Milkman's family

For pretty much all of part 1 Milkman seems pretty distant from his family (and really everyone, except Pilate and Hagar for a bit). His biggest show of emotion is hitting his father (and not even out of love for his mother, just because she seems helpless and I guess he felt like he should). His parents both tell him stories to get him on their side and he just doesn't want to hear it. He works for his father but he doesn't really seem to like it and doesn't really have any intentions of continuing it forever, however much his dad wants him to, and when Lena accuses him of being like his dad it seems that both of them understand that that's an insult. Milkman doesn't even care about Lena that much -- I guess him telling Macon about Corinthians and Porter could be caring about her, but it could also be like punching Macon -- something he thought he should do with not much real emotion behind it.

Things change so much when he leaves his family and goes to Pennsylvania. He gets so excited when someone references "his people," which struck me -- back in Michigan he seems like he's stuck between two worlds -- a lot of people don't like his family but he can't sufficiently rid himself of his upbringing to fit in with them. In Pennsylvania, suddenly there are people who like his family, and he practically swells with pride. He goes there to get gold -- his father told him about it but really he's getting it to gain independence -- but he seems to be drawn closer to his family in the process, or at least towards his father's side (I guess there just isn't a pocket of people who really love Ruth's parents or grandparents). Milkman relays his father's accomplishments, which before he didn't really seem to care about, and he "glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride."

Is this kind of pride that Milkman can only really have when separated from Macon? The quest for the gold seems less and less promising, but I don't know if the gold would even help Milkman -- he needs some kind of purpose or fulfillment in life that he doesn't really have, and without it the gold won't really improve his life much -- hopefully he finds some other sort of realization.

Pilate & Macon

I've been enjoying Song of Solomon, and one of my favorite parts about the book is the characters. They're all very interesting, and Morrison keeps revealing more details about them. Ruth is a character that I initially wasn't that interested in -- she barely did anything at the beginning except obey Macon. I felt sympathy for her, but I wasn't really eager to read more about her. Pilate, on the other hand, is immediately interesting, especially as a contrast to her brother Macon. We talked about the differences between the Macon and the Dead households in class, and Pilate's household seems more alive and less stifling. Milkman wants to escape from his household to Pilate's. So I thought it was really interesting when we got a look into Ruth and Pilate's relationship. Pilate seems very motherly, especially when she threatens Reba's boyfriend -- she doesn't like to see people in trouble. So it makes sense that she would help Ruth. The interesting thing is that it also shows that Macon is still afraid of Pilate -- we saw that he's still intrigued by her when he passes by their house one night, but the fact that Pilate still has power over him and doesn't seem to be afraid of him is interesting. When Ruth gets pregnant, he suspects that Pilate had something to do with it, and when Pilate leaves a doll in his office, he behaves. Macon also seems very afraid of how his reputation could take due to his connection to Pilate. In a novel which is a lot about family, Milkman's sisters don't play much of a role, and both Reba and Hagar are only children, but the sibling dynamic between Macon and Pilate is very interesting and I hope we see more about it.

Antoinette & Rochester

Reading the second part after the first part was interesting -- I've always kind of liked stories that show you another person's view of the person whose thoughts you were just reading (which is totally Mrs. Dalloway). Rochester's critical and dismissive view of Antoinette is a little uncomfortable after reading about her childhood. Antoinette grew up very lonely, and the only person she really seemed to have a good relationship with was Christophine. She really seems to like having a good relationship with her servants, something Rochester seems to view a little suspiciously (which is the view Rochester has of basically everything in Jamaica). When Antoinette asks Christophine what to do since Rochester obviously doesn't love her, Christophine tells Antoinette to go away. "Go, go where?" Antoinette asks. "To some strange place where I shall never see him? No, I will not, then everyone, not only the servants, will laugh at me." This recalls Rochester's line, when someone tells him that Antoinette doesn't want to get married. "I did not relish going back to England in the role of rejected suitor jilted by this Creole girl. I must certainly know why."

Rochester has a problem where he keeps thinking that everyone is judging him and everyone is in on a secret -- and in a way he's right, and his suspicions are confirmed by the letter. Both Rochester and Antoinette seemed to be sort of trying to create a relationship at first. I don't think they were ever really in love, and honestly I'm not exactly sure they could have made it there, although some of the scenes kind of seemed like they could get there. I feel like the biggest thing is that Rochester had this idea of the nice English girl he was going to fall in love with. Antoinette was close enough to that that Rochester wasn't forced to give up on this idea, but far enough away that Rochester was constantly disappointed. His whole passive aggressive silent treatment really annoyed me, because he was punishing Antoinette for something that wasn't her fault & making both of them miserable in the process. Calling her Bertha felt like the worst punishment for her not telling him about her family but most of all for not being the nice English girl Rochester had in mind, the girl that Rochester saw in her once or twice (like when she tells him to taste the mountain water). I kind of liked Rochester at the beginning, when he was trying to be nice to Antoinette, but now the relationship is just cruel and sad.

Intentions

I found Meursault in The Stranger to be both an interesting and disturbing character, especially in the beginning. I like characters that don't always have the best intentions, and I think a lot of people do, judging by the popularity of TV shows with anti-heroes. They're interesting to watch but I think there's also a lot of fantasy going on, with people thinking hey if I wasn't bound by moral constraints or whatever, I could totally be that badass. What makes Meursault weird is that he... doesn't have intentions? He needs to satisfy basic human desires like hunger & comfort, etc, but other than that he just sort of hangs around and goes along with things. He does some pretty bad things, like writing that letter and obviously shooting the Arab, but they're just things he does because doing it seems to be less bother than not doing it... Raymond just asked so nicely and it was so hot out and he just doesn't want to go back and face the women... It makes it more difficult to read because I can't really trust that he has good intentions or accept that he has bad ones.

It was interesting to read the book after reading Hemingway -- I think we talked about this in class -- I kept wanting to read emotions into Meursault, especially in the first chapter. Jake had some emotions I could relate to, even if they weren't all on the surface, but Meursault was kind of in this haze. Even his desire for people to like him seemed kind of muted. It would be nice if people saw it his way, but eh, sometimes it's just too much effort. It was hard to stop reading this as a temporary numbness as a way of coping and just accept that that's the way he is.

There was this one line in the second part of the book about how seeing how much everyone hated Meursault made him want to cry, and it kind of surprised me how much sympathy I gained for Meursault from that line and the little indications of how much he didn't like the prison. He seemed happy in the first part and even mentioned it a couple of times (like at the very end where he says he was happy on the beach) but really it took him being unhappy to find something to... like? I thought Meursault was an interesting character throughout the book but he only really seemed human & relatable when his sadness & anger came out.

Gregor's Father

One of the lines that struck me about Gregor's family was describing the way Gregor gives his paycheck to them: "They had just gotten used to it, the family as well as Gregor, the money was received with thanks and given with pleasure, but no special feeling of warmth went with it any more." It goes on to illustrate the way Gregor remains close to his sister, which is obvious in the way his sister initially cares for him. However, even his sister isn't really appreciated by the parents, later being called mostly useless.

The father is especially interesting because Gregor seems to be afraid of him, but in his current state he seems kind of harmless -- apparently he's gotten so fat that he walks really slowly and takes hours for breakfast. Nonetheless he is always the aggressor -- his sister cares for him and his mother is pretty concerned but his father keeps hitting him with canes and apples. Gregor hates his job but has been working at it for five years and planned to for five more years -- is it completely out of love for his family? Providing for his mother & sister seems to be kind of the carrot whereas his father is more the stick -- the manager represents being fired, but the manager literally runs away from Gregor when he sees the insect, while his father's response to the crisis is to be reduced to kind of an animal himself, what with his hissing & beating Gregor. The narrator remarks: "he was an old man who had not worked for the past five years and who in any case could not be expected to undertake too much; during these five years, which were the first vacation of his hard-working yet unsuccessful life, he had gained a lot of weight and as a result had become fairly sluggish." On one hand this makes him seem kind of harmless -- he was unsuccessful and fairly sluggish -- but he's also the kind of guy who doesn't take any vacations, which isn't always a sign of a pleasant person.

I think it's interesting that the father kind of ends up dragging the rest of the family down to his level with regard to Gregor. He always took a tack of ignore it, and if you can't, attack it -- no love in that. Grete takes care not only to keep Gregor alive but to ensure his happiness, and his mother wants to see his room and is willing to undertake hard work to remove the furniture in order to make it nicer for him (although one of the saddest lines is her's about how maybe they should just leave everything like it is so when everything returns to normal it'll be like nothing ever happened). With the father's apple thing, everyone starts basically ignoring Gregor, and even Gregor loses his love -- he doesn't make excuses for his family anymore and takes to outright hissing at them when he's displeased, while the father wears his bank uniform, where he works the lowliest job, in a kind of proud way, which is in its own way pretty sad for him.

Cycles

I found the end of The Sun Also Rises interesting, if not particularly satisfying, although none of the novels we've read really have particularly satisfying endings (I remember some people not being happy about the ending of Mrs. Dalloway). Mrs. Dalloway I think was sort of a peek into someone else's life, but it felt like Clarissa's life was much more "stable." If people's lives go in little cycles until they break out of them, Clarissa's seemed small and settled, whereas Jake had a sort of big cycle in the book -- completed with the bookends of the cab ride. Maybe some people find a sort of routine life depressing, but I thought Jake's story was really sad. He seemed happiest alone but he kept getting dragged back to Brett -- honestly, I don't blame Brett that much... I'm not sure you can really blame anyone in something like that, although it sounds a bit like an abusive relationship. It feels like a more depressing version of those TV shows where nothing ever changes from episode to episode -- you get a new sort of case, tensions escalate, but everything is back to normal at the end. Sometimes it feels like the writers are afraid to change anything and maybe that's what Jake feels -- he goes with the drama and the bullfighters but at the end of the day, Paris is comforting, and his relationship with Brett might be in a way comforting. He likes Brett, Brett likes him, he understands the troubles that come with that relationship. And they both know they will both come back to each other -- even after the fiasco with Cohn and then Romero, Brett is confident that she can write to Jake and he will answer, and of course Jake does, and the cycle, with the climax and the return to normalcy, will start again.

Maybe this is a bit depressing so here's a picture of Hemingway and a cat (Blogger is not cooperating with my multimedia dreams).

The Hours

I was sick on Friday so while I read a summary of the film later, there's the big gap for me between right when the movie was getting into the action and then the last few minutes of conclusion, and obviously I didn't really enjoy the film as much as I might have. I thought it was interesting that it wasn't just a 1:1 reproduction of the novel but rather messed around with some things. Some of the things I liked most about Mrs. Dalloway weren't in the movie -- for one thing, the most interesting thing for me about Mrs. Dalloway was how Woolf portrayed the characters, and you simply can't do that in a movie. One of the most interesting things about the book for me was the way Woolf both got into people's thoughts but also flitted between people, painting a picture of a crowd. The medium of the movie took that away and while the cinematography was visually appealing, it wasn't as interesting a format.

In the book, I also thought it was interesting how Woolf sort of quartered Septimus's plot, which was much more intense and depressing than the other plots, but let Clarissa feel some of the aftershock of the suicide. I felt that in a way, this made Septimus's suicide more painful. I remember in the book it goes straight from his suicide and the doctor going "oh well" to someone else thinking about something trivial. The suicide popped up once more in the novel, at the end, and I thought Clarissa's thoughts about death were more powerful for being surrounded by her just going about her life, giving parties, etc. The plots in the movie all had suicide, all had people not just not fully happy, which I feel like Clarissa may have been, but very depressed. This is a more focused view on one issue but I feel like it's maybe not as interesting and maybe too much. Overall, I found that while I enjoyed aspects of the movie, it took away some of the things I enjoyed most about Mrs. Dalloway.

Ripples

The main focus of Mrs. Dalloway, and the most impressive part of the book, was how Virginia Woolf fleshed out the characters. I remember during a discussion at the beginning of class someone brought up how they felt disoriented, being dropped in the middle of the action without much explanation. I do like exposition, but I also really like just being airlifted to a scene and left to piece together what's happening. During one of the panel presentations one of the questions was about who do you have a better sense of, Howie or Clarissa. With Howie it felt like someone was painting a portrait and really focused on the left eye or something, just putting a lot of detail into one part and kind of neglecting other parts, like his job or friends or L, etc. I got a broader idea of Clarissa, but I also got a good idea of a lot of her friends. I thought it was really interesting how Woolf used other people to flesh out Clarissa, because through seeing their thoughts about her, you get a good idea of who they are. For example, Peter spent most of the novel thinking about Clarissa, which itself is telling, but you also get an idea of Peter through what bothers him about Clarissa, what he likes about her, and what he dwells on.

It's interesting to look at this sort of ripple effect -- if you want to know Clarissa, see what everyone thinks of her, but what does everyone think of them, etc. Mrs. Dalloway has such a web of characters who provide insight on each other, even the minor characters, that it's interesting that Septimus and Rezia are so isolated where everyone else is connected. Rezia was making a hat for a someone she knew that neither she nor Septimus seemed to like very much, but other than that they didn't really seem to socialize, which made me feel even worse for the couple. You get flashes of perceptions from other people, such as Peter thinking they're just a couple having a fight, but mostly they're isolated, similar to the isolation Septimus feels.

Richard

Mrs. Dalloway is an interesting book to read after The Mezzanine because while both books focus on really delving into certain subjects and exploring their connections, Nicholson Baker writes about objects and Virginia Woolf writes about people. And while I enjoyed reading about staplers, humans are much more deep and complex. I found Virginia Woolf managed to make all the characters in Mrs. Dalloway intriguing and worth reading about, one character who I found interesting in his relative simplicity was Richard Dalloway.

The novel starts with describing Clarissa's everyday actions, but it soon gets into her mind and how she considers what her life would have been like had she married someone else and various other reflections back on her earlier life. Peter, another character who gets a lot of pages about his thoughts, similarly reflects back a lot on previous times and revisits positions on people in his mind over and over, especially going over Clarissa and going back and forth on whether she's snobby, judgmental, charming, kind, etc. Richard, on the other hand, does none of this. I have very little idea of what his life was like and his experiences at Bourton. You get a sense from the other characters' memories, but in the relatively short time that Woolf delves into his thoughts, he never really things back to the past except to consider that hey, everything turned out pretty ok -- "his life had been a miracle, he thought." This isn't really an exceptional stretch of the imagination, as he has a nice wife, a daughter, a good job, and as Lady Bruton says, is in the "pink of condition." However, several characters mention that he has fallen short of some office (I forget what), and Richard's view shows a definite optimism. He's sure of his miracle of his life, too, which sort of stands out against Clarissa's constant "I guess I'm happy now but I wonder where I would be if I married Peter." Richard isn't happy about everything, but he only seems to have minor annoyances, such as Hugh the "intolerable ass." While Clarissa has intense feelings about Miss Kilman, Richard certainly doesn't like it but "these things pass over if you let them."

One thing I found kind of endearing about Richard was the way he thought about Clarissa and Elizabeth. They both came up naturally in his head and both times he got this rush of gratitude. Whereas Clarissa and Elizabeth considered people in a more complex and decidedly cooler way, Richard just seemed very happy that they were in his life.

I really enjoyed seeing the thoughts of all the characters in this novel. I thought Septimus was really interesting but his perspective was intense and almost exhausting, whereas Richard has, as Clarissa says, an "adorable, divine simplicity."

Routines

Looking back on The Mezzanine, especially after writing the pastiche, I noticed one of the things it made me think more consciously about is my routines. Howie spends a lot of time appreciating objects, but he also talks about his routines. Every time one comes to he analyzes every step, noting things he discovered and added to the routine because they save time or are produce better results or simply are more enjoyable.

I think morning routines are one of the most interesting kinds because while I know people who try to take different routes every time they go somewhere, I imagine that even people who love spontaneity don’t change their morning routine every day. However, the routines differ from person to person. Some people shower in the morning rather than the night before, because for them, the pros (wakes you up, makes you feel fresh, no bedhead, etc) outweigh the cons. I shower at night because I don’t like to go to bed sweaty, but mostly because I can’t find the time in the morning to take a shower.

Currently I wake up to my cell phone alarm. The reason I started doing this: I can only plug in two things by my bed. It used to be my lamp and my alarm clock, but I like to listen to podcasts on my phone before going to sleep and it was a pain to get up and plug it in on the other side of the room. I need the lamp but now the alarm clock is permanently unplugged, and occasionally out of habit I look at it for the time only to see a blank black face. When I still used it, I would put it behind my nightstand where I would have to get up to turn it off, in order to make myself get out of bed. Before that, I hit snooze two or three times on my alarm clock (nine minutes each, so sometimes I would sleepily do simple addition to figure out when the alarm clock would buzz again) until my dad came in to make sure I get out of bed. This kind of progression makes me happy, as if someday I’ll achieve the perfect routine. I know realistically this won’t happen, which is also kind of fun, knowing I can experiment with it forever. I have routines for other parts of my life, too: this year the only times I stop at my locker are lunch and before and after P.E., but last year I would plan out my locker stops (after this class I go to my locker but after this class I just go straight to the next class) and it changed throughout the year as I figured that for one class it’s better to get there earlier, but for another it’s a little awkward to be one of the first ones in the room. I said earlier that The Mezzanine made me think more consciously about my routines - looking back I’m not sure that’s true because like Howie, it’s always something that runs through my head every so often, popping up when I have a spare moment to consider it.