What's up? I decided to finally read this book--what I mean by finally is that I took this book with me to college and never once picked it up, mostly out of fear due to a section read from Absalom, Absalom!. But enough of that! This book starts with Addie--the mother of six of the narrators--who is on her deathbed. When she does die, the main story starts. Anse, Addie's husband, promised her that she'd be buried in Jefferson with her family. Well, her blood relatives--not in Anse's plot or what have you. So, Anse, with his four children (Darl, Cash, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman) and one child who he only thinks is his (I'm not really sure if he knows Jewel is his or not) make a trek there. The book is told through their perspectives (even Addie has a few chapters once she's deceased!); it changes every chapter. A few other people have chapters, such as Cora (a lady of the town, familiar with the family), Addie's doctor, Jewel's real father, and a few others. I'm going to try to do my best with this post, as I had some trouble with this book. Worse comes to worse, I will delve into that dark abyss known as Sparknotes, but I'll let you know when I'm sacrificing my image.
So, like I said, when the book starts, Addie hasn't died yet, though she's darned close. Our first narrator is Darl, who sees his brother Cash making his mother's coffin. That chapter ends, and we then come to Cora--Cora's predicament is that she was given an order for two cakes for ten dollars--but right after the cakes were made the order was cancelled. It may seem stupid that I bring that up, but as I was writing about it I realized it's sort of important. Not exponentially, but something clicked...
Okay, so my next note isn't for a few chapters. Addie is still dying, and we're with Darl again, though that doesn't matter much, because what I noted concerns something Anse says: "'I mislike undecision as much as ere a man'" (17). The man clearly has a bad handle on language, so it's not really fair to be nitpicking, but... The prefix 'dis' means the opposite of--dislike, discomfort, et cetera--you 'opposite of like' somebody, you're feeling the 'opposite of comfort'. 'Mis' means wrong--I misunderstood, I understood something wrongly--incorrectly... And so on. So what Anse is really saying is "I like incorrectly not-decision"--even though what he's trying to say is that he hates indecisiveness. Though, we could pretend Faulkner had a meaning for making Anse say this as he did, instead of just imitating the local's speak--Anse waited weeks to send for a doctor for Addie, so by the time the doctor came, it was much too late. So he could be describing himself... because he preferred avoiding a decision, which was incorrect... Yeah. Just some wordplay. I honestly have no idea if Faulkner intended these things or I'm just making mountains out of molehills, but hey.
"It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. 'You all will have to look out for pa the best you can,' she said. 'I'm tired'" (30). First of all, this is Tull who says this--he's Cora's husband. Secondly, this doesn't seem to be such an unusual story of death for those days. I've heard similar stories about not-so-long-past generations, great uncles and aunts and great-grandparents and such. Thirdly, perhaps it seems absolutely morbid to me, but the idea that you could die like this intrigues me. There's a more... Logical, I guess you'd call it, side to me that says well, there was some disease in her, osteoporosis or TB or some wasting disease that just made her take to bed and die like that. But the other half of me says--what if there wasn't? What if she really did say, I have had enough. I have done my time. The time for sleep is now. And then decide just like that--to will herself to death? The idea of someone being able to do that--not even in the sense of having the willpower, just having the ability to do it--fascinates me. I cannot comprehend it.
Another interesting bit about this chapter is that Vardaman catches a fish and brings it back to the house. Anse demands that he clean it, and Vardaman struggles about to take the fish out to kill it. According to Anse a chapter or two later, Vardaman chopped it up with an axe--when he comes in the house he is up to his wrists and blood and comments on how it was full of guts and blood, like a pig. (A literal pig.) Why would this be important? During the rest of the book, after Addie dies, Vardaman's inner monologue constantly repeats--"My mother is a fish" (84). He didn't murder her, but perhaps he felt like he had--or, rather, what I'm more likely to subscribe to, his mother like a fish or a pig is full of that same blood and guts, or that she can in fact die like the fish has die. Or that because the fish suffered, flopping around and gasping for air and all of that, it is like his mother. But mental degradation appears to be apparent because... Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, but what the hell. Later on, the family attempts to ford a river so they can continue moving the body. Holes have been cut into the coffin so Addie can 'breathe'. The coffin slips into the water and Vardaman panics, he says she has escaped and he knew she would because, again, she is a fish--she got out through one of the holes and swam away.
"'Do you know she is going to die, Jewel?' It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end" (39). Obviously this is from Jewel's perspective. I'm not sure exactly what he means--obviously it takes two people to make you. But one--it takes one person to die? It takes one person to die achieve what? To realize that it takes to people to make you? To realize the importance of that? Importance of life?
"Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots and giving Anse Bundrens He makes feet and legs. If He'd just swapped them, there wouldn't ever be a worry about this country being deforested someday" (42). This is Peabody--he is very critical of Anse, in pretty much all regards. His waiting for so long to call for help, his mistreatment of Addie (Anse abused her and alienated her--hence her affair), and so on...
"I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind--and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town" (43-44).
So I've skipped a little--Addie has just died, but Dewey Dell has other things on her mind--at first when reading it I thought this section was a big metaphor that I didn't understand, but now that I've finished it and gone back to it I've pretty much understood that that is not the case. Still: "He could do so much for me if he just would. He could do everything for me. It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts. But I know it is there because God gave women a sign when something has happened bad. It's because I am alone. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone" (59). That is, she's pregnant. (How can a little tub of guts fit into a big tub of guts that already seems chock-full.) If she could feel the baby, she wouldn't be alone... And Lafe is he that could "do so much" for her. Like give her ten dollars to pay to get rid of something that he caused, hint hint. And if she wasn't alone, she'd be with Lafe--married--and "everybody would know it" (58). Dewey Dell's story seems to be mirroring her mother's. I expect her life won't differentiate too much from her mother's.
Also, at this point--what Dewey Dell means by "He dont even know" (59) is that Lafe hasn't been told yet. Not some deep metaphor or something. Just saying. (I'm writing things as I'm realizing them, so...)
So, I've skipped out for a few pages, but we know Addie has died. Darl and Jewel were away from home at the time on a delivery--Darl imagines that he can see what is going on at home, however. Cash and Tull are finishing up the coffin. Also, had to check Sparknotes for what this chapter was about--I was really confused because I knew he was still away, but then he was somehow seeing it... Uh, let's get to it, then.
"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not" (80). Jewel doesn't wonder about his existence, therefore he does not question it, therefore he is content and knows he exists. Darl, on the other hand, must suffer because he is smart enough to question his own existence and wonder about that.
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home" (81).
A few chapters later, we go back to Darl, and he says "I cannot love my mother because I have no mother" (95). He cannot because she doesn't exist anymore--she was his mother but now she's not because she doesn't exist.
Vardaman tells his brothers that his mother is a fish--I like his constant repetition of my mother is a fish, my favourite being "Pa shaves every day now because my mother is a fish" (102).
So, next bit is from Anse--they have just started their journey to Jefferson.
"It's a hard country on man; it's hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up outen the Lord's earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It aint the hardworking man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It's because there is a reward for us above, where they cant take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord. But it's a long wait, seem's like. It's bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead" (110-111). What I find interesting--this doesn't have to do specifically with the quote, the whole book in general rather--you'll notice that there are no apostrophes in the contractions. That's pretty common for stream of thought writings. But, you'll see that 'it's' has a contraction--make the changes that you like to language that will suit you, but you mustn't look uneducated. I'm not criticizing it--just pointing it out. Also, did you notice the apostrophe in seems? Taking apostrophes from what needs them and adding them to what does not--it reminds me of that archetypal Roald Dahl character, usually a constable, whose accent has him cutting off h from words like hatchet or heckle, and adding it to words like eggs (heggs) or what have you.
"I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like" (111).
The very next chapter is told from Samson's perspective. Samson owns a farm some ways down the road. He offers to take the troupe in for the night, and lets them stay in the barn. Samson's wife is disgusted that Addie's corpse (in coffin, of course) should be dragged across the countryside instead of just being buried. At this point, Addie smells pretty ripe, and Samson is kept up all night by the smell, or the memory of that smell. Anyway, the real reason I mention it is that this is the first encounter there is with a vulture--one, attracted by Addie's stench, apparently also took refuge in the barn.
So the family gets to the river. The bridge was waterlogged by the recent inclement weather, so the family has no choice but to ford the river. Before this occurs, though, Darl thinks about his brother Jewel. He falls asleep during the day all the time; it is suspected that he is travelling by night to see a married man. He has much nobler doings than that, but Darl and Cash have a good conversation beforehand. Darl is the first to speak in what is being recorded here: "'You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?' 'Ay; best,' he said, fumbling again. 'It ain't the best things, the things that are good for him....... A young boy. A fellow kind of hates to see....... wallowing in somebody else's mire.......' That's what he was trying to say. When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again" (132).
So after that, we go back to Tull, who with Anse's family is in the present and is going to try and cross the dilapidated bridge.
"When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you've got to have a tight jar or you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than milk that wont, because you are a man" (139). For the first bit about the mule I imagine what Tull means is that the image appeared to, eh, secrete from the donkey's pores as sweat till it finally formed a full image. The bit about Cora I'm not so sure... What I originally thought upon the first reading of this was that the milk was a metaphor for life--when it sours it dies, so it is better to die than live forever--"because you are a man" (139), because it is how men's natures are, to die. But, now that I've reread it... The milk could be Cora, women in general. He'd rather one that soured (getting old, or becoming 'sour' towards him or her life with him) than one that did not--one that did not because she would be temporary, she'd leave, thus there'd never be a chance for her to sour, and there would not have been any real relationship, this would be more like a short affair... Hmm... Perhaps that doesn't hold much water either, but you can't say I'm not trying...
After this, the family begins bringing the wagon across the flooded and roaring river. The two mules drown, the wagon is hit with an errant log, thus Addie's coffin falls off the wagon and Darl dives after it and Vardaman is too preoccupied with the fact that his mother is a fish and she has escaped and Darl could not catch her.
Tull, after this fiasco, telling Cora of the incident later: "'They was going about it right and they would have made it if it hadn't a been for that log.' 'Log, fiddlesticks,' Cora said. 'It was the hand of God.' 'Then how can you say it was foolish?' I said. 'Nobody cant guard against the hand of God. It would be a sacrilege to try to'" (153).
During this fiasco's aftermath, we are set in Cora's past--she is thinking about a conversation she had with Addie once. Cora lectures Addie on sin and not-sin--she gets mad at Addie and says she is vain to judge and decide "'what is sin and what is not sin'" (167). Of course, what Cora doesn't realize is that she's damned herself, for she's making her own judgment... Well, no matter, Cora continues to complain: "She has had a hard life, but so does every woman. But you'd think from the way she talked that she knew more about sin and salvation than the Lord God Himself, than them who have strove and labored with the sin in this human world" (167). Of course what Cora cannot know is that Addie does know sin--Jewel was born from an affair, remember. And I don't know if I've mentioned this, but in the same spirit of The Scarlet Letter, the affair was with the minister. (Okay fine, Dimmesdale was the reverend, but that's pretty much the same thing, right?) Cora reveals that Jewel is standoffish and mean to his mother, despite the fact that he is most lavished upon by his mother and in fact his mother's favourite (I imagine because he was not born of her loveless husband), and says that Addie's only real sin is that she preferred Jewel over Darl, who many consider to be a little off in the head, but Cora seems to regard as a sort of prophet ("...Darl that was touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals" [168]). So when Cora says Jewel is Addie's punishment for her sin, she is unknowingly correct--but she asks where he salvation is, and of course points to God. Addie almost confesses her sin and cuts herself off, instead saying "'He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire'" (168). Addie is talking about Jewel--again, pretty much like Pearl from The Scarlet Letter, only without creeping me out. Of course Cora gets upset and begins to pray for her soul right then and there.
And to rebut this, Addie herself has a chapter! At first she starts out with her early life (as a schoolteacher, and of whipping students when they misbehaved), and her marriage with Anse...
"And when I knew I that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it" (171). The way I see it, this goes back to what Addie said to Cora. Life is terrible, but you can take joy in raising a child. Fire, salvation. The two are so closely intertwined that perhaps they may even be said to be one.
"And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride" (171-172). That is, to someone scared or in pain or rearing children, it isn't an empty word--it is. A word isn't necessary because it is, regardless of the word's existence or not. You see?
"I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights. He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn't matter" (172).
"And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it" (173). Though originally I was going to leave this be, I couldn't help but think of a biblical connection--the serpent is damned by God, he charges it to "crawl on your belly... all the days of your life" Genesis 3:14. A snake can't exactly cling, for it has no limbs, but because it has no limbs it can helped but cling to the earth and be mired in it. So... Yeah....
Addie's section ends as follows: "One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too" (176).
So--the coffin is recovered from the roaring waters. They take refuge in a man named Armstid's house. My note is just that they use the word victuals--which is actually pronounced 'vittles'. Oh Numba Two! Where would I be without you?
I also seem to have bled a little on this page. I don't remember that occurring, but a bloodied page from a previous owner I would have remembered... Hmm...
Okay, my next note doesn't come till much later. Cash broke his leg at the river, and it is quick becoming septic. They are closer to Jefferson, but they still must rest in a barn for the night. While the coffin reposes in the barn, Darl sneaks in and sets the barn aflame. Jewel saves the coffin ("'He will save me from the water and from the fire'" [186]). Anyway, Darl's arson has been the catalyst in making the final decision about sending him to an institution. Where we meet up with the book again is Cash coming to terms with and rationalizing why it must be that Darl will go to the institution.
First of all, Cash uses the word 'suspicioned'. Actually, that's apparently a real word. A real awesome word! I've got to start using that.
"Sometimes I ain't so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it" (233).
"It surprised me. I see all the while how folks could say [Darl] was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too... and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it" (237).
So, they make it to Jefferson. Here, Dewey Dell goes to the local drugstore with ten dollars given to her by Lafe. What I said before about Dewey Dell's life mirroring her mother's--well, we know she's pregnant. A clerk there thinks she's cute, so he gives her any old medicine to drink and any old pills to eat and tells her it will cause an abortion. He also tells her the ten dollars will not be enough and she'll have to do something for him... So, it is most likely a shotgun wedding will occur because unless she's very lucky the medicine and pills won't work (the 'medicine' is said to smell like turpentine, so she might even die) and Dewey Dell will suffer under Lafe as Addie suffered under Anse.
So! Anyways, the book ends with Cash, shortly afterwards--their mother's body is hardly cold in the ground (well, you know what I mean) and the book ends with Anse bringing back a new wife to introduce to the children. What. The. Fu--I'm going to kill Anse. I revile him. He's a damned stupid fool from the start, and you start hating him because of what Addie tells you, and then how he treats the kids the whole while, and then--Ugh! He disgusts me. He wouldn't even look at his kids when he introduced the new wife to his kids. Cash doesn't seem that bothered, but Dewey Dell and Vardaman are shocked and I just want to pull my hair out by the roots. Seriously, what a worm! Ughhh. But, before I kill the world, my last note:
"...I would think what a shame Darl couldn't be to enjoy it too. But it is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life" (261).
Well, I have to say I liked this book. It's definitely of the sort that benefits from a second reading--I really only had to check Sparknotes a few times. Once you go back and reread bits, it all comes together rather nicely. (Not that I'm feeling brave enough to try to read you-know-what yet.) I don't really have much to say, I guess. I like Darl the best, I guess is my final comment. No, just kidding, my final note is that those are some crazy names. I kind of like the name Cash, though... For a collie dog or something. Okay, that's my final comment on the book. As far as final comments go, it's not my best, but hey.
MLA citation information: Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International: New York, 1990.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab For Cutie
This post's cryptic song lyrics: You were right, I'm underground because sleight of hand won't separate your body from the dirt you're standing on today
Friday, January 21, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Well, with this I've completed both of my Christmas books. I'm a little unused to doing these awkward beginner paragraphs, so just bear with me as you always have.
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman
Oh hey world, what is up with you? I'll tell you what is up with me: I finished Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book, if somehow you hadn't gathered that. But this means something bigger than just that! Oh? you say. This means I have completed Robby D's book list. Oh snap! Awesome? Me!? Aww, you're making me blush! (Let me bask in my own glory, okay? I'm proud of myself.) Anyways, for documentary purposes, I think you should be allowed to look upon what happens to a paper that is folded up and carried in a few different wallets over the course of about three years:
Yeah, true story. And let's not get hung up on technicalities, either? Robby D crossed off the other books of his own volition, so just throw me a bone because eventually someday I will hit those up, perhaps.
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| Believe it or not, this once consisted of organic materials. |
Funny story: when my dad saw me reading this book he asked me if understood the context of it. Please dad, I took a whole class worth of context for this.
Funnier story: I didn't actually steal this book. I have, however, damaged the economy enough to be all right with that fact.
So, what is this book about? It's meant to be--well, to quote the back--"A handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock nation!" (back cover). Where to get food, clothing, furniture--how to steal these things, for the most part, what will protect you best and what is most effective to use at demonstrations, suggestions for scoring drugs, advice on pregnancy prevention, taking care of STDs, and so on... Not much to talk about, you say!? Au contraire! I'll critique SO HARD. Yep.
So the very very very first page of the book has a list of all the publishing companies that refused to publish the book. Above this list it says, "'This book will end free speech!' Only one of the more unusual comments made by the following thirty publishers who rejected Steal This Book". Well... once you read a little, it doesn't really seem that unusual at all. It's actual a pretty logical conclusion... But okay, Abbie Hoffman...
There is an introduction by Al Giordano (?) that talks about some of the reasons why Random House wasn't too keen on publishing it... One of the reasons being that there are instructions how to build bombs and use them properly. On the preceding page, the foreword (by Lisa Fithian) ends as follows: "Your work, especially Steal This Book, offers a basic orientation. It is a precursor to the emerging culture of today. We don't have to re-invent the wheel; we just have to keep it rolling. It'd be great to have you here, but we've got your stories and we know you are with us on the ride.... Abbie, thank you." At first, when I read that, I was kind of like, what culture? Us? In case if you haven't noticed, we're kind of really lame. But then I read the bit about bomb instructions on the next page and it became very clear--Fight Club! Well, that's one thing this book could certainly be a precursor to. Or Choke. It's certainly more of a Palahniuk book than Journey to the East or Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or whatever else have you. So yeah. Fight Club=modern-day Steal This Book. Not completely, but enough.
In this it is also discussed how many bookstores at the time of the book's original publication wouldn't stock the book for its title. This is still the case.
"Today, the lid is back on the book publishing industry. I can hardly find a book worth shoplifting in the chain stores. It's all formula. But if you like books, or once liked them, even if you end up paying for this new edition of Steal This Book, you're getting an authentic book... and that, in this age of corporate tyranny, is a steal"--Al Giordano.
The original introduction, as written by Hoffman himself, starts like this: "It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail--that graduate school of survival. Here you learn how to use toothpaste as glue, fashion a shiv out of a spoon and build intricate communication networks. Here too, you learn the only rehabilitation possible--hatred of oppression" (XXI). Now I must admit that this started things off on a slightly sour note. Automatically my reaction was, you know, angsty teenage brat. It was a gut reaction, so sue me. Not to say I don't agree with the last bit--I do--but it has that bratty tone that worried me from the first few steps. Things improved quickly, but I'm just saying....
"Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and the imagery of the pigs, we will forever be f--ked" (XXII). / "It's funny. There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that's their whole thing. They're jail freaks. They've picked up the whole jail language. Only it isn't their language, it's the guards', the cops', the DA'sThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, page twenty-seven.
"Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live" (XXIII).
"Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn't allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps" (XXIII). See, this is why the emerging culture thing threw me off a bit, because really when you think about it, are we closer to this or Fight Club? Yeaaaah, that's what I thought...
Okay, I admit I got my back up once in a while. In the 'Free Food' section, under food stamps it says, "Many states, for racist reasons, do not want to make [the national food stamp program] too available or publicize the fact that it even exists" (6). Though that may be true--though there's a good chance that it was/is true--it sounds kind of ridiculous to just say "for racist reasons". It sounds like Abbie Hoffman doesn't actually know what he's talking about...
Abbie talks about how if you write to a food company and complain about their product they'll send you x number of packages of it to apologize and to keep you quiet and happy. Believe it or not, I've heard of this before in a book I read as a kid. I think it was in The Secret Life of Amanda K Woods. Amanda says a kid told her that if you write to Hershey's and say I opened a bar of chocolate and it was all grey, they'll send you a big carton full of them for free. I don't remember if Amanda actually tries it or not, but ever since then I've wanted to... Sometimes I still hope I get a weird bar right before I open it... Yup...
As for free furniture, there is a section where it talks about checking into a hotel with a huge (but empty) suitcase and then filling it with furniture of whatever sort you'd prefer before leaving. Proud to say that my friends and I have thought of this one previous to my reading this, though we thought of it in jest. It quickly became an argument over that urban legend about the couple who find the decomposing body of a prostitute under their bed mattress, but hey.
"Hitch-hiking is legal in most states, but remember you always can get a 'say-so' bust. A 'say-so' arrest is to police what Catch-22 is to the army. When you ask why you're under arrest, the pig answers, 'cause I say-so'" (27). Also a logical fallacy!
There is a list of free land one can/could claim and a list of communes (though the list of communes is very limited). Robby D told us (in Rebels) about a commune that he had friends in, and though the state is listed in 'Free Land' (I think it is, anyway--it's something with an 'Ma' at the beginning--Massachusetts or Maine, I want to say, but I'll have to get back to you on that) it isn't in the communes list. Then again, that's not to say the commune is younger than this book. It's not like there was a cut-off date--"If your commune hasn't been established by the original publication of Steal This Book (1971), then it can NEVER exist. EVER."
Abbie also shares information of birth control clinics and methods, as I mentioned above. "The next best method is the foams that you insert twenty minutes before f--king. The best foams available are Delfen and Emko. They have the advantage of being nonprescription items so you can rush into any drug store and pick up a dispenser when the spirit moves you. Follow the directions carefully. Unfortunately, these foams taste terrible and are not available in flavors. It just shows you how far science has to go" (61).
"Hep[atitis] is a very dangerous disease that can cause a number of permanent conditions, including death, which is extremely permanent. It should be treated by a doctor, often in a hospital" (65).
"Sandwich boards and hand-carried signs are effective advertisements. You can stand on a busy corner and hold up a sign saying 'Apartment Needed,' 'Free Angela,' 'Smash the State' or other slogans. They can be written on dollar bills, envelopes that are being mailed and other items that are passed from person to person" (70). One, it always weirds me out to see my name in print anywhere, but especially in books. But, anyone who knows me even moderately well can probably figure out why exactly I'd really mark this.
In the section for getting free books: "If you really want a book badly enough, follow the title of this one--Dig!" (85).
For getting welfare: "Many welfare workers are young and hip. The image you are working on is that of a warm, sensitive kid victimized by brutal parents and a cold ruthless society. Tell them you held off coming for months because you wanted to maintain some self-respect even though you have been walking the streets broke and hungry. If you are a woman, tell him you were recently raped. In sexist Amerika, this will probably be true" (88). The last two sentences have a disheartening amount of pessimism in them...
Under diagrams showing how to roll a joint: "Avoid all needle drugs--the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon" (99).
One thing I really liked about the book were the photos--there'd be a picture of a person reading a book while laughing, or a girl in an aisle of a supermarket with sarcastic captions. The girl in the supermarket is in the chapter on stealing, and the caption is something like, "At these prices, who can afford not to?" The picture that makes me think of this is on page 101--a girl watering a marijuana plant. The captions reads: "My, won't the folks at the Horticultural Show be amazed" (101).
I started getting really uneasy towards the end when it started talking about street-fighting. It starts off with things that are mainly last-ditch protection efforts--you know, knives, basic physical self-defense, a diagram of weak points on the human body--but it goes on to give instructions on how to make pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, what the best guns to buy and use are, et cetera. It sort of sullied the whole business--at least to me it seemed to sully the whole business--of what Abbie Hoffman had built up with. The second I saw "If we want to get high we're going to have to fight our way up" (163), I got the sinking feeling. Granted--this is after Woodstock, really, and if I remember Rebels well, Woodstock was sort of the death-rattle of the hippies. Then starts radicalism--so I shouldn't be surprised with this turn. But really, it seems pretty disheartening to me. I don't care if it looked like the hippies and such were copping out, I'd rather be a hippie than one who'd have a need for this... Live and let live. But maybe I'm just a big coward, huh?
"In most areas, a one-night stand in a mental hospital is enough to convince the shrink at the induction center that you're capable of eating the flesh of a colonel" (193).
Abbie also suggests that to dodge the draft, you check off as many things that can't be verified as possible--like homosexuality. I only bring this up for the sake of a fun fact: that's how Jim Morrison dodged the draft!
"Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face" (221). Abbie... referring to people like that doesn't really make you sound any better than the people you're criticizing....
"Poems are free. Are you a poem or are you a prose?" (251).
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose"--Janis Joplin
Well... Like I said, early on, it was pretty easy to follow and enjoy and be a yes-man for, but later on it got increasingly difficult, till I was like "No, I don't want to be here anymore." I mean, fine, Abbie Hoffman wanted to ignite a full-scale, gigantic revolution. Then it makes sense--really, it's all that makes sense--that there'd have to be a section on weaponry and how best to use it and how to protect oneself the best and so on. Weaponry and violence is necessary for a real revolution, but still, it just didn't stick with me. Though if you made me pick, I'd prefer to be in one of the hippie communes of the decade before--and sure, I guess if a huge violent upheaval is what you're looking for, they did "cop out". But why not live and live? Yet at the same time, I remember being pretty critical of that sort of free brotherhood society when we were learning about it... I mean, it seemed like the sort of thing that was doomed from the start... Hmm... I need to organize my thoughts on this. But in conclusion, I guess I'd rather cop out. Oh well.
MLA citation information: Hoffman, Abbie. Steal This Book. Da Capo Press: Massachusetts, 1996.
In other news, my bookshelf is full. What am I going to do with this book? I have somewhere to be in a few hours, so I can't really afford to go on an OCD bookshelf reorganizing spree, but... I... must...!
My next book is A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. I'm about thirty pages in, and I'm sort of loving Christopher Isherwood's writing style, despite it being depressing as all hell.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: The Times They Are A-Changing by Bob Dylan (Why would this even be necessary? Seriously.)
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Well, they'll stone you when you're walkin' along the street, they'll stone you when you're tryin' to keep your seat, they'll stone you when you're walkin' on the floor, they'll stone you when you're walkin' to the door
The original introduction, as written by Hoffman himself, starts like this: "It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail--that graduate school of survival. Here you learn how to use toothpaste as glue, fashion a shiv out of a spoon and build intricate communication networks. Here too, you learn the only rehabilitation possible--hatred of oppression" (XXI). Now I must admit that this started things off on a slightly sour note. Automatically my reaction was, you know, angsty teenage brat. It was a gut reaction, so sue me. Not to say I don't agree with the last bit--I do--but it has that bratty tone that worried me from the first few steps. Things improved quickly, but I'm just saying....
"Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and the imagery of the pigs, we will forever be f--ked" (XXII). / "It's funny. There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that's their whole thing. They're jail freaks. They've picked up the whole jail language. Only it isn't their language, it's the guards', the cops', the DA'sThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, page twenty-seven.
"Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live" (XXIII).
"Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn't allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps" (XXIII). See, this is why the emerging culture thing threw me off a bit, because really when you think about it, are we closer to this or Fight Club? Yeaaaah, that's what I thought...
Okay, I admit I got my back up once in a while. In the 'Free Food' section, under food stamps it says, "Many states, for racist reasons, do not want to make [the national food stamp program] too available or publicize the fact that it even exists" (6). Though that may be true--though there's a good chance that it was/is true--it sounds kind of ridiculous to just say "for racist reasons". It sounds like Abbie Hoffman doesn't actually know what he's talking about...
Abbie talks about how if you write to a food company and complain about their product they'll send you x number of packages of it to apologize and to keep you quiet and happy. Believe it or not, I've heard of this before in a book I read as a kid. I think it was in The Secret Life of Amanda K Woods. Amanda says a kid told her that if you write to Hershey's and say I opened a bar of chocolate and it was all grey, they'll send you a big carton full of them for free. I don't remember if Amanda actually tries it or not, but ever since then I've wanted to... Sometimes I still hope I get a weird bar right before I open it... Yup...
As for free furniture, there is a section where it talks about checking into a hotel with a huge (but empty) suitcase and then filling it with furniture of whatever sort you'd prefer before leaving. Proud to say that my friends and I have thought of this one previous to my reading this, though we thought of it in jest. It quickly became an argument over that urban legend about the couple who find the decomposing body of a prostitute under their bed mattress, but hey.
"Hitch-hiking is legal in most states, but remember you always can get a 'say-so' bust. A 'say-so' arrest is to police what Catch-22 is to the army. When you ask why you're under arrest, the pig answers, 'cause I say-so'" (27). Also a logical fallacy!
There is a list of free land one can/could claim and a list of communes (though the list of communes is very limited). Robby D told us (in Rebels) about a commune that he had friends in, and though the state is listed in 'Free Land' (I think it is, anyway--it's something with an 'Ma' at the beginning--Massachusetts or Maine, I want to say, but I'll have to get back to you on that) it isn't in the communes list. Then again, that's not to say the commune is younger than this book. It's not like there was a cut-off date--"If your commune hasn't been established by the original publication of Steal This Book (1971), then it can NEVER exist. EVER."
Abbie also shares information of birth control clinics and methods, as I mentioned above. "The next best method is the foams that you insert twenty minutes before f--king. The best foams available are Delfen and Emko. They have the advantage of being nonprescription items so you can rush into any drug store and pick up a dispenser when the spirit moves you. Follow the directions carefully. Unfortunately, these foams taste terrible and are not available in flavors. It just shows you how far science has to go" (61).
"Hep[atitis] is a very dangerous disease that can cause a number of permanent conditions, including death, which is extremely permanent. It should be treated by a doctor, often in a hospital" (65).
"Sandwich boards and hand-carried signs are effective advertisements. You can stand on a busy corner and hold up a sign saying 'Apartment Needed,' 'Free Angela,' 'Smash the State' or other slogans. They can be written on dollar bills, envelopes that are being mailed and other items that are passed from person to person" (70). One, it always weirds me out to see my name in print anywhere, but especially in books. But, anyone who knows me even moderately well can probably figure out why exactly I'd really mark this.
In the section for getting free books: "If you really want a book badly enough, follow the title of this one--Dig!" (85).
For getting welfare: "Many welfare workers are young and hip. The image you are working on is that of a warm, sensitive kid victimized by brutal parents and a cold ruthless society. Tell them you held off coming for months because you wanted to maintain some self-respect even though you have been walking the streets broke and hungry. If you are a woman, tell him you were recently raped. In sexist Amerika, this will probably be true" (88). The last two sentences have a disheartening amount of pessimism in them...
Under diagrams showing how to roll a joint: "Avoid all needle drugs--the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon" (99).
One thing I really liked about the book were the photos--there'd be a picture of a person reading a book while laughing, or a girl in an aisle of a supermarket with sarcastic captions. The girl in the supermarket is in the chapter on stealing, and the caption is something like, "At these prices, who can afford not to?" The picture that makes me think of this is on page 101--a girl watering a marijuana plant. The captions reads: "My, won't the folks at the Horticultural Show be amazed" (101).
I started getting really uneasy towards the end when it started talking about street-fighting. It starts off with things that are mainly last-ditch protection efforts--you know, knives, basic physical self-defense, a diagram of weak points on the human body--but it goes on to give instructions on how to make pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, what the best guns to buy and use are, et cetera. It sort of sullied the whole business--at least to me it seemed to sully the whole business--of what Abbie Hoffman had built up with. The second I saw "If we want to get high we're going to have to fight our way up" (163), I got the sinking feeling. Granted--this is after Woodstock, really, and if I remember Rebels well, Woodstock was sort of the death-rattle of the hippies. Then starts radicalism--so I shouldn't be surprised with this turn. But really, it seems pretty disheartening to me. I don't care if it looked like the hippies and such were copping out, I'd rather be a hippie than one who'd have a need for this... Live and let live. But maybe I'm just a big coward, huh?
"In most areas, a one-night stand in a mental hospital is enough to convince the shrink at the induction center that you're capable of eating the flesh of a colonel" (193).
Abbie also suggests that to dodge the draft, you check off as many things that can't be verified as possible--like homosexuality. I only bring this up for the sake of a fun fact: that's how Jim Morrison dodged the draft!
"Ask the blacks what it's been like living under racism and you'll get a taste of the future we face" (221). Abbie... referring to people like that doesn't really make you sound any better than the people you're criticizing....
"Poems are free. Are you a poem or are you a prose?" (251).
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose"--Janis Joplin
Well... Like I said, early on, it was pretty easy to follow and enjoy and be a yes-man for, but later on it got increasingly difficult, till I was like "No, I don't want to be here anymore." I mean, fine, Abbie Hoffman wanted to ignite a full-scale, gigantic revolution. Then it makes sense--really, it's all that makes sense--that there'd have to be a section on weaponry and how best to use it and how to protect oneself the best and so on. Weaponry and violence is necessary for a real revolution, but still, it just didn't stick with me. Though if you made me pick, I'd prefer to be in one of the hippie communes of the decade before--and sure, I guess if a huge violent upheaval is what you're looking for, they did "cop out". But why not live and live? Yet at the same time, I remember being pretty critical of that sort of free brotherhood society when we were learning about it... I mean, it seemed like the sort of thing that was doomed from the start... Hmm... I need to organize my thoughts on this. But in conclusion, I guess I'd rather cop out. Oh well.
MLA citation information: Hoffman, Abbie. Steal This Book. Da Capo Press: Massachusetts, 1996.
In other news, my bookshelf is full. What am I going to do with this book? I have somewhere to be in a few hours, so I can't really afford to go on an OCD bookshelf reorganizing spree, but... I... must...!
My next book is A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. I'm about thirty pages in, and I'm sort of loving Christopher Isherwood's writing style, despite it being depressing as all hell.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: The Times They Are A-Changing by Bob Dylan (Why would this even be necessary? Seriously.)
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Well, they'll stone you when you're walkin' along the street, they'll stone you when you're tryin' to keep your seat, they'll stone you when you're walkin' on the floor, they'll stone you when you're walkin' to the door
Friday, January 7, 2011
The Bible: Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation
Well, here we are, the home stretch. The rest of these 'books' are actually just letters, except for Revelations. Sooo, yeah. Let's do this.
All of Paul's letters start with "The Letter of Paul to X", or "The Second Letter of Paul to X" or what have you, but Hebrews is just "The Letter to the Hebrews". From whom?
"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" Hebrews 13:2.
"Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured" Hebrews 13:3. / "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs
The Letter of James:
"Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field" James 1:9-10.
"No one, when tempted, should say, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one... One is tempted by one's own desire" James 1:13-14.
"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world" James 1:27.
"But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?" James 2:6.
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" James 2:14-16.
"You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder" James 1:19.
I don't have any notes for either 1 Peter or 2 Peter.
The First Letter of John:
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" 1 John 1:8.
"Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world--desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches--comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away" 1 John 2:15-17.
"God is love" 1 John 4:8.
I don't have notes for John's second or third letters, nor do I have notes for Jude's letters.
...Buuuut I do have a note or two in Revelation. (Though I could have sworn that it's Revelations, but okay, fine.)
My first note is that this is where our picture of the apocalypse comes from. The final judgment, the raising of the dead, the four horsemen--! That was fun, it brought me right back to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book that was torturous enough to read that it actually felt like you were suffering the blows dealt by the four horsemen and the seven angels' horns. But seriously, when they were describing the four horsemen, I was just expecting one of them to be introduced as Ras the Exhorter. Bad times with that book. Awful times. Yet not the worst.
What confused me is that John talks about these seven angels with their horns--every time one blows their horn, something terrible happens. When angel number five blows his horn, John "saw that a star had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft" Revelation 9:1-2. So one would automatically assume it's Lucifer/Satan (come to think of it, Satan is never once referred to as Lucifer in the Bible--), no? But that doesn't make sense, because those events would have happened pre-Eden, not during the end of times... Right? Or maybe it's supposed to be a metaphor. Or maybe John is seeing an illusion that is playing up to Satan releasing hell's contents to the world...?
It's also implied that none of the 144,000 who go to heaven forever are women. That's fun.
Oh, and might I add--the 'number of the beast'? We normally think of it as 666, but according to the footnote, depending on your translation/edition of the ancient writings, it could be 616. I had a dream once that it was 521.
Also, demons and devils preparing to ransack the world during the end of times gather in a place that is called 'Harmagedon' in Hebrew. Gee, wonder what word that sounds like...
"And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them" Revelation 9:6.
Other than that, there are a few errant notes here and there relating to the final Chronicles of Narnia book, The Last Battle--but of course there'd be similarities between this and that.
MLA citation information: Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition. American Bible Society: New York, 1989.
So, I'm sure you're hankering for a big reaction to everything, the old and new testament, to have some major religious revelation or what have you...
As for me myself, I had some insight--but it didn't do nearly as much for me as, say, Everything is Illuminated. There are clearly some things that have touched me, but it didn't quite do it. My views spiritually--well, some found backing here, and some were not satisfied. I don't know them that well myself, yet, they're still for the most part unformed. Or maybe it's not quite that, it's just hard to verbalize them. Anyways, like I said--some things boded and some didn't. I tried to remain objective when I read this, but there are many moments when I clearly did not do so. Well, these things happen.
You may be wondering if this will be going on the 'Classics' shelf. I'm not sure yet.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Elephant Love Medley from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack
This post's cryptic song lyrics: The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast, the slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading, and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changing
All of Paul's letters start with "The Letter of Paul to X", or "The Second Letter of Paul to X" or what have you, but Hebrews is just "The Letter to the Hebrews". From whom?
"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" Hebrews 13:2.
"Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured" Hebrews 13:3. / "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs
The Letter of James:
"Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field" James 1:9-10.
"No one, when tempted, should say, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one... One is tempted by one's own desire" James 1:13-14.
"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world" James 1:27.
"But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?" James 2:6.
"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" James 2:14-16.
"You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder" James 1:19.
I don't have any notes for either 1 Peter or 2 Peter.
The First Letter of John:
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" 1 John 1:8.
"Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world--desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches--comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away" 1 John 2:15-17.
"God is love" 1 John 4:8.
I don't have notes for John's second or third letters, nor do I have notes for Jude's letters.
...Buuuut I do have a note or two in Revelation. (Though I could have sworn that it's Revelations, but okay, fine.)
My first note is that this is where our picture of the apocalypse comes from. The final judgment, the raising of the dead, the four horsemen--! That was fun, it brought me right back to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book that was torturous enough to read that it actually felt like you were suffering the blows dealt by the four horsemen and the seven angels' horns. But seriously, when they were describing the four horsemen, I was just expecting one of them to be introduced as Ras the Exhorter. Bad times with that book. Awful times. Yet not the worst.
What confused me is that John talks about these seven angels with their horns--every time one blows their horn, something terrible happens. When angel number five blows his horn, John "saw that a star had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft" Revelation 9:1-2. So one would automatically assume it's Lucifer/Satan (come to think of it, Satan is never once referred to as Lucifer in the Bible--), no? But that doesn't make sense, because those events would have happened pre-Eden, not during the end of times... Right? Or maybe it's supposed to be a metaphor. Or maybe John is seeing an illusion that is playing up to Satan releasing hell's contents to the world...?
It's also implied that none of the 144,000 who go to heaven forever are women. That's fun.
Oh, and might I add--the 'number of the beast'? We normally think of it as 666, but according to the footnote, depending on your translation/edition of the ancient writings, it could be 616. I had a dream once that it was 521.
Also, demons and devils preparing to ransack the world during the end of times gather in a place that is called 'Harmagedon' in Hebrew. Gee, wonder what word that sounds like...
"And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them" Revelation 9:6.
Other than that, there are a few errant notes here and there relating to the final Chronicles of Narnia book, The Last Battle--but of course there'd be similarities between this and that.
MLA citation information: Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition. American Bible Society: New York, 1989.
So, I'm sure you're hankering for a big reaction to everything, the old and new testament, to have some major religious revelation or what have you...
As for me myself, I had some insight--but it didn't do nearly as much for me as, say, Everything is Illuminated. There are clearly some things that have touched me, but it didn't quite do it. My views spiritually--well, some found backing here, and some were not satisfied. I don't know them that well myself, yet, they're still for the most part unformed. Or maybe it's not quite that, it's just hard to verbalize them. Anyways, like I said--some things boded and some didn't. I tried to remain objective when I read this, but there are many moments when I clearly did not do so. Well, these things happen.
You may be wondering if this will be going on the 'Classics' shelf. I'm not sure yet.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Elephant Love Medley from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack
This post's cryptic song lyrics: The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast, the slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading, and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changing
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