So Weird

I was just plotting my next poem - the theme to center around The London Blitz - and what is the first article on New York Times' Books section of their website?

Oh, just a book review about WWII poetry, particularly that of air bombing .... It's a creepy sign. I love those.

UPDATE: If this isn't creepy enough, check out what happened last night (for clarification, last night is the same day I wrote the above, so it's über creepy, okay?):

At the recommendation of the pictured book, I started reading a little TS Eliot (he's a big player in WWII poetry, so I figured, Inspiration, eh?). Then I moseyed around, played with the kid, put him to sleep, then started my "Mad Men" night cap (like I do every night), but something eerily coincidental happens, something out of the ordinary: I get another sign. The character, Kinsey, is lying on his back reciting:

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

You know what that's from? No? "The Hollow Men" by TS Eliot. The end.

Shout Out to Ben Sullivan

I received my alumni magazine the other day. Hoorah! ..... Actually, I was not anticipating anything cool and unusual to be published between its covers. There was a familiar-looking guy on the cover - long hair, plaid shirt, faded jeans - but every guy at Texas State looks like that, so I paid no mind. Then I flipped open the mag ... lo and behold (by the way, why can you never use lo by itself?) the man on the cover was a peer of mine, Ben Sullivan (Sully). Is it weird that I'm writing about him and hardly know him? I don't think so. I just want to take a few minutes out of my day to pay him some respect.

Sully and I took a poetry seminar together my last semester. He is a fantastic poet, and I always thought he would "make it." Some way, some how, he just has a gift. Here's the link to the article: http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/ben-sullivan.html.

Here's a run-down:

Sully was assigned a research paper in his class about baseball and American culture, and he chose to write about Lou Gehrig. What was supposed to be a research paper turned into a story about Lou Gehrig's life/battle with ALS. What's unique is that Sully's mother died from the disease when he was eighteen, and he intertwined his firsthand experience with ALS into the biography of Lou Gehrig.

Now, I never knew any of this in our workshop together. All I knew from his poetry was that his mother was sick ... and I couldn't even be sure of that since not all poetry is biographical. The poetry that seems biographical usually is, though. I spoke maybe ten words to him total. But I always admired him. I think it's very cool to see a peer writer get recognized. The workshop environment is just very intimate, and even if you never hang at the bars with your classmates, or whatever it is you do to be best buds, you know them in a way that their family could never. When you write, and not just write, but open yourself for criticism from fellow writers, you really bare everything, you open some of the darkest, most vulnerable corners of your life. You write about things you could never tell the people closest to you. So in a way, I feel very connected to Sully, even though I didn't immediately recognize him on the cover of the magazine.

Anyway, his poems were so well-written that I kept them ... you know, just in case. I feel a sense of pride, really. Read the article, it's very interesting. And I'm including one of his poems without his permission. Hey, at least he gets credit. And I got his back in a court of law. But I want to give him some more publicity because I have mad respect for him and we went through workshop together and I'm totally proud of him as if I were his sister.

Untitled by Ben Sullivan

A mother and two sons make Alabama
with soccer games and Chinese food
sometimes fight with lots of church.

Then sick came into her, to what was
ours, to what we owned, and stayed.
Step father for a mother and two sons.

A lingering drunk with a leather belt
pulled tight, welting fresh skin, taught a
stupid mother with stupid sons blisters,

picked a stick and beat Alabama bloody
and sent a crying mother to freezing Massachusetts
And two stupid sons to scorching Texas

Where they fry their egg rolls in rancid milk
And feed pinches of soccer to the pigeons
While their churches whisper thumbtacks and shoelaces.

Then what was ours was no longer ours but hers
And hers alone. Her and Massachusetts and the sick.
It ate her legs, then arms, then throat, then the rest.

Texas smiles her crooked yellow teeth
And serves warm guacamole as a show of good faith.
Two stupid sons scrub their hands at the kitchen sink.

I'd love to include more - I have three more - but that's pushing it. So I bid you adieu. Congrats, Sully!

*Chuckle Chuckle Chuckle*

See this link for even more chuckles (Better Book Titles): http://betterbooktitles.com/page/1

Ulysses

The Dictionary

The Sun Also Rises

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

I wrote this critique last semester of college. I'm sort of proud of it and so was my professor. Score! So, in keeping with my literary blog, am posting the following:

Critiquing, much less reading Ariel is a chore. It is a dying woman's elegy, a world where critics could never exist or matter. Ariel acts as a lens into Plath's only retreat from unhappiness. Though the poems are filled with a desire for death, they are full of energy and life. it is overwhelming to anybody familiar with Plath's life to experience this vivacity she has for her art.

Beyond the succulence of the personal content included in these poems, their construction is nearly flawless. One of the difficulties critics have had regarding Ariel is the tendency to focus on the content and the effectiveness of Plath's use of her personal life. Because the biographical information is so important to the reading and the legend of Ariel, people have difficulty looking beyond it. But after doing so, the book becomes a true portfolio of poetic genius. Sylvia Plath used the energy of words like nobody else:

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Considering her personal life, the energy in her poems is magnificent. It's as if Plath put all of her vivacity into writing and therefore had none left for her own life. She gathers so much momentum through the use of not only word choice, but line formatting, which are especially apparent in "Paralytic":

My God the iron lung

That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not

Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by ticker tape

After reading this, I feel suffocated and anguished, which was no doubt intended. The real pinnacle in this passage is the last line. The length reflects the world around her; it "glides."

Two of Plath's most effective tools are unarguably rhyme and repetition. These both have become a little passe in recent years - about the past two hundred - but the best poems use rhyme and repetition provocatively. The rhyme isn't cliche; it's ironic and unsettling. See this excerpt from "Daddy":

There's a stake in your fat, black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

The end rhyme is of the nursery order, and the contrast between the rhyme and the content is almost too much to handle. It is wonderfully appealing, the idea of schoolyard songs about "Daddy," the "bastard." And "you" is repeated in three consecutive lines. One of the most important rules for rhyming is not to repeat words, be innovative. but Plath is obstinate, and she knows how to break the rules with ease. She doesn't just call "Daddy" "you bastard;" he is "you," "you," "you," "you" "bastard." The repetition is mischievous; it reveals a sardonic anger, not self-loathing. It speeds up the poem, invigorates it. Plath's voice is always victorious, which gives Ariel a mammoth serving of irony. Plath saw victory in death, in suicide. It's a completely unfathomable thought, but she uses it to the greatest, most perturbing effect and catapults her work to a monument of poetic fierceness.

Plath also energizes her collection by flipping the mood like a light switch. Most poets have a difficult time changing moods and themes from one poem to the next in a collection of novel-size. Plath not only changes from poem to poem, but even stanza to stanza, even line to line. Ariel is so fun to read because it is manic:

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

She wants to let the bees out, but they appall her, they fascinate her. "The Arrival of the Bee Box" is a whirlwind of temptation. The whole of Ariel tends to mirror this poem, and it garners as many feelings from us as the bee box does from Plath.

Ariel does contain a lot of sad content, but Plath contrasts it with overpowering energy throughout. She even lends her vigor to a few elated poems like "Letter in November," so there is plenty of variety within the book. Ariel stands as such a great piece, because the poems are not mundane. With the book filled with musings on death, it could have easily been uninteresting, but instead it serves as a shocking and completely memorable collection of one of the greatest poet's last works.

Wedding Bed(s)?

Ohmigod, what is it with me and blogging?My last post was on May 21. Nice. I never was very committed to anything.

Anyhoo, this post shan't be about books. Go ahead. Wipe the sweat from your brow. Although. I did finish 2666 by Roberto Bolano ... Okay. You caught me. I got through half of 2666 by Roberto Bolano. And I will not recommend it to you, even though I'm a big fan of cruel and unusual punishment. I am not, however, a fan of self-mutilation, and that's what you would do if you read that novel. Moving on. I saw a very cool article in the New York Times today. And by very cool, I mean something that brings me closer and closer to normalcy. Check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/fashion/25FamilyMatters.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=style&adxnnlx=1280862077-ch3zhEP8/QB8PsiCBVzAlw

For those of you who don't have the energy to click and read - even though I'm sure all of you are very proactive people - here's a run-down: it is common, so "they" say, for married couples to have separate beds - Nay! - separate bedrooms. This proves that I am not a cold-hearted, unromantic shrew.

In my fantasy marriage - which I daydream about all the time, let me tell you - I will have my own room. And apparently, this is fairly common. Do you think this is weird? I don't. I hated sharing a bedroom with my sister, so why would I love sharing a bedroom with my fantasy husband? I know, I know. I will undoubtedly paste myself to his glittering pecs of steel, but I still don't want to share a room. We can rendezvous from time to time - maybe hour to hour in our twenties, day to day in our thirties, even year to year in our sixties. I'm all for some lovin'. Having separate rooms will bring that extra zest - not that my fantasy marriage would ever need zest - to our lives. We can pretend we aren't even married: "My place or yours?" Isn't that cool? I think it most definitely is.

And I can stay up late and watch The Notebook whenever I want (I know your intruder-alert signal is buzzing but most girls like doing this so I figured I'd use it as an example, ahem), he can stay up late and watch Sports Center whenever he wants (really enjoying that solo room right now), I can talk in my sleep to Johnny Depp without his ego shriveling up, he can snore as loud as his nose pleases, and I can sleep at a cool (and room temperature) seventy-five degrees Farenheit since his big, fat - and highly flammable - log of an arm isn't hurled over me at an incredibly uncomfortable ninety-six degrees. Pshew.

So, my fantasy house for my fantasy family will have two master bedrooms.

On a separate and much more somber note, my friend Bailey is moving to ... Pennsylvania? What's a girl to do? Read, I guess. Until next time - which, hopefully won't be too long from now - see ya later.

Run-Down on the Past Couple Books I've Read:

I need to get my ass back in gear. You took it outta me, JD. I think I've recovered my affection for literary review, but not completely (hence the title). I don't have the fortitude (or one of the books, for that matter) to quote, thus rendering my critique a "reader response." Plus, these past two were non-fiction - Ewwww. It squishes when I touch it.

First up: Blink by Malcom Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell argues the merits of split-second decision-making. I should have done more than flinch at Malcolm's best-seller status - this never fails to be a red flag. But I felt an after-flinch about three paragraphs in and an estimated five I thinks. Really, it's a novel on science; you don't think, you research. Somebody wasn't listening in freshman psychology. Tsk tsk. But Malcolm does research, and praise be to Jesus for that. Everything but his commentary is bearable, and on occasion, interesting. Unfortunately, the way to connect studies is through authorial guidance. Although Gladwell is an eager captain, we readers lack direction. As an aside, I apologize - the lack of quotation makes my argument more of a disgruntled opinion. To hell with it. It's my blog; I've already proliferated my opinion throughout. Blink reads like a college research paper, which surprises me. I thought a journalist of New Yorker caliber would have this point-proving thing down. But Gladwell lacks assertion, ever the necessity when asserting. He lacks organization, necessary when presenting ideas. And it's clear that the book is too ambitious for its size. His argument requires more comprehensive support, and I end Blink thinking: "That's a nice idea."

Second up: Songs My Mother Taught Me by Marlon Brando. I'm not going to review this book, because, well, it's an autobiography. My interest in Brando extends from his work in film (inspiring). How is one so familiar with the motivations of other people? My question is never really answered, though Brando asks this himself frequently. But I am certain after all 468 pages that Marlon devoted his life to mastering human impulse. The book is indulgent and pretentious, as autobiographies are. But Brando's charade is a mocking spit in the face, not a product of affectation. My theory is that he's so ashamed of his willingness to do most anything for money (Example A: Publishing his autobiography) that he sells out to the nth degree. "Fine, if you want an autobiography, I'll give you an autobiography" (not a direct quote). Brando was a master manipulator. If he didn't agree with a director, Marlon delivered such a horrible performance that the director would finally relent. Every word is so affected that the autobiography defeats its own purpose. We can no longer consider it an autobiography, because hardly any of it is believable. Brando proves to be stubborn and manipulative, but only because he has to be. These are his defense. Although I take most of Songs with a grain of salt (forgive the cliche), I feel more acquainted with Brando at its close.

Analysis: Nine Stories by JD Salinger

For those like me who couldn't find any insightful analyses about this collection on the Internet: You're welcome. I have finally figured out what this is about (I think).

So the fancy book club met a couple weeks ago to discuss Nine Stories by JD Salinger. Much despair was had because of our varied and confused insights into Salinger's stories. Was Seymour a pedophile? What's up with the random last line in "Just Before the War with the Eskimos?" How should we interpret Nine Stories? And although I haven't answered most of these questions, I can at least answer the last. So for those of who don't know how to absorb the collection, here's a little solace:

All of these short stories are about the loss of innocence and the attempt to gain it back. The characters are stuck between innocence and adulthood. And, interestingly, nearly all of the stories feature an interaction between a child and an adult, the child generally being an ideal or a tool for the adult to regain innocence - but not always. In some, even the child is struggling with the loss of ideals.

Seymour Glass is the main character in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and he's recently returned from the war with mental wounds serious enough to require psychiatric help. The first half of the story shows a telephone conversation between his new wife, Muriel, and her mother. Their discussion revolves around Seymour's problems, and - when compared to our firsthand experience with those problems - we realize how little they grasp and how little either of them has invested in his well-being. In the second part of "Bananafish" Seymour speaks with a young girl named Sybil about catching (mythical) bananafish - a fish whose quest for food leads to its a demise. The encounter is a bit disturbing - sexual language abound - and we get a feel for Seymour's anguish, although specifics are murky. Salinger uses every word to his advantage - in a very subtle way - and, needless to say, the encounter is quite unsettling. We have that distress confirmed when, at the end of the story, Seymour retires to the hotel room - where his wife is sleeping - sits next to her, and shoots himself.

The significance of the bananafish is, of course, Seymour's alignment with it. The fish's quest for food translates to Seymour's quest for innocence. His quest, like the fish's, ends in death. Sybil represents Seymour's ultimate goal, which is why their interaction is so unnerving. It seems, on the outside, like he's preying on her (like the bananafish does its food), but he's actually after what she represents: innocence. He gets his fill and bloats so that he can't fit back into a world where people like his wife and mother-in-law rule. They are Sybil's antithesis, and Seymour is caught between the two different existences. It's in this limbo where Seymour - and many of Salinger's protagonists in Nine Stories - perish.

Eloise and Mary Jane are former college roommates who reconnect in "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (my personal fave). Mary Jane visits Eloise at her house, and thus ensues a night of drunken revelations. Immediately, Eloise appears unhappy to the point of severity, and Mary Jane takes a back seat to Eloise's readily apparent issues. We learn that Eloise lost the love of her life in the war (a common villain in Nine Stories) and has resigned herself to a lackluster, unwanted marriage. She's so unsatisfied with her life and her past that she takes it out on everyone, especially her daughter Ramona who has an imaginary friend - symbolic of dreamy innocence and also indicative of a void she's trying to fill (the lack of compassion from her mother). In one poignant scene in "Uncle Wiggily," Eloise berates Ramona with incredible rage. In the end - after a LOT of alcohol - Eloise admits her weakness: transposing her anger onto others. She resents the loss of her first love, resents her loss of innocence, and resents the people who still have it. It's really an agonizing story about lost hope, the recognition of no longer having hope, and the desperation to - if nothing else - remember what it's like to have hope. She's trapped in a sort of external realm, watching herself, aware of her circumstance, and yet not being capable of moving forward.

"Just Before the War with the Eskimos" is about a frugal young girl, Ginnie, who comes into her friend, Selena's home to collect a cab fare and encounters her brother, Franklin, a grubby Holden Caulfield-type of character. "Eskimos" really eludes any obvious meaning, but it's in there ... somewhere. Okay, here goes .... the larger theme is war. It's the backbone of most of Nine Stories. Franklin was not drafted, because he has a bad heart, and he and Ginnie talk about this briefly, but long enough for Ginnie to connect it with what they are subconsciously discussing: rejection. From the get-go - with her demanding to be reimbursed for the cab fare - Ginnie appears to be a girl who takes things for granted; she gets everything she wants. Ginnie's not deliberately mean, but she doesn't accept things as they are, but rather demands that they be how she wants them and easily dismisses things/people she doesn't care for. She wants to throw the furniture in Selena's home out the window, for example. Then, in walks Franklin, who is boldly himself. Their conversation begins with his rejection from the draft, then moves to his rejection by Ginnie's sister, then Ginnie's rejection of the sandwich he offers her. Ginnie is connecting with a person who has been rejected his whole life by people like her and the types of institutions that she represents. Unconsciously, Ginnie links her behavior with the behavior of war, and in the end, decides to keep the sandwich - a growth in character. The sandwich is sort of symbolic of the rejection Franklin has experienced in the past(his loss of innocence), and it parallels the dead Easter chick (death=death of innocence/hope) in the last line. I may be stretching it, but the story is so tightly wound that it's hard to unravel. Ginnie is undoubtedly changed for the better because of her interaction with Franklin. Her taking the sandwich may have given him hope for future acceptance, and he gave Ginnie forgiveness and a little child-like compassion. Eh?

"The Laughing Man" - Yeesh. This story is a mind-squeeze if I ever saw one, but I think I've got it figured out. The premise is that a college-aged guy takes a bunch of young boys on little "field trips" - to the baseball diamond, for example (What are his motives? Where are these boys' parents and how do they feel? I don't know, but alas ...) During these outings, The Chief - as he's called - narrates a fable about The Laughing Man, a sort of creepy-roguish-Robin Hood character with a deformed face, a sense of adventure, and an Inspector Clouseau type-of-character after him. "The Laughing Man" may or may not be narrated by Buddy Glass, a member of Salinger's Glass family. The boys-only routine comes to a halt when The Chief's girlfriend, Mary Hudson, starts tagging along, presumably because of dentists' appointments she has in the city. With the entrance of Mary, the Laughing Man's fate takes a turn for the worse. The narrator notices frustration between Mary and The Chief, and in the end, the Laughing Man meets his maker and the boys never see Mary Hudson again.

"The Laughing Man" is primarily a story about lost innocence. The Chief, a college student, spends his afternoons with relatively young boys - questionable, but without a doubt, an attempt to sustain his youth. Immediately, with the entrance of Mary Hudson, the narrator senses stress between her and the Chief. The Laughing Man symbolizes boyhood and innocence, and when Mary Hudson arrives, the Laughing Man's fate becomes less certain. Thanks to Wikipedia, a plausible explanation would be that Mary Hudson is pregnant and is actually coming into the city for doctor's visits, not dentist appointments. (Who has frequent dentist appointments?) This is most likely the case, but it's irrelevant. The moral of the story - and what the Chief is teaching the boys through the Laughing Man's story - is that boyhood ends. Innocence ends. Kind of depressing, but there it is, consistent with the rest of Nine Stories.

"Down at the Dinghy" opens with two house servants discussing Lionel, the son of Boo Boo Glass (their employer). (Another Glass appearance - woohoo!) We gather from their conversation that Lionel has a penchant for running away. One of them is also concerned that Lionel will repeat something she said (apparently, he has a penchant for that as well).Thus, after Boo Boo arrives at the house, speaks with the women for a moment, and goes down to the pier to see Lionel, he's trying to sail away. Where the Wild Things Are? anyone? The rest of the story is devoted to Boo Boo's attempt to entice Lionel back to shore, as it were. She tries to go with him, tries to find out why he's leaving (one of the house servants called his dad a kike), and then finally challenges him to a race back to the house. (Lionel wins.)

"Down at the Dinghy" is so understated that it seems like a "day-in-the-life." But Salinger isn't a "day-in-the-life" kinda guy. Soooooooooo .... I'm gonna squeeze this baby open. Two instances in this story are noticeably darker than the rest: the housekeeper calling Lionel's father a kike and Lionel wearing Seymour's goggles. (Seymour was Boo Boo's brother). Now, Lionel's problem isn't as shallow as "a boy with a penchant for running away." These two instances are more significant than the anatomy of "Down at the Dinghy" would lead you to believe. This young boy has recently (I'm assuming) lost his uncle, and additionally, he believes that other people think poorly of his father. It's a double-blow, and Lionel reacts by running away. What seems like a story about a kid just being a kid, read from this perspective, transforms into a story about a person grappling with the loss of ideals. Lionel is realizing that the world is not as it seems; there's more going on. I believe he feels blindsided. Lionel throwing Seymour's goggles into the water is so significant, because he's disposing of distractions from the truth. Finally, Boo Boo coaxes him back into being a kid, distracts him from his disillusionment. So there is Lionel, another of Salinger's characters who is straddling the line between innocence and adulthood.

"For Esmé - with Love and Squalor" is one of Salinger's more obvious stories. During the war, Sergeant X recollects his brief but impressionable meeting with Esmé, a young girl in a restaurant before the war. "Esmé" is totally simple, thus it doesn't need to be dissected; I don't even need to give you a rundown of their interaction. Basically, Esmé represents innocence for Sergeant X during the war, a time of "squalor" and adult concerns. Innocence and squalor both constitute the sergeant's existence.

"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" relates a phone call between Lee and Arthur. Arthur believes his wife, Joanie, is having an affair, while we're led to believe that the woman with Lee is in fact Joanie. Arthur's life appears to be in shambles (lost a court case, wife cheating on him, etc.), but soon after the two men hang up, Arthur calls Lee back and makes up a story about Joanie coming back home even though she's still with Lee. Arthur is, for all intents and purposes, a man who prides himself on having a trophy job and a trophy wife, two naive ideals. When those ideals are torn down - in a sheer act of childish pride - Arthur pretends they still exist. This would generally go unnoticed, but is readily apparent to Lee and Joanie, hence why Salinger chose to tell the story through their points of view.

"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" is about a pretentious young man (De Daumier) who fakes his way into a professorship at an art school. Once there, he reviews his pupils' work and struck by a religious painting by a nun. That's basically it. De Daumier-Smith is a wayfarer, devoid of spirituality and ideals, extremely pretentious and this piece of art forces him to question his convictions. "Blue Period" is about a man who pretends to be a complex "adult" but is stripped of his pretensions through an artist who evokes spirituality and idealism.

"Teddy" is a boy genius/profit who has an existential conversation aboard a ship with Nicholson, a curious grad student. Teddy believes in past lives and karma, and - from what I know about Salinger - represents his spirituality du jour. Salinger, in every one of his Nine Stories, is painting innocence the protagonist and adulthood the villain but is concerned with those characters torn between the two. "Teddy" rounds out the collection nicely, because its main character lives and dies by his ideals. Teddy is the martyr of Nine Stories and he's meant to be the example for its characters, readers, and even its author.

(Dude, this seriously took me like a week *tongue rolls out and eyes turn into little X's*