It seemed to have been raining all night
when I got up on Monday although there was still quite a bit of snow lying
stretched out along the edges of the street and lying in rock shaped chunks in
the middle of the street as the wind continued to howl. Queen Street was mostly
clear and it looked like a plough had actually pushed most of the snow to one
corner of the Dollarama parking lot into the shape of a big white rolled up
carpet.
I
went out in the afternoon to pick up my prescription at the drug store. The
sidewalk was still very wet from melting snow but I got by with wearing my
Blundies instead of the Kodiaks for the walk. I had to sign a receipt twice the
size of a postage stamp but half the size of my signature for my little white
paper bag.
I
wasted a lot of time on the internet until I took a siesta in the afternoon but
shortly after getting up I began making stream of consciousness notes in
longhand towards six practice essays for my Wednesday morning exam.
In
answer to “Examine the representation of female sexuality” I wrote:
A
Streetcar Named Desire takes place in the afterlife where women must still be
subservient, know their place and be able to catch a mans meat when he throws
it at her. Blanche Dubois is out of
place in the afterlife because she is not dead yet. She still expects to be
recognized as she was in the world of the living. She has learned to be a
sexual woman manoeuvring the world with her wiles but she has also been out manoeuvred
by the world. She balances gentility with sexuality and appears fragile and
broken because of it.
This is also about
class. An unmarried woman of class with no property or prospects using her
sexuality to survive is considered low while this is acceptable behaviour for
men. But men do not need to use sexuality to survive. When stripped of nothing
but sexuality one is nakedly vulnerable. But to reach out to others in a sexual
way is considered normal for a man. A woman has to be married to be a lady and
to be sexual. All of her gentility is put in question when she takes
control. Blanche had no power to save
Belle Rêve because it was in the
power of the men to ruin. Blanche is the personification of Belle Rêve. She is a beautiful dream
that cannot be maintained in modern reality.
In “Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?” Martha is a ball buster. She is a predator who makes use of
her sexuality in the service of her father. The infertile, unproductive
environment in which she lives with George allows them both to behave like
children emotionally, even though they are intellectually and sexually adults.
Martha is the only
sexual person in the play. In George’s imagination she even has sex with their
imaginary son. George is disgusted by Martha’s overt sexuality because it is
predatory and bent on conquest. He rejects her advances because he does not
want to be conquered because then he would lose the contest that is their
marriage. He must defeat her through her pretence of being a mother.
On the question of
how violence operates in the works we’ve studied, I said:
Violence operates in A
Streetcar Named Desire to change the energy and to put things on another level.
The first act of violence reveals the sexuality of the relationship between
Stella and Stanley. It initially pushes her away but leaves him on his knees in
a needy, emotionally childlike state, lower than her and puts her in power as
she comes back to him.
Stanley’s violence
towards Blanche is a rape that happens outside of Stella’s civilizing
influence. It is sex without intimacy
that effectively kills Blanche.
In both cases
there are no negative consequences for Stanley. He wins Stella back in the
first case and he is victorious in his efforts to push Blanche out of his home.
Violence in Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Operates to change the level of argument and increase
the sexual tension between George and Martha. After thinking that George was
going to kill her, when she finds out it was a joke she is aroused by his
violent play.
Their imaginary
son is killed in a violent clash between modernity and nature on the road in
George’s mind. The violence is George’s way of hanging on. It is self-defence.
With George and
Martha their violence is mostly verbal and their physical violence serves as
punctuation. They face off like drunken gladiators and they seem to need an
audience for their Punic war in New Carthage. They never agree, they never give
in; they never surrender. They ironically agree upon total war. The only option
is for one of them to be defeated.
Discussing the idea
that the subject of poetry is often poetry itself, I argued:
The subject of poetry is rarely
poetry. None of the poets we’ve covered in this term really talk about poetry
in their poetry. Although writers do talk about writers and about novels and
stories within plays, novels or stories, most poetry is poetry free as far as
subject matter is concerned. In Raymond Carver’s story he talks more about
poetry than any of the poets we’ve covered.
Frank O’Hara’s
approach is often metatextual. He puts himself in his poems and his poems are self-aware.
Ginsberg’s
manuscripts are equated with exposed genitalia that incriminate him to the
police.
Does Williams
write about poetry? Is the Red Wheelbarrow about poetry or composition?
Does Plath mention
poetry in her poetry? When Pat Parker calls herself a goat does she mean poet?
Parker writes a poem to create intimacy, to replace contact with a woman.
The fact is that
the subject of poetry is rarely poetry at all.
Even Lorrie
Moore’s short story is not about short stories but she diminishes the whole
thing to a collection of notes.
To talk about
poetry while writing poetry would be to remove the poem from the self of the
poet and would render the poet naked.
On
the function of ellipses in certain texts I wrote:
Ellipses serve to suggest
continuance and momentum of the action or action of ideation of the text
immediately preceding the dots. They draw reader in to an engagement with and
participation in the text as they fill in the blanks and rescue the narrative
from falling off the edge or hope that the author will resolve things. They force the reader to trust the author.
They are a death. They are a continuance into an unseen afterlife of unreadable
subtext that only the reader is privy to. The reader is called to be creative
and to invent … The reader must walk on the dots and be careful not to stumble
into the spaces between them.
Ellipses create
space by breaking things up and showing that they are not solid or complete or
tidy.
Ellipses are
cartoon machine gun bullets that always shoot to the right to attack the east
side of the map of the page.
Ellipses are the
crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel so we can find and save them from the witch.
They come in threes like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and other
couples on dates with third wheels.
Ellipses say, “You
know what I mean, so now let’s move on to …”
Ellipses are
broken text. Something has slipped. An ellipse is a question mark that has been
bent too far and reduced to atoms that now wait on an assembly line to be glued
back together.
On
the operation and effect of humour I opined:
Humour
operates to ease pressure from the gravity of a situation but also to give the
gravity of a situation swinging room so it will have greater impact. In Lorrie
Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed
Onk” there is humour throughout her conveyance of the tragic circumstances
depicted. The humour serves like rests in a piece of music. The humour carries
us along by maintaining emotion when the sadness has reached saturation so as
to reinsert the recharged sadness later on. Laughter and sobbing cause the same
abdominal spasms. Humour is an effective vehicle to carry us into sadness because
we might not go there willingly otherwise. Humour is how we negotiate with
sadness. We cannot see the shape of a shadow without a light and we cannot see
the shape of sadness without humour and vice versa. Humour is how we reconcile
with the play of opposites in circumstances. Cancer, war and genocide are
absurd and so they must also be funny.
In
Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story” we are witnesses to the beginnings of a
holocaust as the Indians are carried off, many to their deaths, but Coyote only
laughs because Indians are not worth stealing. The idea of enslaving people is
ridiculous and so it cannot be taken seriously. The European slavers are silly
even though their actions have devastating results. Making Columbus silly is
the only way to understand him because overpowering people is an inferior thing
to do. Only cartoons would treat humans so horribly.
On
the role of self and self-creation in US literature I posed that:
To put oneself
into a work of literature is to self-create. Literature examines the self and
self-creates at the same time. There is no objectivity because the more we
examine the self the more universal we make it.
Frank O’Hara
inserts himself into his poems, as do all of the poets we have covered in this
term. O’Hara’s self is an observer that also observes his observing self and
his self becomes to some extent that of the reader but other aspects of his
self are insoluble because of the name dropping of strangers in his poems.
To put oneself
into a poem is to torture oneself. The
short story writers we have covered, other than Lorrie Moore, do not expose
themselves as much as the poets. Every one of Pat Parker’s poems are about the
self even when that self is the collective consciousness of all black women.
Writing about the
self is an attempt at self-discovery. One oneself as a character in a piece of
literature in order to bate a trap in order to catch oneself red handed and
thereby find oneself. Pat Parker’s poems are mirrors that say here I am. Sylvia
Plath’s poems are also all about the self. There is always an “I” observing,
being affected and moved. “I” exists in literature so there can be other. Other
is all around “I”. Poems or stories without a self do not take place in the
centre but rather on the side. They are landscape studies.
I
watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay that started off in an intriguing way
but ended up as conventionally disappointing. A man named Howard is taking a
walk on a deserted road late at night as a woman named Isabel is walking in the
opposite direction. He passes her with little notice but she turns to look at
him before continuing on. Shortly after that he stumbles in the dark and falls
face down in the dirt, bruising his cheek, tearing his pants and generally
getting scuffed up. On the way back a cop stops him, sees his condition and
tells him to get in the car. He is taken to a house where there are other
police officers and a detective. Sitting on the couch in the living room of
that house is the now traumatized woman that he’d passed on the sidewalk. The
cops ask Isabel if Howard is the man that attacked her and she says he was. He
ends up going to jail between one and five years. I assume it was three years
because when he gets out and the warden tells him that he has $105 coming to
him because of his work in the prison machine shop he corrects him that
actually the state owes him $13000 in lost wages. He had been a clerk before he
was arrested and in 1964 three years wages would have amounted to about $13000.
The warden firmly tells Howard firmly that the state owed him nothing but a
lesson. Howard smiles slyly and responds, “Oh, I learned many lessons while I
was here.” Next we see Howard, disguised in a fake moustache, assaulting a bank
courier. The briefcase that he makes away with contains a little over $15,000.
Howard keeps exactly $13,000 and sends the change back to the bank. With the
money he buys a record store in the small town in which Isabel lives. He makes
himself very visible to her. She sees him on the street, at the library and one
time when she accidentally bumps into him she calls a cop, but the officer saw
the whole thing and told her he hadn’t done anything wrong. Eventually she
comes to his record store a couple of times and he invites her to a concert.
They begin a romance and she falls in love with him hard because he is very
handsome and she is not what would be considered a Hollywood beauty. She admits
that she is now not so sure that he had been her attacker three years before
but he tells her to forget about it. The detective that originally charged
Howard is suspicious of his reasons for courting Isabel because he knows that
Howard still maintains his innocence and so he is afraid that Howard is out for
some sort of revenge. When he hears that they are to be married he concludes
that Howard’s intention is to kill Isabel.
This
is where it got boring because it seems to me that there would have been a more
satisfying revenge than murder on someone whose false testimony put you in
prison for three years.
They
take their honeymoon by the sea and Howard arranges for Isabel to die in a
boating accident on the last day of their holiday. He cuts the fuel line
between the two gas tanks on their yacht so that when one runs out of petrol
and she switches to the other it will cause an explosion. But the blast blows
Isabel unharmed into the water. She returns to Howard without knowing that he’d
tried to murder her. The police detective is onto Howard however and though he
has nothing to convict him on now, he warns Howard that he has enough evidence
that if Isabel should ever have another accident he would get the death
penalty. Howard’s punishment then is to stay with a woman that he is not
attracted to, because if he doesn’t the detective will move in on him because
he knows about the bank robbery too. The detective’s motive is that he was a
close friend of Isabel’s father and he knows that because Isabel is not very
attractive she does not have a lot of options. Since Howard has made Isabel
believe he loves her she is happy and so he forces Howard to maintain that
belief for the rest of his life.
It’s
a pretty unsatisfying ending, since Isabel receives no consequences whatsoever
for having put someone in prison for three years based on her own lack of
perception.
The story is based
on a novel called “The Bronze Perseus” by science fiction writer S.B. Hough,
though this one was a psychological thriller rather than his usual genre. From
the summary I’ve read I see that it’s a much more complex story than the “Isabel”
teleplay.
In the novel it’s
Harold who is walking at night. He hears a woman screaming for help but he
ignores it. He is picked up by the cops and is presented to Emma who identifies
him as her rapist. Harold goes to prison for five years. The next few events
leading up to their marriage are similar to the teleplay, but in the novel
Harold successfully murders Emma on their honeymoon ad makes it look like a
drowning accident in front of witnesses.
One important
factor that makes the novel more interesting is that Emma has a mental illness
that frequently compels her to accuse men of attacking her. For instance, when
she goes to the dentist and is put to sleep with gas, when she wakes up she
insists that the dentist raped her even though the nurse was there the whole
time and attests to the fact that no assault occurred.
When the detective
finally catches up with Harold he confesses but insists that he did not kill
Emma out of revenge. He compares himself to Perseus and Emma to Medusa and says
that her murder was an act of mercy.
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