What's up? What's new in my life? We're reading through poems for the literary magazine in English club now--we give everybody five (the names have been removed from the papers) and we go around reading them. Mine came up, and everybody was in utter awe. Kellen even complimented me, he told me, "That was a nice poem, Angela." Which doesn't seem like a big compliment but I've never heard Kellen compliment anybody like that. But yeah, made me feel better after one hell of a stressful week.
And the other day I wore my Carl Sagan shirt to World Religions and Mr Stoloff just stared at me for a minute and then told me that I was amazing. Then when our speaker came in and Mr Stoloff was taking attendance he made it a point of pointing it out. It was awesome!
Let's see, and speaking of Allen Ginsberg--(actually, I guess I'll have to explain this one, Mr Stoloff looks kind of like Ginsberg) I'm painting a portrait of him. I'm using this picture, and hopefully it'll turn out as good (well?) as the Kerouac one. So far I've sketched out the most basic outline (I'm having trouble with his forearm, of course...) and yeah. I need to get bags before I can actually start painting to preserve the paints over day... Gee, painting sure is different when NBHS isn't buying the paints!
So, Queer. I believe this is Burroughs's second book, and like his first (Junky) it's autobiographical. Junky is about heroin addiction, Queer is about Burroughs's interest in a man--specifically, a fellow named Allerton. The book was written after Burroughs's wife was killed, just for the record. It wasn't published until the eighties because of its contents, but honestly, this is hardly anything compared to Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, it's pretty tame--though it has tendencies that definitely point towards Naked Lunch and made me nervous. (Not to sound tasteless, but I also got nervous every time Burroughs mentioned being in possession of a firearm.) After reading this I've come to realize that maybe it's not the surreality of Burroughs's writing style that weirds me out--his whole life was a surreal ordeal (yes, that was on purpose--go ahead, judge me). He was just writing it as it happened (okay, with the help of drugs, but he was kicking heroin in Queer) and that's pretty damned frightening. Um... Yeah. What else do I have to say? Oh, his obsession with yage is reiterated. At the end he and Allerton go on a trip and his ulterior motive--well, actually his main motive would be to get a hold of some yage, I guess. His ulterior motive would be to get a piece of Allerton... Which actually isn't so ulterior, he tells Allerton that's the only payment required for the trip... Fiiiine. Let's get this show on the road, eh?
The biography at the beginning of the book is kind of curious. It goes through the normal birth-death-bibliography bit, and it concludes with "He loved cats" (I). I don't know, it seemed kind of odd to me.
There's also an interesting picture used for the standard author picture. It's a picture of him sitting in a couch or an easy chair, but there's a shadow over his eyes and about three-quarters of his face. It's actually a really cool picture. Beneath it there's a cool note by Allen Ginsberg: "William Seward Burroughs 1953 New York, Queer... That's the look in his eyes" (II).
Burroughs has also added a 'new' introduction to the book.
"[Mexico] City appealed to me. The slum areas compared favorably with anything in Asia for sheer filth and poverty... Entrepreneurs, not infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they dispensed to passerby. Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag, and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance" (VI). GET THE DAMN TIME MACHINE. Actually, if I have a time machine, I'm just going to peace out to the 1890's. Maybe 1870's. Definitely no ulterior motives to that, there's absolutely no-one from that time period I'd like to meet/have a tryst with coughcoughOscarWildecough. Also, I'd like to hang out with Jules Verne. He seems like he'd be a very happy guy. My creative writing novel=living vicariously through fiction? Because now that I think about it, this is starting to look suspicious...
"As authority figures, Mexican cops ranked with streetcar conductors" (VII).
"While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer" (XIV).
"Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction" (XVI). Lee=Old Bull Lee (On the Road)=William S Burroughs... Though in Junky he's more of a Kilgore Trout than the actual Burroughs.
"One wonders if Yage could have saved the day by a blinding revelation. I remember a cut-up I made in Paris years earlier: 'Raw peeled winds of hate and michance blew the shot.' And for years I thought this referred to blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper owing to an obstruction. Brion Gysin pointed out the actual meaning: the shot that killed Joan" (XX). I guess it's dangerous to assume that whoever may stumble over this knows automatically what exactly is being referred to--Burroughs was a bit of a gun nut. Apparently he and his wife had a William Tell-ish
So! We're into the story now. As you may or may not have gathered, Burroughs is in Mexico City and later other parts of South America... But yeah, for now he's still in Mexico City. (Isn't Mexico City in Central America anyways? Is Central America its own entity or what? Who does it get grouped with?)
"Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long. He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. He looked like a child, and at the same time a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact. Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor's hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any weakness in another, He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf" (6). Look at how eloquent Burroughs is when he's not tripping balls! Maybe he should do that less often! Well, while writing at least. I'm not a monster you know.
That's in chapter one, second page of chapter one in fact. Next quote is from the first page of chapter four, page forty-seven.
"Saturday night Lee met Allerton in the Cuba, a bar with an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet. The walls were covered with murals depicting underwater scenes. Mermaids and mermen in elaborate arrangements with huge goldfish stared at the customers with fixed, identical expressions of pathetic dismay. Even the fish were invested with an air of ineffectual alarm. The effect was disquieting, as though these androgynous beings were frightened by something behind or to one side of the customers, who were made uneasy by this inferred presence. Most of them took their business some place else" (47).
Burroughs rambles around Allerton, annoyingly long two or three, once even five page monologues. I guess anybody around someone they like (yes, Burroughs wanted to get into bed with Allerton, but I imagine that end is mainly from the fact that he wasn't sure how else to attract Allerton into a relationship, I mean an unsexual one) is apt to, but good lord, it is painful having to read them. Not just that they're boring and pointless, but also that everybody's been there at some point, and you're wincing for yourself even as you wince for him. On the other hand, it makes you anxious and uncomfortable, so you know exactly how Allerton is feeling.
"Joe Guidry had a young man with man. The young man was telling how he was treated by an Army psychiatrist. 'So what did you find out from your psychiatrist?' said Guidry. His voice had a nagging, derogatory edge. 'I found out I was an Oedipus. I found out I love my mother.' 'Why, everybody loves their mother, son,' said Guidry. 'I mean I love my mother physically.' 'I don't believe that, son,' said Guidry. This struck Lee as funny, and he began to laugh" (53-54). I include everything after Guidry's first response out of formality. I think its funny enough if you just cut it off there, but I thought it might look incomplete to someone who hasn't read the book/full passage.
"'You making it with him?' asked Guidry, which seemed to shock his young friend. 'Not even. I got bigger fish to fry,' said Lee. He glanced over at Allerton, who was laughing at something Mary had said. 'Fish is right,' quipped Guidry. 'Cold, slippery, and hard to catch'" (55). Obviously Guidry is referring to the difficulties Burroughs will have in grabbing Allerton. I think there's also a sexual connotation here, maybe fish not meaning just Allerton, specifically Allerton's, well, junk. His phallic symbol junk, though, not his Junky junk (heroin).
"Like many people who have nothing to do, he was resentful of any claims on his time" (60).
"A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving alone in another country, far away from Allerton" (61). Burroughs was debating on just giving up and leaving for Panama or somewhere else in South America. But what I find curious--well, it's mostly a comment about myself rather the writing. Desolation means barrenness, lack of people, lack of companionship, solitary, deserted, et cetera--but thanks to Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels I don't necessarily see it as such. I mean, it means those things, but the negative tones of it aren't necessarily there. Like, I understand that Burroughs means it to be a depressing feeling of loneliness and all, but I am disconnected from that version of that. I see it, but I don't quite--eh--grok it.
Oh yeah, the actual deal is that while they're in South America, Burroughs gets Allerton at least twice a week. How he actually puts it is: "You can lay all the women in South America if you want to. All I ask is be nice to Papa, say twice a week" (72). What's even worse is that he keeps on referring to himself as Papa. So creepy. Like James Joyce creepy. Well, maybe not that creepy, but the gateway creepiness to James Joyce creepiness.
"[Lee] ordered another rum and swallowed four Benzedrine tablets. Then he went into the head and smoked a roach of tea. 'Now I will ravish my public,' he thought. The busboy had caught a mouse and was holding it up by the tail. Lee pulled out an old-fashioned .22 revolver he sometimes carried. 'Hold the son of a bitch out and I'll blast it,' he said, striking a Napoleonic pose. The boy tied a string to the mouse's tail and held it out at arm's length. Lee fired from a distance of three feet. His bullet tore the mouse's head off" (73-74). JESUS WHO GAVE BURROUGHS A GUN, WHY HAS HE NOT LEARNED. Also, jeez! This sickens me! I don't like mice--in fact I hate the nasty little buggers--but talk about cruel! Disgustingly cruel!
"'Tibet must be about like this. High and cold and full of ugly-looking people and llamas and yaks. Yak milk for breakfast, yak curds for lunch, and for dinner a yak boiled in his own butter, and a fitting punishment for a yak, too, if you ask me" (81). I mark this only because of Gregory Corso's poem "The Mad Yak". Undoubtedly there is no real connection, it's just Burroughs rambling again, and anyways Corso's poem wasn't written--or at least published--until 1958... Seven years after Queer was written. (But then again, maybe Corso read the manuscript and was inspired by it instead of the other way around, how I originally imagined it.) But I think to compare the two is interesting, even if it isn't truth and wasn't really meant to be on any solid grounds--the "fitting punishment" versus the tone of Corso's poem. I don't know, I think it's worth thinking about, even if it's not a completely legit connection...
"Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says, 'How the f--k should I know?'" (82).
"[Lee] got into a conversation with a man at the next table. The man was thin and blond, his head caved in at the temples. Lee could see the blue veins pulsing in the cold, high-mountain sunlight that covered the man's weak, ravaged face and spilled over the scarred oak table onto the worn wooden floor. Lee asked the man if he liked Quito. 'To be or not to be, that is the question. I have to like it'" (84). I like this response. This is how I feel about a lot of tiresome questions--you know, how do you like your college, your classes, are they too hard, do you wish you had done this instead, and so on--it doesn't matter if I like what I'm doing or where I am or any of that, it is what it is. People have trouble with that answer, it never satisfies them and they act as though they don't understand (though they must, right?). Anyways. I like the man from Quito.
"In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain" (94).
"What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes... centipedes besieging the houses... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?" (95). The centipedes, the goddamn centipedes! Helloooo, Naked Lunch.
And more surreality: a group of boys (Burroughs estimates their ages to be twelve to fourteen) surround Burroughs on a waterfront and pull their pants down. Burroughs follows suit, but he keeps his legs tightly held together--however, when the boys try to pull his legs apart he allows them to do so. He then receives a blow job, while another one of the boys just stands there and instead of watching Burroughs with any curiosity or the other boys, stares at his own erection with his hands on his hips. That one boy disturbs me far more than anything else--and I can't figure out why. It's the end of sanity, what the hell is going on here, I can't even comprehend it. I don't get it. It's mad!
"Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. 'I'm not queer,' he thought. 'I'm disembodied'" (97).
"'Someday I am going to have things just like I want,' he said to himself. 'And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river'" (97).
William S Burroughs has a dream in which he is holding and attempting to comfort his crying son. This is the only time his son has ever been mentioned in the four Burroughs books I've read. Where is his son this whole time? I don't know, probably wherever Jack Kerouac's daughter was.
"Many so-called primitives are afraid of cameras. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit" (124). I marked this for more reasons than Ms Basetti. I knew the thing that primitives feared cameras because they thought they captured their souls, but Burroughs expands it. I mean, yeah, you want to keep whatever you see in your mind--chain it there, even if that's not what's meant to be because human memory is so faulty anyways--or keep something exactly as it was. You want to see it that way forever. Ooh. This is getting a little too eerie for my liking.
Also, Junky has an interesting anthropological tone to the whole thing (apparently that's what Burroughs studied in college, or had studied at some point in his life). This is the closest we really get to that in this book, which is kind of a shame.
"Stupid people can learn and language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out" (126). As someone who simply could not pick up a foreign language, I love this quote. Straight A Italian students thinking they're so high and mighty. Which one of us is so awesome now!?
So. Burroughs's Queer. I realize I haven't done a fantastical job of explaining plot or characters or anything like that, but there's really nothing to explain. It's like a diary that he attempted to make a story--that he tried much too hard to make a story. It's not forced, exactly, but it's terribly clumsy. It doesn't have the interesting voice and style of Junky, and nothing really interesting happens. He just wants this Allerton fellow, and... and his life. Well, okay. I have life too. Give me something that's not mine so I'll be interested. (I understand that contradicts my reasons for disliking Naked Lunch, but there's a fine line between fantastic and BAD TRIP.)
Let's see, what else? According to Wikipedia, Burroughs's writings aren't well accepted by the gay community... In fact, they're not really sure what to do with it, because although Burroughs openly talks about it, he makes it sound as undesirable and dirty as he makes everything else sound.
Another note on Burroughs himself: he had money. He came from a rich background. He could afford to live like a bum off a junk habit, or a bum in a shack in the middle of the swamp. I think that's an interesting paradox: You've got to be really rich to be able to afford living poorly.
Burroughs, William S. Queer. Penguin Books: New York, 1987.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Kids by MGMT (This is the EP version. I like it less, but talk about a horrifying music video.)
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Boys stood up on their chairs to make their point of view, I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
I love Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)
I'm not going to lie, I accidentally typed 'To Kill a Mockingboid' the first time. 'To Kill a Mockingboid by Hahpah Lee'... No? Nobody else thinks it's funny? Aw...
You may be wondering why this post has the first title of 'I love Atticus Finch'--it's probably because I do. This is a fantastic book, but Atticus is the best human ever. Seriously, sometimes it's hard for me to concentrate on what I'm reading because I'm just so filled with affection for him. I would love to hang out with him.
So the story is about growing up. I'm not sure if it would be exactly classified as a 'coming-of-age' story, but I hardly ever catch onto what makes a book that--so if somebody says it is, I'd accept it as such. Our narrator is the young Scout (or Jean) Finch, Atticus's daughter. It starts the summer before first grade and it ends when she's in middle school. It's... well, it's about life in a Southern town known as Maycomb. According to the back of the book, Harper Lee "always considered her book to be a simple love story". Well!
"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once"--Charles Lamb
"People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb county. But it was a time of vague optimism for some people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself" (6).
The thing that sets off the novel is when they first meet Dill--he is from henceforth to stay with his Aunt Rachel every summer. At first Scout and her brother Jem are hesitant to accept him until Dill says that he's seen Dracula. I just bring that up because... I don't know, it's awesome!? I've never made a friend like this but I should really try it out.
And there are mysteries and idiosyncrasies about the town, of course: for one, there is the mystery of Boo Radley. he is a reclusive boogeyman who the children of the town never have seen, but it's clear he hasn't died, for his parents haven't ever had to carry him out of the house or anything. So Boo Radley is more a myth than man, especially in the children's minds: "Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events... although the culprit was Crazy Addie... people still looked at the Radley place, unwilling to disregard their initial suspicions... From the Radley chickenyard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked" (11). The real reason I actually quote this is not to give you a better picture of the mythos surrounding Boo, but because this whole passage recalls Finsterwald from Maniac Magee. His front steps are the only "un-sat on" front steps in the whole town, they describe his backyard as being the graveyard for not only balls but Frisbees and toy airplanes and more. And then Maniac talks to him! Was Finsterwald inspired by Boo Radley? Maybe. I'd be willing to say that that book is the kid's equivalent of To Kill A Mockingbird.
So in the twenties it became a big fad to go out and sit on flagpoles. The 'kids' were all doing it, no lie, that was a fad. People would compete to see how long they could stay up there, it was deemed as immoral by some people--I'm not even kidding you. This really happened. Anyways, Jem hears about this on the radio and decides to sit up in the treehouse all Saturday. He has Scout bringing him food and water and blankets and books until Atticus tells her that if she paid no attention to her brother, he'd just come down. It ends with: "Atticus was right" (42). THERE IS A LESSON HERE. Also, I love Atticus Finch. Wait, wait--that's not the lesson! Pay attention to Atticus, not me!
So one of the trees in the schoolyard that are touched by the Radleys has a little hole in it. Scout ventures around in it one day and finds gum--she eats it. Later they find two pennies (Indian heads), a broken pocketwatch, soap dolls...
"'Indian heads--well, they come from the Indians. They're real strong magic, they make you have good luck. Not like fried chicken when you're not lookin' for it, but things like long life 'n' good health, 'n' passin' six-week tests... these are real valuable to somebody. I'm gonna put 'em in my trunk'" (47). I love Jem, he's hilarious. This cracks me up so much, especially the bit about the fried chicken.
"'There are just some kind of men who--who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one'" (60).
Dill eventually dares Jem to go in the Radleys' yard at night. Dill does so, but Boo's father thinks he's a thief and takes potshots at him. Jem escapes unharmed, but his pants get stuck in the fence and he abandons them. There's a commotion and the townsfolk gather outside the house--Jem is stuck there. Dill says he won Jem's pants during a game of strip poker, and Atticus asks if he was playing with cards, and Jem says just with matches. (How would you play poker with matches?) But Scout is all impressed, and her comment is: "Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal" (73). I don't know, something about it struck me--no pun intended. (Obviously it's spiritual health over bodily health.)
"[Jem] went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me--he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one arm in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts" (79).
So one day it snows, obviously a rarity in a Southern town. Scout has never seen snow before, nor does she know what it is, and she screams that the world is ending--and she does the cutest thing ever, she begs Atticus to do something. I mean, it makes sense, Atticus is her father after all, but still. Adorable. If anybody can put off Judgment Day, it'd be Atticus Finch.
The kids end up playing in the snow and they make a gender ambiguous snowman. Miss Maudie gets agitated by it and calls it a Morphodite (hermaphrodite). Later, when talking to Miss Maudie, she refers to the snowman as "the Morphodite" and Miss Maudie cracks up. Later, when Scout gets mad at somebody she calls them a Morphodite. (I want to say that it's Dill...?) I don't know. I just think it's cute. Adorable. Good times with Scout. Looooove.
Oh, and Atticus is a lawyer. The biggest event in the book is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of rape and assault. Of course, being in the South in thirties, Atticus is ridiculed for being Tom's defense lawyer. "'Atticus, are we going to win [the case]?' 'No, honey.' 'Then why--' 'Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,' Atticus said" (101). Ring ring--it's for you, Atticus. I LOVE YOU.
And--the title is explained. To kill a mockingbird is what Atticus deems a sin, because they don't mess up gardens or homes or anything, all they do is sing. Because they don't do anybody harm and only please people with their music it is a sin to kill them. What does this refer to? Well, considering Tom was unjustly accused and other things that would be huge spoilers... I think it could even apply to Scout's mind... To kill a mockingbird--to destroy childhood's sweet innocence--is a sin. Perhaps?
"'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,' said Miss Maudie" (130).
Okay, back to loving Atticus. Atticus is taking a lot of abuse for his defending of Tom--and it's not even Atticus, really. Most people don't even have the guts to abuse him to his face about it anyways--they're mocking Scout and Jem. Jem finally retaliates against Mrs Dubose--he destroys her prized camellia flowers. Of course, Atticus sends him to speak to Mrs Dubose, and when Scout asks Atticus why he's staying with the case even at the hands of all this abuse, Atticus answers: "'Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man'" (139). Scout says he must be wrong, if so many people in the town disagree with him, but he says that they're entitled to their own opinions, and "'before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience'" (140). Um. Atticus Finch. I love you. FYI.
Jem's punishment for messing with Mrs Dubose's garden is that he has to read to her six days a week--I believe six days--for the next few months. After Mrs Dubose dies, it is revealed that she was a morphine addict and she was trying to die clean, which she succeeded in doing. Her gift from the beyond to Jem is a camellia. Atticus explains his reasoning for making Jem's punishment what it was: "'I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her" (149). Um. Atticus. Stop me if this is getting old, but...
Preparing for the case, Atticus is obviously busy, so one day he has the cook Calpurnia take the kids to church. Obviously Calpurnia can't go to the white church, so Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church. Some of the members of the church are angry because the kids--white people--have their own church. This scene exists, I imagine, to show that racial tension existed on both sides of the fence, that black folk weren't just sambos, you know, eager to please the white man and all. I think it's a pretty important scene for that purpose (for the kids too, to see that black folk are just regular folk, though they never seem to carry and prejudices or doubts to that fact).
...And from there I skip one hell of a chunk of pages, about fifty. Atticus is threatened by a group of men from town because he is defending Tom. The appearance of the Finch children make them ease up and not rough him up--and Jem gets agitated, he says his father would have died at their hand had they not shown up. Atticus's response: "'He might have hurt me a little... but son, you'll understand folks a little better when you're older. A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it? ...So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their sense, did it? ...That proves something--that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children... you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough'" (210). I'M NOT GOING TO SAY IT I PROMISE.
The persecutor is Bob Ewell, a snake in the grass if ever there was one. He lives in a filthy little shack in the back of the woods near where the black people have their own sort of commune, procreating constantly and making more just as diseased and dirty children--"All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white" (229).
"'I try to give 'em a reason [to dislike me], you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason. When I come to town, which is seldom, if I weave a little and drink out of this sack, folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey--and that's why he won't change his ways. He can't help himself, that's why he lives the way he does... I ain't honest but it's mighty helpful to folks'" (269). Dolphus Raymond is a white man married to a black woman, they have kids too. He drinks coca-cola out of a sack, the way a wino would drink wine from a bottle in a bag.
I was thinking about not doing this, but--I think I'm going to include most of Atticus's closing statement. It's so amazing. I can't help it. It's revealed that Tom didn't do a thing to Mayella, she came onto him, and her father beat her up and claimed Tom did it. So... Yeah. I'll start a little bit down:
"'What was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being... Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did. What did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man... A strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards... And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to "feel sorry" for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people's... The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption--the evil assumption--that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women--black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire'" (272-273).
Please look me in the eye and say honestly you were not heartened by Atticus speech, and enthralled--I'd be amazed. You'd be the first. This, this above all else, is why I love Atticus Finch. He is a first-class human being. I love Atticus Finch.
I don't think there's much more to write after this. I could gladly end this here and post it. I could gladly never write again and let that be my final statement forever. But the book isn't over--and good God, it's heartbreaking, the end of this section--there's no question of what the jury says, regardless of Atticus's speech. You must know.
"It was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty" (282).
And when they get home--"'Atticus--' said Jem bleakly. He turned in the doorway. 'What, son?' 'How could they do it, how could they?' 'I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep. Good night'" (285). Harper Lee is a damned amazing author. She heartened me so well naught ten pages before, and has so effectively broken my heart hardly ten pages later. Poor, poor Atticus, poor Jem, poor Tom, poor world--
Jem and Dill and Scout go to Miss Maudie's the next day, after Atticus discovers a kitchen full of food brought as thanks by Tom's friends and family.
"'It's like bein' a caterpillar in a cocoon, that's what it is,' [Jem] said. 'Like somethin' asleep wrapped up in a warm place. I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that's what they seemed like.' 'We're the safest folks in the world,' said Miss Maudie. 'We're so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus Finch to go for us.' Jem grinned ruefully. 'Wish the rest of the county thought that.' 'You'd be surprised how many of us do.' 'Who?' Jem's voice rose. 'Who in this town did one thing to help Tom Robinson, just who?' 'His colored friends for one thing, and people like us. People like Judge Taylor. People like Mr. Heck Tate. Stop eating and start thinking, Jem. Did it ever strike you that Judge Taylor naming Atticus to defend that boy was no accident? That Judge Taylor might have had his reasons for naming him?' This was a thought. Court-appointed defenses were usually given to Maxwell Green, Maycomb's latest addition to the bar, who needed the experience. Maxwell Green should have had Tom Robinson's case" (288-289).
"'Can't any Christian judges an' lawyers make up for heathen juries,' Jem muttered" (289).
"'As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it--whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash'" (295). Atticus.
"'Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.' ...'That's what I thought, too,' he said at last, 'when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time... it's because he wants to stay inside'" (304).
Ooh! And their Aunt Alexandra's missionary circle makes me so mad! They're dirty hypocrites, they bash Atticus for what he's done in his own home--they positively enrage me. I don't want to quote them here. They're a sad sort.
Now one of these ladies, Miss Grit, is Scout's teacher. A kid brings in a current event about what Hitler is doing in Germany to the Jewish people--she teaches the kids about prejudice and how it's wrong. Hah! A laugh! Not at the idea that prejudice is wrong--but that she would say it's wrong. She who is so clearly prejudiced against black folks--and the way she writes off the Holocaust gets my goat too. She just says that Jews have been persecuted since the beginning of history without really answering the question of why they'd be so--so she makes it sound like it's okay, because it's historical! And then she just abruptly changes the subject for the sake of math. Ugh! She gets me riled, she does.
And later, Halloween time, the kids go to a party at the school, then walk back home at night... Just Jem and Scout together. Now, Bob Ewell has threatened Atticus's life several times, but is such a worm that he attacks the children--but Boo Radley saves them, and kills Bob. After they meet him and thank him and he goes back home, Scout says that she never saw him again.
Scout imagining: "It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishingpole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's. The boy helped his sister to his feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an old oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched the children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough" (374).
MLA citation information: Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Grand Central Publishing: New York, 2010.
So. This book. This book is so amazing. It's the only book Harper Lee ever wrote--but my God, what a book. It's no surprise she never wrote another book, this book is so much. It has the heart of twenty books--it's just so good. There couldn't have been anything left. I'm simultaneously gladdened and saddened that (most) schools have it as a mandatory part of the curriculum--glad because everyone should read this book at least once. I can't imagine how somebody could ever hate another person after reading this book... But, saddened because I imagine most people are like me and hate it when they're forced into reading something, regardless of the book's quality (I'm willing to reconsider The Great Gatsby, but definitely not The Scarlet Letter). Even the quality of your teacher can affect your perception of a book... What I mean is, some people will take this, or Sparknote it, and treat it like a raw egg swallowed. And that's a damned shame. I'm not going to say it's the most important piece of literature ever written, but at least of the last century. Maybe even the last two centuries. Read it.
Answer to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies's cryptic song lyrics: Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton
This post's cryptic song lyrics: We like to watch you laughing, you pick the insects off plants, no time to think of consequences
You may be wondering why this post has the first title of 'I love Atticus Finch'--it's probably because I do. This is a fantastic book, but Atticus is the best human ever. Seriously, sometimes it's hard for me to concentrate on what I'm reading because I'm just so filled with affection for him. I would love to hang out with him.
So the story is about growing up. I'm not sure if it would be exactly classified as a 'coming-of-age' story, but I hardly ever catch onto what makes a book that--so if somebody says it is, I'd accept it as such. Our narrator is the young Scout (or Jean) Finch, Atticus's daughter. It starts the summer before first grade and it ends when she's in middle school. It's... well, it's about life in a Southern town known as Maycomb. According to the back of the book, Harper Lee "always considered her book to be a simple love story". Well!
"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once"--Charles Lamb
"People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb county. But it was a time of vague optimism for some people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself" (6).
The thing that sets off the novel is when they first meet Dill--he is from henceforth to stay with his Aunt Rachel every summer. At first Scout and her brother Jem are hesitant to accept him until Dill says that he's seen Dracula. I just bring that up because... I don't know, it's awesome!? I've never made a friend like this but I should really try it out.
And there are mysteries and idiosyncrasies about the town, of course: for one, there is the mystery of Boo Radley. he is a reclusive boogeyman who the children of the town never have seen, but it's clear he hasn't died, for his parents haven't ever had to carry him out of the house or anything. So Boo Radley is more a myth than man, especially in the children's minds: "Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events... although the culprit was Crazy Addie... people still looked at the Radley place, unwilling to disregard their initial suspicions... From the Radley chickenyard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked" (11). The real reason I actually quote this is not to give you a better picture of the mythos surrounding Boo, but because this whole passage recalls Finsterwald from Maniac Magee. His front steps are the only "un-sat on" front steps in the whole town, they describe his backyard as being the graveyard for not only balls but Frisbees and toy airplanes and more. And then Maniac talks to him! Was Finsterwald inspired by Boo Radley? Maybe. I'd be willing to say that that book is the kid's equivalent of To Kill A Mockingbird.
So in the twenties it became a big fad to go out and sit on flagpoles. The 'kids' were all doing it, no lie, that was a fad. People would compete to see how long they could stay up there, it was deemed as immoral by some people--I'm not even kidding you. This really happened. Anyways, Jem hears about this on the radio and decides to sit up in the treehouse all Saturday. He has Scout bringing him food and water and blankets and books until Atticus tells her that if she paid no attention to her brother, he'd just come down. It ends with: "Atticus was right" (42). THERE IS A LESSON HERE. Also, I love Atticus Finch. Wait, wait--that's not the lesson! Pay attention to Atticus, not me!
So one of the trees in the schoolyard that are touched by the Radleys has a little hole in it. Scout ventures around in it one day and finds gum--she eats it. Later they find two pennies (Indian heads), a broken pocketwatch, soap dolls...
"'Indian heads--well, they come from the Indians. They're real strong magic, they make you have good luck. Not like fried chicken when you're not lookin' for it, but things like long life 'n' good health, 'n' passin' six-week tests... these are real valuable to somebody. I'm gonna put 'em in my trunk'" (47). I love Jem, he's hilarious. This cracks me up so much, especially the bit about the fried chicken.
"'There are just some kind of men who--who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one'" (60).
Dill eventually dares Jem to go in the Radleys' yard at night. Dill does so, but Boo's father thinks he's a thief and takes potshots at him. Jem escapes unharmed, but his pants get stuck in the fence and he abandons them. There's a commotion and the townsfolk gather outside the house--Jem is stuck there. Dill says he won Jem's pants during a game of strip poker, and Atticus asks if he was playing with cards, and Jem says just with matches. (How would you play poker with matches?) But Scout is all impressed, and her comment is: "Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal" (73). I don't know, something about it struck me--no pun intended. (Obviously it's spiritual health over bodily health.)
"[Jem] went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me--he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one arm in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts" (79).
So one day it snows, obviously a rarity in a Southern town. Scout has never seen snow before, nor does she know what it is, and she screams that the world is ending--and she does the cutest thing ever, she begs Atticus to do something. I mean, it makes sense, Atticus is her father after all, but still. Adorable. If anybody can put off Judgment Day, it'd be Atticus Finch.
The kids end up playing in the snow and they make a gender ambiguous snowman. Miss Maudie gets agitated by it and calls it a Morphodite (hermaphrodite). Later, when talking to Miss Maudie, she refers to the snowman as "the Morphodite" and Miss Maudie cracks up. Later, when Scout gets mad at somebody she calls them a Morphodite. (I want to say that it's Dill...?) I don't know. I just think it's cute. Adorable. Good times with Scout. Looooove.
Oh, and Atticus is a lawyer. The biggest event in the book is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of rape and assault. Of course, being in the South in thirties, Atticus is ridiculed for being Tom's defense lawyer. "'Atticus, are we going to win [the case]?' 'No, honey.' 'Then why--' 'Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,' Atticus said" (101). Ring ring--it's for you, Atticus. I LOVE YOU.
And--the title is explained. To kill a mockingbird is what Atticus deems a sin, because they don't mess up gardens or homes or anything, all they do is sing. Because they don't do anybody harm and only please people with their music it is a sin to kill them. What does this refer to? Well, considering Tom was unjustly accused and other things that would be huge spoilers... I think it could even apply to Scout's mind... To kill a mockingbird--to destroy childhood's sweet innocence--is a sin. Perhaps?
"'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,' said Miss Maudie" (130).
Okay, back to loving Atticus. Atticus is taking a lot of abuse for his defending of Tom--and it's not even Atticus, really. Most people don't even have the guts to abuse him to his face about it anyways--they're mocking Scout and Jem. Jem finally retaliates against Mrs Dubose--he destroys her prized camellia flowers. Of course, Atticus sends him to speak to Mrs Dubose, and when Scout asks Atticus why he's staying with the case even at the hands of all this abuse, Atticus answers: "'Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man'" (139). Scout says he must be wrong, if so many people in the town disagree with him, but he says that they're entitled to their own opinions, and "'before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience'" (140). Um. Atticus Finch. I love you. FYI.
Jem's punishment for messing with Mrs Dubose's garden is that he has to read to her six days a week--I believe six days--for the next few months. After Mrs Dubose dies, it is revealed that she was a morphine addict and she was trying to die clean, which she succeeded in doing. Her gift from the beyond to Jem is a camellia. Atticus explains his reasoning for making Jem's punishment what it was: "'I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her" (149). Um. Atticus. Stop me if this is getting old, but...
Preparing for the case, Atticus is obviously busy, so one day he has the cook Calpurnia take the kids to church. Obviously Calpurnia can't go to the white church, so Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church. Some of the members of the church are angry because the kids--white people--have their own church. This scene exists, I imagine, to show that racial tension existed on both sides of the fence, that black folk weren't just sambos, you know, eager to please the white man and all. I think it's a pretty important scene for that purpose (for the kids too, to see that black folk are just regular folk, though they never seem to carry and prejudices or doubts to that fact).
...And from there I skip one hell of a chunk of pages, about fifty. Atticus is threatened by a group of men from town because he is defending Tom. The appearance of the Finch children make them ease up and not rough him up--and Jem gets agitated, he says his father would have died at their hand had they not shown up. Atticus's response: "'He might have hurt me a little... but son, you'll understand folks a little better when you're older. A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it? ...So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their sense, did it? ...That proves something--that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children... you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough'" (210). I'M NOT GOING TO SAY IT I PROMISE.
The persecutor is Bob Ewell, a snake in the grass if ever there was one. He lives in a filthy little shack in the back of the woods near where the black people have their own sort of commune, procreating constantly and making more just as diseased and dirty children--"All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white" (229).
"'I try to give 'em a reason [to dislike me], you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason. When I come to town, which is seldom, if I weave a little and drink out of this sack, folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey--and that's why he won't change his ways. He can't help himself, that's why he lives the way he does... I ain't honest but it's mighty helpful to folks'" (269). Dolphus Raymond is a white man married to a black woman, they have kids too. He drinks coca-cola out of a sack, the way a wino would drink wine from a bottle in a bag.
I was thinking about not doing this, but--I think I'm going to include most of Atticus's closing statement. It's so amazing. I can't help it. It's revealed that Tom didn't do a thing to Mayella, she came onto him, and her father beat her up and claimed Tom did it. So... Yeah. I'll start a little bit down:
"'What was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being... Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did. What did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man... A strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards... And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to "feel sorry" for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people's... The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption--the evil assumption--that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women--black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire'" (272-273).
Please look me in the eye and say honestly you were not heartened by Atticus speech, and enthralled--I'd be amazed. You'd be the first. This, this above all else, is why I love Atticus Finch. He is a first-class human being. I love Atticus Finch.
I don't think there's much more to write after this. I could gladly end this here and post it. I could gladly never write again and let that be my final statement forever. But the book isn't over--and good God, it's heartbreaking, the end of this section--there's no question of what the jury says, regardless of Atticus's speech. You must know.
"It was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty" (282).
And when they get home--"'Atticus--' said Jem bleakly. He turned in the doorway. 'What, son?' 'How could they do it, how could they?' 'I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep. Good night'" (285). Harper Lee is a damned amazing author. She heartened me so well naught ten pages before, and has so effectively broken my heart hardly ten pages later. Poor, poor Atticus, poor Jem, poor Tom, poor world--
Jem and Dill and Scout go to Miss Maudie's the next day, after Atticus discovers a kitchen full of food brought as thanks by Tom's friends and family.
"'It's like bein' a caterpillar in a cocoon, that's what it is,' [Jem] said. 'Like somethin' asleep wrapped up in a warm place. I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that's what they seemed like.' 'We're the safest folks in the world,' said Miss Maudie. 'We're so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus Finch to go for us.' Jem grinned ruefully. 'Wish the rest of the county thought that.' 'You'd be surprised how many of us do.' 'Who?' Jem's voice rose. 'Who in this town did one thing to help Tom Robinson, just who?' 'His colored friends for one thing, and people like us. People like Judge Taylor. People like Mr. Heck Tate. Stop eating and start thinking, Jem. Did it ever strike you that Judge Taylor naming Atticus to defend that boy was no accident? That Judge Taylor might have had his reasons for naming him?' This was a thought. Court-appointed defenses were usually given to Maxwell Green, Maycomb's latest addition to the bar, who needed the experience. Maxwell Green should have had Tom Robinson's case" (288-289).
"'Can't any Christian judges an' lawyers make up for heathen juries,' Jem muttered" (289).
"'As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it--whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash'" (295). Atticus.
"'Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.' ...'That's what I thought, too,' he said at last, 'when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time... it's because he wants to stay inside'" (304).
Ooh! And their Aunt Alexandra's missionary circle makes me so mad! They're dirty hypocrites, they bash Atticus for what he's done in his own home--they positively enrage me. I don't want to quote them here. They're a sad sort.
Now one of these ladies, Miss Grit, is Scout's teacher. A kid brings in a current event about what Hitler is doing in Germany to the Jewish people--she teaches the kids about prejudice and how it's wrong. Hah! A laugh! Not at the idea that prejudice is wrong--but that she would say it's wrong. She who is so clearly prejudiced against black folks--and the way she writes off the Holocaust gets my goat too. She just says that Jews have been persecuted since the beginning of history without really answering the question of why they'd be so--so she makes it sound like it's okay, because it's historical! And then she just abruptly changes the subject for the sake of math. Ugh! She gets me riled, she does.
And later, Halloween time, the kids go to a party at the school, then walk back home at night... Just Jem and Scout together. Now, Bob Ewell has threatened Atticus's life several times, but is such a worm that he attacks the children--but Boo Radley saves them, and kills Bob. After they meet him and thank him and he goes back home, Scout says that she never saw him again.
Scout imagining: "It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishingpole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's. The boy helped his sister to his feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an old oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched the children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough" (374).
MLA citation information: Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Grand Central Publishing: New York, 2010.
So. This book. This book is so amazing. It's the only book Harper Lee ever wrote--but my God, what a book. It's no surprise she never wrote another book, this book is so much. It has the heart of twenty books--it's just so good. There couldn't have been anything left. I'm simultaneously gladdened and saddened that (most) schools have it as a mandatory part of the curriculum--glad because everyone should read this book at least once. I can't imagine how somebody could ever hate another person after reading this book... But, saddened because I imagine most people are like me and hate it when they're forced into reading something, regardless of the book's quality (I'm willing to reconsider The Great Gatsby, but definitely not The Scarlet Letter). Even the quality of your teacher can affect your perception of a book... What I mean is, some people will take this, or Sparknote it, and treat it like a raw egg swallowed. And that's a damned shame. I'm not going to say it's the most important piece of literature ever written, but at least of the last century. Maybe even the last two centuries. Read it.
Answer to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies's cryptic song lyrics: Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton
This post's cryptic song lyrics: We like to watch you laughing, you pick the insects off plants, no time to think of consequences
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Sunflower (Book One) by Simon Wiesenthal
Hey, I had to read this for World Religions, and I figured why not record that fact here? This won't be terribly in-depth--I already wrote a response essay to it, but hey. Oh, and the reason why it's book one is because that's what Simon Wiesenthal originally wrote. Book two is an addition that's got fifty-three responses from fifty-three different people to the contents of book one... I probably won't do anything with book two, but I haven't started it yet so I guess we'll see.
So the book is based on a true experience of Simon Wiesenthal's. It occurred during the war, and he was taken prisoner. One day while he was working a nurse offered to feed him, but he would have to go with her into the hospital so she could give him food and not risk persecution. Instead of getting him food, she takes him to a dying member of the SS who had asked her to bring him a Jewish person so that he could confess his sins and ask for forgiveness before he died. Sooo yeah.
"The group to which I belonged included my old friend Arthur and a Jew named Josek, a recent arrival. These were my closest companions. Josek was sensitive and deeply religious. His faith could be hurt by the environment of the camp and by the jeers and insinuations of others, but it could never be shaken" (5). This confuses me. To shake one's faith and to hurt their faith, isn't that the same thing? To shake one's faith would be to question it... And to hurt it would to be to lay a blow unto it, right? So... Same thing? Yes? I think what Simon Wiesenthal means was that his feelings could be hurt, not his faith. Maybe.
Josek tells a prequel to the creation story: "'Our scholars say that at the Creation of man four angels stood as godparents. The angels of Mercy, Truth, Peace, and Justice. For a long time they disputed as to whether God ought to create man at all. The strongest opponent was the angel of Truth. This angered God and as a punishment He sent him into banishment on earth. But the other angels begged God to pardon him and finally he listened to them and summoned the angel of Truth back to heaven. The angel brought back a clod of earth which was soaked in his tears, tears that he had shed on being banished from heaven. And from this clod of earth the Lord God created man'" (6). Of course, he's questioned because who could believe that the Nazis as well as the Jews could come from the angel-tear clay? Josek brings up Cain. But really why I brought this up is one, it's a very interesting story. Two, the four archangels. Three, last week we had a presentation in World Religions on the Mohegan Indian tribe. In their belief system, there were four creators representing four different elements. I don't know, I just thought that parallel was kind of interesting...
"'What do you think of that, Simon?' he asked. 'God is on leave.' 'Let me sleep,' I replied. 'Tell me when He gets back'" (8).
"I once read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man's firm belief. If I ever thought that true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently. It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, which repeatedly 'proves' that one is no longer a man. So one begins to doubt, one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a definite place. One really begins to think that God is on leave. Otherwise the present state of things wouldn't be possible. God must be away. And He has no deputy" (9). / "'It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.' 'But it was not the end of the world,' Grandfather said. 'It was. He just did not come.' 'Why did he not come?' 'This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened--there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.' 'What if it was a challenge of your faith?' I asked. 'I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.' 'What if it was not in His power?' 'I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.' 'What if it was man and not God that did all of this?' 'I do not believe in man, either'"--Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Page 189)
Okay, so in books like Maus and Everything is Illuminated--books about the Holocaust--the Polish people generally tend to be depicted as cruel towards the Jews. I mean, I guess it would make sense, with all the antisemitism in the air, but that answer didn't really satisfy me. I mean, it makes sense. But Wiesenthal adds to this that the Polish people were aware that if all of the Jews were wiped out, they were next. So... they were scared and hated Jews for antisemitic reasons and out of fear, and for twisted reasons, that there wouldn't be enough Jewish people to stave off the Germans, or that it was twisted around and the belief had somehow become that the killing machine existed at all because of the Jewish people, which I suppose is technically correct, but I mean... Uh, I mean that I'm not sure how else to articulate what I mean. Oops...
What strikes me odd is something I never realized: Wiesenthal talks about all the men who killed themselves because they couldn't handle their workload or life in the camps. What I find out about this fact is that it never occurred to me that someone would try that, even though that's a pretty logical course of action and really shouldn't be a surprise that some people would do so.
The title of the book is The Sunflower because when Wiesenthal is walking through the town, he passes a soldiers' graveyard. Every soldier's grave had a sunflower planted on it. "Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb" (15).
So Wiesenthal is taken to the dying SS soldier, a young man, hardly out of his teens. The soldier tells about his early years, originally it was thought he'd go to school for theology, but he joined the Hitler youth instead. To put it the way I understand it--and it seems sick to phrase it this way, but I don't know how else to put it--the kids were doing it. I mean, Hitler was the equivalent to a rock star. The Hitler youth was like his little fan club, seriously. And his father really stopped speaking about it, but he'd sit alone and brood for hours on end. You see, the Hitler Youth leader told the youths that they should play up the cause at home--and if anyone insulted it he said to report it. (I imagine the knowledge of this must have inspired George Orwell when he was writing about the children in 1984.) So his parents got nervous around him and never really spoke to him. And... Yeah. I think the only reason why I marked that page was to connect it with 1984, actually.
"'Shortly afterwards we moved on. On the way we were told that the massacre of the Jews was in revenge for the Russian time bombs which had cost us about thirty men. We killed three hundred Jews in exchange. Nobody asked what the murdered Jews had to do with the Russian time bombs'" (48). This frightens me. The bombs and the massacre are horrifying enough--but the fact that no-one asked about the connection... Maybe no-one even wondered about the connection at the time, only now that this dying soldier has had the chance to ruminate he's noticed the lack of logic in the conclusion drawn... I mean, it's beyond possible that no-one asked for fear of being accused of being sympathetic towards the Jews, Russians, whatever--but if that wasn't the reason for obedience... Yeah, that scares me.
"'When I was still a boy I believed with my mind and soul in God and the commandments of the Church. Then everything was easier. If I still had that faith I am sure death would not be so hard. I cannot die... without coming clean. This must be my confession. But what sort of confession is this? A letter without an answer...'" (53).
The dying man eventually, after telling Wiesenthal all the terrible things he has witnessed and done, asks Wiesenthal for his forgiveness. Wiesenthal makes no answer, he just leaves the room. (The first book ends in a challenge to the reader to consider what they might have done in Wiesenthal's shoes.) When he is back in his camp with his friends he tells them the story, and explains what the sunflowers mean to him: "Arthur joined in: 'Well, sunflowers are something to please the eye. The Germans after all are great romantics. But flowers aren't much use to those rotting under the earth. The sunflowers will rot away like them; next year there won't be a trace unless someone plants new ones. But who knows what's going to happen next year?' he added scornfully" (63).
His friends are all pretty unanimous in their decision that they would not have forgiven the man. Josek admits that he was alarmed when Simon started telling his story, he was scared that Simon had forgiven the man. Josek said he would have openly told the man he didn't forgive him instead of just walking away as Simon had done. Arthur said that he wished he could see ten such deaths a day. Anyways, Josek goes on to explain why it would have been bad for Simon to forgive the dying man: first of all, Simon suffered nothing at the dying man's hands, so he couldn't truly forgive the man, because nothing had been done personally to him that needed forgiveness. Secondly, "'I believe in Haolam Emes--in life after death, in another, better world, where we will all meet again after we are dead. How would it seem then if you had forgiven him? Would not the dead people from Dnepropetrovsk come to you and ask "Who gave you the right to forgive our murderer?"'" (65-66).
Arthur argues that the man should have called on a priest of his own religion, not a Jewish person, because the priest actually would have been able to come up with some ritual for forgiveness. Wiesenthal is a little bothered by this, because that would mean every religion's ethical stances and beliefs are different--that bothers me too. I'd hope human nature unites all people on their, well, their humane levels. Natural law and all of that...
Of course, you must also keep in mind that neither Arthur or Josek actually experienced this themselves. Who knows what their actual reactions would have been.
"It seemed to me doubtful and unreal as our whole existence in those days... it could not have been all true; it was a dream induced by hunger and despair... it was too illogical--like the whole of our lives" (67).
Two years later, Simon has moved, and has come into contact with new comrades, one of them being a priest in training named Bolek. Bolek, despite being constantly tortured in Auschwitz because his training was known to the guards, remained strong in his faith. That strength seems to mystify Wiesenthal. He talked about it extensively when speaking of Josek too, if you'll recall. I mean, I'd imagine it's not too different from Vonnegut's mystification with faith and religion. It soothes, but it can only go so far. I think that like Wiesenthal and the old woman from Everything is Illuminated I would lose faith in God, the world, man, et cetera, entirely.
Bolek goes on to say that he doesn't believe that in any of the "great" religions the question of faith differs. I agree, though I extend that to all people. Either you do or don't. You should so a grudge doesn't eat you up or hate doesn't build like a cancer in you, your conscience is clearer when you forgive (or forget), and you feel better for doing so. That's more universal in humanity though, rather than religion. It just so happens that humans created religion (or vice versa), so...
"The priests said indeed that the criminals would have to appear before the Divine Judge and that we could therefore dispense with earthly verdicts against them, which eminently suited the Nazis' book. Since they did not believe in God they were not afraid of Divine Judgment. It was only earthly justice that they feared" (85).
There are some things I didn't mention about the dying man: he died the next night or two after he spoke to Wiesenthal. He gave a bundle of his personal possessions to the nurse that had brought Wiesenthal to him and instructed her to find Wiesenthal again to give them to him. Wiesenthal refused to take the items and told the nurse to just send it to the soldier's mother. So these years later, he goes to the mother's home, he remembered the address. Wiesenthal hadn't the heart to tell her the truth of her son and kept silent. She talked about the terrible things she heard and said that the only thing she was sure of was that her son never did any wrong--not that she was saying killing Jewish people wasn't wrong, but that he didn't do that, or commit any other war crimes.
"'During his training he sent us snapshots but my husband always pushed the photos aside. He did not want to look at his son in SS uniform. Once I told him, "We have to live with Hitler, like millions of others. You know what they neighbors think of us. You will have difficulties at the factory." He only answered: "I simply can't pretend. They have even taken our son away from us." He said the same thing when Karl left us'" (91).
"Perhaps it was a mistake not to have told her the truth. Perhaps her tears might help to wash away some of the misery of the world" (94).
"There are many kinds of silence. Indeed it can be more eloquent than words, and it can be interpreted in many ways" (97).
And like I said, Wiesenthal ends his portion of his book with the challenge to the reader to try and imagine what they would have done in his shoes. I had to write an essay on it, but I'm not going to copy it all down here (unless if you really desperately want to read it). I guess I could post a link to it, since we had to make a Wordpress blog (blasphemy!) for the class... But yeah, that's not happening. To sum it up: I would not forgive him when he was asking forgiveness. I wouldn't even be able to lie and say I forgave him. I would however be able to offer comfort to him, hold his hand or what have you. The way I saw him was like Alex's grandfather in Everything is Illuminated--not a bad person, just alive in a bad time. He did what he thought was correct. (Hm... Maybe I should include the essay...)
MLA Citation Information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. Perennial: United States of America, 2003.
Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower. Shocken Books: New York, 1998.
Also, speaking some more of World Religions (and to super change the tone), Mr Stoloff is ADORABLE. (Not that he looks adorable, he actually looks like Allen Ginsberg with a less intense beard. And he's from the Bronx... And he's Jewish... This is looking awfully suspicious, Mr Stoloff...) He was talking about my essay on The Sunflower to the class--I mentioned Everything is Illuminated in that too (the bit about Alex's grandfather)--and he was like "I love it when you talk about nongenerational books you've read and movies you've seen!" and I was all d'aww, you're making me blush, Mr Stoloff! Then he was like, "I saw the movie of that... the one with the hobbit." (Elijah Wood plays Jonathan.) But yeah, he seems like a pretty cool so far.
Aaaand no cryptic song lyrics for this post, for obvious reasons. Also, spellchecker's acting weird again. Sorry.
So the book is based on a true experience of Simon Wiesenthal's. It occurred during the war, and he was taken prisoner. One day while he was working a nurse offered to feed him, but he would have to go with her into the hospital so she could give him food and not risk persecution. Instead of getting him food, she takes him to a dying member of the SS who had asked her to bring him a Jewish person so that he could confess his sins and ask for forgiveness before he died. Sooo yeah.
"The group to which I belonged included my old friend Arthur and a Jew named Josek, a recent arrival. These were my closest companions. Josek was sensitive and deeply religious. His faith could be hurt by the environment of the camp and by the jeers and insinuations of others, but it could never be shaken" (5). This confuses me. To shake one's faith and to hurt their faith, isn't that the same thing? To shake one's faith would be to question it... And to hurt it would to be to lay a blow unto it, right? So... Same thing? Yes? I think what Simon Wiesenthal means was that his feelings could be hurt, not his faith. Maybe.
Josek tells a prequel to the creation story: "'Our scholars say that at the Creation of man four angels stood as godparents. The angels of Mercy, Truth, Peace, and Justice. For a long time they disputed as to whether God ought to create man at all. The strongest opponent was the angel of Truth. This angered God and as a punishment He sent him into banishment on earth. But the other angels begged God to pardon him and finally he listened to them and summoned the angel of Truth back to heaven. The angel brought back a clod of earth which was soaked in his tears, tears that he had shed on being banished from heaven. And from this clod of earth the Lord God created man'" (6). Of course, he's questioned because who could believe that the Nazis as well as the Jews could come from the angel-tear clay? Josek brings up Cain. But really why I brought this up is one, it's a very interesting story. Two, the four archangels. Three, last week we had a presentation in World Religions on the Mohegan Indian tribe. In their belief system, there were four creators representing four different elements. I don't know, I just thought that parallel was kind of interesting...
"'What do you think of that, Simon?' he asked. 'God is on leave.' 'Let me sleep,' I replied. 'Tell me when He gets back'" (8).
"I once read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man's firm belief. If I ever thought that true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently. It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, which repeatedly 'proves' that one is no longer a man. So one begins to doubt, one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a definite place. One really begins to think that God is on leave. Otherwise the present state of things wouldn't be possible. God must be away. And He has no deputy" (9). / "'It is said that the Messiah will come at the end of the world.' 'But it was not the end of the world,' Grandfather said. 'It was. He just did not come.' 'Why did he not come?' 'This was the lesson we learned from everything that happened--there is no God. It took all of the hidden faces for Him to prove this to us.' 'What if it was a challenge of your faith?' I asked. 'I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.' 'What if it was not in His power?' 'I could not believe in a God that could not stop what happened.' 'What if it was man and not God that did all of this?' 'I do not believe in man, either'"--Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Page 189)
Okay, so in books like Maus and Everything is Illuminated--books about the Holocaust--the Polish people generally tend to be depicted as cruel towards the Jews. I mean, I guess it would make sense, with all the antisemitism in the air, but that answer didn't really satisfy me. I mean, it makes sense. But Wiesenthal adds to this that the Polish people were aware that if all of the Jews were wiped out, they were next. So... they were scared and hated Jews for antisemitic reasons and out of fear, and for twisted reasons, that there wouldn't be enough Jewish people to stave off the Germans, or that it was twisted around and the belief had somehow become that the killing machine existed at all because of the Jewish people, which I suppose is technically correct, but I mean... Uh, I mean that I'm not sure how else to articulate what I mean. Oops...
What strikes me odd is something I never realized: Wiesenthal talks about all the men who killed themselves because they couldn't handle their workload or life in the camps. What I find out about this fact is that it never occurred to me that someone would try that, even though that's a pretty logical course of action and really shouldn't be a surprise that some people would do so.
The title of the book is The Sunflower because when Wiesenthal is walking through the town, he passes a soldiers' graveyard. Every soldier's grave had a sunflower planted on it. "Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb" (15).
So Wiesenthal is taken to the dying SS soldier, a young man, hardly out of his teens. The soldier tells about his early years, originally it was thought he'd go to school for theology, but he joined the Hitler youth instead. To put it the way I understand it--and it seems sick to phrase it this way, but I don't know how else to put it--the kids were doing it. I mean, Hitler was the equivalent to a rock star. The Hitler youth was like his little fan club, seriously. And his father really stopped speaking about it, but he'd sit alone and brood for hours on end. You see, the Hitler Youth leader told the youths that they should play up the cause at home--and if anyone insulted it he said to report it. (I imagine the knowledge of this must have inspired George Orwell when he was writing about the children in 1984.) So his parents got nervous around him and never really spoke to him. And... Yeah. I think the only reason why I marked that page was to connect it with 1984, actually.
"'Shortly afterwards we moved on. On the way we were told that the massacre of the Jews was in revenge for the Russian time bombs which had cost us about thirty men. We killed three hundred Jews in exchange. Nobody asked what the murdered Jews had to do with the Russian time bombs'" (48). This frightens me. The bombs and the massacre are horrifying enough--but the fact that no-one asked about the connection... Maybe no-one even wondered about the connection at the time, only now that this dying soldier has had the chance to ruminate he's noticed the lack of logic in the conclusion drawn... I mean, it's beyond possible that no-one asked for fear of being accused of being sympathetic towards the Jews, Russians, whatever--but if that wasn't the reason for obedience... Yeah, that scares me.
"'When I was still a boy I believed with my mind and soul in God and the commandments of the Church. Then everything was easier. If I still had that faith I am sure death would not be so hard. I cannot die... without coming clean. This must be my confession. But what sort of confession is this? A letter without an answer...'" (53).
The dying man eventually, after telling Wiesenthal all the terrible things he has witnessed and done, asks Wiesenthal for his forgiveness. Wiesenthal makes no answer, he just leaves the room. (The first book ends in a challenge to the reader to consider what they might have done in Wiesenthal's shoes.) When he is back in his camp with his friends he tells them the story, and explains what the sunflowers mean to him: "Arthur joined in: 'Well, sunflowers are something to please the eye. The Germans after all are great romantics. But flowers aren't much use to those rotting under the earth. The sunflowers will rot away like them; next year there won't be a trace unless someone plants new ones. But who knows what's going to happen next year?' he added scornfully" (63).
His friends are all pretty unanimous in their decision that they would not have forgiven the man. Josek admits that he was alarmed when Simon started telling his story, he was scared that Simon had forgiven the man. Josek said he would have openly told the man he didn't forgive him instead of just walking away as Simon had done. Arthur said that he wished he could see ten such deaths a day. Anyways, Josek goes on to explain why it would have been bad for Simon to forgive the dying man: first of all, Simon suffered nothing at the dying man's hands, so he couldn't truly forgive the man, because nothing had been done personally to him that needed forgiveness. Secondly, "'I believe in Haolam Emes--in life after death, in another, better world, where we will all meet again after we are dead. How would it seem then if you had forgiven him? Would not the dead people from Dnepropetrovsk come to you and ask "Who gave you the right to forgive our murderer?"'" (65-66).
Arthur argues that the man should have called on a priest of his own religion, not a Jewish person, because the priest actually would have been able to come up with some ritual for forgiveness. Wiesenthal is a little bothered by this, because that would mean every religion's ethical stances and beliefs are different--that bothers me too. I'd hope human nature unites all people on their, well, their humane levels. Natural law and all of that...
Of course, you must also keep in mind that neither Arthur or Josek actually experienced this themselves. Who knows what their actual reactions would have been.
"It seemed to me doubtful and unreal as our whole existence in those days... it could not have been all true; it was a dream induced by hunger and despair... it was too illogical--like the whole of our lives" (67).
Two years later, Simon has moved, and has come into contact with new comrades, one of them being a priest in training named Bolek. Bolek, despite being constantly tortured in Auschwitz because his training was known to the guards, remained strong in his faith. That strength seems to mystify Wiesenthal. He talked about it extensively when speaking of Josek too, if you'll recall. I mean, I'd imagine it's not too different from Vonnegut's mystification with faith and religion. It soothes, but it can only go so far. I think that like Wiesenthal and the old woman from Everything is Illuminated I would lose faith in God, the world, man, et cetera, entirely.
Bolek goes on to say that he doesn't believe that in any of the "great" religions the question of faith differs. I agree, though I extend that to all people. Either you do or don't. You should so a grudge doesn't eat you up or hate doesn't build like a cancer in you, your conscience is clearer when you forgive (or forget), and you feel better for doing so. That's more universal in humanity though, rather than religion. It just so happens that humans created religion (or vice versa), so...
"The priests said indeed that the criminals would have to appear before the Divine Judge and that we could therefore dispense with earthly verdicts against them, which eminently suited the Nazis' book. Since they did not believe in God they were not afraid of Divine Judgment. It was only earthly justice that they feared" (85).
There are some things I didn't mention about the dying man: he died the next night or two after he spoke to Wiesenthal. He gave a bundle of his personal possessions to the nurse that had brought Wiesenthal to him and instructed her to find Wiesenthal again to give them to him. Wiesenthal refused to take the items and told the nurse to just send it to the soldier's mother. So these years later, he goes to the mother's home, he remembered the address. Wiesenthal hadn't the heart to tell her the truth of her son and kept silent. She talked about the terrible things she heard and said that the only thing she was sure of was that her son never did any wrong--not that she was saying killing Jewish people wasn't wrong, but that he didn't do that, or commit any other war crimes.
"'During his training he sent us snapshots but my husband always pushed the photos aside. He did not want to look at his son in SS uniform. Once I told him, "We have to live with Hitler, like millions of others. You know what they neighbors think of us. You will have difficulties at the factory." He only answered: "I simply can't pretend. They have even taken our son away from us." He said the same thing when Karl left us'" (91).
"Perhaps it was a mistake not to have told her the truth. Perhaps her tears might help to wash away some of the misery of the world" (94).
"There are many kinds of silence. Indeed it can be more eloquent than words, and it can be interpreted in many ways" (97).
And like I said, Wiesenthal ends his portion of his book with the challenge to the reader to try and imagine what they would have done in his shoes. I had to write an essay on it, but I'm not going to copy it all down here (unless if you really desperately want to read it). I guess I could post a link to it, since we had to make a Wordpress blog (blasphemy!) for the class... But yeah, that's not happening. To sum it up: I would not forgive him when he was asking forgiveness. I wouldn't even be able to lie and say I forgave him. I would however be able to offer comfort to him, hold his hand or what have you. The way I saw him was like Alex's grandfather in Everything is Illuminated--not a bad person, just alive in a bad time. He did what he thought was correct. (Hm... Maybe I should include the essay...)
MLA Citation Information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. Perennial: United States of America, 2003.
Wiesenthal, Simon. The Sunflower. Shocken Books: New York, 1998.
Also, speaking some more of World Religions (and to super change the tone), Mr Stoloff is ADORABLE. (Not that he looks adorable, he actually looks like Allen Ginsberg with a less intense beard. And he's from the Bronx... And he's Jewish... This is looking awfully suspicious, Mr Stoloff...) He was talking about my essay on The Sunflower to the class--I mentioned Everything is Illuminated in that too (the bit about Alex's grandfather)--and he was like "I love it when you talk about nongenerational books you've read and movies you've seen!" and I was all d'aww, you're making me blush, Mr Stoloff! Then he was like, "I saw the movie of that... the one with the hobbit." (Elijah Wood plays Jonathan.) But yeah, he seems like a pretty cool so far.
Aaaand no cryptic song lyrics for this post, for obvious reasons. Also, spellchecker's acting weird again. Sorry.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Hey, what's up? I've been kind of busy because of Fab Fables (hate hate hate death hate) but rehearsal is delayed until nine tonight which I guess is a sort of mixed blessing. Let's see... how has life been...? Well, my question mark key has been acting weird. My World Religions teacher thinks it's totally awesome that I read Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut... My writing teacher has a man-crush on Jeff Goldblum... So... Yeah. That's not really it, but I might as well cut to the chase.
Pretty straightforward. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just that. It's written in the same language, details are changed though the plot stays essentially the same. For reals. If Jane Austen had written the book with zombies and a knowledge of double entendres, it would be this. It's actually pretty perfect. I mean, the ninjas employed by Mr Darcy's aunt are a little much, but...
Okay, let's be honest here, because of the overwhelming fact that this is Pride and Prejudice except with zombies I'm going to be lazy and not include a summary. In fact, it's really only going to be the 'best-of' quotes from the book. Okay. So good times?
So first of all, I liked the author information on the back: "JANE AUSTEN is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. SETH GRAHAME-SMITH once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was the truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead" (7).
"The business of Mr. Bennett's life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennett's was to get them married" (9).
Oh, oh! You know the part when Mr Darcy first turns Elizabeth down? Elizabeth, instead of being all, "What a jerkface", goes to pull a stiletto off her ankle and kill him, but zombies attack before he can. And when she refuses his proposal later on? She refuses it by kicking him into the mantle in this. Awesome.
And you know how pretty much all ladies had to do for hobbies was play piano and sing and stuff? Here's a song: "When once the earth was still and dead were silent, And London-town was for but living men, Came the plague upon us swift and violent, And so our dearest England we defend" (41).
"'How pleasant it is to spend an evening this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!' 'Spoken like one who has never known ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand,' said Darcy" (44). Might I mention that they're all zombie fighters, including the five Bennett daughters?
"She landed on her feet beside one of the horses, and with her sword, began cutting down the attackers with all the grace of Aphrodite, and all the ruthlessness of Herod" (117). A little much, but okay, I guess I can appreciate the ridiculousness of it.
So Charlotte is infected, but she wants to marry before she dies. In this book, it takes months for the disease to come to full fruition, but oh when it does! ...Sorry, that was kind of lame... But, anyways, Charlotte is slowly decaying--at this point her humanity is leaving, though she can still speak and function (for the most part) as an ordinary human being: "Apparently overcome with excitement, Charlotte dropped to the ground and began stuffing handfuls of crisp autumn leaves in her mouth" (122).
"She could not think of Darcy without remembering his cousin; for agreeable as he was, Colonel Fitzwilliam was also the one man who could assign the guilt of Darcy's slaying to Elizabeth. He would have to be dispensed with as well" (148).
"That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! That she should fail to kill him when her honor demanded it!" (154).
"She remembered the lead ammunition in her pocket and offered it to him. 'Your balls, Mr. Darcy?' He reached out and closed her hand around them, and offered, 'They belong to you, Miss Bennet.' Upon this, their colour changed, and they were forced to look away from one another, lest they laugh" (205). Remember, they used musket balls back then. Also, good times with jokes that Jane Austen would never, ever understand?
"For the more she dwelled on the subject, the more powerful she felt; not for her mastery of the deadly arts, but her power over the heart of another. What a power it was! But how to wield it? Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous" (213).
So... yeah, that's really it. I mean, the story proceeds pretty much as usual, except with zombies and ninjas. And quite frankly, who didn't think that Mr Darcy's aunt didn't own ninjas anyways?
Also, fun fact: the editor missed an inordinate amount of spelling errors regarding Elizabeth's family name--it fluctuates through the entire book between Bennett and Bennet.
OhhhHmm... Suddenly I started thinking of Colin Firth, but I don't know why.
Austen, Jane and Grahame-Smith, Seth. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Quirk Productions: Canada, 2009.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show
This post's cryptic song lyrics: All we want to do is eat your brains, we're not unreasonable, I mean no-one's gonna eat your eyes...
Pretty straightforward. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just that. It's written in the same language, details are changed though the plot stays essentially the same. For reals. If Jane Austen had written the book with zombies and a knowledge of double entendres, it would be this. It's actually pretty perfect. I mean, the ninjas employed by Mr Darcy's aunt are a little much, but...
Okay, let's be honest here, because of the overwhelming fact that this is Pride and Prejudice except with zombies I'm going to be lazy and not include a summary. In fact, it's really only going to be the 'best-of' quotes from the book. Okay. So good times?
So first of all, I liked the author information on the back: "JANE AUSTEN is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. SETH GRAHAME-SMITH once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was the truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead" (7).
"The business of Mr. Bennett's life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennett's was to get them married" (9).
Oh, oh! You know the part when Mr Darcy first turns Elizabeth down? Elizabeth, instead of being all, "What a jerkface", goes to pull a stiletto off her ankle and kill him, but zombies attack before he can. And when she refuses his proposal later on? She refuses it by kicking him into the mantle in this. Awesome.
And you know how pretty much all ladies had to do for hobbies was play piano and sing and stuff? Here's a song: "When once the earth was still and dead were silent, And London-town was for but living men, Came the plague upon us swift and violent, And so our dearest England we defend" (41).
"'How pleasant it is to spend an evening this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!' 'Spoken like one who has never known ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand,' said Darcy" (44). Might I mention that they're all zombie fighters, including the five Bennett daughters?
"She landed on her feet beside one of the horses, and with her sword, began cutting down the attackers with all the grace of Aphrodite, and all the ruthlessness of Herod" (117). A little much, but okay, I guess I can appreciate the ridiculousness of it.
So Charlotte is infected, but she wants to marry before she dies. In this book, it takes months for the disease to come to full fruition, but oh when it does! ...Sorry, that was kind of lame... But, anyways, Charlotte is slowly decaying--at this point her humanity is leaving, though she can still speak and function (for the most part) as an ordinary human being: "Apparently overcome with excitement, Charlotte dropped to the ground and began stuffing handfuls of crisp autumn leaves in her mouth" (122).
"She could not think of Darcy without remembering his cousin; for agreeable as he was, Colonel Fitzwilliam was also the one man who could assign the guilt of Darcy's slaying to Elizabeth. He would have to be dispensed with as well" (148).
"That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! That she should fail to kill him when her honor demanded it!" (154).
"She remembered the lead ammunition in her pocket and offered it to him. 'Your balls, Mr. Darcy?' He reached out and closed her hand around them, and offered, 'They belong to you, Miss Bennet.' Upon this, their colour changed, and they were forced to look away from one another, lest they laugh" (205). Remember, they used musket balls back then. Also, good times with jokes that Jane Austen would never, ever understand?
"For the more she dwelled on the subject, the more powerful she felt; not for her mastery of the deadly arts, but her power over the heart of another. What a power it was! But how to wield it? Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous" (213).
So... yeah, that's really it. I mean, the story proceeds pretty much as usual, except with zombies and ninjas. And quite frankly, who didn't think that Mr Darcy's aunt didn't own ninjas anyways?
Also, fun fact: the editor missed an inordinate amount of spelling errors regarding Elizabeth's family name--it fluctuates through the entire book between Bennett and Bennet.
OhhhHmm... Suddenly I started thinking of Colin Firth, but I don't know why.
Austen, Jane and Grahame-Smith, Seth. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Quirk Productions: Canada, 2009.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show
This post's cryptic song lyrics: All we want to do is eat your brains, we're not unreasonable, I mean no-one's gonna eat your eyes...
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Look, I'm writing again! Mike inspired me to start writing my creative writing thing again, but then I looked at Timequake and was like dammit... I've got to get this done too. Worst of all, I'm ripping through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies faster than a Vonnegut book so yeah, I really need to get this done. Let's start, then?
It's actually sort of funny that I should have decided to read Timequake, of all the Vonnegut books I could have picked--this is, from what I understand, the last book he wrote before he wrote A Man Without A Country. So, it was his last fiction work (A Man Without A Country is actually a collection of a few of Vonnegut's short essays), and even then, there's more Vonnegut in there than fiction. It's about a time quake--that is, everything that occurred in the last ten years goes on repeat, and afterwards things progress as normal, with people in charge of their own destinies again. This the description on the back of the book: "At 2:27 P.M. on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" The story is a combination of what I've just explained and Kurt Vonnegut being Kurt Vonnegut. Hi ho!
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: 'Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again'" (XVI).
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'" (1).
"Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry" (5). / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story, a movie from the seventies.
"[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with someone that cracked? 'Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?' 'Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?'" (5).
"Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen" (7).
"A reporter asked [my son] what it had been like to grow up with a famous father. Mark replied, 'When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College'" (16). I love this. I love how down to earth Mark is. This is definitely the attitude my more favourite relatives have, and I love it.
"I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J.D. Salinger of John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Conner or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more" (17) This made me sad--not for the fact that that was what I was planning on being my safety net (I wouldn't mind just having a parakeet for company)--but for the fact that... Well, it got me all excited at first. You know--I love Ray Bradbury, I like JD Salinger, I've only read 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but that's one of the best short stories I've ever read, no lie... But I just got it excited because of that, and the realization that this wasn't the situation anymore--forget the short stories building a rep, but that in general this was no longer the way. Everything about Vonnegut's statement is no longer the way, not really, and that's pretty damned sad, if I do say so myself.
"[Trout's] long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, 'Kiss Me Again,' he had written, there is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.' The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic'" (22).
"'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. She had to wonder, "What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go...?"'" (29).
"'The Garden of Eden,' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (29).
A Man Without A Country, too.
So, Trout, as we know, was a bum. He was pretty poor to begin with, but after his son died, that's when he took to being a real bum, with no home but the streets and the homeless shelter. The shelter he is in during this book is next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "'Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper... Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!'" (71).
"Are [humanists] enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought it was too much to lose" (82). Vonnegut goes on to say that he didn't have faith like Bernie did because of how he was raised, he was raised by skeptics--intelligent folks but skeptics nonetheless. He ends this bit with: "But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much" (83).
"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games" (83).
"Yesterday... I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities... for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do? I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, 'Join a church.' I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family" (84).
He goes on: "I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for the majority of the planet's population. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche... said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanist's Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them" (84).
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about what happened to him during the time quake: "I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, 'How the hell did I do that?' I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say" (91).
"I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz" (96).
"'Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful'" (121).
So you remember how back in the day I read Psalm 23 and was all, "This is worded so differently than the version I know, maybe it's the translation, blah blah blah..." Well, Kurt Vonnegut starts a chapter by saying Shankspeare is not the greatest writer (so far) of the English language but it was Lancelot Andrews. It includes his more poetic rewrite of Psalm 23, and there we go! That's the version I know. So... thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, for solving that mystery! Also Lancelot Andrews for making Psalm 23 even more badass.
"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this" (133). Like James Joyce!? LIKE JAMES JOYCE!?
"Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her" (136).
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs. This is the third time I have quoted this quote here, and I don't think it's any less meaningful than I did the first time, in July/August (fun fact, I definitely just wrote Augustus), or the second time in January. He goes on to add this after the quote: "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not" (143).
My only addition is to mention that Debs ran for the presidency and this sentence was in every one of his speeches, according to Vonnegut. How could he have not gotten far? The problem, of course, was that he was a socialist.
"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of those three things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (161). The last bit comes from the fact that that was exactly what Kilgore Trout was doing with the short stories he wrote.
The most disturbing part of the book is when he writes about two people that he knew that killed themselves. Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of his first literary agents and how one time he asked the man how to end a story. The man answered: "'Nothing could be simpler, my dear boy. The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset'" (161-162). He says that many years later, the man shot himself. "Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, 'Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun'" (162).
He continues: "Many years ago, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art. He said, 'You know what artists are?' I didn't. 'Artists,' he said, 'are people who say, "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"' About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide" (162).
That scares me. These are the sort of people you'd expect to be happy, you know? I mean--their attitudes, okay, that scares me too, because that's how I am like, at least the artist guy is like. I mean you know, be happy about what you can and all. But the first guy--I can imagine the suicide happened because he realized that that wasn't how it went--the hero rarely wins and doesn't ride off into the sunset... And he didn't have the heart to fool himself anymore. And the advisor fellow? Sure, he realized he had control of that little thing, but he realized how minuscule that thing was against everything else he named, state, city, marriage, et cetera--and that realization killed him. It made him realize how unimportant he was tenfold than it was at the beginning.
Vonnegut also cares to mention that homeless and HIV-positive patients of his friend are insulted if someone asks if they ever want to kill themselves.
"Happy days! We thought we'd live forever" (173).
"Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people" (173).
"And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcome and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage" (176).
Kurt Vonnegut imagines at one point in the book--the part that's more a story--that he has lived to 2010. He died in 2007. It's sort of eerie to read that bit then, at least to me.
"'You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do'" (196). I just want to say that Kilgore Trout says this. It doesn't seem right to attribute this to Vonnegut.
"Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone" (202).
"If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosiniski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind. But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgiore trout" (211).
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone'" (221).
So the last scene of the original draft of Timequake sans Vonnegutian interludes was a clambake at Xanadu. In Breakfast of Champions, it's made pretty clear that Trout resembles Vonnegut's late father and is meant to represent him in some way. Earlier in the book Vonnegut says that he, if he could, would not bring his dead relatives and friends back. However, at this party, there are people who resemble his friends and relatives that have passed. Monica Pepper looked like his sister, a bakemaster looked like the man who had originally published Slaughterhouse-Five--and as always, "Kilgore Trout looked like my father" (227).
"Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was" (228).
"Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, 'I suppose the young people will like it'" (232). This makes me so sad. Uncle Alex appears to be Vonnegut's hero; that must have been so sad to hear his uncle say that.
Vonnegut also urges the reader to read Catch-22. I agree!
"I told Borden what [Joseph] Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said" (238). Okay, I quoted this out of liking it, but also, what the hell is going on with those commas?
So then Vonnegut describes a play by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah is its name. The scene described is God visiting Adam and Eve: "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime" (238).
"You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were" (239). / "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals"--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.
"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place" (249).
"I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore" (249).
So... This book was more Kurt Vonnegut being awesome in general than anything else. So it was definitely different in that respect from Player Piano, but to be honest, Vonnegut was a fairly static writer. His voice doesn't change in leaps and bounds--Player Piano and Timequake certainly read differently, but it's not to the point where you couldn't recognize the fact that the parentage is the same. It's more like he just comes through more and more--his voice was always there, I mean the style he writes of course, but then he just gets past that and appears himself. It just becomes more real... If you see what I'm trying to say...
Look, I like Vonnegut. This isn't maybe what people would usually expect of him, and maybe it'll feel cheapened to them (I didn't like this book a bit the first time I read it), but I say, go ahead and read it. Vonnegut is really great.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. Penguin Group: New York, 1997.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Machinehead by Bush
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Let's do the time warp again!
It's actually sort of funny that I should have decided to read Timequake, of all the Vonnegut books I could have picked--this is, from what I understand, the last book he wrote before he wrote A Man Without A Country. So, it was his last fiction work (A Man Without A Country is actually a collection of a few of Vonnegut's short essays), and even then, there's more Vonnegut in there than fiction. It's about a time quake--that is, everything that occurred in the last ten years goes on repeat, and afterwards things progress as normal, with people in charge of their own destinies again. This the description on the back of the book: "At 2:27 P.M. on February 13th of the year 2001, the Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" The story is a combination of what I've just explained and Kurt Vonnegut being Kurt Vonnegut. Hi ho!
Here is what Trout said when he realized that the ten-year rerun was over, that he and everybody else were suddenly obligated to think of new stuff to do, to be creative again: 'Oh, Lordy! I am much too old and experienced to start playing Russian roulette with free will again'" (XVI).
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'" (1).
"Somebody should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry" (5). / "Love means never having to say you're sorry"--Love Story, a movie from the seventies.
"[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with someone that cracked? 'Anything interesting happen at work today, Honey-bunch?' 'Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?'" (5).
"Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen" (7).
"A reporter asked [my son] what it had been like to grow up with a famous father. Mark replied, 'When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn't get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College'" (16). I love this. I love how down to earth Mark is. This is definitely the attitude my more favourite relatives have, and I love it.
"I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J.D. Salinger of John Cheever or John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Conner or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more" (17) This made me sad--not for the fact that that was what I was planning on being my safety net (I wouldn't mind just having a parakeet for company)--but for the fact that... Well, it got me all excited at first. You know--I love Ray Bradbury, I like JD Salinger, I've only read 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson, but that's one of the best short stories I've ever read, no lie... But I just got it excited because of that, and the realization that this wasn't the situation anymore--forget the short stories building a rep, but that in general this was no longer the way. Everything about Vonnegut's statement is no longer the way, not really, and that's pretty damned sad, if I do say so myself.
"[Trout's] long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, 'Kiss Me Again,' he had written, there is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.' The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic'" (22).
"'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, "Let there be light," and there was light. She had to wonder, "What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go...?"'" (29).
"'The Garden of Eden,' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (29).
A Man Without A Country, too.
So, Trout, as we know, was a bum. He was pretty poor to begin with, but after his son died, that's when he took to being a real bum, with no home but the streets and the homeless shelter. The shelter he is in during this book is next door to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "'Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper... Wonderful! As though the planet weren't already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!'" (71).
"Are [humanists] enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought it was too much to lose" (82). Vonnegut goes on to say that he didn't have faith like Bernie did because of how he was raised, he was raised by skeptics--intelligent folks but skeptics nonetheless. He ends this bit with: "But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much" (83).
"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games" (83).
"Yesterday... I received a well-written letter from a man who never asked to be born in the first place, and who has been a captive of our nonpareil correctional facilities... for many years. He is about to be released into a world where he has no friends or relatives. Free will is about to kick in again, after a hiatus of a good deal more than a decade. What should he do? I, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, wrote back today, 'Join a church.' I said this because what such a grown-up waif needs more than anything is something like a family" (84).
He goes on: "I couldn't recommend Humanism for such a person. I wouldn't do so for the majority of the planet's population. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche... said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanist's Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them" (84).
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about what happened to him during the time quake: "I myself was zapped back to this house near the tip of Long Island, New York, where I am writing now, halfway through the rerun. In 1991, as now, I was gazing at a list of all I'd published, and wondering, 'How the hell did I do that?' I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say" (91).
"I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz" (96).
"'Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful'" (121).
So you remember how back in the day I read Psalm 23 and was all, "This is worded so differently than the version I know, maybe it's the translation, blah blah blah..." Well, Kurt Vonnegut starts a chapter by saying Shankspeare is not the greatest writer (so far) of the English language but it was Lancelot Andrews. It includes his more poetic rewrite of Psalm 23, and there we go! That's the version I know. So... thank you, Kurt Vonnegut, for solving that mystery! Also Lancelot Andrews for making Psalm 23 even more badass.
"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this" (133). Like James Joyce!? LIKE JAMES JOYCE!?
"Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swathmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her" (136).
"While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"--Eugene Debs. This is the third time I have quoted this quote here, and I don't think it's any less meaningful than I did the first time, in July/August (fun fact, I definitely just wrote Augustus), or the second time in January. He goes on to add this after the quote: "In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not" (143).
My only addition is to mention that Debs ran for the presidency and this sentence was in every one of his speeches, according to Vonnegut. How could he have not gotten far? The problem, of course, was that he was a socialist.
"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of those three things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (161). The last bit comes from the fact that that was exactly what Kilgore Trout was doing with the short stories he wrote.
The most disturbing part of the book is when he writes about two people that he knew that killed themselves. Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of his first literary agents and how one time he asked the man how to end a story. The man answered: "'Nothing could be simpler, my dear boy. The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset'" (161-162). He says that many years later, the man shot himself. "Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character. I replied, 'Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun'" (162).
He continues: "Many years ago, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art. He said, 'You know what artists are?' I didn't. 'Artists,' he said, 'are people who say, "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"' About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide" (162).
That scares me. These are the sort of people you'd expect to be happy, you know? I mean--their attitudes, okay, that scares me too, because that's how I am like, at least the artist guy is like. I mean you know, be happy about what you can and all. But the first guy--I can imagine the suicide happened because he realized that that wasn't how it went--the hero rarely wins and doesn't ride off into the sunset... And he didn't have the heart to fool himself anymore. And the advisor fellow? Sure, he realized he had control of that little thing, but he realized how minuscule that thing was against everything else he named, state, city, marriage, et cetera--and that realization killed him. It made him realize how unimportant he was tenfold than it was at the beginning.
Vonnegut also cares to mention that homeless and HIV-positive patients of his friend are insulted if someone asks if they ever want to kill themselves.
"Happy days! We thought we'd live forever" (173).
"Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people" (173).
"And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcome and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage" (176).
Kurt Vonnegut imagines at one point in the book--the part that's more a story--that he has lived to 2010. He died in 2007. It's sort of eerie to read that bit then, at least to me.
"'You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do'" (196). I just want to say that Kilgore Trout says this. It doesn't seem right to attribute this to Vonnegut.
"Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone" (202).
"If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it. My mother and Ernest Hemingway and my former literary agent and Jerzy Kosiniski and my reluctant thesis advisor at the University of Chicago and Eva Braun all come to mind. But not Kilgore Trout. His indestructible self-respect is what I loved most about Kilgiore trout" (211).
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone'" (221).
So the last scene of the original draft of Timequake sans Vonnegutian interludes was a clambake at Xanadu. In Breakfast of Champions, it's made pretty clear that Trout resembles Vonnegut's late father and is meant to represent him in some way. Earlier in the book Vonnegut says that he, if he could, would not bring his dead relatives and friends back. However, at this party, there are people who resemble his friends and relatives that have passed. Monica Pepper looked like his sister, a bakemaster looked like the man who had originally published Slaughterhouse-Five--and as always, "Kilgore Trout looked like my father" (227).
"Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. The whole world was" (228).
"Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, 'I suppose the young people will like it'" (232). This makes me so sad. Uncle Alex appears to be Vonnegut's hero; that must have been so sad to hear his uncle say that.
Vonnegut also urges the reader to read Catch-22. I agree!
"I told Borden what [Joseph] Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said" (238). Okay, I quoted this out of liking it, but also, what the hell is going on with those commas?
So then Vonnegut describes a play by George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah is its name. The scene described is God visiting Adam and Eve: "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know it was going to end sometime" (238).
"You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were" (239). / "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals"--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.
"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place" (249).
"I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore" (249).
So... This book was more Kurt Vonnegut being awesome in general than anything else. So it was definitely different in that respect from Player Piano, but to be honest, Vonnegut was a fairly static writer. His voice doesn't change in leaps and bounds--Player Piano and Timequake certainly read differently, but it's not to the point where you couldn't recognize the fact that the parentage is the same. It's more like he just comes through more and more--his voice was always there, I mean the style he writes of course, but then he just gets past that and appears himself. It just becomes more real... If you see what I'm trying to say...
Look, I like Vonnegut. This isn't maybe what people would usually expect of him, and maybe it'll feel cheapened to them (I didn't like this book a bit the first time I read it), but I say, go ahead and read it. Vonnegut is really great.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. Penguin Group: New York, 1997.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Machinehead by Bush
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Let's do the time warp again!
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Hello! Instead of doing English homework I'm writing this post. Hey, it's free time anyways--classes were cancelled due to snow. Yay! So here we are. Um. This book is about a completely automated society. Pretty much everything nasty or difficult is done by machines. People exist to run and keep an eye on machines, but really, one person has a job as opposed to sometimes in the thousands of people that would have jobs that the machine displaces. Like that episode of the Twilight Zone! (There will probably be more on this later.) So for the most part, the person whose shoulder we are looking over is Doctor Paul Proteus. Proteus is the son of the man who ushered in this latest industrial revolution. Proteus isn't entirely comfortable with this automatic future, and kind of dreams of a simpler life, even though his pathway to success is already paved for him. Might I mention that there is an underground revolution against the automation brewing. And... Well, I guess that's all you really need now. Fun fact: This was Kurt Vonnegut's first book! In an interview with Playboy he admitted that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World" (Source). I guess there are two fun facts for the price of one...
First of all, you know how a lot of books have that "Any relations to any person, living or dead, are purely coincidental" shtick? Vonnegut puts his own spin on it: "This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be. The characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writings, infants" (V).
Ah! I'm also obliged to mention that this is set in Ilium, New York. The city is split into the managers of the machines (people like Proteus), the machines, and where most of the people live--the average people. So okay, we can really go on now.
Proteus starts out as a frighteningly modernized man. He finds a stray cat and takes it in, knowing that a mouser is needed. Instead of letting it loose and just letting it follow its instincts, he asks an engineer of incredible skill (Bud Calhoun) to build a mouse alarm to tell the cat when and where mice were. Now that does scare and disgust me. Well, as Proteus is leaving the office, he reflects upon Bud's incredible talents and vaguely wonders if Bud wouldn't be happier in some other time period--but shakes that thought off as ridiculous, because this time of mechanization was clearly the best for him and vice versa. Of course, Bud would be happier in an earlier time, when things were being invented out of necessity, but Proteus can't think yet, so let us continue.
When Proteus gets into his car, Bud's car tells him to not take any wooden nickels over and over and over: "Don't take any wooden nickels, don't take any wooden nickels, don't take any--" (5). I know this was a problem at one point (remember that episode of Spongebob where Squidward gives Spongebob a quarter and Spongebob bites it? That's what people used to do to check if the nickel was a fraud or not), but still, it seems like a funny thing for a car to remind someone. The talking car also reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story--I believe it was originally published alone, but it can be found in the latter pages of The Martian Chronicles. This is after the nuclear war on earth, so this fully automated house stands alone on the Martian landscape, cooking meals, letting the dog in and out, setting up drinks and card tables for games of poker, et cetera. Ah--and I probably should mention the name of the story, it is "There Will Come Soft Rains". Anyways, the house sings the times and reads poetry and such, and at the end of the story the house is set aflame thanks to an ignored cigar. As the house smolders into ashes the next morning it continues to cry, "Today is August 25th, 2026", over and over and over. Well--thanks to Wikipedia I found an incredibly depressing Soviet short loosely based on it. My God. Well, what the hell, I'll ruin your day too: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38uy2_there-will-fall-soft-rains_shortfilms The end differs greatly, but the beginning is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. The very end is mighty depressing too.
Actually, while I'm thinking about it, let me point out the obvious symbolism. The machines tried to destroy nature--human nature, outdoors nature, whatever--in doing so destroyed religion, and it was what destroyed the people. But, it could not destroy the earth itself--(Michael Crichton, in Jurassic Park, points out that when we say "save the earth", we mean "save ourselves", because the earth will continue on just fine without us) or all life. And I don't think it's just a coincidence that this one living creature is a dove.
Although Proteus is still modernized, he has been suffering periods of depression and doubt that maybe things aren't that great. "Objectively, Paul tried to tell himself, things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors--mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day. Paul wished he had gone to the front, and heard the senseless tumult and thunder, and seen the wounded and dead, and maybe got a piece of shrapnel through his leg. Maybe he'd be able to understand then how good everything now was by comparison, to see what seemed so clear to others--that what he was doing, had done, and would do as a manager and engineer was vital, above reproach, and had, in fact, brought on a golden age. Of late, his job, the system, and organizational politics had left him variously annoyed, bored, or queasy" (7). Okay, first of all: whether we want to admit it or not (most likely not) none of those terrors are unnatural. People think they should be, and don't get me wrong--I don't think people should have to suffer under them either. But starvation, murder, torture--those are natural, those are from are very deepest animal roots. This posh life isn't natural, it is what man desires--and hell, I'd prefer posh to a natural, animal life, but the definitions must be absolutely clear.
Second of all, I think Proteus is completely right. I think it's incredibly appropriate to say you can't appreciate something unless if you've seen the before, especially with war in consideration. Ye-es, the revolutionary war was a good thing (at least at the time), but I don't know what it was like to be trapped under unfair British rule. The founding fathers did good, I'm sure, or so I've been told, but I can't comprehend how much good they actually did. And yes, that is the best war example I've got. Think of a better American one.
I also mention that EPICAC computers are the supercomputers of this story. I mention EPICAC because it has survived from a short story of Vonnegut's, "EPICAC", published two years prior to this post. The narrator is lonely and in love with a coworker, and begins to explain to the computer concepts like "girl" and "beauty" and "affection". The computer falls in love with the girl and writes her poetry, which the narrator passes off as his own and gives to the girl. They are to be married, and EPICAC kills itself when it learns of this, though it leaves the narrator with five hundred poems to give to the girl. That was the very first EPICAC machine, however, and these EPICACs are version number twenty-two, I believe.
Another important character of the plot is the Shah, a lord from India, or a place that seems just as exotic as India. He provides an objective look at American life, which is clearly different from his own. Where the Shah comes from there are only the elite and the takaru--slaves. Seeing citizens, he points them out and exclaims takaru, takaru! His guide attempts to explain to the Shah that citizens are different from slaves but really, citizens aren't that different. And people say the elite doesn't exist but there's obviously an upper crust that isn't pulling its own weight, let's be honest with ourselves. I mean, yay, we're getting paid and we get food and the means to survive, but hell, it may as well be indentured servitude. We didn't ask to work, we don't want to work, but we don't have a choice.
Finnerty is an engineer who Proteus knows. He lives a little--eh--carnally? Wholly? Let's put it this way, he does what he wants. If he wants to be drunk, he drinks, if he wants to have sex, he finds a girl, and he avoids excessive machinery. Proteus admits that he does enjoy it when Finnerty tells him about his "socially destructive, undisciplined antics" (35). He is intrigued by the idea of indulging in such things too, and goes so far to imagine that that may even be the key to his contentedness, but he nips that thought in the bud.
"The only insight Finnerty had ever permitted Paul was in a moment of deep depression, during a crushing hangover, when he'd sighed and said he'd never felt like he belonged anywhere" (35). This I find interesting because it is direct contrast to The Soul of Man Under Socialism, an essay by Oscar Wilde. Now, take what I say with a grain of salt, I admit it has been a while since I've read it. Also, keep in mind that Wilde could not have possibly imagined the magnitude of what he was suggesting. Remember, the actual Victorian era wasn't actually full of steam-powered Vernes creations that would have made Henry T Ford green with envy. Wilde argues, though, with machines caring for menial labour, man will have more time to work on spiritual and intellectual growth, which is most important from a--well, a view. (Wilde was raised with Christian beliefs, though supposedly he converted on his deathbed, after experiencing a spiritual revelation in prison... But I'm not sure about his feelings on the matter in the times in between.) So--Finnerty should feel like he belonged somewhere--if Wilde was right, he should have found something. But he has not. I will be coming back to this essay later, I'm sure.
Proteus's wife is at unease because of Finnerty's 'radical' ways, and therefore does not care for Finnerty at all. So when she tries to remove her husband from Finnerty's presence: "'Anita,' said Finnerty, 'if you don't show more respect for men's privacy, I'll design a machine that's everything you are, and does show respect.' She colored. 'I can't say I find you screamingly funny.' 'Stainless steel,' said Finnerty. 'Stainless steel, covered with sponge rubber, and heated electrically to 98.6 degrees... And blushes at will,' said Finnerty. 'And I could make a man like you out of a burlap bag filled with mud,' said Anita. 'Anyone who tries to touch you comes away dirty!'" (41). Okay, so welcome to obscure references land: once upon a time, MAD magazine wasn't a parody magazine or anything. It was a varied comic book. In one of the first issues--maybe even the first--there is a comic about a futuristic society like this, only it's so far that men cannot even function without machines. They can't even walk or move on their own (the epiphany at the end is that the main character manages to move his pinky finger) and I don't remember if they show any women... but, you can buy robot women who are still the picture of society's ideal women even though real people are really like fat overgrown infants. The women come out of vending machines like coca-cola. It implies they're used for sex, but now that I think of it, how would that even...? Oh well. Anyways, that was my connection right there. Good times?
Soooo. Skip ahead thirteen pages. They're still at the party--they were at a cocktail party when Finnerty and Anita sparred. "'Atomic energy was hogging the headlines, and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world. The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.' 'And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately,' said Finnerty. 'Ed!' said Anita. 'That was after the war,' said Kroner soberly. 'It happens after every war.' 'And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of the use of the vacuum tubes,' said Finnerty. 'Oh, come on, Ed,' said Paul, 'you can't prove a logical connection between those factors.' 'If there's the slightest connection, it's worth thinking about,' said Finnerty. 'I'm sure there isn't enough connection for us to be concerned with here,' said Kroner severely. 'Or enough imagination or honesty,' said Finnerty" (54).
"'Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis'" (60). Quoth Finnerty, of course. It is the shortened, slangy version of a fuller saying which means "thus always death will come to tyrants"--it sounds familar because it also happens to be what John Wilkes Booth may or may not have said when he shot Abraham Lincoln.
"'Your father though you'd be manager of Pittsburgh someday. If he were alive, nothing would make him happier than to know you got the job.' ...[Proteus] remembered how Anita, shortly after their marriage, had dug up a picture of his father from a trunk and had had it enlarged and framed as her first birthday present to him... She had never met Paul's father, and he hadn't said much about him to her; yet she'd built up a kind of mythology about the man that could keep her talking knowingly for hours" (63). I have no point about this other than the illusions the mind can cast for itself and the strength of these illusions--how you can create someone completely different as they were--but what interests me more is this phenomen occurring in memories... That is, remembering unpleasant people fondly when really they were perfect beasts. (Try out 'The Incredible World of Horace Ford' for a great example of this; it's an episode of--OH WAIT YOU GUESS THE SHOW.)
"'If somebody doesn't clip his wings, he's going right over everybody's heads one of these days.' 'Welcome to'" (63). Anita and Proteus, respectively.
Another dozen pages later, Bud is out a job--he invented a machine so good that it replaces his and the jobs of seventy-two other men. Now, that episode of the Twilight Zone I mentioned at the very first! Now I can't remember the title, of course, but the basis is that this man inherited a top manufacturing company from his pop. The man is only concerned with efficiency, so he thinks nothing of replacing 2,000 men with a machine. There's one man who's very upset, a guy who's worked with his father from the beginning. This man quits, though he's replaced anyways too... Well, the twist is that eventually someone makes a machine to replace the boss. It... It was better watched. It was a pretty good episode. It was actually one I didn't predict the end for, though my dad did... Uh, anyways, the book...
"'You think I'm insane?' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. 'You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.' 'Barely--barely.' 'A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.' Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center... Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first'" (84).
"[Finnerty] had a candor about his few emotional attachments that Paul found disquieting. He used words to describe his feelings that Paul could never bring himself to use when speaking of a friend: love, affection, and other words generally consigned to young and inexperienced lovers. It wasn't homosexual; it was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second" (85). This is the only part of the book that distinctly reminds me of Brave New World, to be honest. I mean in the unfamiliarity and even fear there is regarding the ideas of love and real affection. And by the way, if you're saying, 'but they're both about a dystopian future' et cetera, et cetera--well, yeah, but so is 1984, so is Rant, so is We, so is Anthem, and more besides that. I don't think Brave New World could decay like this. If anything, this seems more to me like the earliest stages of 1984.
So I've skipped over a lot, but where Finnerty and Paul were was at the bar (is that grammatically correct? It doesn't look right either way), a bar across the river, a bar of the 'average' citizens. Anita was waiting for them, but they just kept on putting them away. First of all, Proteus passes out shortly after two women join them in their booth. A lot of things happen in between, but--that's what's important for my means. Proteus goes home to his wife and she accuses him halfheartedly of sleeping with one of the girls, and he denies it for a while--but then he suddenly says he went to bed with one of the girls. She pretty much tunes him out, but I think it's interesting--it seems like he was trying to incite a fight, because she didn't even care that he had been out all night drinking and left her up drinking. In fact, Anita might as well have been robot, up until the very end.
Of course, Proteus becomes interested in the ideas of Finnerty, even moreso after last night when dealing with the 'average' men. Maybe the machines and all aren't worth it, maybe they must be destroyed and life must return to what it was... "If his attempt to become the new Messiah had been successful, if the inhabitants of the north and south banks had met in the middle of the bridge with Paul between them, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea of what to do next. He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else. Paul did a complicated sum in his mind--his savings account plus his securities plus his house plus his cars--and wondered if he didn't have enough to enable him simly to quit, to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody's life. To live in a house by the side of a road...." (115).
So this Shah fellow meets EPICAC, who runs the country. There is a human president, but he's just a figurehead. Shah is taken to meet the president(s) and he asks EPICAC a riddle which only an all-wise god who has transcended to earth can answer. When the riddle is answered, suffering will cease. The riddle is: "Silver bells shall light my way, And nine times nine maidens fill my day, And mountain lakes will sink from sight, And tigers' teeth will fill the night" (122). EPICAC, being unable to answer this riddle, is denounced as a false god by the Shah. He uses the name of the false gods by a tribe the Shah knows--and the president, caught in an awkward situation, asks how that tribe is faring. "'They all died of cholera last spring.' He added after a moment, 'Of course.' He shrugged, as though to ask what else people like that could possibly expect" (123). I don't think it's necessary to explain this passage at all.
So Paul's inward rebellion starts with thinking to hell with whatever work is in front of him as he fills it out or deals with it. He's also reading books about the outdoors and adventure. So it's not much, but it's a start.
Proteus to Finnerty: "'You know the cops are after you for not registering [as a regular citizen]?' 'Spice of life.' 'You can be jailed, you know.' 'You're afraid to live, Paul. That's what's the matter with you. You know about Thoreau and Emerson?' 'A little. About as much as you did before Lasher primed you, I'll bet.' 'Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn't pay a tax to support the Mexican war. He didn't believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. "Henry," he said, "why are you here?" And Thoreau said, "Ralph, why aren't you here?"' 'I should want to go jail?' said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote. 'You shouldn't let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in'" (143).
The real catalyst is the Meadows--it's a job retreat, essentially. A two-week company picnic, doing all the shit that made you feel like that on field day. I know I try to keep some sort of censoring up, but there are few things I hate more and find more foolish than field day. So Proteus is depressed, thinking of this, and decides he really does want to live by his own hands--and farming is the obvious answer. Now, that's not exactly an intelligent conclusion--but as we'll see, Vonnegut doesn't let him get away with it. What Proteus thinks farming will be like is a game of Harvest Moon, essentially. He is of course caught up in the Romanticism of the bit.
So the Shah is taken to see the inventions a housewife deals with. Super-powered dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, et cetera... Anything can be cooked in under a minute, washers are super-effective... Well, as each of these devices and benefits are explained, the Shah's translator keeps on asking what next? Clothes get dried in seconds thanks to a heat-ozone lamp, and then the clothes go through a machine which irons clothes that would take an hour "before the war" (164) in only three minutes. "'And then what does she do?' asked Khashdrahr. 'And then she's done.' 'And then what?' Doctor Dodge reddened perceptibly. 'Is this a joke?'" (164). And then he asks (speaking for the Shah): "'The Shah would like to know why [the housewife] has to do everything so quickly--this in a matter of seconds, that in a matter of seconds. What is she in such a hurry to get at? What is it she has to do, that she mustn't waste any time on these things?'" (164). The Doctor goes on to say she has to live, enjoy herself--and the Shah asks how so. The housewife, Wanda, says they watch a lot of TV, and the kids do too, and it's offered to show the Shah how the ultrarsonic appliances work, only the washer has been broken and they have to wait a month for a part to come in, so Wanda has been washing clothes the 'old-fashioned' way.
But that, though important, isn't what counts to me--what Khashdrahr says is the most important. I had a mini-revelation when I read his bit--why must everything be done quickly and all. Why? Why do we place such importance on that? Why why why? Look at them, they're just wasting it! Hell, we just waste it ourselves! But even without that! Why is it so important that we not toil? Sure, it may be unpleasant, but so? So what? Kurt Vonneguuuuuut, you blow my miiiiiiind.
"'That man's got a lot of get up and go,' said Anita. 'He fills me full of lie down and die,' said Paul" (172).
Well, Paul takes Anita on a drive through the poorer section, you know--and Anita freaks out and all. Actually a nervousness there, and the fact that she seemed to outright hate the common man suggests to me now that she clawed her way up out of that by marrying Paul Proteus. Well, anyways. "'Nobody's going to hurt you. These people are just your fellow Americans.' 'Just because they were born in the same part of the world as I was, that doesn't mean I have to come down here and wallow with them'" (174). I don't think it's necessary to point out who's saying what.
The two have a fight, too: "'I could cut out my tongue for having said those things.' 'Don't use any of our good kitchen knives'" (178). Kind of funny, I thought. And again--no need to point out who's saying what, I think it's a pretty easy guess...
Anyways... Proteus went and bought himself a farm. It has an overseer, but still... That's where he's taking Anita, in an attempt to have her realize what he himself has realized. Anita, unsurprisingly, is less than receptive and instead of meeting it with appall--she meets it with a mechanized brain, thinking what could replaced with machines to make it more efficent, et cetera. She can't even comprehend what her husband means. When Proteus attempts to make her realize the harm machines have done to humans, she responds with a little result of brainwashing or just flat-out stupidity, I haven't decided what would be worse: "'If someone has brains,' said Anita firmly, 'he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed.' She looked at him appraisingly. 'Brains and nerves, Paul.' 'And blinders'" (184).
And Anita placates him with sex, to be quite frank. Paul tires of arguing, and it says: "[He] gave himself over to the one sequence of events that had never failed to provide a beginning, a middle, and a satisfactory end" (185). Now, that, that I think is sad. If sex is the only thing that is all the way right through and through? Nothing else satisfies you, leaves you content in life? Just sex? I don't think that's a good sign at all. If that's the only good thing that's going for you, you are in a pretty poor way, or so I'd think...
"'With every step he hammers another nail into my coffin'" (179).
So the Shah gets his hair cut. And I guess barbers talk a lot, I wouldn't know, girls don't go to barbers. And the barber talks about how you know, in peacetime you never really have a chance to get famous or to be remembered. He may be the greatest barber in the world, but he couldn't do so in a blaze of glory or something. He talks about this fellow who was away from home for two years when his wife wrote him and said she had a baby. Something in him snapped and he killed dozens of enemies in blind rage before being ripped to shreds. His point was that this soldier, Elm Wheeler, was great thanks to the war, but in peacetime, he wouldn't be remembered or anything. And he goes on to say that people deep down want a war or a big fire or something, so they can do something heroic and be remembered, but the machines kind of nullify those possibilities.
He also says another nice thing about war--not exactly nice, but... comforting? The comforting thing about war is that if you're fighting in it, you don't question if you're right. You're being shot at and you are shooting back. That's it. Now granted, I've never been directly involved in a war as a soldier, and I don't think the barber had either, but I think with the dehumanizing that existed at least back then (keep in mind that this book was written about five years after WWII), that's a concept that stands up pretty well...
So the real turning point occurs during the company picnic. It kicks off with a play touting their society, and although the argument for their society is made seemingly correctly (they address issues 'radicals' have with the society), it is flawed (they answer the issues with red herrings). Of course, the man who wrote it is as foolish and brainwashed as the rest of them, so I'd imagine he just spit out blind patriotism when he was stumped...Anyways, my first note is on the name of the character who they use to tout the modern society. His name is John Averageman. Of course, this recalls the play Everyman, whose main character is John Everyman. That play is about redemption and what one must do to avoid going to hell, et cetera, but I think it's an important thing to note that the John in this book's play is only Averageman. The men watching the play, none of them, are that man.
So, Averageman complains that his wages are lower, he doesn't feel like he's worth anything anymore, and so on. An Engineer, young and handsome, representing society, asks him if, before the war, did he have--well, what is essentially socialism, universal medical insurance, a twenty-eight inch television set, a pension, a laundry machine, and this that and the other thing. Of course, Averageman did not but now he does, thanks to the new society with the machines and all. Here's how the conversation continues--
"YOUNG ENG[INEER]. John, you've heard of Julius Caesar?... John, do you suppose that Caesar, with all his power and wealth, with the world at his feet, do you suppose he had what you, Mr. Averageman, have today?
JOHN. (Surprised) Come to think of it, he didn't. Huh! What do you know?
RADICAL. (Furiously) I object! What has Caesar got to do with it?
YOUNG ENG. Your honor, the point I was trying to make was that John, here, since the star in question has risen, has become far richer than the wildest dreams of Caesar or Napoleon or Henry VIII! Or any emperor in history! Thirty dollars, John--yes, that is how much money you make. But, not with all his gold and armies could Charlemagne have gotten one single electric lamp or vacuum tube! He would have given anything to get the security and health package you have, John. But could he get it? No!" (216). After this, the Radical never speaks again, and the play ends with patriotic, feel-good BS. But you see the red herring? It's nothing! It's progress! Charlemagne couldn't have gotten those things because they didn't exist, and quite frankly, he did quite well enough without them. So the Romans didn't have computers! They had plumbing! How long did it take for us to figure out how to do that again? And quite frankly, plumbing is more important than automation, so far as I'm concerned. They had what they positively needed and, I admit, then some... but my point is that we don't need what the Player Piano society has. They made the wealth. Am I making sense?
"An awakening conscience, unaccompanied by new wisdom, made his life so damned lonely, he decided he wouldn't much mind being dead" (221). Proteus, of course. Also, Vonnegut's use of commas drives me a little mad in a bad way, not that I'm one to talk about overuse of commas...
While the invited workers are at the bar, the highest up are at the Council House. Because it is a still summer night, though, the voices from the men in the bar carry: "The shouts and songs that floated over the greensward from the saloon, Paul noted, had a piping quality. There wasn't the inimitable hoarseness of an honest-to-God drunk in the lot. It was unthinkable that there was a man in the saloon without a glass in his hand, but it was also unlikely that many men would have their glasses filled more than once. They didn't drink at the Meadows now the way they used to in the old days when Finnerty and Shepherd and Paul had joined the organization. It used to be that they'd come up to the Meadows to relax and really tie one on as a relief from the terribly hard work of war production. Now the point seemed to be to pretend drunkenness, but to stay sober and discard only those inhibitions and motor skills one could do safely without" (225).
Proteus meets with the eldest member of the company and reflects on that man's rise to the top: by chance, really, nothing less than a Horatio Alger, pulling oneself up by their bootstraps sort of deal. He ends this thought with "It could never happen again. The machines would never stand for it" (228). Thus, the American dream really would be dead, no?
"'Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go'" (236). What I've neglected to tell you is that Proteus quits his job, then goes to the bar to drink it away--only to be told he will not be served. So he punches the bartender out and creates a scene, and then he finds his wife having sex with Shepherd.
"And Paul waved wanly, apathetically. This was goodbye to his life so far, to the whole of his father's life. He hadn't had the satisfaction of telling someone he'd quit, of being believed; but he'd quit. Goodbye. None of this had anything to do with him any more. Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilzation's parade. And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they'd been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots--roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep--in home. A lump grew in his throat, and he couldn't do anything about it. Doctor Paul Proteus was saying goodbye forever to home" (237).
So what of Paul? With no wife, no life, he just kind of wandered about the lower-class areas. He has yet to join the underground rebellion against the machines, but we'll get there, just hold onto your hats...
"The town hall clock struck four. It might have struck midnight or seven or one, for all the difference it made to Paul. He didn't have to be anywhere at any time any more--ever, he supposed. He made up his own reasons for going somewhere, or he went without reasons. Nobody had anything for him to do anywhere. The economy was no longer interested" (266). I added the last line so this wouldn't be confused with an optimistic look at freedom. And, I have to say, this reminds me of what may or may not be a related passage from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The narrator is walking through the streets of New York City for the first time, and he is in awe of the fact that no-one knows him--that he could completely reinvent himself if he so desired, and no-one else would ever be none the wiser. He could do or be whatever the hell he wanted. The tones are really different--but maybe I'm not so crazy for connecting the two? And while I'm thinking of it, as much as I didn't like that book, I think I need to reread it.
Actually, I think that's a good connection! The Ghost Shirts make up their whole plan for rebellion and rising and plan on just using Proteus as a figurehead. Sort of like the narrator in Invisible Man... Well, their mantra is, "'Take the world away from the machines... and give it back to the people'" (291). I like that. But, they leave Proteus in a room to rest and prepare. He objects and: "'You don't matter,' said Finnerty. 'You belong to History now'" (291).
So the Ghost Shirts make a carefully concocted letter that they have signed with Paul's name. Of course, there's an irony in the fact that it's just as synthesized as everything else in their world, but there's a passage in it that I particularly liked: "'Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption'" (301). Again, this reminds me of the narrator in Invisible Man... (By the way, I'm not being lazy or forgetful. The main character in Invisible Man really doesn't have a name.)
"'Blessed are fetishists. Inherited earth,' tapped Paul" (307).
"'You can't ask men to attack pillboxes cold sober,' said Finnerty. 'And you can't ask them to stop when they're drunk,' said Paul" (330). So the people are semi-successful--they ransack the town, destroy pretty much all the machinery... And then, in the midst of all this, they find an automated drink machine, an automated soda fountain sort of deal. People are waiting excitedly around a man working the thing--Bud Calhoun, fixing it, getting orange drink out of it, much to the delight of those huddled around him. And there is the promise that things will go back to what they were--which is negative, but purely logical, you know? It makes sense, it's all a lot of those people have ever known. And if not it being all that they've ever known, it's certainly what they'd prefer. Well, at least Bud can be happy...
And I love the very end of the book. I have to quote it here. Don't read it if you don't want to. "And that left Paul. 'To a better world,' he started to say, but he cut the toast short, thinking of the people of Ilium, eager to recreate the same old nightmare. He shrugged. 'To the record,' he said, and smashed the empty bottle on a rock. Von Neumann considered Paul and then the broken glass. 'This isn't the end, you know,' he said. 'Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be--not even Judgment Day.' 'Hands up,' said Lasher almost gaily. 'Forward March'" (341).
MLA citation information: Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. The Dial Press: New York, 2006.
Wow.... my wrists hurt from writing all of this, even over the course of a week. I don't really have the gumption to write anymore right now, save that I like this book a whole lot (as you may or may not have been able to tell). It's definitely on the meatier side for a Vonnegut book. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to run to dinner! Timequake next, then Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: You're the Good Things by Modest Mouse
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Got a machine head, better than the rest, green to red, machine head, green to red--I walk from my machine, I walk from my machine...
PS. This was a particularly long post as I'm sure you've noticed, and for the first time in a while the spellchecker has protested. So I apologize in hindsight for any erroneous spelling.
First of all, you know how a lot of books have that "Any relations to any person, living or dead, are purely coincidental" shtick? Vonnegut puts his own spin on it: "This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be. The characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writings, infants" (V).
Ah! I'm also obliged to mention that this is set in Ilium, New York. The city is split into the managers of the machines (people like Proteus), the machines, and where most of the people live--the average people. So okay, we can really go on now.
Proteus starts out as a frighteningly modernized man. He finds a stray cat and takes it in, knowing that a mouser is needed. Instead of letting it loose and just letting it follow its instincts, he asks an engineer of incredible skill (Bud Calhoun) to build a mouse alarm to tell the cat when and where mice were. Now that does scare and disgust me. Well, as Proteus is leaving the office, he reflects upon Bud's incredible talents and vaguely wonders if Bud wouldn't be happier in some other time period--but shakes that thought off as ridiculous, because this time of mechanization was clearly the best for him and vice versa. Of course, Bud would be happier in an earlier time, when things were being invented out of necessity, but Proteus can't think yet, so let us continue.
When Proteus gets into his car, Bud's car tells him to not take any wooden nickels over and over and over: "Don't take any wooden nickels, don't take any wooden nickels, don't take any--" (5). I know this was a problem at one point (remember that episode of Spongebob where Squidward gives Spongebob a quarter and Spongebob bites it? That's what people used to do to check if the nickel was a fraud or not), but still, it seems like a funny thing for a car to remind someone. The talking car also reminds me of a Ray Bradbury story--I believe it was originally published alone, but it can be found in the latter pages of The Martian Chronicles. This is after the nuclear war on earth, so this fully automated house stands alone on the Martian landscape, cooking meals, letting the dog in and out, setting up drinks and card tables for games of poker, et cetera. Ah--and I probably should mention the name of the story, it is "There Will Come Soft Rains". Anyways, the house sings the times and reads poetry and such, and at the end of the story the house is set aflame thanks to an ignored cigar. As the house smolders into ashes the next morning it continues to cry, "Today is August 25th, 2026", over and over and over. Well--thanks to Wikipedia I found an incredibly depressing Soviet short loosely based on it. My God. Well, what the hell, I'll ruin your day too: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x38uy2_there-will-fall-soft-rains_shortfilms The end differs greatly, but the beginning is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. The very end is mighty depressing too.
Actually, while I'm thinking about it, let me point out the obvious symbolism. The machines tried to destroy nature--human nature, outdoors nature, whatever--in doing so destroyed religion, and it was what destroyed the people. But, it could not destroy the earth itself--(Michael Crichton, in Jurassic Park, points out that when we say "save the earth", we mean "save ourselves", because the earth will continue on just fine without us) or all life. And I don't think it's just a coincidence that this one living creature is a dove.
Although Proteus is still modernized, he has been suffering periods of depression and doubt that maybe things aren't that great. "Objectively, Paul tried to tell himself, things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors--mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day. Paul wished he had gone to the front, and heard the senseless tumult and thunder, and seen the wounded and dead, and maybe got a piece of shrapnel through his leg. Maybe he'd be able to understand then how good everything now was by comparison, to see what seemed so clear to others--that what he was doing, had done, and would do as a manager and engineer was vital, above reproach, and had, in fact, brought on a golden age. Of late, his job, the system, and organizational politics had left him variously annoyed, bored, or queasy" (7). Okay, first of all: whether we want to admit it or not (most likely not) none of those terrors are unnatural. People think they should be, and don't get me wrong--I don't think people should have to suffer under them either. But starvation, murder, torture--those are natural, those are from are very deepest animal roots. This posh life isn't natural, it is what man desires--and hell, I'd prefer posh to a natural, animal life, but the definitions must be absolutely clear.
Second of all, I think Proteus is completely right. I think it's incredibly appropriate to say you can't appreciate something unless if you've seen the before, especially with war in consideration. Ye-es, the revolutionary war was a good thing (at least at the time), but I don't know what it was like to be trapped under unfair British rule. The founding fathers did good, I'm sure, or so I've been told, but I can't comprehend how much good they actually did. And yes, that is the best war example I've got. Think of a better American one.
I also mention that EPICAC computers are the supercomputers of this story. I mention EPICAC because it has survived from a short story of Vonnegut's, "EPICAC", published two years prior to this post. The narrator is lonely and in love with a coworker, and begins to explain to the computer concepts like "girl" and "beauty" and "affection". The computer falls in love with the girl and writes her poetry, which the narrator passes off as his own and gives to the girl. They are to be married, and EPICAC kills itself when it learns of this, though it leaves the narrator with five hundred poems to give to the girl. That was the very first EPICAC machine, however, and these EPICACs are version number twenty-two, I believe.
Another important character of the plot is the Shah, a lord from India, or a place that seems just as exotic as India. He provides an objective look at American life, which is clearly different from his own. Where the Shah comes from there are only the elite and the takaru--slaves. Seeing citizens, he points them out and exclaims takaru, takaru! His guide attempts to explain to the Shah that citizens are different from slaves but really, citizens aren't that different. And people say the elite doesn't exist but there's obviously an upper crust that isn't pulling its own weight, let's be honest with ourselves. I mean, yay, we're getting paid and we get food and the means to survive, but hell, it may as well be indentured servitude. We didn't ask to work, we don't want to work, but we don't have a choice.
Finnerty is an engineer who Proteus knows. He lives a little--eh--carnally? Wholly? Let's put it this way, he does what he wants. If he wants to be drunk, he drinks, if he wants to have sex, he finds a girl, and he avoids excessive machinery. Proteus admits that he does enjoy it when Finnerty tells him about his "socially destructive, undisciplined antics" (35). He is intrigued by the idea of indulging in such things too, and goes so far to imagine that that may even be the key to his contentedness, but he nips that thought in the bud.
"The only insight Finnerty had ever permitted Paul was in a moment of deep depression, during a crushing hangover, when he'd sighed and said he'd never felt like he belonged anywhere" (35). This I find interesting because it is direct contrast to The Soul of Man Under Socialism, an essay by Oscar Wilde. Now, take what I say with a grain of salt, I admit it has been a while since I've read it. Also, keep in mind that Wilde could not have possibly imagined the magnitude of what he was suggesting. Remember, the actual Victorian era wasn't actually full of steam-powered Vernes creations that would have made Henry T Ford green with envy. Wilde argues, though, with machines caring for menial labour, man will have more time to work on spiritual and intellectual growth, which is most important from a--well, a view. (Wilde was raised with Christian beliefs, though supposedly he converted on his deathbed, after experiencing a spiritual revelation in prison... But I'm not sure about his feelings on the matter in the times in between.) So--Finnerty should feel like he belonged somewhere--if Wilde was right, he should have found something. But he has not. I will be coming back to this essay later, I'm sure.
Proteus's wife is at unease because of Finnerty's 'radical' ways, and therefore does not care for Finnerty at all. So when she tries to remove her husband from Finnerty's presence: "'Anita,' said Finnerty, 'if you don't show more respect for men's privacy, I'll design a machine that's everything you are, and does show respect.' She colored. 'I can't say I find you screamingly funny.' 'Stainless steel,' said Finnerty. 'Stainless steel, covered with sponge rubber, and heated electrically to 98.6 degrees... And blushes at will,' said Finnerty. 'And I could make a man like you out of a burlap bag filled with mud,' said Anita. 'Anyone who tries to touch you comes away dirty!'" (41). Okay, so welcome to obscure references land: once upon a time, MAD magazine wasn't a parody magazine or anything. It was a varied comic book. In one of the first issues--maybe even the first--there is a comic about a futuristic society like this, only it's so far that men cannot even function without machines. They can't even walk or move on their own (the epiphany at the end is that the main character manages to move his pinky finger) and I don't remember if they show any women... but, you can buy robot women who are still the picture of society's ideal women even though real people are really like fat overgrown infants. The women come out of vending machines like coca-cola. It implies they're used for sex, but now that I think of it, how would that even...? Oh well. Anyways, that was my connection right there. Good times?
Soooo. Skip ahead thirteen pages. They're still at the party--they were at a cocktail party when Finnerty and Anita sparred. "'Atomic energy was hogging the headlines, and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world. The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.' 'And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately,' said Finnerty. 'Ed!' said Anita. 'That was after the war,' said Kroner soberly. 'It happens after every war.' 'And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of the use of the vacuum tubes,' said Finnerty. 'Oh, come on, Ed,' said Paul, 'you can't prove a logical connection between those factors.' 'If there's the slightest connection, it's worth thinking about,' said Finnerty. 'I'm sure there isn't enough connection for us to be concerned with here,' said Kroner severely. 'Or enough imagination or honesty,' said Finnerty" (54).
"'Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis'" (60). Quoth Finnerty, of course. It is the shortened, slangy version of a fuller saying which means "thus always death will come to tyrants"--it sounds familar because it also happens to be what John Wilkes Booth may or may not have said when he shot Abraham Lincoln.
"'Your father though you'd be manager of Pittsburgh someday. If he were alive, nothing would make him happier than to know you got the job.' ...[Proteus] remembered how Anita, shortly after their marriage, had dug up a picture of his father from a trunk and had had it enlarged and framed as her first birthday present to him... She had never met Paul's father, and he hadn't said much about him to her; yet she'd built up a kind of mythology about the man that could keep her talking knowingly for hours" (63). I have no point about this other than the illusions the mind can cast for itself and the strength of these illusions--how you can create someone completely different as they were--but what interests me more is this phenomen occurring in memories... That is, remembering unpleasant people fondly when really they were perfect beasts. (Try out 'The Incredible World of Horace Ford' for a great example of this; it's an episode of--OH WAIT YOU GUESS THE SHOW.)
"'If somebody doesn't clip his wings, he's going right over everybody's heads one of these days.' 'Welcome to'" (63). Anita and Proteus, respectively.
Another dozen pages later, Bud is out a job--he invented a machine so good that it replaces his and the jobs of seventy-two other men. Now, that episode of the Twilight Zone I mentioned at the very first! Now I can't remember the title, of course, but the basis is that this man inherited a top manufacturing company from his pop. The man is only concerned with efficiency, so he thinks nothing of replacing 2,000 men with a machine. There's one man who's very upset, a guy who's worked with his father from the beginning. This man quits, though he's replaced anyways too... Well, the twist is that eventually someone makes a machine to replace the boss. It... It was better watched. It was a pretty good episode. It was actually one I didn't predict the end for, though my dad did... Uh, anyways, the book...
"'You think I'm insane?' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. 'You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.' 'Barely--barely.' 'A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.' Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center... Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first'" (84).
"[Finnerty] had a candor about his few emotional attachments that Paul found disquieting. He used words to describe his feelings that Paul could never bring himself to use when speaking of a friend: love, affection, and other words generally consigned to young and inexperienced lovers. It wasn't homosexual; it was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second" (85). This is the only part of the book that distinctly reminds me of Brave New World, to be honest. I mean in the unfamiliarity and even fear there is regarding the ideas of love and real affection. And by the way, if you're saying, 'but they're both about a dystopian future' et cetera, et cetera--well, yeah, but so is 1984, so is Rant, so is We, so is Anthem, and more besides that. I don't think Brave New World could decay like this. If anything, this seems more to me like the earliest stages of 1984.
So I've skipped over a lot, but where Finnerty and Paul were was at the bar (is that grammatically correct? It doesn't look right either way), a bar across the river, a bar of the 'average' citizens. Anita was waiting for them, but they just kept on putting them away. First of all, Proteus passes out shortly after two women join them in their booth. A lot of things happen in between, but--that's what's important for my means. Proteus goes home to his wife and she accuses him halfheartedly of sleeping with one of the girls, and he denies it for a while--but then he suddenly says he went to bed with one of the girls. She pretty much tunes him out, but I think it's interesting--it seems like he was trying to incite a fight, because she didn't even care that he had been out all night drinking and left her up drinking. In fact, Anita might as well have been robot, up until the very end.
Of course, Proteus becomes interested in the ideas of Finnerty, even moreso after last night when dealing with the 'average' men. Maybe the machines and all aren't worth it, maybe they must be destroyed and life must return to what it was... "If his attempt to become the new Messiah had been successful, if the inhabitants of the north and south banks had met in the middle of the bridge with Paul between them, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea of what to do next. He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else. Paul did a complicated sum in his mind--his savings account plus his securities plus his house plus his cars--and wondered if he didn't have enough to enable him simly to quit, to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody's life. To live in a house by the side of a road...." (115).
So this Shah fellow meets EPICAC, who runs the country. There is a human president, but he's just a figurehead. Shah is taken to meet the president(s) and he asks EPICAC a riddle which only an all-wise god who has transcended to earth can answer. When the riddle is answered, suffering will cease. The riddle is: "Silver bells shall light my way, And nine times nine maidens fill my day, And mountain lakes will sink from sight, And tigers' teeth will fill the night" (122). EPICAC, being unable to answer this riddle, is denounced as a false god by the Shah. He uses the name of the false gods by a tribe the Shah knows--and the president, caught in an awkward situation, asks how that tribe is faring. "'They all died of cholera last spring.' He added after a moment, 'Of course.' He shrugged, as though to ask what else people like that could possibly expect" (123). I don't think it's necessary to explain this passage at all.
So Paul's inward rebellion starts with thinking to hell with whatever work is in front of him as he fills it out or deals with it. He's also reading books about the outdoors and adventure. So it's not much, but it's a start.
Proteus to Finnerty: "'You know the cops are after you for not registering [as a regular citizen]?' 'Spice of life.' 'You can be jailed, you know.' 'You're afraid to live, Paul. That's what's the matter with you. You know about Thoreau and Emerson?' 'A little. About as much as you did before Lasher primed you, I'll bet.' 'Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn't pay a tax to support the Mexican war. He didn't believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. "Henry," he said, "why are you here?" And Thoreau said, "Ralph, why aren't you here?"' 'I should want to go jail?' said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote. 'You shouldn't let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in'" (143).
The real catalyst is the Meadows--it's a job retreat, essentially. A two-week company picnic, doing all the shit that made you feel like that on field day. I know I try to keep some sort of censoring up, but there are few things I hate more and find more foolish than field day. So Proteus is depressed, thinking of this, and decides he really does want to live by his own hands--and farming is the obvious answer. Now, that's not exactly an intelligent conclusion--but as we'll see, Vonnegut doesn't let him get away with it. What Proteus thinks farming will be like is a game of Harvest Moon, essentially. He is of course caught up in the Romanticism of the bit.
So the Shah is taken to see the inventions a housewife deals with. Super-powered dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, et cetera... Anything can be cooked in under a minute, washers are super-effective... Well, as each of these devices and benefits are explained, the Shah's translator keeps on asking what next? Clothes get dried in seconds thanks to a heat-ozone lamp, and then the clothes go through a machine which irons clothes that would take an hour "before the war" (164) in only three minutes. "'And then what does she do?' asked Khashdrahr. 'And then she's done.' 'And then what?' Doctor Dodge reddened perceptibly. 'Is this a joke?'" (164). And then he asks (speaking for the Shah): "'The Shah would like to know why [the housewife] has to do everything so quickly--this in a matter of seconds, that in a matter of seconds. What is she in such a hurry to get at? What is it she has to do, that she mustn't waste any time on these things?'" (164). The Doctor goes on to say she has to live, enjoy herself--and the Shah asks how so. The housewife, Wanda, says they watch a lot of TV, and the kids do too, and it's offered to show the Shah how the ultrarsonic appliances work, only the washer has been broken and they have to wait a month for a part to come in, so Wanda has been washing clothes the 'old-fashioned' way.
But that, though important, isn't what counts to me--what Khashdrahr says is the most important. I had a mini-revelation when I read his bit--why must everything be done quickly and all. Why? Why do we place such importance on that? Why why why? Look at them, they're just wasting it! Hell, we just waste it ourselves! But even without that! Why is it so important that we not toil? Sure, it may be unpleasant, but so? So what? Kurt Vonneguuuuuut, you blow my miiiiiiind.
"'That man's got a lot of get up and go,' said Anita. 'He fills me full of lie down and die,' said Paul" (172).
Well, Paul takes Anita on a drive through the poorer section, you know--and Anita freaks out and all. Actually a nervousness there, and the fact that she seemed to outright hate the common man suggests to me now that she clawed her way up out of that by marrying Paul Proteus. Well, anyways. "'Nobody's going to hurt you. These people are just your fellow Americans.' 'Just because they were born in the same part of the world as I was, that doesn't mean I have to come down here and wallow with them'" (174). I don't think it's necessary to point out who's saying what.
The two have a fight, too: "'I could cut out my tongue for having said those things.' 'Don't use any of our good kitchen knives'" (178). Kind of funny, I thought. And again--no need to point out who's saying what, I think it's a pretty easy guess...
Anyways... Proteus went and bought himself a farm. It has an overseer, but still... That's where he's taking Anita, in an attempt to have her realize what he himself has realized. Anita, unsurprisingly, is less than receptive and instead of meeting it with appall--she meets it with a mechanized brain, thinking what could replaced with machines to make it more efficent, et cetera. She can't even comprehend what her husband means. When Proteus attempts to make her realize the harm machines have done to humans, she responds with a little result of brainwashing or just flat-out stupidity, I haven't decided what would be worse: "'If someone has brains,' said Anita firmly, 'he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed.' She looked at him appraisingly. 'Brains and nerves, Paul.' 'And blinders'" (184).
And Anita placates him with sex, to be quite frank. Paul tires of arguing, and it says: "[He] gave himself over to the one sequence of events that had never failed to provide a beginning, a middle, and a satisfactory end" (185). Now, that, that I think is sad. If sex is the only thing that is all the way right through and through? Nothing else satisfies you, leaves you content in life? Just sex? I don't think that's a good sign at all. If that's the only good thing that's going for you, you are in a pretty poor way, or so I'd think...
"'With every step he hammers another nail into my coffin'" (179).
So the Shah gets his hair cut. And I guess barbers talk a lot, I wouldn't know, girls don't go to barbers. And the barber talks about how you know, in peacetime you never really have a chance to get famous or to be remembered. He may be the greatest barber in the world, but he couldn't do so in a blaze of glory or something. He talks about this fellow who was away from home for two years when his wife wrote him and said she had a baby. Something in him snapped and he killed dozens of enemies in blind rage before being ripped to shreds. His point was that this soldier, Elm Wheeler, was great thanks to the war, but in peacetime, he wouldn't be remembered or anything. And he goes on to say that people deep down want a war or a big fire or something, so they can do something heroic and be remembered, but the machines kind of nullify those possibilities.
He also says another nice thing about war--not exactly nice, but... comforting? The comforting thing about war is that if you're fighting in it, you don't question if you're right. You're being shot at and you are shooting back. That's it. Now granted, I've never been directly involved in a war as a soldier, and I don't think the barber had either, but I think with the dehumanizing that existed at least back then (keep in mind that this book was written about five years after WWII), that's a concept that stands up pretty well...
So the real turning point occurs during the company picnic. It kicks off with a play touting their society, and although the argument for their society is made seemingly correctly (they address issues 'radicals' have with the society), it is flawed (they answer the issues with red herrings). Of course, the man who wrote it is as foolish and brainwashed as the rest of them, so I'd imagine he just spit out blind patriotism when he was stumped...Anyways, my first note is on the name of the character who they use to tout the modern society. His name is John Averageman. Of course, this recalls the play Everyman, whose main character is John Everyman. That play is about redemption and what one must do to avoid going to hell, et cetera, but I think it's an important thing to note that the John in this book's play is only Averageman. The men watching the play, none of them, are that man.
So, Averageman complains that his wages are lower, he doesn't feel like he's worth anything anymore, and so on. An Engineer, young and handsome, representing society, asks him if, before the war, did he have--well, what is essentially socialism, universal medical insurance, a twenty-eight inch television set, a pension, a laundry machine, and this that and the other thing. Of course, Averageman did not but now he does, thanks to the new society with the machines and all. Here's how the conversation continues--
"YOUNG ENG[INEER]. John, you've heard of Julius Caesar?... John, do you suppose that Caesar, with all his power and wealth, with the world at his feet, do you suppose he had what you, Mr. Averageman, have today?
JOHN. (Surprised) Come to think of it, he didn't. Huh! What do you know?
RADICAL. (Furiously) I object! What has Caesar got to do with it?
YOUNG ENG. Your honor, the point I was trying to make was that John, here, since the star in question has risen, has become far richer than the wildest dreams of Caesar or Napoleon or Henry VIII! Or any emperor in history! Thirty dollars, John--yes, that is how much money you make. But, not with all his gold and armies could Charlemagne have gotten one single electric lamp or vacuum tube! He would have given anything to get the security and health package you have, John. But could he get it? No!" (216). After this, the Radical never speaks again, and the play ends with patriotic, feel-good BS. But you see the red herring? It's nothing! It's progress! Charlemagne couldn't have gotten those things because they didn't exist, and quite frankly, he did quite well enough without them. So the Romans didn't have computers! They had plumbing! How long did it take for us to figure out how to do that again? And quite frankly, plumbing is more important than automation, so far as I'm concerned. They had what they positively needed and, I admit, then some... but my point is that we don't need what the Player Piano society has. They made the wealth. Am I making sense?
"An awakening conscience, unaccompanied by new wisdom, made his life so damned lonely, he decided he wouldn't much mind being dead" (221). Proteus, of course. Also, Vonnegut's use of commas drives me a little mad in a bad way, not that I'm one to talk about overuse of commas...
While the invited workers are at the bar, the highest up are at the Council House. Because it is a still summer night, though, the voices from the men in the bar carry: "The shouts and songs that floated over the greensward from the saloon, Paul noted, had a piping quality. There wasn't the inimitable hoarseness of an honest-to-God drunk in the lot. It was unthinkable that there was a man in the saloon without a glass in his hand, but it was also unlikely that many men would have their glasses filled more than once. They didn't drink at the Meadows now the way they used to in the old days when Finnerty and Shepherd and Paul had joined the organization. It used to be that they'd come up to the Meadows to relax and really tie one on as a relief from the terribly hard work of war production. Now the point seemed to be to pretend drunkenness, but to stay sober and discard only those inhibitions and motor skills one could do safely without" (225).
Proteus meets with the eldest member of the company and reflects on that man's rise to the top: by chance, really, nothing less than a Horatio Alger, pulling oneself up by their bootstraps sort of deal. He ends this thought with "It could never happen again. The machines would never stand for it" (228). Thus, the American dream really would be dead, no?
"'Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go'" (236). What I've neglected to tell you is that Proteus quits his job, then goes to the bar to drink it away--only to be told he will not be served. So he punches the bartender out and creates a scene, and then he finds his wife having sex with Shepherd.
"And Paul waved wanly, apathetically. This was goodbye to his life so far, to the whole of his father's life. He hadn't had the satisfaction of telling someone he'd quit, of being believed; but he'd quit. Goodbye. None of this had anything to do with him any more. Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilzation's parade. And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they'd been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots--roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep--in home. A lump grew in his throat, and he couldn't do anything about it. Doctor Paul Proteus was saying goodbye forever to home" (237).
So what of Paul? With no wife, no life, he just kind of wandered about the lower-class areas. He has yet to join the underground rebellion against the machines, but we'll get there, just hold onto your hats...
"The town hall clock struck four. It might have struck midnight or seven or one, for all the difference it made to Paul. He didn't have to be anywhere at any time any more--ever, he supposed. He made up his own reasons for going somewhere, or he went without reasons. Nobody had anything for him to do anywhere. The economy was no longer interested" (266). I added the last line so this wouldn't be confused with an optimistic look at freedom. And, I have to say, this reminds me of what may or may not be a related passage from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The narrator is walking through the streets of New York City for the first time, and he is in awe of the fact that no-one knows him--that he could completely reinvent himself if he so desired, and no-one else would ever be none the wiser. He could do or be whatever the hell he wanted. The tones are really different--but maybe I'm not so crazy for connecting the two? And while I'm thinking of it, as much as I didn't like that book, I think I need to reread it.
Actually, I think that's a good connection! The Ghost Shirts make up their whole plan for rebellion and rising and plan on just using Proteus as a figurehead. Sort of like the narrator in Invisible Man... Well, their mantra is, "'Take the world away from the machines... and give it back to the people'" (291). I like that. But, they leave Proteus in a room to rest and prepare. He objects and: "'You don't matter,' said Finnerty. 'You belong to History now'" (291).
So the Ghost Shirts make a carefully concocted letter that they have signed with Paul's name. Of course, there's an irony in the fact that it's just as synthesized as everything else in their world, but there's a passage in it that I particularly liked: "'Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there, pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption'" (301). Again, this reminds me of the narrator in Invisible Man... (By the way, I'm not being lazy or forgetful. The main character in Invisible Man really doesn't have a name.)
"'Blessed are fetishists. Inherited earth,' tapped Paul" (307).
"'You can't ask men to attack pillboxes cold sober,' said Finnerty. 'And you can't ask them to stop when they're drunk,' said Paul" (330). So the people are semi-successful--they ransack the town, destroy pretty much all the machinery... And then, in the midst of all this, they find an automated drink machine, an automated soda fountain sort of deal. People are waiting excitedly around a man working the thing--Bud Calhoun, fixing it, getting orange drink out of it, much to the delight of those huddled around him. And there is the promise that things will go back to what they were--which is negative, but purely logical, you know? It makes sense, it's all a lot of those people have ever known. And if not it being all that they've ever known, it's certainly what they'd prefer. Well, at least Bud can be happy...
And I love the very end of the book. I have to quote it here. Don't read it if you don't want to. "And that left Paul. 'To a better world,' he started to say, but he cut the toast short, thinking of the people of Ilium, eager to recreate the same old nightmare. He shrugged. 'To the record,' he said, and smashed the empty bottle on a rock. Von Neumann considered Paul and then the broken glass. 'This isn't the end, you know,' he said. 'Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be--not even Judgment Day.' 'Hands up,' said Lasher almost gaily. 'Forward March'" (341).
MLA citation information: Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. The Dial Press: New York, 2006.
Wow.... my wrists hurt from writing all of this, even over the course of a week. I don't really have the gumption to write anymore right now, save that I like this book a whole lot (as you may or may not have been able to tell). It's definitely on the meatier side for a Vonnegut book. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to run to dinner! Timequake next, then Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: You're the Good Things by Modest Mouse
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Got a machine head, better than the rest, green to red, machine head, green to red--I walk from my machine, I walk from my machine...
PS. This was a particularly long post as I'm sure you've noticed, and for the first time in a while the spellchecker has protested. So I apologize in hindsight for any erroneous spelling.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)