Dream Catcher by Margaret A Salinger

Not to be confused with Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, though, strangely enough, I received both books at the same exact time (also a copy of Gone With the Wind and a giant book of quotes, but shush).
This is the memoir of JD Salinger's daughter.  Her memoir, though I picked it because I saw the name and was like JD SALINGER'S DAUGHTER WROTE A BOOK ABOUT HIM.  I know what a memoir is, but come on, let's be real, probably almost all of the people who bought this book bought it for that reason.  Prior to the halfway point I actually got rather agitated because she was talking so much about herself.  Sorry.  Once I remembered that the words "memoir" were on the cover though, I got over it.  Also, JD Salinger wasn't a great father, so there's a point where you kind of want to push him out of the way.  He didn't beat his kids or anything like that, but he refused to give them real medicine even when they were dangerously ill (homeopathic meds are always a good idea), let them stay with their mother who was unstable--he suspected her of burning their house down (as did Margaret herself), kind of peaced out on showing up for parental events like graduations and such (though he almost went to Woodstock--it's too bad he changed his mind.  Can you imagine??), kind of was a messianic guy (or at least his daughter likens him to a cult leader, drawing women in and kind of breaking them down.  I kept on thinking of Ken Kesey and the Mountain Girl, or whatever her name was, from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  In any case, it was an interesting comparison.) and so on.  It wasn't--I don't like calling it neglect, but it was bad parenting.

Anyways.  It's a memoir.  Do I need to say more?  Most of my complaints/comments came early on when I was still like "TALK ABOUT YOUR DAD MORE"--or comments.  He was an interesting guy (JD Salinger died in 2010).  The bad parenting or less than pretty picture of him didn't really make me question my life or personal heroes or anything like that--he's not one of them.  That sounds mean, but what I'm trying to say is, I'm not idolizing him over Catcher in the Rye.  As you can see, the second reading of the book didn't even end up that well.  When you're fifteen or sixteen, the book is your little teen angst Bible, and when you're eighteen, after a while you just want to shut Holden up.  (Actually, this makes me want to reread Franny and Zooey really badly, because I liked that twice as much as I ever did Catcher.)  It did weird me about a little because there's something about JD Salinger's face that reminds me of Jack Kerouac.  (They have the same haircut, actually.)  So at times the image in my head of this person acting this way was Kerouac, and it was like "No, no, no--that's not right.  Not at all."

The first thing that worried me is that her introduction starts off with tons of quotes, poems, song lyrics, etc.  Immediately I got worried, because that's like rubbing it in someone's face that you're ridiculously educated (sure enough, she is--I don't even know what an M.Phil is).  Such annoying (and often seemingly unneeded) interludes became scarcer and scarcer as she moved away from the subject of her father, however.
The second thing that got me were the footnotes.  She berates a biographer of her father's very rudely--apparently her father had the nickname Sonny since childhood.  This biographer mistakenly said that he got the nickname in ninth grade, given to him by his friends.  "Ian Hamilton... claimed that it was at the McBurney school... that 'he was nicknamed "Sonny" by his chums, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.'  Please, chums?  On the West Side of Manhattan, perhaps?  Several of my dad's army buddies in the foxholes and bloody battlefields of World War II were referred to, by the same scholar, as his colleagues.  'Let me confer with my colleagues, Rocco,' Jerry said.  'Oh, Rocco, would you be so kind as to pass the ammo?'  'Right-o, Sonny old chum,' Rocco expostulated laconically... I can't stand it" (Salinger 17).  So the guy screwed up on something!  Sorry he didn't have the advantage of being born in your family.  Hell, there's a whole year where no-one (to this day, apparently) knows where Salinger (JD) went, after Margaret's mother refused to drop out of school to marry him.  Also, sorry he uses admittedly odd phrasing like chums and colleagues.  Maybe it's a little old-fashioned, but it's not like the guy just threw HP Lovecraft call-words in there.  And what's with her little sarcastic reverie at the end there?  No need to get bitchy.  Just state that he was incorrect and move on.  Jeez.  (I don't know why this annoys me so much, but it makes me very mad.)
My next note was on another footnote that annoyed me--she explains a Hindu concept as being like excommunication, or "the WASP favorite, disowning or disinheriting, but more to the bone" (Salinger 23).  For some reason this made me mad (because I am a WASP, maybe?  That's honestly the only explanation I can make for my reaction...)--because only WASPs disinherit or disown?  Yeah okay.  She could just say "or disowning or disinheriting".  Again, I don't know why this agitated me so.  (Perhaps it would help to mention that I am PMSing and all my irrational moods and acts are ten times more so?)  In any case, the concept she's trying to describe--sitting shiva

My next bit is quick--Margaret recalls that at the time her father was writing Catcher, he told a friend that he was writing an autobiographical work at the time.  Also, this book is--before I forget--very heavy in drawing connections between Salinger and his characters, predominantly in the first half of the book.  That was very interesting, and made me wish I had bothered to read more of Salinger's works before reading this.  On the plus side, I'm all inspired to read Nine Stories now.  (If I can find a nice copy--I've never seen a library copy of any Salinger book that didn't look like it had been gnawed on.  One time Wallingford had a nice, almost-new copy of Catcher, which would have been perfect if some idiot teenage girl hadn't wrote "I [heart] Gerard Way" [with a real heart, not an HTML heart] on the cover.  Ugh.  Help.)  It's interesting because Holden is definitely autobiographical--I've never really had a doubt about that.  Franny and Zooey, however, seemed like a logical procession of thought (at least at the time), more than an illustration of the inner personal mechanisms of a mind.

Oh, I also thought that it was interesting that Salinger left his wife (Margaret's mother--apparently Salinger had a very extensive list of lady friends over the years--where/how did he meet them all!?) after he discovered she was pregnant.  Despite the fact that he loved kids, he got disturbed and... I don't want to use the phrase "grossed out", but I don't have all those fancy degrees, so I am.  This is also the popular explanation for why Oscar Wilde only had two children, and why Elvis only had one.  Also, is it too early to mention that Salinger also reminds me of a demented Atticus Finch?  Like, he seems like he would be a really good, awesome dad from certain descriptions by Margaret, and then it's like haha, just kidding.  Like if Atticus Finch was anything less than the perfection that he is.  I love Atticus Finch.

Oh yeah, apparently JD wrote a short story entitled "For Esme--with Love and Squalor".  Immediately I thought of A Series of Unfortunate Events--Remember Count Olaf's girlfriend... Esme Squalor?  What's uuuup.  And don't even be like, "but Angela, it's just simple word association!", because there's is no way it's not.  Lemony Snicket (wait, is it cool to call him Dan Handler now?  Is that cat out of the bag?  I've also seen his face before.  Do people still wonder about that?) was a smart guy and definitely did do that on purpose.  It is 100% fact now.*  Also, this led to a half-hour researching frenzy on the series, which I used to be obsessed with, but, oddly enough, did not survive rereading either.  I looked at the Wikipedia page for the first book, though, and felt the same feeling when I first picked it off the shelf and looked at the picture on the inside and everything.  Man.
(Also, my cousin met Dan Handler.  What.)

Margaret also mentions that in one of her father's stories, a boy named Seymour throws a rock at a beautiful girl, permanently destroying her beauty in the form of a scar on her forehead.  (Make your own Harry Potter joke here.)  She says that she didn't quite understand it, though all the characters in the story did.  The closest she came to understanding it is when her son was two and they would hug and cuddle and all of a sudden he would hit her.  I think I kind of understand it (in a different way).  I think it's like Fight Club, when the narrator says that he wants to destroy everything beautiful that he could never have or hope to have.  He couldn't have it, so he didn't want to be reminded of it, and he wanted to punish the people who did have it.  Of course, I haven't actually read the JD Salinger story, so take that with a grain of salt....

Oh, and Margaret related an event that again, reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird.  They lived in the country--obviously--and at one point one of the known poor kids gets his tooth knocked out at school.  Margaret's mother took the child to the dentist, where the nurse there asked her "'Why'ja bother?  All them Courdelaines lose their teeth anyways'" (Salinger 139).  She then tells them to just go home.  It's a superficial connection, but it was kind of like how Scout knew everything about all the families.  These kids were the white trash, this family was poor but they paid back every penny given to them no matter how long it took, et cetera.

Oh, and very young (I want to say seven or eight?) Margaret broke her arm.  I thought I was going to die laughing--wait for it--: "Some idiot moved my arm to place it on the X-ray plate.  Screaming agony.  They did it an eternal hell number of times.  I had a compound fracture: one bone was splintered, the other was sticking out and covered with dirt.  A mask came over my face.  Some nurse, with a cheery stewardess voice, actually asked me to count!  Jesus.  Now?" (Salinger 169).  Obviously it was just that last part that I thought funny--the rest of it is kind of gross.  But that reaction cracked me up.
Oh, and when the parent Salingers decided to get divorced, Margaret explains it to her brother, including this: "'They both love you.  They just hate each other'" (Salinger 205).  Again, hilarious, though maybe I'm a bad person for thinking that. (But I wish someone had explained it to me like that!)

JD Salinger's advice to his daughter on marriage: "'Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do'" (Salinger 226).

I think the major change in my opinion on Margaret came when she was talking about her crush on Paul McCartney.  No, Paul isn't my favourite Beatle, but she imagined kissing, or going to kiss him, while he sang "All My Loving", which just so happens to be my favourite Beatles song.  Touche.

Oh, and Margaret went to a boarding school.  I can't say I liked this part--the only time I've ever seen a boarding school portrayed in a way that wasn't terrible was in a Mary-Kate and Ashley book--but it was familiar.  The first memoir I ever read was Roald Dahl's, then James Joyce's, and... Okay, there's basically no school ever in Running With Scissors.  But at least Margaret didn't get caned, or beaten with a pandybat!  (Or have to fag for the older children.  Ugh.)  There was some intense psychological abuse from the headmistress in Margaret's case, like Captain Hardcastle, but... Well, without the caning.  But just as scary and awful.  Her letters were also censored, which I was surprised when she found out and was surprised by that fact.  (Well, Boy wasn't even published then, to be fair.)  I was half-expecting to see examples of such letters in the following pages in the same manner as Dahl's--with the same explanation for their being there, her mother kept them and bound them all in green ribbon... But no such luck.  And yes, I did read that book about a million times as a kid, okay??

Oh, JD Salinger was also apparently invested in orgone boxes.  (Look them up for yourself.  I can't really give a good, concise explanation of what they are, but they're basically supposed to fill you with good energy or whatever.  It's super homeopathic.  [Sort of] Big in the fifties.)  The only reason why I mention it is because... So was William S Burroughs!  Yay!  Kerouac mentions it in the original version of On the Road (I can't vouch for the shorter version, though...).

Oh, and she never mentions the murder of John Lennon.  Skips right to 1982.  Granted, it's not necessarily something you would want to mention, "My dad's book caused John Lennon's murder and somebody to take potshots at Ronald Reagan!", but it's one hell of an elephant in the room.  (And it's strange too, considering the things she does choose to write about.  It couldn't be any worse than some of the other things she chronicles...) I wonder if JD Salinger even knew?  He had to have known, though, even if he was a recluse.  I mean, come on.  John Lennon.  He knew who he was, he made a vague promise to introduce John to Margaret by way of his publisher or something that never came to fruition... I never thought about it before this, but I'd really like to read up on Salinger's reaction to John Lennon's death.

Margaret eventually has a fight with her father, and her father's policy is pretty much, make me mad and we're done.  They had a few fights prior to this where he promised her that he would still love her, but he'd be done with communicating with her.  That's a harsh policy especially when applied to your daughter.  Margaret said that that was the last "real" conversation she had with her father, so I imagine they talk, but small talk, stranger talk.  That's too bad--I wonder if they reconciled at all before his death... Anyways, she talks about how students who had read the book would try to find him--one such girl interviewed said that she'd ask him "'if he'll be our catcher, our catcher in the rye'" (Salinger 427).  Margaret couples this with the fact that she felt like one of those children running alone in the rye, and that her father simply wouldn't be a catcher.  He couldn't, and his raising and treatment of her (and her brother) kind of proved that.  He'd like to save, but he simply didn't have that ability for this or that reason.  The irony makes me a little queasy.

Okay, one last comment on the book itself.  Margaret occasionally copies her father's tendency to emphasize random parts of words.  I always find myself saying such words over and over in Salinger's books, trying to figure out the point of a certain emphasis is, or even if such an emphasis could flow naturally.  I found myself doing the same thing in this.  And no, they rarely seemed to flow naturally or have a point.  If the whole word was emphasized, or even two syllables together instead of the odd one... Uuuuuugh.

I don't really have a comment on whether this book was good or bad.  I don't feel comfortable judging a memoir in such terms.  It was interesting, and at times very eerie or difficult to read--but still interesting.  It's too bad that she is nearly overshadowed by the fact that her father was JD Salinger, but she pulls through, and the information given on him is definitely cool, because prior to this I knew him as that author who was a recluse and may or may not have drunk his own pee (Margaret confirms that this is in fact true).  A bigger JD Salinger fan might have been more into it than I was--and it's an interesting sort-of companion to his works.  I liked the book, at least, and I don't regret reading it or anything like that; however, this isn't the sort of book I'd just pick up again and read for fun.  I'm probably going to end up giving it to Fabrizzles or Stubs if either of them are interested, or send it off to the Jerome Harrison book fair.  Again--no judgment on the book itself, Margaret is a very talented author and the book is interesting--but I know I'm not going to read it again, at least not in the next ten years or what have you.  (And if she wrote some sort of addendum after her father's death I would definitely read it!  And... Now that I'm thinking about it, did JD Salinger know about this book?  Did he read it?  Probably not, if he was "done with" his daughter like he said, but still.  It would be interesting, albeit impossible, to know his reaction to it if so, or the idea of the book in general.)


MLA citation information: Salinger, Margaret A.  Dream Catcher.  Washington Square Press: New York, 2000.


*No, it is not.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

Look, I'm doing this again!  I was only going to take a break from doing this for a month last year, but... Well, clearly it went a little longer than that.  I took three English classes and a history class that was basically a Lit class, though, so I have one heck of an excuse.  (I shudder to think what my final two years in college will be like.)  Hopefully I'll be able to do at least one book a month in the future or something, but we'll see.

Anyways.  First off, I got awesome nerdy things for Christmas which I am going to tout: Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant! book (the one with Napoleon on the cover), Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (which is an absolutely gorgeous and amazing book.  Last year when it came out it was out for forty dollars, which I can assure you is totally worth it.  It's beautiful, and a good book too.) and an uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is also amazing.  Kate Beaton, I have touted before, and you can check out her awesome comics at harkavagrant.com, Foer's book is a reworked version of the book Street of Crocodiles, a book I myself have not read, but he says is his favourite book, so now of course I need to read it.  I recommend searching Google images for pictures of the book if you're curious about it--but I don't think you can really get it unless you're actually cracking it open yourself and reading it.  In fact, I take that back.  Don't even wonder about it until you actually buy it.  I kind of knew what was in store when I asked for it (Foer cuts out parts of the text to create a new story out of it all), but I was still awed when I opened it.  It's seriously amazing.
The edition of Dorian Gray I got was this edition, and is worth the money, even if you already own three copies of the book already, which I definitely do not.  It gives a very good background for the novel, as well as a more in-depth look at Wilde's life and the parallels between that in the book.  To read an even better case for it, go here.  (Really--much better than my description thus far.)  It's also interesting because all of the story with James Vane (Sybil's brother) hadn't existed yet, which meant until about ten minutes ago, when I checked my 1910 edition, I thought I was going insane.  Actually, James's death occurs in (I believe) chapter eighteen, which the original manuscript never even reached.  So yeah.  Get that.  It's definitely worth it.


Anywayyys, Haruki Murakami's book... I borrowed it from Meg.  I've heard he was good for a while, but from a source that I was not particularly fond of in the least, so I put off trying him out.  In any case, I really did enjoy this book.  It's kind of like--well, the end of it reminded me of John Green's Looking for Alaska, or Paper Towns.  You see, the book starts with Hajime reflecting on his early years, and girl he was close friends with right before he hit puberty, or before puberty really hit him.  He was attracted to her, and he moves away before they get any older and their relationship really has the chance to become anything more.  She definitely becomes a sort of romanticized figure, but not in a whiny way, if that makes sense.  He thinks of her from time to time while he's dating Izumi in high school, and every so often he thinks of the girl (Shimamoto), but it's not dominant.  He even gets married, becomes pretty successful in his job, and has two children and all of that.  She appears in his life again when he's thirty-seven, and things become turbulent for a while, but other than that time, it's not like "SHIMAMOTO SHIMAMOTO" and I'm going to try real hard not to smear Looking for Alaska, but this book is like the perfect version of it.  No--better.  It's unfair to say that.  But it reminded me a lot of that, and the end could have potentially gone on a long time more in a Looking for Alaska-esque way.

One thing I don't understand is a section with Izumi.  The first time they kiss, Hajime decides it is important that he gets condoms ASAP, not for any lascivious reasons, but because he's just a teenager, you know, sixteen or so.  Izumi is nervous, and he assures her that he was just curious about them, and that he will take it slow and never hurt her or anything like that.  The thought of it makes her nervous, still, though, and she says she feels like a snail without a shell--Hajime responds by saying that he is nervous too--he feels like a frog without any webs.  I'm not sure if I get it... Webs?  Last time I checked, frogs weren't spiders...?  Translation issue?  I don't know...
Anyways, things obviously don't work out with Izumi.  Hajime has sex with her cousin on multiple occasions--where Hajime moves on, Izumi does not.  She is permanently damaged by the occasion and kind of... deflates.  She appears from time to time throughout the novel, and now that I think of it, kind of serves as a picture of a person who is too wrapped up in the past.  She just kind of dies inside and becomes emotionless and kind of creepy.  (An old classmate of theirs says that the local children are scared of her, specifically of her face.)  That sounds mean, but... but yeah.
The Living Desert.  "'There's nothing you can do about it. Another person's life is that person's life.  You can't take responsibility.  It's like we're living in a desert.  You just have to get used to it.  Did you see that Disney film in elementary school--The Living Desert?'  'Yeah,' I answered.  'Our world's exactly the same.  Rain falls and the flowers bloom.  No rain, they wither up.  Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds.  But in the end, every one of them dies.  They die and dry up.  One generation dies, and the next one takes over.  That's how it goes.  Lots of different ways to live.  And lots of different ways to die.  But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference.  All that remains is a desert'" (Haruki 81).  Kind of depressing, especially in that it does have merit, right?  Don't worry, I'll be getting back to this later.

Anyways.  Shimamoto reappears in Hajime's life.  She tells Hajime very little about herself--she has surgery on her bad leg (she had a partially lame leg when they were kids, which led Hajime to go on a blind date with a different girl with a partially lame leg at some point in his twenties), she had a baby but it died within, at most, two days of its birth, and she does not wear a wedding ring.  Their first 'excursion' is to go out and spread the baby's ashes.  But they spend a lot of time together at one of the bars Hajime owns, talking and drinking and what have you.  They actually only have sex once--well, not once, but only one night is, uh... marked by sex.  After this she disappears.  Hajime's wife reveals that she knows that something has been going on.  Now I'm going to spoil the end, which I didn't intend to do, but I am the worst person after all.  Hajime chooses between the two--and comes to the fact that Shimamoto was idealized.  (Actually, his sudden run-in with the deadened Izumi is what kind of brings him to that realization.)  While driving with Shimamoto to the cottage they had sex at, she told him that she had a sudden impulse to grab the wheel and jerk it--undoubtedly that would kill them, but she does not add that.  Hajime comes to the conclusion that she's... Not so much unbalanced (though I would definitely put it like that) but that whatever had happened made her so desperate that death kind of... infected her.  It was the only real option she could truly see.  Or, she became "creepy as hell".  Actually, he described her eyes as being very dead, or having death in them, while they were having sex (I think specifically while she was giving him a blow job), so yeah.  "Creepy as hell".  (But can you see why she would bring up the image of Alaska?)  

Anyway.  My last bit (sorry if this post seems weird; I'm kind of out of practice.)  goes back to the desert.  (And also a little bit onto Alaska.)  After he decides that he will stay with his wife, he meditates at the table until "someone" comes and "lightly rested [their] hand on my shoulder", imagining "rain falling on the sea.  Rain softly falling on the vast sea, with no one there to see it.  The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it is raining" (Haruki 213).  It shows an opposite, more optimistic view of life than that afforded by Hajime's old schoolmate, yet I believe it may be saying the same thing.  The people are the rain, hitting the water, the world, eternity, what have you, and the fish are supposed to God, the universe, all of that.  At least that's what I'm thinking.
And I hope you can see the connections to Looking for Alaska--the idealized girl, the car issues, that sudden impulsive suicide (or not-suicide in Shimamoto's case), etc.  I think potentially, the book could have gone on like the second half of Looking for Alaska.  I thank God it did not, because that was three-quarters of the reason I did not like the book.  He could have and he didn't, which I respect.  I mean--I understand why the main character (Pudge?) wanted to find out the reason behind it all and everything, but it just got boring and painful, like an episode of The Big Bang Theory.  Ugh, sorry about this.  I didn't mean to slam John Green.  I loved An Abundance of Katherines.  (I did mean to slam The Big Bang Theory, though.  It is terrible.)

Um... Yeah.  Sorry that this post is a little... Strange.  Well, in any case, I liked the book, and would definitely recommend it.  I'm still a little leery about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which Meg said she'd lend me next, just because its style is supposedly a little odd, but it's still going to happen.  Hooray and goodnight!


MLA information: Haruki, Murakami.  Trans. Philip Gabriel.  South of the Border, West of the Sun.  Vintage Books: New York, 1999.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

This is the classic vampire story.  (Or at least the most well-known, this wasn't even close to the first vampire-related piece of literature, or tale or anything,)  Strange things you probably didn't know about this story: It's told through a series of letters and diary entries, Renfield and Harker are different people, and Bram Stoker is thought to have had an affair with Oscar Wilde, but I doubt that because 1. Stoker married a woman who turned Wilde down, 2. Wilde had better taste than that, come on.

The story starts with Harker going to the count's castle--Harker is a real estate agent and the count is going to London so he will be closer to victims.  Harker is trapped in the castle for some time after the count leaves, and I'm not really clear on how he ends up in a British hospital. He escapes somehow, but he had a "brain fever", so he never made it really clear on how he got out... Dracula makes it to England, of course.

My first note is on what was apparently a common enough Victorian phrase--to make your toilet.  I can't figure out if it's a general phrase to freshen up, put your PJs on, whatever, or if that was actually how late Victorians said to go to the bathroom.  It's just... it's just really silly sounding.

At this point you may be wondering, "Angela, why is your first note hardly ten pages in and your next note on page 297?"  Well, there's not a lot to make notes on.  Anyway, I actually read the introduction to this book, and the author points out that much of what Dracula and Renfield are parodies or twisted versions of biblical passages.  Most of it's pretty obvious (the famous quote "The blood is the life!" is actually out of the Old Testament, believe it or not), but Renfield says that Dracula "'began promising me things--not in words but by doing them'" (297).  I'm ninety-nine percent sure that that's from somewhere in the Bible (I'm thinking New Testament, about Jesus), but I can't seem to find the passage.  I could just be crazy, but you have to admit, it sounds awfully biblical.  Help, please?

My next note is on Dracula's origins--he's expected to have been based off of Vlad Dracul, or Dracul is usually referred to as the "real-life" Dracula.  Bram Stoker doesn't specifically say that Vlad Dracula is the Dracula, but Dracula certainly hails from the right location.  ...Anyway, though Bram doesn't specify that Dracula is Vlad, van Helsing explains that Dracula was supposedly an incredibly talented and intelligent man in life.  A soldier, a statesman, and alchemist (dating him perfectly--though van Helsing also calls him a "'wonderful man'" [320], which doesn't sound like Vlad Dracul), which all can be twisted around to point to Vlad Dracul, but makes it seem awfully iffy... On the other hand, he also supposedly "'knew no fear and no remorse'" (320).  According to van Helsing, his brain was just so big and powerful it just didn't shut down at the time of his death.  This survival is what gave him his weird power.  Now, at the time I'm sure the legend of the vampire wasn't very well explored and this was probably pretty acceptable--still, I prefer the Hellsing version--in desperation, when Vlad is being taken to his death by the Turks, he licks up the blood on the ground in front of him.  Because he is apparently a virgin (he was raped as a child, but I guess that didn't count because of his young age, or because it was sodomy?), this enabled him to become a vampire.  (This also actually works with the book--Dracula attempts to entice Mina to drink his blood so, presumably, she will become like him completely.  This is necessary for Seras too, even after he drank her blood--she was caught in between.

"'A man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow'" (321).

So eventually everybody gets together to destroy Dracula.  Van Helsing, Mina, Harker, and two of Mina's Harker's ex-suitors (Mina and Jonathan marry when Jonathan recovers).  One of them is an American--a Texan, to be exact.  When trying to decide what weapons to use to defeat Dracula or at least defend themselves from Dracula and his fellows, the Texan pipes up: "'I propose that we add Winchesters to our armament.  I have a kind of belief in a Winchester when there is any trouble of that sort around'" (344).  Of course.

The most annoying part of the book comes at the end--not at how Dracula dies or that he dies (he doesn't get stabbed with a stake, he gets stabbed in the heart with a bowie knife), but because they kill him, they rejoice because the reign of evil is over and he is redeemed and free to die, and then all of a sudden they're just like "seven years later..." Oh okay, that's cool.  Nah, I don't mind.  Whatever, Bram.  Not stupid at all.

My last bit is on what the book is a comment on--foreigners, sexuality--there have been dozens of things suggested, but I think the only one that really makes sense through and through is sexuality.  Dracula is kind of gross looking, but very--um--seductive.  I mean, he's biting all the women, he already has three voluptuous vampire-wives (whose sexuality Harker is terrified of--when he kisses them he is stuck between desire and terror--sounds like HarkerRenfield's speech about Dracula are often twisted versions of Bible passages), so... An oversexed false god?  Even just the devil in general.  The devil isn't known for seducing anybody (to the best of my knowledge), but it's the same basic temptation bit.  The essay/introduction to this edition (Barnes and Noble Classics) is very interesting and helpful, especially in relation to what I'm trying to explain.  This is what I'd suggest you buy if you were looking to read it...  (The introduction was written by Brooke Allen, if you want to try looking it up online or something.)

MLA Citation information: Stoker, Bram.  Dracula.  Barnes and Noble Classics: New York, 2004.

EDIT: Fun fact, I guess this was originally supposed to be published on August eighteenth, I just pressed "Save Now" instead of "Publish Post".  Oooooops.  Well, I'm not dead, in any case.

Perelandra by CS Lewis

This book is the second in the space trilogy series, the sequel to Out of the Silent Planet.  Perelandra is the name of Venus.  In this book, Ransom goes again to space, though this time he goes there.  On Venus there is a new garden of Eden forming, complete with the first man and woman, though they have been separated at the time that Ransom lands.  The book is, to some extent, a remake of the attempt told in Genesis: though Ransom has been summoned to Venus in order to thwart the devil/his subject, who is using Weston's body as a host.  So, Ransom is a Christ-like figure.  He's sacrificing himself to defeat evil, but he's stopping it before it starts so he only gets injured and doesn't have to die.  This book is also told after the fact, as was the last one.  Let's go.

First of all, I think that I figured out what the Oyarsa are.  If you'll recall, I had some trouble getting the eldil and Oyarsa and all together.  The Oyarsa is the name of the 'patron saint' (if you will) of each planet--so the planet Mars's patron saint would be the Greco-Roman god Mars/Ares, but a pure version, having almost nothing to do with what humans made up for them.  From here, they act as archangels, I would imagine.

I got straight-up excited when Ransom refers to the partial-narrator who is recording this story for us as 'Lewis'.  Hmm, wonder who that could be?  And I wonder who Ransom is supposed to be?  CS Lewis does make a point of reminding the audience that Ransom is a philologist.  (Even though he denied that Ransom what supposed to be a caricature of Tolkien, I'm one hundred percent certain that that's who he's supposed to be.  You "borrowed characteristics"?  Yeah, all of them.  Ooh, buuuuurn.)

Oh, and apparently a common figure of speech was being 'knocked up' in the thirties-forties-sometime before today.  I've deduced that it meant looking haggard or something like that, but it's still kind of funny when someone exclaims it.  No, Tolkien, I don't think Clive is... knocked up.  ("You slut! How long has this been going on!?")  In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say that he lacks the necessary parts for that.

When Tolkien Ransom first sees the 'Eve' of Venus, she is nude and green.  In fact, she remains nude and green for the whole novel, except for a brief scene, where 'Weston' tricks her into wearing a robe.  Anyways, he panics--after he meets her he says he is too in awe to feel sexual desire, and never actually does.  (Later, when he sees her in the robe he comes to the conclusion that clothes are what created desire and perversion, because they hide something, and like children, a person tends to desire what they cannot reach, and thus... I cannot remember if I marked that page or not.  But again, he didn't actually feel sexual desire for her at that time, he was horrified, because if you'll recall, that's the first thing Adam and Eve did after they ate the apple--make clothes because they realized they were naked and felt ashamed.)  Anyyyyywaaaays... When he first sees her he gets scared, and wonders if she is not a "Circe or Alcina" (54).  Circe transformed men into creatures (most notably Odysseus's crew after they gorged themselves on the feast she set up for them) and enjoyed sleeping with men and then stealing their "manhood".  Alcina is the one I didn't know--she is apparently a sorceress from an opera by Handel (named Alcina).  Alcina seduces men and has sex with them for a while, but then gets bored and will turn them into animals or rocks.

Now, naivety is often considered cute or pure.  And although it can be beneficial, it often does more harm than good--unknowing and naive (a fool, to say harshly), the green lady would never think of wearing clothes or admiring her own reflection or murder or gluttony on her own.  When 'Weston' appears and starts entreating her to disobey orders set by God/Venus, she at first objects, but 'Weston' is a smooth talker, and she doesn't know any better.  In a few ways her naivety does protect, because she doesn't really get the point of clothing and what mirrors are, but other times it is grating.
One thing that does bother me is when 'Weston' introduces the green lady to stories and poems--descriptions of things that aren't real, but could be, or would be nice.  The lady has never heard of such a thing.  CS Lewis's point is probably that life in her Eden is so great she doesn't need any stories or diversions like that--but that paints a rather frightening picture of heaven, for me at least.  Very Brave New World-ish, if you ask me (though I'm sure Lewis didn't intend it that way at all, and probably would be disgusted if he heard that take on things...  And now I'm wondering what CS Lewis's thoughts on Aldous Huxley were.  Also, I'm starting to really like the name Aldous.)

Of course, 'Weston' and Ransom interact.  In attempting to discredit 'Weston', Ransom looks rather bad himself, and more often than not, do more harm than good.  They are rather like two siblings who are constantly trying to get the other in trouble.  This goes on until an explosive final chase and wrestle (and because this is a trilogy, I think you can figure out for yourself who wins the final fight)... But!  Eventually Ransom comes upon 'Weston' strangling a bird so that he may pluck its feathers.  ('Weston' is never seen eating, and it would be more evil just to kill for the sake of killing--plus earlier in the book 'Weston' would just rip frogs apart for the heck of it.)  'Weston' attempts to shake Ransom's faith by telling him that God will not aid Weston, and lists all the others who waited too long for God to help them and ended up dying because of it--victims of the Holocaust, madmen, Jesus--"'Could He help Himself?'" (153).  This is obviously a reference to the crucifixion, though it is twisted--it was necessary for Jesus to sacrifice himself so everyone else would be saved.  God could have helped himself/his son/however that works, but in doing so he would have abandoned his people.  He goes on to quote Jesus's wailing at the cross (in Aramic): "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  As you can see from what I've just said (and if you actually read the book, Ransom tells you) that he's used something for his own means, twisting it perfectly.  What is chilling about is that Ransom has the idea that when 'Weston' is quoting the words perfectly--he's not just quoting because he saw them written by some scribe.  He is remembering.
Also, back to "'Could He help Himself?'" (153).  In the Stephen King book Desperation, a monster-demon named Tak attempts to mock David, an eleven-year-old boy whose overwhelming and practically unbelievable faith in God is the only thing that can save him and the people he's with.  Tak tries to make David lose his faith by saying, "'Your God isn't here, any more than he was with Jesus when Jesus hung dying on the cross with flies in his eyes'" (pages aren't listed in this online edition, but the full text appears to be online here, so I guess they aren't really needed.  I urge you to read it.  It is actually a very good book).  It's a tad grislier than Lewis's statement, but essentially the same.

Ransom and 'Weston', like I said, eventually do have a standoff, deep inside the caves of the 'fixed land' (every other piece of land is basically a literal seafoam island)... Ransom and the fake Weston beat the hell out of each other, and eventually they both collapse from exhaustion.  This makes me the maddest--not because they beat each other, although that was very unexpected and disturbing from CS Lewis, it was necessary--but because what had possessed Weston let him go so it wouldn't have to suffer.  All of a sudden Weston is in the middle of nowhere, memories from any time after Mars nonexistent, beaten to a pulp, with a broken leg.  He's crying, whimpering--he begs Ransom not to leave him, and finally explains why he is the way he is: as a child, he saw his large, strong grandmother dead and it frightened him, and he became obsessed with living, for as long as possible, no matter the cost.  During this, his speech gets twisted, and one is able to follow the same pattern that led Weston to be so open for possession.  The thing in Weston slowly returns again and attempts to drown Weston but fails and instead drowns himself.
What Ransom realizes is that fear and evil make you completely one with the devil/evil--he can work through you as if he is you and there is little to no difference, because it came on so gradually and naturally.  "What Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell.  They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring.  The question whether Satan, or one whom Satan has digested, is acting on any given occasion, has in the long run no clear significance.  In the meantime, the great thing was not to be tricked again" (173).  This would be a reference to the ultimate goal of Hinduism, where your goal would be to attain a complete oneness with the rest of the universe.

My last note is towards the end of the book--Ransom recovers in the caves, finds food and a way out... Finalizing Ransom's position as a Christ-like figure is what he sees when he finally gets out of the cave and starts walking around: "There was something white near the water's edge.  An altar?  A patch of white lilies among the red?  A tomb?  But whose tomb?   No, it was not a tomb but a coffin, open and empty, and its lid lying beside it" (193).  What this actually is is the ship he is to return home in--it alternately represents the opened tomb left when Christ was resurrected (because Ransom was basically raised from the dead) and the tomb open yet waiting, because Ransom has yet to go back to earth and be reborn, so to speak.

The book ends with everyone reunited (including the green lady's mate), the true Venus and Mars greet everyone, and Ransom is sent back home, and we're back to the beginning.  I really hope I find the third book soon.  Although this series isn't stellar, it's pretty good.


MLA Citation Information: Lewis, CS.  Perelandra.  Collier Books: New York, 1962.

After Many A Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley

What.  The bloody hell.  Is this book?  I thought that because it made a little cameo in A Single Man it would be good.  That whole class lecture scene is incredibly intriguing.  Amazing!  But noooo.  This book couldn't hold my attention for five minutes.  I'd read twenty pages and be like... "What the hell is this?"  Not because it was terribly difficult or anything--it just wasn't interesting or amazing.  I mean, it pretty much was exactly about and representing what Isherwood had the students and George say (this may help).  It was helpful to read A Single Man first, actually, despite the fact that it gave me far too high expectations... I mean, it was like a pseudo-sparknotes deal.
So.  What the book is actually about--I trust you've peeked at the post linked above, so I need not explain what the title is referring to--though I think Huxley got his mythology confused.  Endymion, if I remember my mythology, was a sheepherder who was given immortality--but he was eternally sleeping.  This preserved his youth... On the other hand, there is another more unfortunate mortal who had won a goddess's affections.  His loving goddess, unfortunately, forgot to ask Zeus to grant her beloved eternal youth along with his eternal life. So--the man lived forever, but withered and eventually turned into a cricket.  There's a subplot--which becomes the main plot--involving a diary of a man who lived in the seventeen-hundreds.  The 'mainest' character of the book is a millionaire named Stoyte.  He is terrified of dying and has his personal physician working on the secret to immortality (apparently).  So yes, the doctor has a man's journal--an earl's, actually--who basically feared the same thing.  Noticing that the carps in the estate's pond are supposedly over one hundred years old, he decides to start eating the guts of the oldest carp to see what it will do for him.  What it does for him, is make him very, very... hmm... Long lived and fertile.  At the very end of the book, they find this man--he's holed up and locked away in a basement because he's devolved.  (He also gave a bit of the mixture to a housekeeper who was ill, and she too is locked away with him.)  So--like the cricket--he was given eternity but he withered on it--to something far more disgusting and pathetic than a cricket.  He's filthy, only wearing a shirt--a group consisting of Stoyte, the doctor, and a young woman who I will get to later watch him, stunned, for a few minutes... In that time he and the woman chatter to each other like apes. The man has blemishes and sores on him from living in such poor conditions (which aren't entirely his fault, admittedly...) But what is repulsive is that he just pees. Right where he's sitting.  Doesn't even get up, doesn't get up right away after he's sitting--and beyond being gross, it's disturbing.  The woman is just kind of there (the ex-Earl slaps her once or twice), but the man still has habits that he did so often while coherent that he just kind of does them.  He is wearing a ribbon and a medal, and he gets up and polishes them while humming a particular favourite tune of his--and every time he and his ex-housekeeper chatter at each other, their noises are described as on the verge of being understandable, echoes of coherence--and so on.  So yes, he withered like the cricket, but in a far worse way.
And--I realize I've been spoiling the ends in the very beginning of these posts quite often as of late--but now I feel that I absolutely have to tell you Stoyte's reaction to this gruesome spectacle.  Stoyte appears to be grossed out for a moment, but he can't seem to quite understand the situation: "Mr. Stoyte broke his silence.  'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow hesitating voice.  'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once... there'd be a long time while a person... well, you know; while he wouldn't change any.  And once you get over the first shock--well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course.  Don't you think so...?' he insisted" (356).  The doctor just laughs at how pathetic he is.  Actually, the more I think about it, the more that this Doctor seems almost like a god figure of the novel... Beyond everyone's personal hangups and--he just seems a lot more intelligent and more powerful than everybody else.  The doctor may even be seen as a devilish figure--he is holding out powerful temptations (he seduces the young woman who saw the devolved people, and makes her feel pleasure during sex, eek), and has the key to immortality in his palms--and he's messing with everybody with utter glee.  He likes watching everybody floundering for nothing more than his own amusement.

So, the story starts out when a middleaged man named Jeremy goes to America to do some bookkeeping for Mr Stoyte.  From here we meet the doctor, Obispo, Pete (O's assistant, who falls for Virginia), Virginia, Stoyte's mistress, Stoyte himself, and a few others.
My first note has to do with Jeremy--seven pages in he writes a letter to his mother, "Oscar Wilde's old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage" (7).  Of course I would mark that--as for the name, she is entirely fictional.  I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise, but you never know.

I also want to mention that this is Jeremy's first time in the country--and he's in California first!  He's hit with a barrage of neon marketing and superficiality, the likes of which he's never seen before.  He's very overwhelmed, he starts trying out lingo and promising himself he'll try the things advertised, like certain types of burgers or milkshakes.   It's overwhelming and strange, because he's never seen this sort of mass advertising and everything.  It all seems as it is: absurd, alien, disgusting, rotten, pointless, a mockery--because it's being looked at by a foreigner (he is not necessarily seeing things as rotten or disgusting, but through his eyes, things look that way--like the neon-lit cemetery.  He's in awe of it and I was disgusted)--it's essentially the same way Thompson and his Attorney see Las Vegas in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, except without the lizards and bats and overwhelming fear--but those few moments when Thompson is sober and disgusted, basically the same.  And even when he's tripping, all the lights and signs and flashes and all overwhelm him and seem terrifying in their own right.

Stoyte has a terrible temper--his doctor has warned him that if he gets too riled, he's likely to give himself a second stroke.  So: "'God is love,' he said again, and reflected that, if people would only stop being so exasperating, he would never have to lose his temper.  'God is love.'  It was all their fault" (37).  This cracked me up.  I hope I don't need need to point out the humour... Do I?

The grossest thing I learned from the book was, unsurprisingly, explained by Obispo.  He talks about theories of prolonging life, and untrue rumours--that sour milk will lengthen your life or what have you.  One popular surgery in the days before the first World War it was apparently popular to have sections of your colon removed--that was thought to prolong health, I guess.  Huxley is not making this up, I just looked it up.  It killed 50% of people who tried it within two years, and even if it didn't, with a quarter of a colon you have to, um, "evacuate" as the doctor puts it, quite often.  Yeah, so my point is, ew ew ew, gross gross gross, Jesus why, ew gross, vomitrocious.

As for George of A Single Man talking about what Huxley has cited as the "stupidest text in the Bible"--it is, to remind you, "They hated me without a cause".  I guess this disturbs George's students, though Huxley in his own book basically says what George says, except in a more concise manner without examples and not as expansively (though I suppose concise would imply that?).  And it's weird to think... A student raises the Holocaust in response to George's agreement with Huxley on this being the stupidest scripture.  This book was written in 1939--when the very first Jews were being taken into ghettos and camps.
"For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that 'they hated me without a cause' and that he had no part in his own disasters?  Obviously, no hope whatever... In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible.  Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts.  Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be" (107).
Later Huxley adds that the most sensible text of the Bible is "'God is not mocked; as a man sows, so shall he reap'" (256).  I agree--and if the God bit makes you uncomfortable, add 'fate' or 'destiny'--or even cutting it out altogether works.
"'As a man sows, so shall he reap.  God is not mocked.  Not mocked,' he repeated.  'but people simply refuse to believe it.  They go on thinking they can cock a snook at the nature of things and get away with it.  I've sometimes thought of writing a little treatise, like a cook-book.  "One Hundred Ways of Mocking God," I'd call it.  And I'd take a hundred examples from history and contemporary life, illustrating what happens when people undertake to do things without paying regard to the nature of reality.  And the book would be divided into sections, such as "Mocking God in Agriculture", "Mocking God in Politics", "Mocking God in Education", "Mocking God in Philosophy", "Mocking God in Economics".  It would be an instructive little book.  But a bit depressing,' Mr. Propter added" (282-283).  "'Cock a snook'"?

"'Bad art can't do so much harm as ill-considered political action'" (172).  Originally I marked this because again, Huxley mentioned Oscar Wilde, but then I realized that there was a good point--he's playing off of Wilde's "art for art's sake".  Even if the art you make is mediocre, it's not as bad as a terrible political move--et cetera.

So far as i know, the earl whose diary is found and read is not based on any real earl.  Again, I guess that probably goes without saying, but that's not the point--the point is that the earl 'wrote' a pretty bit of poetry and I was just checking if it was thieved... Anyways, the results, other than one passage, are pretty bad--"'If only the rest were silence!'" (213).  Hehe.

The doctor, although he plays as a sort of God character, he is a smug fool too--he's just stupid in different ways--he's one of the sort who would have caused Brave New World.  The doctor vaguely mentions several authors--the one he says specifically is Shelley--that he could have fixed, thanks to his modern medicines and therapies.  Because many great pieces of art and literature are created out of suffering, I believe what he (Huxley, not the doctor) is essentially saying is that modern amenities can basically end art--beauty--and so on.  Which again is exactly what is illustrated in Brave New World.  There's a scene where Jonathan asks the man who suppresses all old literature and art if he has any use for old things, and the man says no, and then Jonathan asks even if they are beautiful, and the man says "'Particularly when they're beautiful'".  (No source, but I promise that that is the exact line.)


My last note that directly corresponds to a page is the quote attached to the spiel about the silliest/most important quotes from the Bible.  My last comment is again on the earl and his immortality secret: raw carp guts.  It doesn't specify if it's just one dose or several that keeps up youth indefinitely (which bothers me greatly, the housekeeper lady is recorded to have taken it once when she was ill, but no other records of her taking it are there... Which doesn't really make sense...)
My second note is that a popular Roman condiment/dish was fermented fish paste--the exact recipe for making this... thing is unknown, though apparently historians have sought after the dish for quite some time.  My point is that Romans, judging from statues, aged really, really well.  And it's been proven that having a diet that's high in fish is about as healthy as you can get--well, it was at one point.  Now that all fish are supposedly up to their gills in mercury... So, Huxley has something!  We've found the key to immortality!  HAHAHAHA--no, that's stupid.  The reason why Huxley chose carp is because they live so incredibly long.  But yeah, a diet with fish as a staple bis very healthy, but probably won't lengthen your life to two hundred years/turn you into an ape person.  That is all, good night.


MLA Citation Information: Huxley, Aldous.  After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.  Ivan R Dee, Inc: Chicago, 1993.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Well!  You've heard of this.  You know you've heard of this.  Don't even try to tell me that you haven't heard of this.  Even if you somehow aren't aware of this movie's (everyone knows this movie; I have a feeling many people are surprised when they find out that this is a book) existence, you know these faces.  This is a book set before, during, and after the Civil war.  What makes it most interesting is that it's set in the South, and if you're not from the South at least, you don't really hear about that perspective of the war.  Then again, Mitchell could have been a Southerner and may have exemplified things--though I've no doubt Northerners looted, robbed, and burned down property.  Most of them were probably fighting just because there was fighting going on.  Actually, the book does a good job of proving that not all Northerners were saints.
The main character, Scarlett O'Hara, is your basic Southern belle.  Basically every boy her age (or of marrying age) wants to marry her.  Her world, just before the war, is shattered because she learns that one ex-beau of hers is getting married.  She is pretty convinced that she loves him, but it's actually a stupid crush that screws up a good portion of her life--even when she realizes that she never actually truly loved Ashley (about four pages from the book's end), it bites her in the butt.  And she doesn't change at all.  She almost matures and grows and learns at the end, but she ruins it all.*
Rhett Butler is a suave, smooth-talking ladies' (is that right?) man.  He's a scam artist, and he gets around.  He's a slippery, slimy thing--unfortunately, even though I hated him at the end of the book, he was the only main character I could like.

The first sentence of the novel is this: "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms as the Tarleton twins were" (1).  This is interesting--her eyes are sort of the hypnotizers (yes, I know that's not a word.  Roll with it), and her charm draws men in.  As the hardships of the war and its aftermath continue, her charm disappears, and her face becomes narrow and even harsher.  Her lack of beauty becomes painfully clear, and her face begins to look like her cold mind.  (To be fair, it was necessary to become that way to survive the war and all, but while she grew up mentally to survive, she never really matured, if you understand what I mean.*)
So the book starts on the day Scarlett learns Ashley is to be married.  She becomes horrified, but somewhat comforted--because she will see him at the barbecue the next day and she becomes sure that she will be able to talk Ashley out of it, or have him admit that it was just a joke, or something.  Surprise, surprise, this was not the case.  And I've lasted almost three paragraphs without complaining, and now it has to happen: Ashley 'loved' Scarlett (by the end Scarlett realizes it was just infatuation, or lust)--but at the beginning he cannot tell the difference.  He didn't propose to Scarlett even though he thought he loved her because he was cowardly.  When he reappears after the war it is excruciating, watching their "drama" unfold.  They have their dramatic soap opera "I love you and I must kiss you" moments, and I just want to keel haul them both.  They need sassy gay friends.  Scarlett, he turned you down because he wasn't man enough to make a good decision--and Ashley, you missed your chance.  You both need to write sad poems in your diaries and move on.  I practically cheered when they realized that they were just being teenagers about each other.

Anywayyys.  Scarlett gets livid, and in desperation she accepts a proposal from a certain Charles.  Of course Ashley tells Scarlett he loves her that night... Ugh.  I didn't find this dramatic or touching or anything, and as you can tell, I never found it particular touching or moving or dramatic.  If you can't man up then don't make the rest of us suffer, jeez.
Scarlett's dramatic bit is that Ashley turns the corner and walks away, Scarlett realizes that she is now stuck to Charlie when in reality her and Ashley share stupidity love, and the section reads something like "and in that moment Scarlett realized how much she loved Ashley".  (Note the "something like".)  Ughhh, cry me a river.  And in the book this failed "romance" didn't even bother me yet.  I figured it would fade.  Sure, she's living with Ashley's wife, but come on.  Five years pass!  Six!  Come on.  Ugh... They just... they just make me want to drink.  Let's just please move on, okay?

"'The man is too clever with cards to be a gentleman'" (137).  Scarlett's father on Rhett, who got him, in a word, wasted, and wrecked him in cards.

"'Once he's made up his mind to something, no one could be braver or more determined but--He lives inside his head instead of outside and he hates to come out into the world'" (142).  This is Scarlett's major revelation about Ashley.  It comes while she is secretly reading a letter from him to his wife--she realizes that he was too cowardly to marry her for fear it would "'upset his way of thinking and living'" (142).  Of course, she doesn't think of it as cowardice.  She just gets frustrated that she doesn't quite understand her revelation--what it means to be in your head and to fear coming "out into the world" and thinks that if she could figure it out she would figure out how she could have gotten him to marry her instead of Melanie.

 "'All wars are sacred,' he said. 'To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is "Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!" Sometimes it's "Down with Popery!" and sometimes "Liberty!" and sometimes "Cotton, Slavery and States' Rights!"'" (153).  First of all, Rhett is referencing the crusades, any sect of Christianity that's not Roman Catholicism (probably the Protestant Reformation?), liberty could be anything, but my first thought was of the Revolutionary war (remember the stamp act, the sugar act, and the other unfair taxes?), and the last one is, of course, the Civil war, which is currently going on (in the story), and which Rhett clearly doesn't support or believe in.  Scarlett, idiot as she is, doesn't understand the references and gets annoyed that he is bringing up seemingly unrelated topics.
Second of all, Rhett has a very good point.  I still kind of have trouble with trying to figure out how the Crusades were more money related than trying to gain back the holy lands from 'heathens', but I'm not very familiar with the Crusades.  And it makes sense with an overwhelming amount of battles and wars that can be skimmed off the top of the head.
3.  This book certainly proves that noble reasons don't mean squat.  The Northerners are portrayed as being more racist than Southerners--after the war, one Northern lady is horrified at the suggestion to get a black nursemaid for her children.  The Northern ladies, who have all read Uncle Tom's Cabin, are also grossly interested in hearing about servants being whipped and tortured.  Now, as I said, Mitchell may be a Southerner, so she may be trying to make Northerners look stupid--though I've no doubt that there was a good percentage of Northerners that were like this.  They didn't give two pence for their noble cause--they might not even have been aware of that.  Now, let me go in another direction entirely: Scarlett and Melanie are both shocked at the idea of whipping slaves, and it's true, that only once we see a slave beaten (and that slave is beaten by her own mother) in the book, but remember--we basically are only seeing "house slaves", or "house n-----s".  Though life was still rough, their lives were considerably more posh, and probably wouldn't have been treated as harshly as field hands.  (Go read the Meet Addy American Girl Doll book for an example of how field hands were treated.)  Scarlett thinks of Mammy and Pork and the other house slaves as family, or just below family, so beatings and other harsh actions were probably rare.  (Hence why the field hands ran away and Mammy and Pork and company did not.)  I can't remember what I was trying to prove, but I hope that this off-kilter rant/long statement was at least somewhat interesting/enlightening.  Now then--I guess on to more coherent things...

So, my next note is just a quote from during the siege--when Northerners went through plantations and towns and all and burned whatever they couldn't eat or loot--they burn thousands of dollars worth of cotton at Tara (the O'Hara plantation), for example.  "It was as though, the worst having happened, they had nothing more to fear.  They had feared a siege and now they had a siege and, after all, it wasn't so bad.  Life could and did go on as usual.  They knew they were sitting on a volcano, but until that volcano erupted there was nothing they could do, so why worry now?" (218).  Or: Gone With the Wind summarizes my basic take on life entirely.

Rhett Butler, right before he took Scarlett, Melanie, and Scarlett's son by Charlie back to Tara during the siege: "'[Yankees] are pretty much like Southerners--except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents'" (223).  This cracked me up.  At first I got annoyed (accents?  We don't have accents!)--but then I remembered Rhode Islanders, and Bostoners, and... Are New Jersey folks 'Yankees'?  And, of course, it's ironic, because Southern accents are simply awful.  They grate on my nerves (well, still not as bad as Rhode Island accents, I'll give Southerners that, but...)

Ah, my next note is on a reference to the book of Job--Scarlett manages to grab hold of a mangy horse at Tara.  It's been kicked about and is a pretty sad sight, but it's better than having no horse.  She says that if the horse was dead, she would just curse God and die--"Somebody in the Bible had done just that thing.  Cursed God and died" (261).  Of course, no-one had actually done that--while Job is suffering from boils and destroyed crops and his sons becoming ill and dying, his wife suggests that he curse God and die.  (What about her?  Seems suspicious to me.)

Oh, and of course Melanie was pregnant, and fared badly.  Actually, they thought she would die after she had the child--the second there was a worry of her death I was like, "SHE IS GOING TO DIE AND ASHLEY WILL BE ALIVE AND ASHLEY AND SCARLETT WILL GET TOGETHER!"  Eventually Melanie does die due to complications--but this is because of a second child, nearly 400 pages and five or six years later.  Of course, this is when Scarlett realizes she and Ashley didn't really love each other, but still.  I called it this early on, and at that point when she actually died, I rolled my eyes.  It's like when the girl conveniently dies in David Copperfield, except it didn't seem so stupid and overwrought then, although I did predict it.  Anyways, times are tough, there are infirm, house slaves who are useless because they aren't field hands, there is Scarlett's kid, Melanie's new baby, and Pork's wife just had a baby.  Scarlett isn't exactly rejoicing at all the mouths to feed, and to hear that there's another baby about nearly drives her mad.  "Babies, babies, babies.  Why did God make so many babies?  But no, God didn't make them.  Stupid people made them" (270).  I pretty much died laughing.

"But she could not feel.  She could only think and her thoughts were very practical" (358).

As a little bit of a summary of what has gone on--I'm sorry--the war has ended, and Scarlett took a visit back to Atlanta, Georgia.  Desperate to make some income for Tara, Scarlett married her younger sister's old beau, Frank Kennedy, and manages his store and two lumber mills.  Obviously, this is a scandal to everyone, and Frank is embarrassed, and Scarlett's younger sister hates everything that has ever lived.  I believe I've mentioned already about how all the Northern officers' wives were curious about whipping and slave mistreatment because they had all read Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Mitchell refers to this as bigotry!  Scarlett expresses disbelief at the thought of whipping slaves--but again, Scarlett has only ever been in contact with house slaves--slaves who very rarely would have been whipped.  Not only that, Mitchell, I have found out since last writing on here, was a terrible racist.  In fact, that's what she's known for more than being the author of this book.  Mitchell might not have believed whipping and such occurred.  The house slaves she portrays are "like family" (according to Scarlett), but are more often than not portrayed as being very stupid or doglike--like Dilcey.  Even if a slave is being portrayed as being intelligent, or at least smarter and cleverer than an animal, they are always brought down, for Mitchell will describe them in broad stereotypical ways.  EG, "she had that negro-like way of...", she had X look that was common to negroes such as herself", "she had the powerful glare of a...", et cetera.  Mitchell actually even presents the slave system as being necessary. Unbound field slaves being drunken degenerates and a group of them almost gang-rapes Scarlett.  Although this probably occurred now and again (just as white men will rape women, it happens), the knowledge of the author makes everything untrustworthy and suspicious.  (If the topic of the book itself didn't make the reader wary already...)  So--Mitchell was probably trying to say that the slave system was necessary, or else all hell would break loose and no-one would be safe, et cetera.

Mitchell also puts women who believe that they have the right to vote (and men who believe that women should have that right) on the same level as lunatics, alcoholic (women) and divorced women (which was quite a scandal in those days).

Frank is killed after the incident where Scarlett is almost raped--he was a member of the KKK, and upon hearing her recounting of what happened, he rallied the troops, so to speak, and killed the men who did it and lost some of their own.  Scarlett feels guilty about his death, especially since she was so nasty to him while they were married.  Anyways--Rhett goes to comfort her, and there's a funny scene: "'It's all Frank's fault for not beating you with a buggy whip... I'm surprised at you, Scarlett, for sprouting a conscience this late in life.  Opportunists like you shouldn't have them.'  'What is an oppor--what did you call it?'  'A person who takes advantages of opportunities.'  'Is that wrong?'  'It has always been held in disrepute--especially by those who had the same opportunities and didn't take them'" (552).
Rhett then immediately proposes to Scarlett.  Scarlett accepts.
"He made her play and she had almost forgotten how.  Life had been so serious and so bitter.  He knew how to play and swept her along with him" (569).

Again, another reference--really a paraphrase--to the Bible: "'It's harder for speculators' money to get into the best parlors than for the camel to go through the needle's eye" (572).  Jesus, in Matthew, says that "It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven... It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God" (Luke, Mark, Matthew--various phraseries of this).

As things usually go, Rhett and Scarlett have a child together.  The daughter began to suffer from night terrors.  After Bonnie was born, Scarlett absolutely refused to have another child and would not even let Rhett share a bed with her.  So their daughter slept in her crib in her father's room with the lights on.  Scarlett once overhears Bonnie relating one of her horrible nightmares to her father--she explains that a big "it" sat on her chest and had claws.  The claws are different, but often incubi are characterized as sitting on their victims' chests or stomachs.  (See "The Nightmare", a painting by Henry Fuseli--the 1790 version is pretty nightmare-inducing in its own right, too.)  I just thought that that was a rather curious reference, if Mitchell even intended that... (The kid is only four or five!)

Ashley is terrible and depresses the world--it kills him that Scarlett has turned so hard and money hungry, but she's had to become that way.  Though she's hard and cruel now, she has adapted, and he's become weak because he can't handle a hard life of work and money garnering.
"'I shouldn't have let him make me look back,' she thought despairingly.  'I was right when I said I'd never look back.  It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything but look back'" (615).

"'Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them'" (675).  Scarlett, after seeing Melanie in her deathbed, when she realizes that she would have gotten nowhere if Melanie hadn't been at her side.  As she realizes this, she realizes that she never needed Ashley at all.  Her love for him wasn't really love at all, it was hardly anything: "Out of the dullness, one thought arose.  Ashley did not love her and had never really loved her and the knowledge did not hurt.  It should hurt.  She should be desolate, broken hearted, ready to scream at fate.  She had relied upon his love for so long.  It had upheld her through so many dark places.  Yet, there the truth was.  He did not love her and she did not care.  She did not care because she did not love him.  She did not love him and so nothing he could do or say could hurt her" (675).
*So--as Scarlett has her revelation, Rhett has his own.  He was sick of playing second banana to Ashley for so long, and now that Melanie is out of the picture, he sees no point in staying on.  When Scarlett attempts to explain that she truly loved him all along and only just realized it, he explains that he fell out of love with her as easily as she did with Ashley.  Now--this disappointed me, though I understood it.  It made sense.  Now, as a backtrack, Scarlett's little anthem was "I'll think about it tomorrow, tomorrow is another day", etc--and that's how the book ends: "'I'll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara.  I can stand it then.  Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back.  After all, tomorrow is another day'" (689).  The last line is inspiring.  As last sentences go?  Very nearly one of the best.  But--"some way to get him back"?  Oh no.  Oh hell no.  You spent four hundred and fifty pages attempting to do this with Ashley.  You are not doing this again.  You are still an idiot.  Though she grew up--she became money-minded, could manage food and all--managed a store, two mills and Tara--but she didn't mature any.  Ughhh.


Oh, and the last time I saw the movie, I was about eleven.  Basically the only scene I remember was when Rhett and Scarlett's daughter dies--she falls off a pony while riding sidesaddle when it jumps a hedge.  The second Rhett bought her the pony I was basically like, IT IS ALL OVER, YOU HAVE SEALED YOUR DAUGHTER'S FATE.  The only other scenes I remember clearly are these two: the iconic "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" scene, and an added scene where Scarlett gets mad that her waist is nineteen inches (because of her two children) instead of sixteen as it used to be.  I remember it because I couldn't figure out what the big deal was.


Well, there's that.  The book was rather gripping--I was completely sucked in during the war years.  Unfortunately, when Ashley showed up again and their pathetic romance played out I lost interest.  But still--if you're interested in this period, definitely read it.  Like I said, it was pretty interesting to see the war and its aftermath from a Southern perspective.  It was even more interesting because I took a history class first semester that was something like America 1650-1870, so I actually knew what the battle of Vicksburg met, who Carpetbaggers were, and so on.  I wouldn't read it if you haven't got a lot of free time, though--my edition clocks in at nearly seven hundred pages, and it's columned like a Bible.

MLA Citation Information: Mitchell, Margaret.  Gone With the Wind.  The Macmillan Company: New York, 1936.  (Is it possible that I have a first edition of this book!?  Or a close to first!?  It's in awful condition, but still, that's pretty cool...)



Unrelated Revelation Time: I was thinking about sunflowers the other day and realized something about the film adaptation of Everything is Illuminated--in The Sunflower, Wiesenthal observes that every grave of a soldier has a sunflower growing on it.  In Everything is Illuminated; however, those flowers are probably meant to represent the dead residents of Trachimbrod.  Or maybe soldiers too.  There were an awful lot of flowers.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Hello!  Today's book is Hunter S Thompson's famous--or maybe not so famous--book.  It's a warped version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.  Actually, in one of the videos or excerpts or somethings we saw or read in Robby D's class actually asked, basically, "Where (or what) would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas be without Kerouac's On the Road?"  What I mean by saying it's a warped version of Kerouac's most famous book (actually and for sure famous) is that like Kerouac, Thompson is looking for "it", or, the American Dream, which I think is fair to say could be "it", or a portion of "it".  (And now I have a sudden urge to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test... Hm.  Strange.)  But yeah, I think it's a fair query, and a fair judgment.
So--Thompson (excuse me, Raoul Duke) and his attorney have been sent to cover a story out in Las Vegas.  They've stuffed their rented car with... Um.  Well... "We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" (4).  So... Yeah.  Kerouac just stuck to pot.  What I should mention is--well, what I feel obliged to mention is that Thompson doesn't out rightly mention Kerouac anywhere, or not at all that I noticed, but he talks a lot about Horatio Alger.  Horatio Alger was a fictional character who was your basic "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" fellow.  I've never heard of anyone still 0reading the books he's featured in, and they're not required reading anymore, but you've probably read a description of someone that calls them a Horatio Alger.  So that's kind of who they're trying to be--kind of.  I think there's a difference between Horatio Alger representing the American dream and Kerouac.  Alger was trying to make something of himself and be successful (so I'm led to believe), while Kerouac is just trying to be--living without worries, doing whatever he wants, not being trapped in one state or another--et cetera.  (Of course, if Horatio Alger does make something of himself he wouldn't have worries and would have the money to do what he wanted... But it's obviously different.)

Anyways--the book opens with a quote by a fellow named Samuel Johnson.  The quote is "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being human".  This is the Samuel Johnson is this guy, apparently.  Although that is true of the book--the men are ruining themselves with drugs and constantly high and stoned and everything else--but they've fallen into a different kind of pain (or something) entirely.

"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars" (18).  Thompson's reasoning for this excursion in the "red shark".

Most of these quotes are here because they were definitely on the sheet Robby D gave us.  Here we go: "Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later?  Six?  It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again.  San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something.  Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.  Whatever it meant... It seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened" (67).

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour... You could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastical sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that.  Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..." (68).  I believe this is where the quote on Robby D's paper ended.  The section, however, ends with this: "So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back" (68).  Obviously the hippies didn't work out.  There's a better quote some page later:  "But what is sane?  Especially here in 'our own country'--in this doomstruck era of Nixon.  We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.  After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too.  What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy: the desperate assumption that somebody--or at least some force--is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel" (179).  This too was on Robby D's sheet, and I think that it's interesting, implying that acid heads were desperately looking and hoping for God--Kesey's band insisted they were all anti-god, didn't need Him or any, but they worshiped Kesey fanatically--religiously.

The only tape they have is a Rolling Stones tape which has the song "Sympathy For the Devil" on it.  While listening to it: "Sympathy?  Not for me.  No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas.  This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded.  In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.  In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity" (72).
"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind" (89).

Thompson and his attorney end up at a drug conference.  This is filled with people who couldn't tell you the difference between a joint and a tab of LSD.  Joints are sometimes known as roaches, and a man presenting says it's because joints look like cockroaches.  Any idiot who has seen a movie, read a comic book or can use Google images can see this is not the case.  Wikipedia's theory is that the name comes from "joined", as in "joined rooms"--opium dens.  There's that mystery solved.  Anyways, Thompson goes onto further explain how idiotic and uninformed these people are, and that he can just see people like Timothy Leary making up these BS lines and feeding them to these unwitting people.  Although this sort of behaviour is natural for in groups when speaking to out groups, undoubtedly those gags caused troubles and misunderstandings that hurt the hippie/LSD/et cetera movement incredibly.  My point then, is just the fact that the disciples of acid and other drugs and such did play with people in this way, and in bigger ways, and basically screwed themselves.

Thompson and his attorney, much later, end up in a little truck stop diner, and the two, possibly strung out and possibly not, explain to the waitress and cook that they're looking for the American Dream.  The two of them--the waitress kind of an airhead and the cook kind of a grizzled older fellow--try to figure it out... The waitress asks the cook where it is, thinking it's a physical place.  He responds by asking what is that, and then says he thinks that it's the "old Psychiatrist's Club" (165).  The club is on the street/road/whatever Paradise... All that is left of the building--the American Dream--is a scorched base in an uncared-for vacant lot that's weed-choked.  "The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had 'burned down about three years ago'" (168).  In the introduction to this particular chapter it says that Thompson refused to read over this chapter or even discuss this.  I would bet that Thompson wrote that himself and it wasn't actually an editor writing.  The metaphor is so obvious I don't even feel like calling it a metaphor is quite right.  First of all, the cook, old and grizzled, is stuck in a dead-end job, and probably has been since he was the waitress's age--he doesn't know what the American Dream is.  He can only guess about what it might be.  The building is on paradise.  To achieve the American dream would, imaginably, put one in a heaven or paradise of sorts.  And the building has been burnt down.  Even its foundation is cracked and ruined and dirty.  The lot on Paradise is unattended to and ugly and filthy itself.  It burned down about three years ago--if you will recall, Thompson said that less than five years ago the hippies and acid generation ruined themselves.  That may not be exactly what he's referring to, but it seems to coincide... Either way, it's saying that the American Dream has been almost completely obliterated with barely even the memory of what it was still remaining.

"What sells, today, is whatever F---s You Up--whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time.  The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia.  The Miltown man has returned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining... and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal.  They never even bothered to try speed" (202).
"Uppers are no longer stylish... It is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon" (202).

The book ends without Thompson finding the dream.  He boards a plane back to Denver and snorts some amyl, then shambles into the bar.  The very last sentence is, "I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident" (204).  Presumably, he will start on the same path all over again.

And, not to be overlooked--my favourite lines in the book.  The attorney will often start demands or requests or even just statements as "As your attorney, I advise..." My favourite?  "'As your attorney, I advise you to tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline'" (119).


MLA Citation Information: Thompson, Hunter S.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Vintage Books: New York, 1998.


I'm tempted to put this in the classics shelf just because it's such a nutty bastardization of On the Road and like books.  We'll see tomorrow, I guess.  Despite its insanity and because its subject is likely to get it written off as--um--just some junky work or something, you can tell Hunter S Thompson is a very bright fellow.  I'd recommend it.