necessity of understanding the relation between modernism and postmodernism as temporal, but not periodic. That is, postmodernism is modernism's future, just as modernism is postmodernism's past, but the connection between the past of postmodernism and the future of modernism is neither causal nor sequential; rather, it is an overlapping that reveals the degree to which the modernist anticipation of postmodernism and the postmodernist recollection of modernism comprise modes of repetition-with-a-difference...The relation of the modern to the postmodern, then, is one in which each verges on the other, indicating the continued presence (posterior or anterior) and limits of the other. 519
Stein's repetitions also create some complex effects. As words (for example, "feeling") subtly change meaning with each iteration, Stein demonstrates the relationship between language and time 17
Friday, December 3, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Land of LIttle Rain
I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him...according as he is called by friend or enemy...No other fashion, I think, Set so well with the various natures that inhabit in us...and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity xxxv
the County of Los Borders 3
One hopes the land my breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but to do. 5
It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured...Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls. 10
I suppose the dumb creatures know nearly as much of death as do their betters, who have only the more imagination. 20
hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight...Nothing happens in the deep wood that the blue jays are not all agog to tell. 22
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise...the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor. 24
There are many strange sorts of humans bred in a mining country, each sort despising the queernesses of the other 27
they behavior as history and judge it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense 45
names that smacked of the soil 46
there is a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,—it wants the German to coin a work for that...It is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to sheer off what is not what whole...Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at 47
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. 62
To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year. 65
The homesickness of an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief from it; neither wine nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of a strange land sufficiently like his own. 68
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the noble plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned. 78
That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later one of the CLarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. 87
The Indian never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and relations, but what it can do for him. 89
The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing. They sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to comfort two families of that land. 107
I am persuaded only a complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a poet and symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that house their God. 108
the way they count relationship everybody is more or less akin. 108
the County of Los Borders 3
One hopes the land my breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but to do. 5
It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured...Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls. 10
I suppose the dumb creatures know nearly as much of death as do their betters, who have only the more imagination. 20
hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight...Nothing happens in the deep wood that the blue jays are not all agog to tell. 22
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise...the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor. 24
There are many strange sorts of humans bred in a mining country, each sort despising the queernesses of the other 27
they behavior as history and judge it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense 45
names that smacked of the soil 46
there is a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,—it wants the German to coin a work for that...It is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to sheer off what is not what whole...Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at 47
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. 62
To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year. 65
The homesickness of an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief from it; neither wine nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of a strange land sufficiently like his own. 68
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the noble plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned. 78
That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later one of the CLarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. 87
The Indian never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and relations, but what it can do for him. 89
The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing. They sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to comfort two families of that land. 107
I am persuaded only a complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a poet and symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that house their God. 108
the way they count relationship everybody is more or less akin. 108
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Good, better, best, bested 32
All right...what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? of do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know! / Very good! Very good! 33
Martha and I are having...nothing...exercising...that's all 33
It's just that I don't like to...become involved 34
But you are going to have kids...anyway. In spite of history. 40
will lose its glorious variety and unpredictability. I and with me the...the surprise, the multiplexity, the sea-changing rhythm of...history, will be eliminated. There will be order and constancy 67
I've been drawing you out on this stuff...because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood 111
You ineffectual sons of bitches...you're the worst 111
you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same...you bring things to the saddest of all points 117
You given up? / No...no. It's just I've got to figure out some new way to fight you, Martha. Guerilla tactics, maybe...internal subversion...I don't know. Something. 125
They're dancing like they've danced before. / It's a familiar dance...they both know it 131
THE GAME IS OVER! 136
This isn't a novel at all...this is the truth...this really happened...TO ME! 137
Well! That's one game. What shall we do now, hunh? 138
We gotta play a game. 139
We'll play a round of Get the Guests 140
By God, you gotta have a swing to show you where the truffles are. 149
I'll play the charades like you're got 'em set up...I'll play in your language...I'll be what you say I am. / You are already...you just don't know it. / No...no. Not really. But I'll be it, mister...I'll show you something come to life you'll wish you hadn't set up. 151
you've moved bag and baggage into your own fantasy world now, and you've started playing variations of your own distortions 155
It's snapped, finally. Not me...it. The whole arrangement. 156
You can't come together with nothing, and you're nothing. 158
who keeps learning the game we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. 191
There's no limit to you, is there? / No, baby; none. 194
No more games...please. It's game I don't want. No more games. 207
There's a real mother talking 222
YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN'T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! 232
I think I understand this. 236
We never spoke of it; that's all. I could kill him any time I wanted to...You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him...you mentioned him to someone else. 236
It will be better...It will be...maybe 240
Are you all right? / Yes. No. 241
All right...what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? of do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know! / Very good! Very good! 33
Martha and I are having...nothing...exercising...that's all 33
It's just that I don't like to...become involved 34
But you are going to have kids...anyway. In spite of history. 40
will lose its glorious variety and unpredictability. I and with me the...the surprise, the multiplexity, the sea-changing rhythm of...history, will be eliminated. There will be order and constancy 67
I've been drawing you out on this stuff...because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood 111
You ineffectual sons of bitches...you're the worst 111
you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same...you bring things to the saddest of all points 117
You given up? / No...no. It's just I've got to figure out some new way to fight you, Martha. Guerilla tactics, maybe...internal subversion...I don't know. Something. 125
They're dancing like they've danced before. / It's a familiar dance...they both know it 131
THE GAME IS OVER! 136
This isn't a novel at all...this is the truth...this really happened...TO ME! 137
Well! That's one game. What shall we do now, hunh? 138
We gotta play a game. 139
We'll play a round of Get the Guests 140
By God, you gotta have a swing to show you where the truffles are. 149
I'll play the charades like you're got 'em set up...I'll play in your language...I'll be what you say I am. / You are already...you just don't know it. / No...no. Not really. But I'll be it, mister...I'll show you something come to life you'll wish you hadn't set up. 151
you've moved bag and baggage into your own fantasy world now, and you've started playing variations of your own distortions 155
It's snapped, finally. Not me...it. The whole arrangement. 156
You can't come together with nothing, and you're nothing. 158
who keeps learning the game we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. 191
There's no limit to you, is there? / No, baby; none. 194
No more games...please. It's game I don't want. No more games. 207
There's a real mother talking 222
YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN'T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! 232
I think I understand this. 236
We never spoke of it; that's all. I could kill him any time I wanted to...You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him...you mentioned him to someone else. 236
It will be better...It will be...maybe 240
Are you all right? / Yes. No. 241
Twilight
This play requires a different kind of acting than psychological realism and depend on an "informed actor" 4
Language in this play creates identity, not from the words themselves, but from the actual arrangement of the words. 5
be a specific and individual as possible to avoid stereotype 5
It is useful to think of all the physical properties as functional, rather than decorative or indicative 5
The play sees actors as cultural workers, who reach towards that which is "other" than themselves. 6
The task for all the actors is to suspend judgment and stereotype at all times. 7
If a character is identified as "black," it is not the author's intention that a black person play the role. IF a character is identified as a "woman," it is not the author's intention that a woman necessarily play the role...The theory of the play is that an actor has the ability to walk in another person's "words," and therefore in their hearts. 7
Suggested casting for a company of six
One Korean male
One white female
One white male
One Latino male
One black male
One black female 8
And these are gang meetings / for the purpose of truces... / (The author was momentarily distracted.) / Pay attention! (Short laugh.) 25
this city has abused both sides..."Why do I have to be on a side? / There's a problem here!" 28
So we stayed and we watched the whole thing 50
We just feel like we were pawns that were thrown away by he system 57
I mean I haven't seen a movie like that! 61
See we showed the insides. / The core...It came forward / It / let it be known 66
"you could hear little bits / of information... / It's like we were transmitting / thoughts / to each other / all across the restaurant... / Just generic-guilt 76
it was like a carnival out there 94
And I felt I were being heard for the first time / it would not be singed as we know it / It would be a roar 100
But the reason why he's comic. / rather than tragic / is that he allows himself to linger longer / on the different manifestations / of sadness and sorrow. / He doesn't skip over! 107
Very few white people could / actually take seriously, / black sadness and live the lives that / they livin 108
And when things fell apart in this / country / in the fifties and sixties, / and everything / became processed 137
So to me, it's like I'm stuck in limbo, / like the sun is stuck between night and day, / in the twilight hours, / You know? / I'm in an area not many people exist. 170
Language in this play creates identity, not from the words themselves, but from the actual arrangement of the words. 5
be a specific and individual as possible to avoid stereotype 5
It is useful to think of all the physical properties as functional, rather than decorative or indicative 5
The play sees actors as cultural workers, who reach towards that which is "other" than themselves. 6
The task for all the actors is to suspend judgment and stereotype at all times. 7
If a character is identified as "black," it is not the author's intention that a black person play the role. IF a character is identified as a "woman," it is not the author's intention that a woman necessarily play the role...The theory of the play is that an actor has the ability to walk in another person's "words," and therefore in their hearts. 7
Suggested casting for a company of six
One Korean male
One white female
One white male
One Latino male
One black male
One black female 8
And these are gang meetings / for the purpose of truces... / (The author was momentarily distracted.) / Pay attention! (Short laugh.) 25
this city has abused both sides..."Why do I have to be on a side? / There's a problem here!" 28
So we stayed and we watched the whole thing 50
We just feel like we were pawns that were thrown away by he system 57
I mean I haven't seen a movie like that! 61
See we showed the insides. / The core...It came forward / It / let it be known 66
"you could hear little bits / of information... / It's like we were transmitting / thoughts / to each other / all across the restaurant... / Just generic-guilt 76
it was like a carnival out there 94
And I felt I were being heard for the first time / it would not be singed as we know it / It would be a roar 100
But the reason why he's comic. / rather than tragic / is that he allows himself to linger longer / on the different manifestations / of sadness and sorrow. / He doesn't skip over! 107
Very few white people could / actually take seriously, / black sadness and live the lives that / they livin 108
And when things fell apart in this / country / in the fifties and sixties, / and everything / became processed 137
So to me, it's like I'm stuck in limbo, / like the sun is stuck between night and day, / in the twilight hours, / You know? / I'm in an area not many people exist. 170
The Great Gatsby
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past 180
Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder 180
that huge incoherent failure of a house 179
unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all...subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. 175-6
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about 161
(the sick and the well) 124
"Her voice is full of money" 120
I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words...what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. 99
the colossal vitality of his illusion 95
"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die 66
sprang from him Platonic conception of himself 98
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate" 49
It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella'a a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. thoroughness! What realism! Knew what to stop, too—didn't cut the pages. 46 (stage director interested in perfect illusion)
"I never care what I do, so I always have a good time" 43
like a photograph of a man of action 36
Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder 180
that huge incoherent failure of a house 179
unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all...subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. 175-6
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about 161
(the sick and the well) 124
"Her voice is full of money" 120
I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words...what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. 99
the colossal vitality of his illusion 95
"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die 66
sprang from him Platonic conception of himself 98
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate" 49
It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella'a a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. thoroughness! What realism! Knew what to stop, too—didn't cut the pages. 46 (stage director interested in perfect illusion)
"I never care what I do, so I always have a good time" 43
like a photograph of a man of action 36
John Ashbery
Soonest Mended
We are all talkers / It is true, but underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.
though meaning could be cast aside some day / When it had been outgrown
though nothing / Has somehow come to nothing
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
But your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface
No words to say what it really is, that it is not / Superficial but a visible core
I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything / Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty, / Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing
Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted
just as one / Gets accustomed to a noise that / Kept one awake but now no longer does
New York / Where I am now, which is a logarithm / Of other cities.
deflate / Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
Since it is a metaphor / Made to include us, we are a part of it
questioning / We now see will not take place at random / But in an orderly way that means to menace / Nobody
And we can no longer return to the various / Conflicting statements gathered, lapse of memory
We don't need paintings or / Doggerel written by mature poets when / The explosion is so precise, so fine
us / Who have been given no help whatever / In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely / On second-hand knowledge.
to flatten ultimately / Among the features of the room, an invitation / Never mailed, the "it was all a dream" / Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely / Enough how it wasn't. Its existence / Was real, though troubled,
and the ache / Of this waking dream can never drown out / The diagram still sketched on the wind, / Chosen, meant for me and materialized / In the disguising radiance of my room.
We are all talkers / It is true, but underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.
though meaning could be cast aside some day / When it had been outgrown
though nothing / Has somehow come to nothing
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
But your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface
No words to say what it really is, that it is not / Superficial but a visible core
I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything / Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty, / Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing
Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted
just as one / Gets accustomed to a noise that / Kept one awake but now no longer does
New York / Where I am now, which is a logarithm / Of other cities.
deflate / Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
Since it is a metaphor / Made to include us, we are a part of it
questioning / We now see will not take place at random / But in an orderly way that means to menace / Nobody
And we can no longer return to the various / Conflicting statements gathered, lapse of memory
We don't need paintings or / Doggerel written by mature poets when / The explosion is so precise, so fine
us / Who have been given no help whatever / In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely / On second-hand knowledge.
to flatten ultimately / Among the features of the room, an invitation / Never mailed, the "it was all a dream" / Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely / Enough how it wasn't. Its existence / Was real, though troubled,
and the ache / Of this waking dream can never drown out / The diagram still sketched on the wind, / Chosen, meant for me and materialized / In the disguising radiance of my room.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Lolita
destabilizing framing
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to for and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. 13
bewitched travelers 16
the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power 17
teasing them with fake 'primal scenes' 34
I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. (and more) 62
but Lo kept following the scent of rich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free. 147
She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. 148
Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. 151 (roadside attractions)
I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! 169
"There is no point in staying anywhere" 244
The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt. 247
In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. 249
265 (literary characters stay the same)
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me—not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience—that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good...I drove on the queer mirror side. 306
but Lo kept following the scent of rich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free. 147
She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. 148
Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. 151 (roadside attractions)
I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! 169
"There is no point in staying anywhere" 244
The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt. 247
In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. 249
265 (literary characters stay the same)
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me—not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience—that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good...I drove on the queer mirror side. 306
Rabbit, Run
they all run along together like sticks in a stream 22
But he is going eat, the worst direction 24
He doesn't drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. 24
Laws aren't ghost in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. 25
"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there" 26
all this phony business, this twentieth-century vitamin racket 27
The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system...reaching for him 29
31 out of america
he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net her is somewhere caught in 33
He wishes he had a cigarette, to help him decide what his instinct is 34
He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trail of tears and strings of words...faded but still existent... 37
his appetite's innocent gusto 55
"Of course, all vagrant think they're on a quest. At least at first. 110
His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. 170
Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. 240
Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded...He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net...Its smallness fills him like a vastness. 264
But he is going eat, the worst direction 24
He doesn't drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. 24
Laws aren't ghost in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. 25
"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there" 26
all this phony business, this twentieth-century vitamin racket 27
The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system...reaching for him 29
31 out of america
he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net her is somewhere caught in 33
He wishes he had a cigarette, to help him decide what his instinct is 34
He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trail of tears and strings of words...faded but still existent... 37
his appetite's innocent gusto 55
"Of course, all vagrant think they're on a quest. At least at first. 110
His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. 170
Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. 240
Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded...He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net...Its smallness fills him like a vastness. 264
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Ginsberg
now you're really in the total animal soup of time 2581
the neon fruit supermarket 2584
gnarled steel roots of tress of machinery 2585
nothing stainless
the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty / with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotive in its eye
soon-to-be-toothless mouth
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these / entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in / the sunset, all your glory in your form!
when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old / locomotive 2586
The method must be purest meat / and symbolic dressing...A naked lunch is natural to us / we eat reality sandwiches. / But allegories are so much lettuce. / Don't hid the madness. 2588
the neon fruit supermarket 2584
gnarled steel roots of tress of machinery 2585
nothing stainless
the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty / with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotive in its eye
soon-to-be-toothless mouth
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these / entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in / the sunset, all your glory in your form!
when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old / locomotive 2586
The method must be purest meat / and symbolic dressing...A naked lunch is natural to us / we eat reality sandwiches. / But allegories are so much lettuce. / Don't hid the madness. 2588
Jameson
materials they no longer simply 'quote' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. (seems wrong to me)
I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed.
it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant
aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production general.
(modernism is read as a depth model, hermeneutics)
depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces
there is no longer a self present to do the feeling
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse...Pastiche is thus blank parody.
the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion
libidinal historicism...complacent eclecticism 18
approached the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness'
it is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. 23
the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of rasping what used to be called relationship: something of which the word collage is still only a very feeble name 31
a degraded attempt...to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. 38
My implication is that we ourselves, the human subject who happen into this new space, have no kept pace with that evolution...an imperative to grow new organs 38-9
catastrophe and progress all together 47 (on capital)
we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imaged in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm 48
forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overly political interventions...are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system 49
peculiar new forms of realism...mimesis of reality 49
the new political art...will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism...the world space of multinational capital...global cognitive mapping 54
I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed.
it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant
aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production general.
(modernism is read as a depth model, hermeneutics)
depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces
there is no longer a self present to do the feeling
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse...Pastiche is thus blank parody.
the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion
libidinal historicism...complacent eclecticism 18
approached the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness'
it is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. 23
the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of rasping what used to be called relationship: something of which the word collage is still only a very feeble name 31
a degraded attempt...to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. 38
My implication is that we ourselves, the human subject who happen into this new space, have no kept pace with that evolution...an imperative to grow new organs 38-9
catastrophe and progress all together 47 (on capital)
we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imaged in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm 48
forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overly political interventions...are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system 49
peculiar new forms of realism...mimesis of reality 49
the new political art...will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism...the world space of multinational capital...global cognitive mapping 54
Eliot
"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. it cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor" (1582)
"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered...
the confused cries of the newspaper critics (1583)
The emotion of art is impersonal.
And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
"Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / swaddled with darkness."
"This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us. like Death, our death, / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death"
"Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"
"To be conscious is not to be in time"
"Will the sunflower turn to us"
"Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. ONly by the form, the oattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness"
"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered...
the confused cries of the newspaper critics (1583)
The emotion of art is impersonal.
And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
"Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / swaddled with darkness."
"This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us. like Death, our death, / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death"
"Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"
"To be conscious is not to be in time"
"Will the sunflower turn to us"
"Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. ONly by the form, the oattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness"
Pound
"Who bears the brunt of our America / And try to wrench her impulse into art"
"Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried / And stretched and tampered with the media"
" I am old enough now to make friends. / It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving, / We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us.
"In a half savage country, out of date"
"The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage, / Not, at any rate, an Attic grace" (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - II)
"All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says; / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlas out days"
"There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization"
"Poetry, her border of ideas, / The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending / With other strata / Where the lower and higher have ending"
"Siftings on siftings in oblivion, / Till change hath broken down / All things save Beauty alone"
Cantos: The Odyssey - the speaking dead
anti usury
"1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective"
"2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation"
"Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried / And stretched and tampered with the media"
" I am old enough now to make friends. / It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving, / We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us.
"In a half savage country, out of date"
"The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage, / Not, at any rate, an Attic grace" (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - II)
"All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says; / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlas out days"
"There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization"
"Poetry, her border of ideas, / The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending / With other strata / Where the lower and higher have ending"
"Siftings on siftings in oblivion, / Till change hath broken down / All things save Beauty alone"
Cantos: The Odyssey - the speaking dead
anti usury
"1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective"
"2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation"
Long Day's Journey into Night All
More stage direction. Not comedy or tragedy, just a thing.
"all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread" (1611)
"But the actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement and gesture. These have the quality of belonging to a studied technique" (1611).
"his habitual expression of cynicism it gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast" (1614)
"Forget everything and face nothing! It's a convenient philosophy (1615)
"Yes, that's right, she did stop to listen outside his room...It was her being in the spare room that scared me. I couldn't help remembering that when she starts sleeping alone in there, it has always been a sign—" (1622) Always reading each other.
"If there was only some place I could go to get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to—not about anything serious, simply laugh and gossip and forget for awhile" (1626) Stifled womanhood
"He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he want a home" (1632).
"Here's how" (1634) drinking. performative speech?
"In a real home one is never lonely" (1637)
Increasingly detached mother - characters that have to splinter
"I've never missed a performance in my life. That's the proof" (1641)
"If you're that far gone into the past already, when it's only the beginning of the afternoon, what will you be tonight?" (1642) compare to Death of a Salesman
"You mustn't remember! You mustn't humiliate me so!" (1643)
"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too" (1643)
Dead baby 1643, compare to Woolf
1647 - hiding in herself, away from the others the audience
"So maimed and crippled! You would think they'd been through some horrible accident" (1650)
"And he was handsomer than my wildest dream, in his make-up and his nobleman's costume that was so becoming to him. He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world" (1651)
"I don't remember!...Can't you forget—?...I'm sorry I remembered out loud" (1655)
"I can tell when you're acting!" (1659)
"Enough is not as good as a feast" (1662)
"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here...to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself....The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost" (1663)
"We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it" (1663)
"We don't seem able to avoid unpleasant topics, do we?" (1666)
"The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it's more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses hereself...It's as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!" (1667)
"It's not true the way you look at it!" (1669)
"What the hell was t I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—" (1672)
"For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish" (1674)
"I shall give the art of acting back to the performing seal, which are its most perfect expression" (1677)
1667 Roads
"I love you more than I hate you. My saying what I'm telling you now proves it. I run the ish you'll hate me—and you're all I've got left" (1686) audience, art
"Seal are intelligent and honest. They don't put up any bluffs about the Art of Acting. They admit they're just hams earning their daily fish" (1682)
"I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time" (1685) see also Isn't it pretty to think so.
"all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread" (1611)
"But the actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement and gesture. These have the quality of belonging to a studied technique" (1611).
"his habitual expression of cynicism it gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast" (1614)
"Forget everything and face nothing! It's a convenient philosophy (1615)
"Yes, that's right, she did stop to listen outside his room...It was her being in the spare room that scared me. I couldn't help remembering that when she starts sleeping alone in there, it has always been a sign—" (1622) Always reading each other.
"If there was only some place I could go to get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to—not about anything serious, simply laugh and gossip and forget for awhile" (1626) Stifled womanhood
"He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he want a home" (1632).
"Here's how" (1634) drinking. performative speech?
"In a real home one is never lonely" (1637)
Increasingly detached mother - characters that have to splinter
"I've never missed a performance in my life. That's the proof" (1641)
"If you're that far gone into the past already, when it's only the beginning of the afternoon, what will you be tonight?" (1642) compare to Death of a Salesman
"You mustn't remember! You mustn't humiliate me so!" (1643)
"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too" (1643)
Dead baby 1643, compare to Woolf
1647 - hiding in herself, away from the others the audience
"So maimed and crippled! You would think they'd been through some horrible accident" (1650)
"And he was handsomer than my wildest dream, in his make-up and his nobleman's costume that was so becoming to him. He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world" (1651)
"I don't remember!...Can't you forget—?...I'm sorry I remembered out loud" (1655)
"I can tell when you're acting!" (1659)
"Enough is not as good as a feast" (1662)
"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here...to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself....The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost" (1663)
"We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it" (1663)
"We don't seem able to avoid unpleasant topics, do we?" (1666)
"The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it's more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses hereself...It's as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!" (1667)
"It's not true the way you look at it!" (1669)
"What the hell was t I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—" (1672)
"For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish" (1674)
"I shall give the art of acting back to the performing seal, which are its most perfect expression" (1677)
1667 Roads
"I love you more than I hate you. My saying what I'm telling you now proves it. I run the ish you'll hate me—and you're all I've got left" (1686) audience, art
"Seal are intelligent and honest. They don't put up any bluffs about the Art of Acting. They admit they're just hams earning their daily fish" (1682)
"I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time" (1685) see also Isn't it pretty to think so.
The Grapes of Wrath All
Modernist form in the relation between the nameless mass experience and the individual narrative. The two interact and effect each other.
"all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement" (14) movement is inherent in them, the initial motive moment of force
"And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of the hated the mathematics that drove them...the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling...machines and masters all at the same time" (32).
"those creature don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (32)
"When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size" (32).
"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it" (33).
"The bank isn't like a man...only made of me...the bank is something else than men...Men made it, but they can't control it" (33).
"Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me" (38).
"Maybe the thing isn't men at all. maybe, like you said, the property's doing it" (38).
"ol' graveyard ghos'" (52)
"it's a thing that started way the hell an' gone back, an' nobody seems to be able to stop her, an' nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God's sake don't read about her because he says for one thing you'll jus' get messed up worse, an' for another you won't have no respect for the guys that work the gover'ments" (55).
"And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way" (88)
"Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understan'. All them things is the good things" (94)
"The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious" (99).
"She tool a letter from an envelope and dropped the trinkets in the envelope...and laid the box gently among the coals" (108).
"Well, California's a big State. / It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men...Ever hear of the border patro on the California line?...Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it" (120).
"He had become the soul of the car" (123).
"Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'...They's movement now. People moving. We know why, an' we know how. Movin' 'cause they got to" (128).
"You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song" (128).
"The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution...Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is cahnged; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—'We lost our land.' The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one" (151).
"For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.' (152)
"the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression" (163)
"Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. / At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique" (194)
Of CA: "She's a nice country. But she was stole a long time ago" (205).
"ever'thing in California is owned...they ain't even nice to each other...Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'...Guess he's crazy. Mus' be crazy...He looks crazy. Crazy an' mean" (207).
221: Dehumanizing
"repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed" (238)
"Thy're scairt we'll organize, I guess. An' maybe they're right. This here camp is a organization. People there look out for theirselves. Got the nicest strang band in these parts. Got a little charge account in the store for folks that's hungry" (297).
321 Human made inhuman
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success" The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, ad the ripe fruit. And child dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food much rot, must be forced to rot" (349).
"You don' know what you're a-doin'." (386) the crucial destructive violence of the book, people killing each other without knowing why, without specificity.
The speech: 419
"They wored jerkily, like machines" (441)
"There ain't no baby. They never was no baby. We was wrong" (446)
Breast feeding: 455
"all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement" (14) movement is inherent in them, the initial motive moment of force
"And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of the hated the mathematics that drove them...the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling...machines and masters all at the same time" (32).
"those creature don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (32)
"When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size" (32).
"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it" (33).
"The bank isn't like a man...only made of me...the bank is something else than men...Men made it, but they can't control it" (33).
"Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me" (38).
"Maybe the thing isn't men at all. maybe, like you said, the property's doing it" (38).
"ol' graveyard ghos'" (52)
"it's a thing that started way the hell an' gone back, an' nobody seems to be able to stop her, an' nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God's sake don't read about her because he says for one thing you'll jus' get messed up worse, an' for another you won't have no respect for the guys that work the gover'ments" (55).
"And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way" (88)
"Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understan'. All them things is the good things" (94)
"The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious" (99).
"She tool a letter from an envelope and dropped the trinkets in the envelope...and laid the box gently among the coals" (108).
"Well, California's a big State. / It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men...Ever hear of the border patro on the California line?...Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it" (120).
"He had become the soul of the car" (123).
"Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'...They's movement now. People moving. We know why, an' we know how. Movin' 'cause they got to" (128).
"You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song" (128).
"The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution...Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is cahnged; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—'We lost our land.' The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one" (151).
"For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.' (152)
"the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression" (163)
"Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. / At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique" (194)
Of CA: "She's a nice country. But she was stole a long time ago" (205).
"ever'thing in California is owned...they ain't even nice to each other...Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'...Guess he's crazy. Mus' be crazy...He looks crazy. Crazy an' mean" (207).
221: Dehumanizing
"repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed" (238)
"Thy're scairt we'll organize, I guess. An' maybe they're right. This here camp is a organization. People there look out for theirselves. Got the nicest strang band in these parts. Got a little charge account in the store for folks that's hungry" (297).
321 Human made inhuman
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success" The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, ad the ripe fruit. And child dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food much rot, must be forced to rot" (349).
"You don' know what you're a-doin'." (386) the crucial destructive violence of the book, people killing each other without knowing why, without specificity.
The speech: 419
"They wored jerkily, like machines" (441)
"There ain't no baby. They never was no baby. We was wrong" (446)
Breast feeding: 455
On the Road All
"It was embarrassing. Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do" (68)
"devising curses out of his innocent stock of words" (70)
The role of the superlative (80.86.101.127.170.200) life is experienced as always culminating. If every superlative is taken as authentic, the describe an exponential growth, a continual increase in momentum that can't lead to anything but pure accelerated chaos.
"I was guts and juice again and ready to go" (92).
"I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along" (103)
"God exists without qualms...the thing will go along itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side" (121).
"I had forgotten something...It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler...Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven...mere simple longing for pure death" (124).
"God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rain night" (128).
"performing our one and nobel function of the time, move" (134)
149 - trick commodities
"The city was one big construction job; the people transient, wild, ambitious, busy, gay... altogether very Californian" (165) Tucson.
"Everything fell apart in me" (183).
"the beatest suitcase in the USA...cared about everything in principle...he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it...motherless feverish life across American and back numberless times, a undone bird" (189).
"the road is life" (212).
"All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad" (235).
"All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience (246). movie
"they're worstest" (256)
Mexico: "It couldn't be cooler, it couldn't be grander, it couldn't be anything" (277).
"For a mad moment I thought Dead was understanding everything he said by sheer wild insight and sudden revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness" (284).
"It's a nation" (297) - in Mexico, on the limits of nationness, on the interconnection through roads.
"it's the end of the first half of the century...We all wait for you" (306)
Dean Moriarty and old Dean Moriarty, collapsed to produce American continuity with a break?
"devising curses out of his innocent stock of words" (70)
The role of the superlative (80.86.101.127.170.200) life is experienced as always culminating. If every superlative is taken as authentic, the describe an exponential growth, a continual increase in momentum that can't lead to anything but pure accelerated chaos.
"I was guts and juice again and ready to go" (92).
"I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along" (103)
"God exists without qualms...the thing will go along itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side" (121).
"I had forgotten something...It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler...Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven...mere simple longing for pure death" (124).
"God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rain night" (128).
"performing our one and nobel function of the time, move" (134)
149 - trick commodities
"The city was one big construction job; the people transient, wild, ambitious, busy, gay... altogether very Californian" (165) Tucson.
"Everything fell apart in me" (183).
"the beatest suitcase in the USA...cared about everything in principle...he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it...motherless feverish life across American and back numberless times, a undone bird" (189).
"the road is life" (212).
"All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad" (235).
"All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience (246). movie
"they're worstest" (256)
Mexico: "It couldn't be cooler, it couldn't be grander, it couldn't be anything" (277).
"For a mad moment I thought Dead was understanding everything he said by sheer wild insight and sudden revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness" (284).
"It's a nation" (297) - in Mexico, on the limits of nationness, on the interconnection through roads.
"it's the end of the first half of the century...We all wait for you" (306)
Dean Moriarty and old Dean Moriarty, collapsed to produce American continuity with a break?
Absalom, Absalom! All
"I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings" (302).
(subtractive logic of killing)
"Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool...it doesn't matter: that pebble's water echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space" (210)
"you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying r having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it...And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything...at least it would be something just because it would have happened...something that might make a mark on something that was once fore the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish" (101).
"It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know...They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest...almost indecipherable, yet meaningful...you re-read, tedious and intent...you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols" (80)
(subtractive logic of killing)
"Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool...it doesn't matter: that pebble's water echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space" (210)
"you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying r having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it...And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything...at least it would be something just because it would have happened...something that might make a mark on something that was once fore the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish" (101).
"It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know...They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest...almost indecipherable, yet meaningful...you re-read, tedious and intent...you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols" (80)
The Souls of Black Folk All
"the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line" (3)
"studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there" (3).
"the central problem of training men for life" (3)
"How does it feel to be a problem?...peculiar even for one who has never been anything else" (6)
"the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousnnes, this sense of alawys looking at one's self through the eyes of other...One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thought, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (7).
8
"the contradiction of double aims...for he had but half a heart in either cause...the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors" (9)
"the cabalistic letters of the white man" (11)
"studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there" (3).
"the central problem of training men for life" (3)
"How does it feel to be a problem?...peculiar even for one who has never been anything else" (6)
"the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousnnes, this sense of alawys looking at one's self through the eyes of other...One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thought, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (7).
8
"the contradiction of double aims...for he had but half a heart in either cause...the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors" (9)
"the cabalistic letters of the white man" (11)
Borderlands / La Frontera All
A third vector pries out the doubling, the dual.
"1,950 mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me / me raja me raja / This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire. / But the skin of the earth is seamless.../...This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again" (24-5).
"It is in a constant state of transition" (25).
"what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country" (33).
"What we are suffering from i s an absolute despot duality that says we able to be only one or the other" (41).
"The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer. We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her" (44).
"I know things older than Freud, older than gender...to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul (48).
"She [la Viregn de Guadalupe], like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered...She mediates...the tolerance of ambiguity...people who cross cultures" (52).
"We're not supposed to remember such otherwordly events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bond and bird and worm has spirit in it" (58).
"The other mod of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination...they call the "magical" mind, the "savage" mind, the Participations mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become "objective," Western culture made "objects" of things and people when it distance itself from them...This dichotomy is the root of all violence" (59).
"Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes" (59).
V PoMo:
"La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface...The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world" (60).
"The mirror is an ambivalent symbol. Not only does it reproduce images (the twins that stand for thesis and antithesis); it contains and absorbs them...its gaze...it can 'possess' us" (64)
Coatlicue "Simultaneously, depending on the person, she represents: duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality...Coatlicue depicts the contradictor...the fusion of opposites" (68-9).
"Mine. OUrs. Not the heterosexual white man's or the colored man's or the state's or the culture's or the religion's or the parents'—just ours, mine. / And suddenly I feel everything rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center" (73).
"Language is a mall discourse...But Chicago Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally...a living language...A language which they can connect their identity to...españl ni inglés, but both...a forked tongue...language is a homeland close than the Southwest" (76-77)
"It is illegitimate, a bastard language" (80).
"Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate" (81).
"copping out" (84)
"This voluntary (yet forced) alienation make for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don't identity with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identity with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degress of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometines I feel like once cancels out the otehr and we are zero, nothing, no one" (85)
"I see a mosaic pattern )Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. I see a preoccupation with the deep structure, the underlying structure...I can see the deep structure, the scaffolding...the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form...I am preoccupied with texture as well...I see a hybridization of metaphor...full of variations and seeming contradictions" (88)
"an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance" (88).
"The aesthetic of virtuosity, art typical of Western European culture, attempts to manage the energies of its own internal system such a conflicts, harmonies, resolution and balances. It bears the presences of qualities and internal meanings. It is dedicated to the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by mean of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always 'in power'" (90).
"Let's all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent" (90).
"Being a writer feel very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo" (94).
"Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" (101).
"The third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm" (102).
"In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures" (103).
"Before...we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to know ours" (108)
"Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happen in the images in our heads" (Borderlands / La Frontera, 109)
"1,950 mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me / me raja me raja / This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire. / But the skin of the earth is seamless.../...This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again" (24-5).
"It is in a constant state of transition" (25).
"what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country" (33).
"What we are suffering from i s an absolute despot duality that says we able to be only one or the other" (41).
"The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer. We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her" (44).
"I know things older than Freud, older than gender...to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul (48).
"She [la Viregn de Guadalupe], like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered...She mediates...the tolerance of ambiguity...people who cross cultures" (52).
"We're not supposed to remember such otherwordly events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bond and bird and worm has spirit in it" (58).
"The other mod of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination...they call the "magical" mind, the "savage" mind, the Participations mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become "objective," Western culture made "objects" of things and people when it distance itself from them...This dichotomy is the root of all violence" (59).
"Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes" (59).
V PoMo:
"La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface...The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world" (60).
"The mirror is an ambivalent symbol. Not only does it reproduce images (the twins that stand for thesis and antithesis); it contains and absorbs them...its gaze...it can 'possess' us" (64)
Coatlicue "Simultaneously, depending on the person, she represents: duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality...Coatlicue depicts the contradictor...the fusion of opposites" (68-9).
"Mine. OUrs. Not the heterosexual white man's or the colored man's or the state's or the culture's or the religion's or the parents'—just ours, mine. / And suddenly I feel everything rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center" (73).
"Language is a mall discourse...But Chicago Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally...a living language...A language which they can connect their identity to...españl ni inglés, but both...a forked tongue...language is a homeland close than the Southwest" (76-77)
"It is illegitimate, a bastard language" (80).
"Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate" (81).
"copping out" (84)
"This voluntary (yet forced) alienation make for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don't identity with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identity with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degress of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometines I feel like once cancels out the otehr and we are zero, nothing, no one" (85)
"I see a mosaic pattern )Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. I see a preoccupation with the deep structure, the underlying structure...I can see the deep structure, the scaffolding...the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form...I am preoccupied with texture as well...I see a hybridization of metaphor...full of variations and seeming contradictions" (88)
"an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance" (88).
"The aesthetic of virtuosity, art typical of Western European culture, attempts to manage the energies of its own internal system such a conflicts, harmonies, resolution and balances. It bears the presences of qualities and internal meanings. It is dedicated to the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by mean of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always 'in power'" (90).
"Let's all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent" (90).
"Being a writer feel very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo" (94).
"Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" (101).
"The third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm" (102).
"In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures" (103).
"Before...we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to know ours" (108)
"Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happen in the images in our heads" (Borderlands / La Frontera, 109)
Monday, November 29, 2010
Melanctha All
"She was still to complex with desire" (341)
"Sometimes she would almost go over, and then the strength in her of not really knowing...Melanctha had a strong respect for any kind of successful power...it was only men that for Melanctha held anything there was of knowledge and power." (348)
"Melanctha all her life did not know how to tell a story wholly. She always, and yet not with intention, managed to leave out big pieces which make a story very different, for when it came to what had happened and what she had said and what it was that she had really done, Melanctha never could remember right." (351)
"he waned very badly to be really understanding" (374)
"I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing" (376) see also On the Road for superlative experience
"I don't change, never, and I got to do what I think is right and honest to me, and I never told you any different, and you always knew it very well that I always would do just so" (388)
"I don't know anything real about you Melanctha" (397).
"Melanctha was too many for him" (410).
419 - opposites passionate natures and tender-hearted natures
"Sometimes she would almost go over, and then the strength in her of not really knowing...Melanctha had a strong respect for any kind of successful power...it was only men that for Melanctha held anything there was of knowledge and power." (348)
"Melanctha all her life did not know how to tell a story wholly. She always, and yet not with intention, managed to leave out big pieces which make a story very different, for when it came to what had happened and what she had said and what it was that she had really done, Melanctha never could remember right." (351)
"he waned very badly to be really understanding" (374)
"I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing" (376) see also On the Road for superlative experience
"I don't change, never, and I got to do what I think is right and honest to me, and I never told you any different, and you always knew it very well that I always would do just so" (388)
"I don't know anything real about you Melanctha" (397).
"Melanctha was too many for him" (410).
419 - opposites passionate natures and tender-hearted natures
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Ceremony All
"She is sitting in her room / thinking of a story now / I'm telling you the story / she is thinking" (1)
"He rubbed his belly. / I keep them here / [he said] / Here, put your hand on it / See, it is moving. / There is life here / for the people. / And in the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still growing" (2) On stories.
Distances and days existed in themselves, then; they all had a story.. They were not barriers. 17
that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. 24
It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human 32
They would breed these cattle, special cattle, not the weak, soft Herefords that grew thin and died from eating thistle and burned-off cactus during the drought. The cattle Ulibarri sold them were exactly what thy had been thinking about. These cattle were descendant of generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way desert antelope did. 68 (more on land/life connection)
these cattle were everything that the ideal cow was not. They were tall and had long thin legs like deer; their heads were long and angular, with heavy bone across the eyes supporting wide sharp horns which curved out over the shoulders. Their eyes were big and wild. 69
"He could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities—St. Lois, Seattle, New York, Oakland—and he began to feel another dimension to the old man's room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the questions. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man's rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the year, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room" (110)
"In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays..." (11)
"in recent years the old man had favored Santa Fe Railroad calendar that had Indian scenes painted on them—Navajos herding sheep, deer dancers at Cochiti, and little Pueblo children chasing burros...on the reservation these calendars were more common than Coca-Cola calendar. There was no reason to be startled. This old man had only done the same thing." (111)
"It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too" (112)
"But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the agin of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle's claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants...But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong...things which don't shift and grow are dead things" (116).
"all of it seemed suddenly so pitiful and small compared to the world he knew the white people had—a world of comfort in the sprawling house he'd seen in California, a world of plenty in the food he had carried from the officers' mess to dump into garbage cans. The old man's clothes were dirty and old, probably collected like his calendars. Te leftover things the whites didn't want...What kind of healing power was in this? (117)
"They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulated; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery tat made white people in the first place" (122).
125
Cattle 73, 168, 183, 197
He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together 169
He did not expect to find Josiah's cattle near Herefords, because the spotted cattle were so rangy and wild...It seemed more likely to find the spotted cattle in the south, far far in the south—the direction they had always gone 173
the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had take everything from him 28
The Texans who bought the land fenced it and posted signs in English and Spanish warning trespassers to keep out. But the people from the land grants and the people from Laguna and Acoma ignored the signs and hunted deer 174
Fences had never stopped the speckled cattle either...It was a fence that could hold the spotted cattle...a wolf-proof fence...to make the land his 175
Hunting the cattle was good for that...It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn't be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. 178
wilder than antelope, smarter than elk about human beings. Their memory of people endured long after all other traces of domestication were gone; and he counted on another instinct: the dime memory of direction which lured them always south, to the Mexican desert where they were born.
they ran southeast, in the direction he wanted them to go, with tails straight out behind their manure-stained haunches, running more like deer than cattle, moving form ticket to ticket for cover, avoiding the clearings. They favored trails too low and brushy for horses and riders 183
"He rubbed his belly. / I keep them here / [he said] / Here, put your hand on it / See, it is moving. / There is life here / for the people. / And in the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still growing" (2) On stories.
Distances and days existed in themselves, then; they all had a story.. They were not barriers. 17
that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. 24
It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human 32
They would breed these cattle, special cattle, not the weak, soft Herefords that grew thin and died from eating thistle and burned-off cactus during the drought. The cattle Ulibarri sold them were exactly what thy had been thinking about. These cattle were descendant of generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way desert antelope did. 68 (more on land/life connection)
these cattle were everything that the ideal cow was not. They were tall and had long thin legs like deer; their heads were long and angular, with heavy bone across the eyes supporting wide sharp horns which curved out over the shoulders. Their eyes were big and wild. 69
"He could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities—St. Lois, Seattle, New York, Oakland—and he began to feel another dimension to the old man's room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the questions. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man's rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the year, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room" (110)
"In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays..." (11)
"in recent years the old man had favored Santa Fe Railroad calendar that had Indian scenes painted on them—Navajos herding sheep, deer dancers at Cochiti, and little Pueblo children chasing burros...on the reservation these calendars were more common than Coca-Cola calendar. There was no reason to be startled. This old man had only done the same thing." (111)
"It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too" (112)
"But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the agin of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle's claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants...But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong...things which don't shift and grow are dead things" (116).
"all of it seemed suddenly so pitiful and small compared to the world he knew the white people had—a world of comfort in the sprawling house he'd seen in California, a world of plenty in the food he had carried from the officers' mess to dump into garbage cans. The old man's clothes were dirty and old, probably collected like his calendars. Te leftover things the whites didn't want...What kind of healing power was in this? (117)
"They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulated; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery tat made white people in the first place" (122).
125
Cattle 73, 168, 183, 197
He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together 169
He did not expect to find Josiah's cattle near Herefords, because the spotted cattle were so rangy and wild...It seemed more likely to find the spotted cattle in the south, far far in the south—the direction they had always gone 173
the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had take everything from him 28
The Texans who bought the land fenced it and posted signs in English and Spanish warning trespassers to keep out. But the people from the land grants and the people from Laguna and Acoma ignored the signs and hunted deer 174
Fences had never stopped the speckled cattle either...It was a fence that could hold the spotted cattle...a wolf-proof fence...to make the land his 175
Hunting the cattle was good for that...It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn't be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. 178
wilder than antelope, smarter than elk about human beings. Their memory of people endured long after all other traces of domestication were gone; and he counted on another instinct: the dime memory of direction which lured them always south, to the Mexican desert where they were born.
they ran southeast, in the direction he wanted them to go, with tails straight out behind their manure-stained haunches, running more like deer than cattle, moving form ticket to ticket for cover, avoiding the clearings. They favored trails too low and brushy for horses and riders 183
Neuromancer All
"The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" (1)
"And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Catle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks form the wall of a skyscraper canyon." (8)
"He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction." (9) see also House of Mirth, Long Days Journey into Night.
"But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technlogies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitant, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground of technology itself (11) see also Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise.
"in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market" (17)
"We invented you in Siberia, Case...I was there when they invented your kind...You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside." (29)
Book is defined by newness. The form is intended to teach and tease at once. It is always an introduction to the world, a lesson in the world itself. The form of speculative fiction thus allows us to play in a world of new radical possibilities, but only as an outsider with one foot in the traditional, the known. We play, as such, reactionaries or sycophants, either at a worried remove or throwing ourselves full bore into the learning.
Environment:
"Home...Program a map to display frequency of data exchanged, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. You map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain block in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta." (43)
"Armitage...a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask." (45)
"The mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (46).
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games" said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals..."Cyperspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters of constellations of data. LIke city lights, receding..." (52)
"the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. " (54)
"she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living." (55)
"entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly...random acts of surreal violence...the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent" (57) see also Armies of the Night, White Noise.
"There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of variou sshort-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals...The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists" (58)
"This deal's rel big, looks to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not why. I wanna know why." (92)
"They don't make much of a difference between state, you know? [He] tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry" (104)
"Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity...Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass...A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube...the gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere , and detached itself from the cube." (112-3)
117-8 Wintermute entity stuff
"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind...You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing" (165)
168 Wintermute's missing center.
"Power...meant corporate power...Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality...T-A was an atavism, a clan...the soiled humanity." (196)
"It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of a personality" (201)
"It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few second, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero" (205)
Hive, swarm stuff (220)
"I am the dead, and their land" (235) Neuromancer himself.
"To live here is to live. There is no difference" (249) in the virtual world.
259 Conclusions
"And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Catle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks form the wall of a skyscraper canyon." (8)
"He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction." (9) see also House of Mirth, Long Days Journey into Night.
"But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technlogies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitant, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground of technology itself (11) see also Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise.
"in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market" (17)
"We invented you in Siberia, Case...I was there when they invented your kind...You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside." (29)
Book is defined by newness. The form is intended to teach and tease at once. It is always an introduction to the world, a lesson in the world itself. The form of speculative fiction thus allows us to play in a world of new radical possibilities, but only as an outsider with one foot in the traditional, the known. We play, as such, reactionaries or sycophants, either at a worried remove or throwing ourselves full bore into the learning.
Environment:
"Home...Program a map to display frequency of data exchanged, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. You map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain block in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta." (43)
"Armitage...a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask." (45)
"The mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (46).
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games" said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals..."Cyperspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters of constellations of data. LIke city lights, receding..." (52)
"the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. " (54)
"she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living." (55)
"entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly...random acts of surreal violence...the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent" (57) see also Armies of the Night, White Noise.
"There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of variou sshort-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals...The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists" (58)
"This deal's rel big, looks to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not why. I wanna know why." (92)
"They don't make much of a difference between state, you know? [He] tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry" (104)
"Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity...Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass...A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube...the gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere , and detached itself from the cube." (112-3)
117-8 Wintermute entity stuff
"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind...You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing" (165)
168 Wintermute's missing center.
"Power...meant corporate power...Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality...T-A was an atavism, a clan...the soiled humanity." (196)
"It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of a personality" (201)
"It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few second, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero" (205)
Hive, swarm stuff (220)
"I am the dead, and their land" (235) Neuromancer himself.
"To live here is to live. There is no difference" (249) in the virtual world.
259 Conclusions
Strategies
Time
Environment
- Melanctha
- On the Road
- Gravity's Rainbow (former Slothrops)
- Ceremony?
- Neuromancer (toward futurity - looking back)
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (performative time - game time)
Environment
- Land of Little Rain
- Gravity's Rainbow (overlaying land with desire)
- White Noise
- Ceremony
- Merwin / Ginsberg / Eliot
Hybridity - Identity
- Ceremony
- Passing
- Gravity's Rainbow
- Neuromancer
- Twilight
- Zoot Suit
Race - Region
- Absalom, Absalom!
- Three Lives (Melanchtha)
- Ma Rainey / Twilight / Zoot Suit
- Ceremony
Identity - Race (Hybridity)
- Ceremony
- Passing
- Souls of Black Folk
- Invisible Man
- Twilight / Zoot Suit
Experimental Form
- Twilight
- Gravity's Rainbow
- Pound / Eliot
- Forty Stories
- Armies of the Night
- Counterlife
- The Things They Carried
Modernisms
- The Sun Also Rises
- Absalom, Absalom!
- Three Lives
- Grapes of Wrath
- Midcentury Modernism (Rabbit, Run / In Cold Blood)
Postmodernisms
- Gravity's Rainbow (formal/world)
- White Noise (world)
- Forty Stories (formal)
- Twilight (citational)
- John Ashbery
- Ceremony
Modern to Postmodern
- House of Mirth (for underpinning of social machine?)
- Eliot Pound (citational style)
- Gravity's Rainbow (retains Modernist structuring, but em-plots dissolution)
Role of Realism
- Rabbit, Run
- Cathedral
- House of Mirth
- White Noise
- In Cold Blood (Nature Mort)
Extended Naturalism
- House of Mirth (stable)
- White Noise
- In Cold Blood
- Cathedral
- Rabbit, Run (social world without motivation)
Borders - Region
- Ceremony
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Zoot Suit
- Gravity's Rainbow
- On the Road
Borders - Hybrids
- Ceremony
- Gravity's Rainbow
- Neuromancer (real/virtual border)
- Passing (race borders)
- Absalom, Absalom! (race borders / Jim Bond)
Travel - Migration (Diaspora)
- Grapes of Wrath
- Zoot Suit
- The Souls of Black Folk
- Borderlands/La Frontera
Travel - Adventure (Identity)
- On the Road (movement itself)
- Gravity's Rainbow (dissolution without narrative drive)
- Long Day's Journey into Night (traveling actor)
- Death of a Salesman (he's big in the north, always away from home)
- The Counterlife (narrative adventure / trip to Israel)
Region - Identity
- The Great Gatsby (a midwestern century)
- Absalom, Absalom! (south's identity)
- The Grapes of Wrath (midwestern diaspora)
- Ceremony (adaptable / attachment to land)
- Frank O'Hara (new york) Gwendolyn Brooks (north east?)
- Zoot Suit / Twilight (LA)
Americanness
- Lolita (motel life)
- Gravity's Rainbow (America returns to Europe)
- On the Road (travel)
- The Great Gatsby (midwest come east)
Technology - Identity/Hybridity
- Gravity's Rainbow (interactions with material/tech)
- Ceremony (modern ceremony)
- Neuromancer (cybernetics)
- White Noise (consumer life)
- John Ashbery (mirror, painting) / Allen Ginsberg (trampled nature) / T.S. Eliot (bleak nature)
- House of Mirth (society)
- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (sound recording)
Family
- Long Day's Journey into Night
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Absalom, Absalom!
- Ceremony
Cars
- On the Road
- The Great Gatby
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Lolita
- Rabbit, Run
- White Noise
- Death of Salesman
War
- Ceremony
- The Things They Carried
- The Sun Also Rises
- Gravity's Rainbow
- The Armies of the Night
For a modernism or postmodernism question: play the middle off of the edges. How does In Clood Blood pose a challenge to an easy division between modern and pomo? Its highly structured and highly composite form makes it difficult to discern reality from fiction. These tropes, however, don't enter the text in an explicit way.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Gravity's Rainbow PoMo Form
"This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening. often forever, without knowing it." (735) Enzian and Tchitcherine meeting without resolving their plot tension.
Double Meaning of Preterite: Passed over as left behind and passed over as not chosen for punishment.
"Passed over. / "We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waiting in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth" (167)
"have we been passed over, or have we been chose for something even more terrible" (328)
Double Meaning of Preterite: Passed over as left behind and passed over as not chosen for punishment.
"Passed over. / "We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waiting in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth" (167)
"have we been passed over, or have we been chose for something even more terrible" (328)
Gravity's Rainbow Identity
"Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thing, to scatter. "Personal density...is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.../..."Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is a familiar "[delta]T" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment" (509)
"Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himsel, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred. / Pas Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host." (624)
"he becomes a cross himself, a crossroad, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon." (625)
"He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying ot hold him together, even as a concept—"It's just got too remote" 's what they usually say)...But somebody's got to hold on, it can't happen to all of us—no, that'd be too much" (740-1)
"The lat image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure...And in the darkening and awful expanse of the screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know—" (760)
"Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himsel, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred. / Pas Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host." (624)
"he becomes a cross himself, a crossroad, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon." (625)
"He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying ot hold him together, even as a concept—"It's just got too remote" 's what they usually say)...But somebody's got to hold on, it can't happen to all of us—no, that'd be too much" (740-1)
"The lat image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure...And in the darkening and awful expanse of the screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know—" (760)
Gravity's Rainbow Borders
"We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the black sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us" (264)
"In ordinary times...the center always wins. ITs power grows with time, and that can't be reverseed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times...this War—this increadible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it." / "Sure. For how long?"... "No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German one, our hope is limitless" (265)
"Same problmes of control. But more intense. As to some musical ears, dissonance is really a higher form of consonance..../..."But mistakes are part of it too—everything fites. One see how it fits, ja? learns patterns, adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the camera...even those that reach the final row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, and no Tower will ever rise or descend—no: flight has been given only to the Springer!" (494)
"In ordinary times...the center always wins. ITs power grows with time, and that can't be reverseed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times...this War—this increadible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it." / "Sure. For how long?"... "No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German one, our hope is limitless" (265)
"Same problmes of control. But more intense. As to some musical ears, dissonance is really a higher form of consonance..../..."But mistakes are part of it too—everything fites. One see how it fits, ja? learns patterns, adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the camera...even those that reach the final row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, and no Tower will ever rise or descend—no: flight has been given only to the Springer!" (494)
White Noise (Environment)
The Sunset
"Another postermoden sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It's enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There has been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep." (227)
"The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life" 324
"we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread" 324
"The sky is under a spell, powerful and storied" 325
The Super Market
"But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip." (170)
"The supermarket shelves have been rearranged...They walk in a fragmented trance...trying to figure out the pattern discern the underlying logic...There is a sense of wandering now...ware of a second level of betrayal" 325-6
The Cloud
"This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born" (116)
"the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers—immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light" (157)
"We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses." (202)
Misc
"Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of the final line, a border or limit." (229)
"There was a charm and a native sense to the rows of slanted vehicles. This form of parking was an indispensable part of the American townscape...The arrangement was not only practical but avoided confrontation, the sexual assault motif of front-to-back parking in teeming city streets...Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there...It made me think of the Law of Ruins...built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically...The ruin is built into the creation" (257-8)
"I'm technically dead. My body is growing a nebulous mass. they track these things like satellites. All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There's something artificial about my death. It's shallow, unfulfilling. I don't belong to the earth of sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone" (282)
"Technology is lust removed from nature" (285)
"But isn't repression unnatural? / "Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species" (289)
"But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We're not supposed to deny our nature." / "It's natural to deny our nature...It's the whole point of being different from animals" (296)
"Another postermoden sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It's enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There has been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep." (227)
"The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life" 324
"we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread" 324
"The sky is under a spell, powerful and storied" 325
The Super Market
"But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip." (170)
"The supermarket shelves have been rearranged...They walk in a fragmented trance...trying to figure out the pattern discern the underlying logic...There is a sense of wandering now...ware of a second level of betrayal" 325-6
The Cloud
"This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born" (116)
"the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers—immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light" (157)
"We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses." (202)
Misc
"Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of the final line, a border or limit." (229)
"There was a charm and a native sense to the rows of slanted vehicles. This form of parking was an indispensable part of the American townscape...The arrangement was not only practical but avoided confrontation, the sexual assault motif of front-to-back parking in teeming city streets...Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there...It made me think of the Law of Ruins...built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically...The ruin is built into the creation" (257-8)
"I'm technically dead. My body is growing a nebulous mass. they track these things like satellites. All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There's something artificial about my death. It's shallow, unfulfilling. I don't belong to the earth of sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone" (282)
"Technology is lust removed from nature" (285)
"But isn't repression unnatural? / "Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species" (289)
"But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We're not supposed to deny our nature." / "It's natural to deny our nature...It's the whole point of being different from animals" (296)
White Noise Summary
Jack Gladney, the found of Hitler Studies, and his fourth wife Babette (Baba) fear death. Their lives are filled with Midwestern, suburban technological, material culture. The book ruminates a lot on supermarkets and television. Jack's fellow teacher and friend Murray analyzes tv, the culture of kids and everything else as a system of code, a deep collectively created modern mysticism. Jack is learning German. Babette teaches posture and reads tabloids to the blind.
A black cloud of Nyodene D is spilled, there is a confused evacuation. Jack is exposed to the cloud for a little over two minutes and is told my simulated evacuators that he has a high likelihood of dying. He conceals this from everyone.
His wife meanwhile is taking Dylar, a drug to control or eliminate the fear of death. She obtains it through a drug trial and an illicit affair with a man she calls Mr. Gray (a composite, incomplete). Jack becomes obsessed, wants the drug for himself, eventually tracks down the guy Willie Mink who is mentally destroyed by Dylar, which is experimental. Jack shoots him twice but ends up shot in the wrist by the dude. They go to the hospital to get fixed up, things seem cool since Mink doesn't remember anything, thinks he shot Jack. Dylar cause people to react to words as if they were experience.
More supermarkets, lots of consumerism bad and good, focus on the innocence of kids to the fear of death, total ego.
A black cloud of Nyodene D is spilled, there is a confused evacuation. Jack is exposed to the cloud for a little over two minutes and is told my simulated evacuators that he has a high likelihood of dying. He conceals this from everyone.
His wife meanwhile is taking Dylar, a drug to control or eliminate the fear of death. She obtains it through a drug trial and an illicit affair with a man she calls Mr. Gray (a composite, incomplete). Jack becomes obsessed, wants the drug for himself, eventually tracks down the guy Willie Mink who is mentally destroyed by Dylar, which is experimental. Jack shoots him twice but ends up shot in the wrist by the dude. They go to the hospital to get fixed up, things seem cool since Mink doesn't remember anything, thinks he shot Jack. Dylar cause people to react to words as if they were experience.
More supermarkets, lots of consumerism bad and good, focus on the innocence of kids to the fear of death, total ego.
Friday, November 19, 2010
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