly deal with the topic of love in the conventional sense. In the last stanza of this poem, however, maybe he is:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Maybe Stevens really does have a heart! (Just kidding.)

Dr. Sexson also mentioned a poem in class that we do seem to be allowed to talk about. And I love it. Click here to view the complete text of what has truly become one of my favorite poems.

Our class discussion also came around to one of my favorite topics to discuss--music. Though I'm usually a fan of songs thanks to their lyrics, today's discussion centered on songs we like based solely on the way that they sound, ignoring lyrics. For songs that just sound great, regardless of lyrics, I recommend anything by the band Cake. Catchy as heck.

Finally, the question was asked if we have ever experienced a work of art that, once we turned away from it, the world changes for us. Excuse the shallow example, but after experiencing "Being John Malkovich" for the first time, I'll never be able to watch that actor in any role in the same way again.

I think this concept applies even more powerfully to children, probably due simply to their greater impressionability. You'll rarely, for example, see a kid willingly go fishing with Grandpa the day after watching Finding Nemo.

technicolor kansas

All right, I'll admit it. Unless I completely erased watching this film in my early childhood from my memory, I had never seen it before this semester. And I call myself a movie buff...

One of the most striking things I noticed on my first time through was how many lines and songs I already knew even without ever seeing it before. The Wizard of Oz truly remains iconic in American culture today.


Scene: Black and white. Little girl runs around her farm complaining to everyone she meets about problems between her witchy neighbor and her dog, but they're busy with chores and cannot give her all of the attention she's after. Girl's dog is taken away from her. Welcome to the state of Kansas.

Scene: Color. Little girl is hailed by everyone she meets as a hero, and she gets even more attention than she needs for taking care of a problem dealing with a witch. Girl's dog is by her side the whole time. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Clearly, Kansas is the way that Dorothy's world works, but Oz appears to be how Dorothy's world *should* work. Dorothy needed a little color in her life, a little attention, and a few less problems. At first, Oz produced all three of these necessities instantaneously. Not only that, but there seems to be a poetic justice present in Oz that is unknown to Kansas--the KS trickster figure is never found out (Dorothy never does discover that the crystal ball is nothing magical at all), but the Wizard is certainly found out in Oz. Heck, Oz even features random people on the street singing songs that rhyme--apparently invented on the spot--in perfect unison.

Regardless, just before leaving Oz, Dorothy proclaims, "this place could never be like Kansas." The problem with Oz is that Oz itself does all the imagining needed *for* you. In Oz, a horse of a different color is literally a horse that changes colors. Oz has to room for metaphors that don't take on literal form. You don't need an imagination of your own in Oz; there's simply no place for it.

Oz does serve a purpose for our heroin, however. The imagination inherently present around every corner in Oz rubs off on Dorothy, and this setting awakens the imagination lying dormant inside her. Kansas could have been filmed in color at the end because Dorothy has now learned how to see Kansas as just as colorful a place as Oz. As a matter of fact, the magic of Kansas is superior to the magic of Oz because it requires the exercizing and the excitement of Dorothy's imagination.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, this movie seems to value the brain over courage and--surprisingly--the heart. Not only does Dorothy tell the scarecrow (proud owner of the brain), "I think I'll miss you most of all," the former phony Wizard of Oz puts the scarecrow in charge when he leaves Oz... to be assisted by the Lion and the Tinman. Makes you wonder why this movie was dedicated to "the Young in Heart," don't it?

mythic orphans

Sometimes, when someone brings to my attention a pattern in lit that I've never picked up on before, I am reminded how blind I actually can be. Class today served as one such reminder for me in our discussion of orphans in lit. Dr. Sexson suggested that the presence of orphans often suggests that you're dealing with the mythic realm. Of course! The Wizard of Oz's Dorothy, Oliver Twist, Citizen Kane--Harry Potter, for goodness sakes!

We also discussed how the fiction's ideal male character is not really ideal at all. If you get someone too perfect without any flaws, the heroin of the story will no longer be interested. As a mostly-former patron of bad chick flicks, I can attest to this pattern continuing in mainstream contemporary romantic comedies. Basic premise: girl engaged to goody-two-shoes Guy #1. Guy #2--the guy with a bit of an edge to his personality--wins girl back. Girl breaks initial engagement. Girl marries Guy #2. See "The Notebook," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Liar Liar," etc. Okay, "Liar Liar" isn't typically classified as a romantic comedy, but it fits the pattern.

I'll end with a qualm I have about our discussion of The Wizard of Oz. In my opinion, this movie is not gnostic propaganda. The fact that Baum, the writer of the script, was a theosophist is a convenient fact for someone championing the gnostic interpretation of this movie to bring up, but this fact was also already dismissed a few class sessions ago when we were instructed, "Trust the tale, not the teller." Isn't it rather unfair to use evidence concerning the intent of the author when it's convenient to an argument while calling this same concept a fallacy otherwise? Regardless, I'll admit that my objections to this really stem from my refusing to believe that the wizard in the film wanted to be caught. I just don't see enough evidence within the film to support that. Call me a subscriber to the literary criticism type of the formalist flavor because, well, I often am. =)

stockholm

Funniest sexist remarks I've heard recently:

1. from today's lecture:
"Women have three great qualities: weaving, weeping, and lying."
- Geoffrey Chaucer

2. from As Good As It Gets:
in response to the question, "How do you write women so well?"
"I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability."
- Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson

Today, I was very excited to finally learn what Stockholm Syndome is. For any Blink-182 fans--assuming I'm not the only one--this band actually titled one of their songs "Stockholm Syndome." I never thought about the title before taking this class, but I was pretty psyched to find out what it meant in lecture today because the song's lyrics have now suddenly taken on a far more poignant meaning. What a great title for a twisted story of love gone wrong. If you're interested, check out complete lyrics here.

claus, wonka, wayne

Class began with a list of names on the board. Dr. Sexson asked us what all of these people had in common. With names like Santa Claus, Willy Wonka, Bruce Wayne, and Charles Foster Kane, I concluded the only requirements were fictional, male, and eccentric. Unfortunately, the presence of Cruella Deville threw a wrench in my thought process.

Actually, this group was a sample of Forbes magazine's "Fifteen Richest People in the World." (I highly recommend following that hyperlink; the article is pretty amusing.) I did find it interesting, though, that 95% of the characters included in this list are either portrayed as completely insane or absolutely corrupt. Interesting how we view those with money in the world of fiction.

I also had a mild epiphany in class today concerning something else from pop culture. Has anyone ever seen the incredibly sappy (and one of my guilty pleasures) Notting Hill? It stars Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts and was pretty popular when it was released... odds are you've heard of it. Anyway, I watched this movie (for about the third time) with my more-literate-than-I-am boyfriend, and both of us looked at each other funny when the characters in the movie began discussing the author Henry James; neither of us had ever heard of this guy. In Notting Hill, Julia Roberts' character is an actress who signs on to do a movie with a script adapted from a Henry James novel. I couldn't figure out why Richard Curtis--the writer of Notting Hill--decided to use Henry James' name for this part of the movie. Given that all that Curtis needed was the name of an author who wrote some kind of period piece, Jane Austin would have been sufficient, and the typical member of the viewing audience of Notting Hill is probably more familiar with Austin's texts than with James'.

And here's where the mystery was cleared up. Dr. Sexson mentioned that James often writes about Americans' interactions with Europe, and vice versa. Richard Curtis does too. In Notting Hill, a British man falls in love with an American woman. In Love Actually, a British man falls in love with an American woman. In Four Weddings and a Funeral, a British man falls in love with an American woman. See a pattern? Richard Curtis *is* this decade's Henry James; of course he would reference the author in one of most popular films. Thank you, semi-random connections.

xanadu

We watched the beginning of Citizen Kane in class today. We were told to google Xanadu on our blogs, so click here to visit Wikipedia's page for the term.

Dr. Sexson had us pay close attention to Bernstein's speech about a scene he remembered from his youth--a girl standing on a ship wearing a white dress and holding a white parasol. My guess is that this speech was supposed to remind us of the character Daisy Miller; it certainly did me. Then again, if I had just read The Great Gatsby before watching Citizen Kane, Bernstein's speech would have reminded me of that Daisy instead. I'm not sure that's such a coincidence.

I'm very curious to finish Citizen Kane--the best movie ever made, according to most movie critics--so I'll definitely play the role of dedicated student and rent the movie soon. I'm such a film nerd.

sunday morning

Quote of the day:

"I had never heard the cry of a peacock, until I one day did."
-Dr. Michael Sexson

=) All right, anyway, we talked about Italian male stereotypes today in relation to Daisy Miller. And while this novel certainly does feature an Italian male character, I disagree that it features the sterotypical one depicted in class today. Giovanelli is no young, robust hunk with broad shoulders. The narrator introduces this character, in fact, as "a little man standing with folded arms nursing his cane" (35). We don't get the archetype we're expecting when we meet this guy, and Giovanelli never turns into the expected archetypal character later in the story, either.

And a question that is probably only interesting to me, what is with Sunday morning? Dr. Sexson taught me today that Stevens has a poem called "Sunday Morning," the band No Doubt's greatest hits collection features a song called "Sunday Morning," the band Maroon 5 released a song on the radio called "Sunday Morning," and Howie Day's latest album includes "Sunday Morning Song." And as far as I can tell, none of the themes of any two of these works coincide. Strange.

origins & agons

Dr. Sexson recommended a book today with a catchy title, so I thought I'd blog it. Click here to check out amazon.com's page for "Love and Death in the American Novel."

To follow up on Dr. Sexson's brief (but intriguing) mention of the curious tribe called the Nacirema, click here.

We also talked about the word "originality." It was suggested that this is a paradox, since the fact that the word "origin" appearing in the word "originality" suggests that in order to be original, you have to get back to the origins. Doesn't it just as easily suggest that originality means creating your own origins, since "originality" is a derivative of "origins," rather than the other way around?

And since I'm a fan of lit related vocab, we were taught the word "agon" in class today. An agon is a contest of force of will between antagonists to decide who will be victorious. Our in-class example is the agon between the old and the new, the innocent and the corrupt, and America and Europe in Daisy Miller.

american gothic

Disclaimer: The following is, I can almost guarantee, not what the original artist of "American Gothic" was trying to convey. It is my personal interpretation of the painting, biases unsuppressed. Feel warned!

Every time I attempt to "interpret" this painting, I come back to the same aspect of the picture--the expression of the two miserable souls in its forefront. Wikipedia says that American Gothic originated in 1930, landing perfectly between two prominent literary works that were probably beaten into most of our high school brains: Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Both stories concern themselves with the disillusionment of Americans with the American Dream. "American Gothic," in my estimation, expresses the same sentiment. I gather that this couple has acquired a lovely home by diligently working their farmland six days a week, but still--they ain't happy. They're consumed with their work. Even in their portrait as a couple, the third presence of a pitchfork exists. It seems that their work is never done, and it is never too far from them. If we place this couple in 2006, they've earned their own home, bought two color TVs, and paid off their mortgage. Now they're working overtime for TiVo. To me, "American Gothic" illustrates Americans' tendency to work ceaselessly and to consequently acquire everything they could possibly want, with the sole and significant exception of satisfaction.

welcome

Our first text in this class is to be Daisy Miller, and it's not very long! Small celebration required.

To begin the class, everyone free-associated what they thought of when they heard the word "American." I played it pretty safe with my answer, but I later regretted not thinking of "super-size" in time. That's all right--props to whoever added apple pie.

Dr. Sexson said that we will be framing this class with, in his words, "two stupid girls"--Daisy Miller and Lolita. Other required reading includes "Mules and Men," poems by Wallace Stevens, "Invisible Man," "Wise Blood," and "The Bear." We will also be watching the films The Wizard of Oz (a new fairytale for America), Dead Man (starring Johnny Depp), The New World (a movie that came out pretty recently), and Citizen Kane (once actually titled "The American.")

For the record, most of my subsequent blog entries won't function as summaries of the day's lecture as much as this one seems to be, but cut me some slack--it's the first day. =) For complete notes over the day's lecture, please refer to the corresponding notes blog that I have linked on the right side of this page (at the top). Or, for your convenience, you can also just click here.

The three requirements of a good class, according to our good Dr., are that the class is pleasurable, is abstract, and changes. Let the games begin.