Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

     This is all based on a story. No real plot, it’s just a bit of family history. My grandma Olga went to prison when she was 18. She never talked about it, but some bits and pieces survived with brief exchanges and visits and images from my great-aunt (her sister), who told my mom while she lived with her in college, who told me, again in bits and pieces over the years, told in passing, on walks around the neighborhood with my mom, in dinner conversations with relatives, a historical footnote from my parents. Every time, there’s some new context that makes me hear it a bit differently.      I’m going to write this story a few times. Right now I’m writing from my bedroom during the age of coronavirus. I’ve been told, “you should keep a journal this is a very historic time,”. Okay look, nobody’s going to be reading my journal as historical evidence, it’s not even about coronavirus. It’s about the normal shit teenagers go through, figuring out a complex ...

The title of  Kindred illuminates an important aspect of the novel - familial relations. For Dana going back in time, she’s not only sent back to a general time period or place. It’s a very specific plantation, and not only that, it’s her family. Her existence depends on them and their having children. But not only that - the fact that they’re her family makes what she sees all the more powerful. It removes a sense of vagueness when you know something happened in your family. Like you can say, lots of people were political prisoners in the late 40s in Yugoslavia, they were ripped from their homes and endured a lot of physical and psychological torture. But knowing that during that same time my grandma was picked up from her extracurricular activity (Russian culture club) at 18 without a reason or warming and sent directly to prison, that feels very different. When you remember who they were as your grandparents, get told regularly how you look like them, have the same anxious mann...

Henry and Ethan brought up this question about sex and death in their panel presentation: just like in Ragtime, sex and violence are undoubtedly, but very depressingly, connected. In the essay they presented, the author describes the sexual language with which the war enthusiasts describe war, particularly the “post-coital satisfaction” of the process of “mopping up”. The entire concept of war as conquest is associated with an overblown masculinity, and that concept of war is sexualized. Violence and sex are linked, fetishized by men and used to exploit others. As the author says, Vonnegut essentially genders the concepts of conquest and innocence. When masculinity is overblown in this way, the world we live in is ultimately a dangerous and deeply misogynistic one as well. The way sex is described in calmer parts of the novel isn't any less troubling. For Billy, any sex with either his wife Valencia or Montana Wildhack are fundamentally about comfort. They are depicted as comforta...

I sat down with  Mumbo Jumbo , a pen, and notebook on my desk, and the entire internet at my disposal. Every cryptic image would become a specimen for examination, a good Atonist explanation. But what we called “Reed glasses” transformed into “Reed contacts” into “Reed lasik surgery”, and now I can’t unsee much of the thesis Reed presented us with. So let’s just get two birds stoned at once; why go down a time consuming rabbit hole of research when I could simply explain that the point of the images is contained within their awkwardness. Including citations, a bibliography, newspaper excerpts, and the images, all make Mumbo Jumbo at a surface level appear something more like an academic text. This could be a conversation in and of itself of course, but images especially add to this. Usually you see them in the middle part of a non-fiction book or a history textbook, with added captions explaining what is being shown. However, Mumbo Jumbo lacks any captions and really the connectio...

“There once was a country” are the mysterious ending words to Emir Kusturica’s 1995 film Underground (10/10 would recommend watching). Even without seeing it, a quick explanation of the main trope can lead to a pretty interesting discussion of postmodern ideas about the blending of history and fiction - ideas that relate to Ragtime and its portrayals of nationalism as well. Quick(ish) plot summary: Two friends, gangsters Marco and Blacky, are partisans (like sort-of communist-y nationalists, but specifically Yugoslav nationalists) in Belgrade during WII. They, along with their extended family and friends, spend much of the war in an underground bunker, and towards the end Blacky gets injured in a battle. Marco, and their mutual love interest Natalija, lie to both him and everyone else that the war is still going on for the next 45 years, while they become citizens of the communist Yugoslavia formed after the war. Marco tells everyone that Blacky was killed in a heroic battle against t...

“Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable,” (4). Other than their status as the two (nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life, sex and death are a jarring combination. What’s being implied as the connotation? Repression? Violence? - I think it’s both, and both ideas get explored more throughout the novel. The novel shows an ugly underside of American life, particularly in the realm of women’s lives, marriage, and sex, as well as the progression of feminism and shifting power dynamics, showing the first of inklings of sexual liberation and setting the stage for a more postmodern idea of sex. I said “(nearly) unavoidable parts of any human life” earlier, but in the setting of the novel it is truly unavoidable, practically a burden for the women. Mother’s relationship with father, Evelyn Nesbit’s sexuality and relationships, the little girl’s existence in the Lower East Side, and Emma Goldman’s spelling out of the economics of marriage are all examples of the inescapabl...

Two weeks. Two weeks until school is done. Two weeks until the trial of junior year is done. Two weeks until we fly over the white city turned gray by years and bombs, and land in Belgrade. Two weeks until I sit in the old, red, air-condition lacking Škoda my uncle drives and cross the bridge into the city, with the view of a sort of grandiose, socialist-era corner building. My escape into the city. Two weeks until Serbia, the only consistent place I’ve gone every summer, my own Sag Harbor. Like Benji, summer has thus become a sort of periodic experience of cultural shifting, as he navigated the weird shift from being in a white community to a black community. He has to catch up with a bunch of people he sees only once a year, and while being a part of their community he constantly feels like he has to catch up on things. And he’s always in an odd place of in between both cultures. That’s what it’s always like for me over the summer, going back to Serbia. My American-ess becomes both ...

As the composer Igor Stravinsky said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit,”. This is at least how I, and undoubtedly some of you guys, felt about this project. You’re given a pretty limited set of requirements for what you can write, established characters, setting, et cetera. But within those limits, I found it all of a sudden a lot easier to write something. The combinations and possibilities were extremely fascinating. My story is from Esther’s perspective ten years later, in 1963, when she’s a writer and return to New York City. She meets Holden and they get to know each other a bit. It’s a story that looks at both of them ten years on, but now in the context of the 1963 political crises and culture (although part of the story is that things haven’t changed that much yet). My goal was to follow Esther’s thoughts over two days with Holden, and see where it goes. It's titled In Open Air, sort of "the opposite...

Mr. Mitchell - I’m not sure if you planned it like this, but it’s interesting that we have two novels in a row that take a very different approach to placing the novel “in an era”. My last post was about how Housekeeping omits the historical context of the story, so that the story becomes “timeless” to some degree, showing the human life in geological context to emphasize its transience. On the other hand, the historical context of Black Swan Green is expressed in a variety of ways and its deeply important to the actual story. The musical references are a really perfect way to place the book in historical context and to depict the emotions Jason is feeling. It shows that people are always a part of a greater culture, interacting with it in unique ways, so writing a book with such direct references is super cool. Music is a potent way of evoking an era, and a great way to elicit memories. And not only does Mitchell mention the music, but he describes how Jason feels about it. He also de...

Ruthie never mentioned when the story takes place, and Fingerbone is not actually a real town. However, you can probably trace the setting pretty well - Wikipedia helpfully mentions that the book Ruthie reads, Not as a Stranger, was written in 1954. And I assume it’s not taking place after 1980, when the book was published. In a sense it’s nice to know where the book takes place, so maybe those hours I spend procrastinating on Google Maps can be spent in relation to at least one class. Anyway, here's what Finerbone probably looks like. But upon trying to figure out where the book takes place and when and whatnot, I started thinking if that even matters. Obviously, since it’s not all that hard to figure out and place names are mentioned, it’s not exactly that Robinson’s intention is to hide the location of the story to illuminate something specific. But the setting isn’t emphasized,and Robinson also depicts how miniscule human life is in the scale of geologic time, making all hum...

One of my good friend’s mom’s, who became perhaps my friend as well, when I was younger was an anthropology professor who spoke four languages (including Korean, and once she called one of my dad’s students over the phone and when he met her he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t a Korean herself). She traveled everywhere all the time for conferences and was dedicated to all of her students and was really just this sort of beaming light of awesomeness. As a twelve year old, I remember seeing her as my role model - I was gonna be just like her. Not an anthropologist, but I assumed at that point an astrophysicist or mechanical engineer or something, but I would also spend my days working and working, but also having a family and having cool hobbies and having an quirky minimalist style (walls white, furniture bright!) and maybe an artist on the side, doing everything possible. I saw her as an Everything Woman, and I wanted to be that too. Not just a renaissance man, but really an Everything...

The first time I read The Catcher in the Rye was in seventh grade, and it was kind of my first love of a novel. Rereading it now, I still love it, but it’s obviously not the same as before. I read the book earlier as being about a bitter teenager who was angry at everything and everyone, maybe only sparing his sister because she was still a child. But what I didn’t notice before that truly struck me is how much Holden actually cares about people. Not only that, but it’s the root of his bitterness about phony people. Love and the challenging of gender norms now seem to me to be the most important parts of the novel. I think he really cares about Jane; he thinks about her like a human and in his descriptions of their time together he seems particularly empathetic. He enjoys talking to Mrs. Morrow, and the nuns, and he finds interesting things in their conversations. He wants to save face with all of the people he meets in order to make their interactions as pleasant for them as possible...

Having discussed Portrait and coming-of-age in general in more details during class has made me slightly more attuned to the elements of coming-of-age stories. I’ve started noticing these patterns in a few of my favorite movies, so perhaps a comparison of them to Portrait is worthwhile. On his blog, Dylan mentioned the movie Breaking Away , one of my favorite movies probably (and not just because it features biking and Campagnolo bikes, although that is definitely a big reason). It’s a classic coming-of-age film, particularly in the sense that Dave becomes disillusioned with the thing he most believed in - Italian culture and cyclists. He’s in a bike race where he was ahead of these professional Italian cyclists, but they sabotage him and he doesn’t finish the race. When he comes home, instead of calling his mom and dad “papa” and “mama”, he returns to his American lingo. He tears down every single poster of Italy in his room and starts calling his cat Jake instead of Fellini. But...

In a lot of ways I find myself relating to Stephen, in all of his melodrama. I’m not proud but I remember liking the feeling of being the kid brooding outside, pretending I was somehow superior to those around me, or at least special. Stephen imagines himself dying, his funeral, coming across a romantic partner (or more being found; an encounter), etc. And to me, I feel like that’s just a normal way that kids thing (although I’m realizing I might be wrong, and maybe it’s not a normal experience). The scene in the tram especially hit me hard. I remember having a first crush, having a moment with them, not shooting my shot, and just feeling an absolutely crippling sense of regret afterwards. Which is silly, because I was probably 12 and had no idea what was going on and the person I know for a fact did not reciprocate the feelings. And yet I immersed myself in those new feelings, wrote crap poems about loneliness and whatever. And yet I didn’t really read the scene as predatory, as Emma ...

I. The Intersection of Arts and Cultures With the end of the semester comes reflection, and after spending four months reading a variety of literature, I have a lot to reflect on. Particularly in the last weeks, as we finished The White Boy Shuffle and watched Sorry to Bother You. On top of that, I watched a film called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (which is not black media, but is connected in many ways to The White Boy Shuffle), and read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” in class. And all of these things have been connected, leaving me with similar questions. And the way I’ve consumed all of these things is deeply affected by my own life, but they’ve also affected how I’ve gone about living my life. And they will continue to do so. So in honor of the film Mishima, here’s is a four-part sweeping comparison of these artworks and a contemplation of their impact. As Gunnar increasingly takes suicide more seriously, he reads a lot of Japanese literature, courtesy of Yoshiko. He r...

After reading Loewy’s post about Gunnar’s friendships with the Santa Monica boys, I started to think about how the fact that David is Jewish affects their relationship, and does it? For one thing, what Beatty is doing by depicting Gunnar’s close friendships, both David and Scoby, is showing what “true” friendship is. In both relationships, Gunnar and the friend click immediately, have things to bond over, and can have intellectually stimulating conversations. Gunnar acknowledges that David is white, but says that he’s “off-white”, and the fact that he’s Jewish and Gunnar is black is something he recognizes. However, Gunnar says that the only time race really entered their conversations was when they were “debating who Hitler would kill first, David the diabolical Jew or me the subhuman Negroid,” (pg. 40). It’s a weird thing to bring up, mostly because it shows that even while being taught color blindness they acknowledge that they are different, but that they were also both part of h...

Now that we’ve finished Beloved, it’s time to revisit my first post about Denver being the primary narrator. Having finished it, the novel obviously isn’t from her perspective, as it’s (mostly) written in third person and captures the perspectives and intimate stories of Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and even Beloved. Beloved is a beautifully complicated novel, and includes numerous intertwined narratives. Each character’s perspective tells a different story, but together they weave together into a stunning depiction of slavery; its horrors, the human experience, and the endurance of family, love, and culture in spite of it. One of these narratives is Denver’s, and her’s is extremely compelling to me. Her story is one about coming-of-age, and how a child has to reconcile with the past of their parents, how to care for them but also how to live their life. Her birth story is repeated multiple times as one of the big, important events because her birth is symbolic. She i...

Toni Morrison has asked us to believe in ghosts, and we do. Our reality and the reality of a novel are not synonymous; that would make fiction boring. The novel is set in our world, and yet employs supernatural elements. And so if we put a genre label on Beloved , magical realism fits well. Magical realism is perhaps one of the most convincing genres. What defines it, I would say beyond the standard definition, is that there is a hyper realistic setting with supernatural elements. I mean “hyper realistic” in the sense that magical realism often depicts very real events and is regularly littered with actual cultural references or well-researched historical elements. (For example, the thing about the banana plantations One Hundred Years of Solitude was based in reality, and yet the descriptions are hyperbolic. In Slaughterhouse Five , the firebombing of Dresden was real, but it’s full of Billy Pilgrim’s bizarre experiences with aliens and getting “unstuck in time”. If you’ve read any Ha...

I have an idea about the story in Beloved , but as we’re still really early in the novel it’s just a prediction. I’ll try and come back to the idea later on: What if this story is from the perspective of Denver? The novel is told in third person, obviously, so it’s not from her directly. But here’s the thing: the story is told in a way that there is a present-tense narrative, that is being intermittently interrupted by memories of the traumatic past. But those aren’t all separate memories - they’re the same memories, just cycled back to in more detail. So as you progress through the present-day narrative, the pieces of the story are filled in so that by the end, you have the full picture. This reminds me of what a child’s relationship is with their parent. You grow up with your parents, and progress through your life as they are also progressing through theirs. But they had things in their life before you. So as you grow up and they grow older, you hear their stories and as you get old...

Their Eyes Were Watching God certainly showcases Zora Neale Hurston’s training as an anthropologist. She used the idea of cultural relativism, the knowledge that aspects of a culture can only truly be understood relative to that culture itself. The whole idea emerged as a reaction to very Eurocentric anthropological practices. Huston shows us this in the novel by letting the black characters speak from themselves, unlike Bigger in Native Son . She has the readers understand black American culture as it exists without having to constantly describe it in the context of white society, which is different than the social protest novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In this way, I see cultural relativism seems as a good idea, particularly if the author/anthropologist is to some degree an insider of the community/culture. I think it’s possible to allow cultures to speak for themselves, but this novel can still end up being “minstrel-y”. Not because of the novel, but because of the rea...