6 impossible things...before Christmas break

1) I will not fail any classes and I will be able to graduate on time
2)Sam will finish her 20 page Gwendolyn Morgan paper due on Wednesday, of which only her name is written
3)When I take a scantron test, the correct bubbles will magically light up like I were playing a game of Bob-em'
4)I will learn 12 weeks of spanish vocabulary and conjugations the night before the final
5)Bozeman off-leash laws are passed, which will eventually to the world's first "cage-free" zoo in bOZeman
6)I will finally meet Santa this year

BONSAI!!!!

I told Johnny that if he didn't blog about this, I was going to. Since tonight is the last night and I see he still hasn't blogged about it, its fair game. It's probably dead right by now, but he was explaining the concept of his new bonsai tree to me around the same time we were discussing nature. What makes it fascinating, he was telling me, is that you try and keep a mature coniferous tree in an immature state. This is a lot like Mozart being a miniature grown up and it is what we do to children through our literature. We bring them up to be morally responsible and civically minded individuals when what they should be doing is getting into trouble and being curious. There is also a certain amount of respect, in that when you photograph or show a bonsai, it must be properly potted and presented. It is like nature itself is a daemon. Our own personal nature can be our daemon as well. Like Ryan's paper, it is a way of taking advantage of nature, a way of not letting it become what it will on its own terms, but shaping and pruning it to fit our own metamold.

What I have not learned

I have decided to stop trying to decide what something is. What is a child, what is a book, what is nature, what is didacticism, or what is dust? I feel like we can really only talk about the essence of a child or a thing rather than give it a concretness that only makes us feel warm and comfortable. More importantly, rather than asking what it is, maybe we could ask why is it important. After this class I feel like I know more about nature than a biologist and more about a child than any of my elementary school teachers. I also know that the fact of the matter is if I were to have kids of my own I would realized immediately that I don't know sheeit. But I guess it takes a long time to learn everything and know nothing. Thats what education is about. Everything that I've learned in this class affects me. I think this is a larger part of all our studies --to find how we are able to interact and relate to the things we have studied. Through ideas like six degrees of separation and displaced myth we understand how childrens literature is a part of us, and we are a part of it-just like a myth is a personalized dream and a dream is a depersonalized myth. There is a little child in each and everyone of us, and that it what it takes to see the extraordinary in the ordinary--we need to always stive to achieve the condition of a child. To be open to the way things present themselves to us, willing to disbelieve and understanding that there is always room for contradiction.

The Metanarrative Escape

Though I don’t often admit to being ignorant, I had no idea that beautiful white sand beaches stretched the length of the shoreline and that I could visit one until Pat Seajack gave Marlene, a proud mother of three and loving wife of one, a six day stay at a Sandals Beach Resort after answering a “before and after” category. I find that our realities, the reality of sipping pina coladas somewhere off the coast of South Padre Island is only as real as it exists solely on the television, a flat screen reality. “The news told me to do it,” is a common excuse for how we have put our trust into a defunct system, void of any real guidance or intent of wholesome human progress and emancipation. As a culture, I fear we are driven by an attitude of consumption, of acquiring new schools of thought and faster ways of accessing the internet from farther removed locations; of acquiring new habits and habitats that come at historically low interest rates. New agencies of motility and Sea-Doo’s are premeditated by a force which we do not understand, a didacticism and social instruction that has led us to our present economical and moral deficiencies. These systems cannot presently be regarded as tools which benefit our existence and lend themselves to more simplistic means. There is now, it seems, an overarching attitude of mistrust in the ways in which we as a society exist.
This is the metanarrative of our life. The way in which we live is part of a totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience. The messages that come through our televisions and IPhones dictate how we live and provide for us our desires and experiences. They are conventions that have the same role in literature that they have in life: they impose certain patterns of order and stability on the view and the reader. We our initiated into this system from our earliest years through the use of children’s literature. These stories serve to initiate children into aspects of social heritage, transmitting the culture’s central values and assumptions and body of shared experiences into our future. But a system that is morally bankrupt should not be passed onto our children. Instead, canonical authors such as Lewis Carroll or Phillip Pullman challenge the assumption that narrative trustworthiness, authorial control, and determinate meaning should be defining characteristics of the reading experience.
Long before “postmodernism” was a glint in the cynic’s eye, authors of our favorite books and stories have sought to liberate children from this controlling force. They have broken from conventions so that they can make what is familiar unfamiliar. Although these authors may find themselves suffocating under such narratives, too far entrenched into the verisimilitudes of society, they realize that the only way to change the future through the future: children. Using several techniques that fall under the auspices of postmodernism, such as pastiche and the homogenization of extremes to create something completely different and utterly nonsensical, authors direly attempt to break the hypnosis of unfounded didacticism and offer to the children an escape from it.
When reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the element of parody pervades with utmost importance. To say the least, Carroll had had enough of the pedagogical morals that are found throughout preceding children’s literature. The intent to teach, he felt, had become overworked, as each story ended with a moral. But it is not the moral that is important, but the story itself. To combat this, Carroll parodied these stories to take authorial control away from the guiding morals of this metanarrative.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly
Like a tea-tray in the sky.”


Carroll subverts the reading experience through parody, undermining the preconceived notions that stories and the children who read them are repositories for universal truths. Just as the busy bee becomes the busy crocodile, the Gingerbread Man becomes the Stinky Cheese Man in John Scieska’s subversive book, we find that meaning is formed at the intersections of these stories. These reversions of story tales, of which they are innumerable, have common subversive impulses. They seek to undermine and call into question ideological assumptions of their pre-texts. This intertextuality takes the form of parody of a pretext. They are bricolage, a combinatorial arrangement of past images to try and from something new. Though a principle problem of postmodernist texts, or simply texts that attempt to try something different, is whether or not they are successfully lifting the veil of familiarity or perpetuating the very same constructs that they seek to shatter.
The icons of our progress are old, reused, and hackneyed. In order to parody there must be an acceptance of a norm from which they may use as a stepping off point. We have been learning and relearning the same things throughout all of human history it would seem. Northrop Frye says, “there’s nothing new in literature that isn’t the old reshaped.” Carroll’s parodies show this. Though we may tweak it one way or another, Photoshop this, juxtapose that, what we really have are the same images just rearranged, as if our experiences were some sort of anagram. It is at these intertextual intersections when meaning is formed. The creators of these texts take authority from the metanarrative and place it in the hands of the reader, at which time the child finds him or herself on both sides of the text, being apart from and a part of the text at the same time. Alice, for instance, is offered a “time out” from her habitual constraints of society, but, as with most of these texts, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz included, are eventually incorporated safely back into social normality. In escaping the convolution of street sign and scrolling marquees many options are presented by these authors. As with Little Red Riding Hood or Thoreau we can go into the woods.
Another consideration of postmodernism if the blending of high and low cultures. We are all exposed to the same images and we all want the forty-foot yacht and an episode of MTV’s Cribs. Our desires become the same and the differences between to people, to things, become imperceptible. The notion of the individual is disregarded. Postmodern practice in children’s literature closes this gap by appealing to the extremes of both child and adult; but in an effort to liberate both from the metanarrative, authors of these texts turn simile, two things that are similar, into metaphor, two things that are each other. The desired effect of this is nonsense. When “this is that”, we turn our backs on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things. By using metaphor as a language of identification, leads our imaginations back to our lost identity.
High culture mixes with low culture, positive and negative attractions are mixed, simile becomes metaphor. No longer is something like something different but similar, but everything is like everything else. When simile turns to metaphor, both occur but with auspicious results. Nonsense arrives when two things transcend their similarities and become one another. The veil is lifted, but the nonsense provides for us an escape. A poet is subject to his words, he can become a slave to them, but a nonsense poet—never. For example, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less…When I make a word do a lot of extra work like that I always pay it extra.” They provide narratives that defamiliarize the experience of reading and disrupt and subvert the world of fantasy and attempt to undermine the didactic, and thus controlling the force of fairy tale. Wordsworth’s A Defense of Poesy has had a great impact on the way I think about literature, and it seems that these authors seek to defamiliarize old ways of thinking by creating new metaphors. Through new metaphors they lift the veil of familiarity and over usage of our own language. To combat these predetermined horizons of expectations, canonical bricoleurs parody these totalizing conventions by retelling them in a new textual and ideological configuration. They dash preconceived notions of collective progress and existence by creating the nonsensical and imaginative worlds in which characters and readers find themselves.
The world of nonsense changes experience. As humpty proves with his explanation of Jabberwocky, meaning, as with the simulacra of our lives becomes ambiguous. It is a world in which child (an adult) readers may discover meaning for themselves. This ulterior world can be very enticing, inviting to step forth, open one of three doors or jump through a porthole and spin off into another sort of dementia. It breaks the boundaries of textual involvement, fragments and disjoints the author’s and character’s interaction with the readers, subverting what is perceived as a dominant discourse. Like Uncle Sam saying “We Want You”, pointing at you as if his finger, callused from the American work ethic, inviting you to jump through the poster and into the armed services. Or perhaps it would be as if I were to reach out of this screen or paper right now and....
...shake your hand. You get that feeling that the book is reading you and you are an integral part of the text. The reader, and especially the child, finds him or herself on both sides of the book, being its reader and being an integral part of the story itself. The story becomes an experience. “The real realities, so to speak, are things that don’t remind us directly of our own experience,” says Northrop Frye. Carroll’s employs this type of intertextuality as reaction to his own postmodern sentiments and unrest in the way a child’s experience is provided to him just as ours are to us. In order to combat the stalwartly didactic conventions of representing the world to a child and the ways in which children and adults alike read a text, Carroll, as well as my favorite childhood author, John Scieszka, is by taking trite codes of authorship and making them new again. By parodying instructional poems Carroll depletes what was once a teaching device and depleting it almost entirely of moral value. As a result, the moral of the story is the story, that is all that exists or matters. The dream world is the real world, for, what is life but a dream? Carroll’s mocking and antagonistic retellings of tight conventions results not so much in a retelling of the story as a re-version of the story, disassembling it and recreating it as a new textual and ideological configuration.
The postmodern attitude does not incorporate an inherent mistrust in signs or a hermeneutical suspicion of them, but rather the only thing that exists is the image as we see it relayed to us through simulacra. All that exists is the image with no intrinsic root or meaning, but just the image as it exists in its outward form. Philip Pullman demonstrates this point beautifully, quoting John Keats in the Subtle Knife, “…Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. You have to get into that state of mind.” To interpret the signs, the shadows, the elementary particles of dust and dark matter we must get rid of the notion that we must learn something. As with reading this paper, you must absolve yourself from the idea that what I am saying is in any way correct or founded. I have. We must be completely receptive to what is there. It is the same with nonsense. These shadows come through to us when “you look at the Cave,” or, “the computer. We call it the Cave. Shadows on the walls of the Cave, you see, from Plato.” To the postmodernist, all that exists is the shadow with nothing to cast it.
Children, like Lyra, though, are given the authority to decipher meaning for themselves. The experience of reading, and of living, becomes an active, rather than passive. Instead of accepting television commercials as real and story morals as right, children are urged to be individuals to use their imaginations to transcend what is to what could be. The notion of the individual is dead from our first moments of life, for our metanarrative seeks to assimilate children into society and, through these morals, teach them to be a part socially responsible and civically minded mass, a unified whole. Take for example Dr. Seuss’s “Oh The Places You’ll Go” as he describes people “just waiting. Waiting for the train to go or a bus to come, or a plant to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No.” We are all going in the same direction, or not going anywhere at all, acting the way we are told, but “NO! That’s not for you! Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.” Though postmodernism believes the notion of the individual to be dead because we are all exposed to the same images and conventions, children’s literature aims at defamiliarizing these images which have been the (mis)guiding force in our lives, telling children that it is possible to be an individual. And then of course there is A.A. Milne’s introduction to The World of Pooh. Described is a motion proper, like an escalator and elevator, but it is through a zoo. “You can’t be in London for long without going to the Zoo. There are some people who begin the Zoo and the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.” Children are seen as animals and animals as children, these impulses to identify human and natural worlds become purely metaphors, like Lyra and Pantalaimon
There is always a way out of our current situation. Children’s literature explores these escapes from our postmodern world in many forms. There is nonsense, or you could go into the woods, step through a porthole, and have real experiences. Parents and authors who foster imaginations in their children, challenge their curiosities, and encourage them to explore and be unique little snow flakes challenge our social expectations of becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

A couple of quick thoughs about daemons and authorship

When we ask what is nature let us think of animals in terms of how they were portrayed in My Book and Heart Shall Never Part. We learned from the movie that kids and animals resemble each other, while animals disguise human weakness and dramatize pitiless morals. We also gleaned that, according to Aesop, "Love can tame the wildest". Also, a child is "an aged philosopher focused on dreamlike creatures performing what it means to be human." Finally, we were told that reading about animals is reading about the uneasiness of the human condition. We know that daemons resemble their humans, and vice versa. You can even take a test to see what your daemon would be (click here to take the test!) When they are cut off from one another they cease to exist and each feels the pain of the other. Lyra disguises Pantalaimon's weakness and he her's. These animals, like Pan, do perform what it means to be human, while I think the child performs what it mean to be an animal (as in adapted to civilization as the adults, or magesterium, see fit). And the powers of love are evident in His Dark Materials, when we are witness to the strong bonds between daemon and human (as well as the respected boundaries that you may not touch another daemon). Philip Pullman had said of the Chronicles of Narnia that, if it is supposed to be a religious book, it is void of the single most important Christian value: love.

As far as authorship goes, I never really like to see what the author of the book looks likes. It somehow ruins it for me. Imagining the author is a big part of imagining the book and with all of Pullman's imput, he has grown a little didactic himself, it would seem. J.K. Rowling has always maintained a distance from her readers but Philip is, at least from my experience, interruping his own work by telling me what it is about. Well, that's the equivalent of Lewis Carroll providing us with the actual answer to the raven and writing desk riddle. Something is taken away, its one less thing for me to have the pleasure of imagining. So thank you, Phil Pullman, for doing the thing to me which you have vowed so strongly never to do: leave little or nothing to the imagination. Why did you let them make a movie, especially if it isn't even as good as the book? How can we imagine what you've written if we can watch it, only further depreciating the value of an education which you so highly esteem? It seems like Phil is not doing this purely for alturistic reasons, and even he said so himself "I write a book for myself." If this is the case, why does he feel the need to explain himself to everyone?

Fairy Dust?

I don't know too much about dust yet. I'm about half way through and from what I have gathered about dust from the book is that it could have something to do with experience, knowledge, and rememberance. It is described as a shadow. Lyra and the other kids had speculated that dust was bad and forced a child to be removed from his daemon, but by the end of the Golden Compass Lyra and Pantelaimon had decided that they never actually asked if it was bad. The dust makes me think of Meno's paradox which Dr. Sexson mentioned to us in our Classical Literature class. Essentially, you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. Before being born we are little angels flying around heaven with all the knowledge in the world, but the immediate shock of our birth, purged from our amniotic sack, forces us to lose our angel wings and fall. Now here on earth, we know everything, but we have forgotten it, and each time we have a new experience our backs itch. Our angel wings grow a little each time we learn something. We drink from the river Mnemosyne, and stay away from the river Lethe, but we have an "alethe", or an unforgetting of what we have known. Hypothetically speaking, then, the dust could be knowledge. Knowledge of what the shadow on the cave wall really is, an understanding of what is being displayed in a computer. Then I think back to Paradise Lost. Sam, in arguing with me because she loves to do that, told me of an episode at a latter part of the book in which, through the amber spyglass, trees are dying because the dust is not "pollenating" them. "So," said Sam, "How do you like dem apples?" I figured if the dust represents knowlege in humans, and it is polenating a tree, couldn't that represent the tree of knowledge? Another idea in Paradise Lost is that we cannot have all the knowledge in the world, or else that would signify too much ambitiousness (for god-head). We also see how Eve's curiosity, her desire for more knowledge, leads to the eventual fall, however happy, of man.

So, we can ascertain that under the auspices of organized religion (which Pullman openly detests), curiosity and the want of knowledge are to be cut-off at a certain point or once you've reached a certain capacity. Adam says in book 12, "Greatly in peace of thought and have my fill of knowledge, what this vessel can contain, beyond which was my folly to aspire. Here is what Philip Pullman says about learning and teaching: In the Subtle Knife, "Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." He also said at the end of a lecture he gave on education: "But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …”

In class we also talked briefly about Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The three magical places are Zembla, Zenda, and Xanadu. In the dedication poem of the book, Rushdie says:

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:

All our dream-worlds may come true
Fairy lands are fearsome too

As I wander far from view

Read, and bring me home to you.

The poem forms an acrostic of Salman Rushdie's son, ZAFAR! In the aforementioned lecture by Philip Pullman, he says, as his concluding point, that FEAR has seeped into our educational system. That we are afraid to try new things, afraid of awkward classes, asking questions. Fear of Failure. It is a scary notion to be curious, to learn and enter a fairy land; but a good education, reading, curiosity, and imagination can inspire confidence in our educational systems. Pullman says, "When I started teaching thirty years ago, there was a culture of confidence in schools. It's not there any more; it's been replaced by a culture of fear. Shame on us, to be so timid. Shame on us, to be so mistrustful. Shame on us, to have so little faith in literature, in poetry and drama and story."

More to come, and, if you care, I have more blogs about education which correlate.

My short insight

One "device" that I have found throughout Alice in Wonderland and Sunderland is the use of frames. I think I mean but I'm not sure I mean what I say when I say that my understanding of frames is, essentially a story within a story. When you step back from a story you realize there are many different stories inside of the one you are reading, revealing many layers of meaning. Its usually done in the context of narration, like in Lolita. Other examples I can think of off the top of my head would be The Notebook (how the story is being read years later) and The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

Brian Talbott's book is made up entirely of frames, one story inside of another story, one story framed by the historicity surrounding it, and, in comic fashion, most of it is illustrated in frames. If it is the case that framing a story is a way of buttressing a story with another story, providing for it a frame work from which to base itself, then it lends itself very well to intertextuality, or the allusions we commonly see and the connections we have been stressing. Talbott shows these connections, supporting them with history and stories within stories. Because there is six degrees of separation between literature, us, and everything else, there are stories in stories everywhere. I also like how Talbott really plays with narration, often engaging himself personally with the reader, making you a part of the story, which adds to the numbers of frames in and layers of meaning surrounding the story

And I cannot think of a painting or a mirror that isn't surrounded by a frame. Have you ever been in an elevator that is surrounded by mirrors? You are basically in a mirror box, except for the doors, and if you look left you see hundreds of yourself, one image being reflected off the mirror behind you and then reflected off that. What did Dr. Sexson call this sort of perpetual reflexivity, like a mirror in a mirror in a mirror, or tv within a tv within a tv?

My favorite chapter

My favorite chapter is from Through the Looking Glass, and it is Humpty Dumpty. It is a very interesting chapter where Humpty discusses the meanings of words with Alice. He uses language to convery his own meanings, demonstrating both the arbitrariness and the importance of word. He employs words, like Shakespeare does, telling Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less. When I make a word do a lot of work like that I always pay it extra." Humpty also explores identity in this chapter, asking Alice what is in a name? Alice wondered, "Must a name mean something?" Humpty argues that words have an intrinsic relationship to the things they name, and that an abstract face would do more in defining a person than any anatomically correct face. He also describes words (verbs, adjectives) as having human characteristics, such a pride, glory, or impenetrability. Here he exemplifies that some words have fixed meanings and are universally understood. But elsewhere he argues that names are entirely arbitrary, adding an aura of nonsensicality where one thing cannot mean something and nothing at all. His explanation of Jabberwocky, though conceptually correct, he imagines the scene to be more fantasmagorical and Seussesque. According to a note in my book, the literal translation of the first stanza of Jabberwocky 'Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves/Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:All mimsy were ye borogoves; And ye mome raths outgrabe means "it was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots, and the grave turtles squeaked out." But is there ever a literal translation? Humpty describes to Alice slimy badgers with corkscrew probosci, parrots with mpos on their heads, and, like the dream we heard on Wednesday, mom raths a homesick green pigs.

Also featured in this chapter is math. 365 - 1=364 is clearly drawn out. I wondered what the relationship is between the meanings of names and mathmatical figures and why Carroll would have wanted to write out its process. Then I came upon a Northrop Frye quote from The Educated Imagination and it reads: "From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination...It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary expreience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can...one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have." Northrop Frye distinguishes the imagination from consciousness as seeing something as it is as opposed to seeing something as you want it to be. Do you recall from Alice in Sunderland on page 303 when he says "The city is reinventing itself. Old industries are replaced by new. The biggest Nissan car factory in Europe is here. New buildings are springing up on post-industrial land. Rival developers, each with their own vision of the Sunderland of tomorrow..." But my question was, why is math one of the languages and is that why we find mathematical instances laced through Wonderland? Humpty Dumpty confirmed Alice's calculations as being correct when he was reviewing it upside down. Can numbers be arbitrary as words may be? Do we use numbers do see and reinvent the world as we do with language?

Giants in Time

I did some interesting reading this weekend in additin to the two assigned books. Sam and I had to get out of the house on Saturday night (we noticed how many lights were on in the dorms and figured everyone was recuperating from Friday) so we went to Barnes & Noble where there was a caucophony of bratty high school girls scaring the living crap out of me like bees do. I was looking for anything that might be germane to my project, and since I have yet to see the word Bohemia used in a children's literature I figured anything could work. In the criticism section of the store I found a Northrop Frye book, The Educated Imagination, and Sam and I both read it this weekend. What I would like to do is succinctly raise several points about what I read this weekend:

1) In Alice in Sunderland on page 270 it says "Carroll describes his metods of developing stories; he jots down ideas, scenes, fragments of dialogue as they occur to him over time--a laborious process that takes years." This weekend I also read an excerpt from "A History of the Past" by Anders Henriksson. Henriksson, a professor of history at Shepherd College, compiled the essay from sentences extracted from students' papers over a fifteen-year period. Here is how some of it goes:
"Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her face. The Trojan War raged between the Greeks and the Tories. We know about this thanks to Homer's story about Ulysses Grant and Iliad, the painful wife he left behind. King Xerox of Persia invadad Greace, bet fell off short at the battle of Thermosalami...Historians today feel that the renaissance was the result of medevil people being fertalized by events. Italy was pregnent with huge ideas and great men. Machiavelli, wo was often unemployed, wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon. Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his later personality. This was a time when Europeans felt the need to reach out and smack someone..."
This history professory has retold history by using a hodgepodge of erroneous (and silly) historical statement written by his students over a 15 year span. Not only is the essay very interesting and funny, but the concept is brilliant. He creates something entirely new, but recognizable, by using symbols we know and may often get confused. What is it about the use of symbols and iconography in this way that leds itself to the nonsensicality of it all? See number 3

2) One particular scene in Alice in Wonderland that I liked was wen the cards were lying face down for the procession of the Queen, but because they were all the same on the back and had to lie as such, there was no way of telling what they really were. In case anyone didn't know, the reason there is the intricate pattern on the back of playing cards is because it is possible to read through cards. What might this say about concealing the truth of things behind confusing patterns and images. We have seen this over and over again in literature, from Plato's Cave to today's literature, that the truth is concealed, or what we are seeing may only be a version of the truth, and it could be likely that no truth exists at all, there are only images.

3)In my Mythologies class with Dr. Sexons I did my final presentation of six degrees of separation. I drew out a series of six different connections, however random they may at first seem, are actually very realted. For instance, I connected Mnemosyne, or Memory, with Sir Mix Alot, essentially by saying that Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory and the mother of all muses is what Wordsworth was talking about in his poem "I wandered lonely as as cloud" which is about remembering things past, which was the basis of a role played by Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect. This movie was about Ashton's soul and his past, and the soul is often represented by a butterfly. Psyche, or the soul, is the mother of Voluptua (Cupid is the father) and Voluptua means pleasure (or the root of voluptuous) which is what Sir Mixalot sang about in "Baby Got Back." I made several of these connections and I found that this is exactly what Alice in Sunderland is all about. It is what it is all about! On page 194 of the graphic novel we get this explanation, "Comics are demanding of the reader. The illustrations have to be "read", taking on the function of descriptive passages in text workds. The reader has to interpret the images and make the mental jump between one panel and the next." I found this to be a very redeeming quality about comics. This is also the reason there is so much history in Alice in Sunderland. You need the history to make the connections. You need the history to make the literature! Its all right there, you just need to know how to look, you begin to see things as a whole, as an entirety, rather than fragmented and disassociated events and instances.

3) Do you remember when Dr. Sexson said "simile becomes metaphor"? Here is a little explanation and it may, or may not, relate to number 1. This is a quote directly taken from a Wallace Stevens poem and is used by Northrop Frye. The poem is The Motive For Metaphor and it goes like this:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--T

he obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Northorp Frye says of this poem, "What Stevens calls the weight of primary noon, the A B C of being, and the dominant X is the objective world, the world set over against us. Outside literature, the main motive for writing is to describe this world. But literature itself uses language in a way which associates our minds with it. As soon as you use associative language, you begin using figures of speech. If you say this talk is dry and dull, you're using figures associating it with bread and breadknives. There are two main kinds of association, analogy and identity, two things that are like each other and two things that are each other. You can say with Burns, "My love's like a red, red rose," or you can say with Shakespeare:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring.
One produces the figure of speech called the simile; the other produces the figure called metaphor...As for metaphor, where you're really saying "this is that," you're turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same ting and still remain two things."

Is this the basis of nonsense in Alice in Wonderland? When a card is not only a playing card but a member of the court, the caterpillar is not only a caterpillar, but a hookah smoking existentialist?

Click here to watch a YouTube of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach Cello Suites. We learned that all of the arts aspire to music in class. I'll talk more about this later

Comments on My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

I enjoyed the movie very much tonight, though I felt a little over prepared for it. Here are a few interesting points:

1) In keeping with my diatribes on postmodernism, Dr. Sexson narrated that "text informs reality." This is one of the principle ideas behind p.m., whereby all that exists to us our symbols and images of other icons and images resulting in our reality being provided for us. A child, a tabula rasa, might be the only truly natural thing, other than nature, in this world. G.C. Lichtenberg said, "the nearer we get to any natural object, the more incomprehensible it becomes. A grain of sand is undoubtedly not what I take it to be." Our reality is made up of our present symbols and images which are readily perceptible, as such, we are the sum of our images. It would make sense that a child is the sum of his or her images (by the way, I got autographs from the stars of tonight's performance!) I was watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia tonight and Dennis had to perform his life to make his fictional memoir true. Life follows art, not the other way around.

2) We also heard that "A world of story liberates literature." Meaning, the literacy breeds literacy, and this remind's me of a quote, though I cannot remember who from, "Some say only the free are educated, I say only the educated are free."

3) Here are a few interesting connections between nature, children, and books that were mentioned. Children could be seen as beasts being raised towards civility, or as an "aged philosopher focused on dreamlike creatures performing what it means to be human." Bob Dylan said words to that effect, if you imagine nature as a didactic agency that decays the eternal spirit of a child (which I don't think is far reaching if you consider the fact that once a child begins to read he loses the child inside of him), "I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams which nature can't touch with decay."

Beasts were described with an anti-nature bias by which they were only considered to the extent at which they serve humanity. Also, "reading about animals is reading about the uneasiness of the human condition." Literate children are both a part of nature and apart from it, the "metaphor meets nature, and the child meets the book." This reminds me of beast fables which were popular in Jacobean England. Such plays would include Ben Jonson's Volpone, where each character embodied a particular animal. Volpone means fox and his sidekick is named Mosca, which means flea. Animals, according to the narration of the film, and kids resemble each other; moreover, animals disguise human weakness and dramatize morals. My feeling is that there is a strong possibility that we view children in the same way we view nature, trying to assimilate them into society and instructing them towards a purpose or intent. Here is an interesting quote from C.S. Lewis, "What we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument." The early primers used animals and nature as a vehicle to instruct and preach, but to what extent? Here is another quote from George Eliot, just replace animals with kids and the meaning stays the same (as per the suggestion the kids are meant to learn but not question), "Animals are such agreeable friends--they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms." Finally, here is a quote from E.B. White which relates to Sam's blog about how we teach children (again, replace nature with kids) "I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially."

Thanks for reading. Sutter

In class today

Did everyone catch the tautology in Beauty and the Beast where the suitor says "Glass is just glass" when he kicks the window in? I did some wiki's tonight and found the Jean Cocteau was also a ceramicist, so we have that in common. Click here http://www.cocteau-art.com/ to see more of his art. He decorates his pots and platters with many stick figure images and portraits. The movie poster, incidentally, as most movie posters tend to do, looks like a pulp fiction cover. Here are the opening lines of the movie if anyone is interested:

"Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim and that this will cause the beast shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's 'open sesame,' "Once upon a time..."

"Jean is telling us to appreciate the story for the story (some more tautology for you), that the moral of the story is the story and he's making a great excuse to start with "once upon a time." Maybe the story, maybe all stories, are only as good as our imagination. There are no boring things, only boring people. Children are the least boring and the most exciting of all people, possibly because all they have is an imagination. They don't have the logic to dissuade the imagination, the world is their oyster and they can have it any way they'd like. It would be nice to be a child again and this is the point of nostalgia. This is also known as Puer Aeternus, which is Latin for eternal youth, or the Peter Pan Syndrom. If image is everying, and I believe that it is, then so is imagination. Imagination gives to every nothingness a location and a name, it changes simile to metaphor.

I was also reading Ben's blog and he was wondering if children are corrupt as soon as they begin to read. I think they probably are corrupt before that, but if they aren't, literature will surely do the job. Ben also mentioned that literacy is a port-hole and authors write in an effort to get in touch with their lost past. Well, if that's the case, and I agree that it is, then we are teaching our kids the recycled images of a nostalgic author who has been around long enough to have been corrupted to the point of wanting innocense. I believe that both writing and reading are port-holes, but not to a concrete image, a particualr origin or ur story, but to other images, which only lead us to more images, and so on until you've completely convinced yourself that there is no reality. And dag-nabbit there is no reality!

Coincidences and sudden connections?

Tonight I had the priveledge of being in the effervescent presence of John Nehring, always a touch of Shangri-la, and we were talking about Alice in Sunderland. I asked him how he liked it and, although he did very much, he described some pages as being overloaded with images and text boxes, describing it as "flashes and flashes of images man, all coming at once!" Last night I was talking about how postmodernism is all about images, a world comprised entirely of images that have no concrete reality because one image is covered up by another. There is no Urr Story, or original story. What Johnny felt is known as a "procession of Simulacra", or, as Don Delillo (who I mentioned earlier in this blog) calls it in his novel of the same noise, White Noise. It is, basically, the constant barrage of images we are subjected to on a daily basis, mostly in the form of media, consumer capitalism. I think I might know that I understand to believe that children are a product of their environment, the simulacra they are subjected to. Many of these images, as I mentioned, come to them in the form of their parents' own nostalgia for their past.

Another note on nostalgia: Many of us are familiar with Pulp Fiction Novels, and they are very Nostalgic for our parents, the baby boomers, and even more so for the vast amount of enthusiastic collectors. Pulp Fiction Novels (called so because of the cheap pulp paper they were printed on, one reason why few exist today in good condition) reached their height during the 1950's and, interestingly enough, were preceeded by Dime Novels such as Buffalo Bill Cody, and the Waverly Fireside Chats for Women, and they were incredibly successful in spreading literacy. They were very similar, and if not in some cases the exact same, as the early primers we have discussed that may have asserted a didactic moral, taught young girls how to be ladies, and gave young boys pages of adventure for only a dime!. Dime Novels of the 1800's were preceeded by Penny Novels of England, such as The Mysteries of London.

Know what I'm thinking by seeing what I'm saying:

tau-tol-o-gy. n. Gk, tautologos. 1: needless or meaningless repetition in close succession of an idea, statement, or word: PLEONASM, REDUNDANCY~in describing any act of society as socieal. 2: an instance of such repetition

Derivitaves: tautological, tautologism, tautologist, tautologize, tautologous.

Examples: I am what I am, it is what it is. A tautological statement is, or was regarded by the Greeks, as being true merely because it is the same thing twice. "It was fun because it was fun." Interestingly enough, but I don't understand it (nor do I care to), is that there is a mathematical logic based on probability that is used when you do a boolean search on the internet. That's very postmodern, not understanding something that we are so intrinsically a part of. We use tautologies, or redunduncies, everyday. Here is a sentence comprised entirely of tautologies, 16 in all, see if you can spot them!

In my opinion, I think that the SAT test is no harder than using an ATM machine. It should never be a joint cooperation and done in close proximity with other people, but it is a necessary requirement that one should be adequate enough with today's modern technology that one should learn the test with DC-ROM disks and dot.com aids, irregardless (not acutally a word) of how stupid, smart, inept, and etc. they may be. I'll reiterate again, the SAT test is not hard, but if you do well on it you should win a free $100.00 dollars!

Our guest speaker on Friday talked about many interesting things. When she mentioned iconoclasm I thought of many things. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe are iconoclasts. As are crucifixes and swastikas, and all of the little symbols on the althiometer that guide Lyra in the Golden Compass. Linda said that "reading doesn't hold still. There is no end to the ways of reading. If your gonna be a Baptist, they're three different kinds of Baptists." I find it interesting that the needles of the compass never hold still, there are always different ways to see the symbols, read between the lines and disect the different layers of literature and life. Nothing really, "is what it is", and nothing goes without saying. Thinking like a postmodernist, there is no origin, and we are skeptical of symbols but IMAGE IS EVERYTHING. Linda mentioned that children are not supposed to be skeptics. She had also mentioned an anxiety of influence in spreading literacy through america through early primers. Noah Webster sought to regularize language and give America its own language apart from England.

I would also like to explore the notion of whether or not there is a such thing as a child. Is a child a being in and of itself, a little alien we cannot understand inside of a miniature human's body, one particular body and mind that is distinct from what it will become, or does the term child just denote time, a life stage, something psychologically void until we provide it with the necessary tools for it to move on to another stage in life, and so on, until it dies? In class today it was mentioned that the child was invented, possibly as a result of adult nostalgia and yearning for one's past. We have explored how nothing is new, nothing is original, "Don't ask what's new, ask what's old". Postmodern theory suggests that nostalgia is a form of pastiche, which is empty parody. It is a way of recycling old images, a sort of bricolage, but it also suggests that there is no real depth, the images don't have a root or an origin from which to garner real meaning and, as such, like we've seen with Plato and the problem with poets and artists, is that there is an inherent mistrust in signs. A bricoleur is an artist, a poet, who may hodgepodge different symbols that are at hand. In a sense then, children may be a bricolage of the symbols we have exposed to and instilled in them. Children are what we want them to be (refer to an earlier blog of mine) and we don't allow their own individual mind time to flourish as God intended, but we teach as we see fit. We create a child, as Pygmalion sculpted Galetea, from a presence of our symbols from our own nostalgic past. That said, there would be nothing unique about the child, they are only recycled versions of ourselves. And isn't that really true. I am just like my father and my mother complains about it all the time!

Great reads!

I read a couple of interesting things last night. In fact, all of my time yesterday that should have been spent on my Spanish homework, or in the ceramic studio where I am unwelcomed as an English major, I spent reading things for pure enjoyment. I was able to proof a couple of stories up for publication in Story Quarterly, and it is always great reading an author without acclaim, I am halfway through this wonderful book called The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman. It was a "forgotten" novel of the beat generation, a coming of age story, that Holden Caulfield couldn't hold a candle to and it even rivals Ball Turret Garp. When I finally got to two pieces, one by Don DeLillo whose post-modernist tendencies really hit the nail on the head of many current nationalistic sentiments (White Noise is an intriguing and perfectly written book, in my opinion, and one of the most popular, if not the only popular book, of the 1980's), and another excerpt by Jean Jacques Rosseau from Emile. You will recall Rosseau as one of the most underrated philosophers of his time, composing the great Pygmalion, which was a copy of the same story of Ovid, which was subsequently copied most notably by George Bernard Shaw. See...nothing is new, and I feel we musn't flatter ourselves.

A conversation from DeLillo's Underworld fits nicely with Dr. Sexson's piece in the Mississippi Review, and aids in his overreaching theme that nothing is new, there is something in everything, you just need to know how to look. The conversation takes place between a Father and a young teenage boy, Shay, in Catholic school and it is about a boot. The conversation is lengthy, but I feel I would be doing you all, you all who are reading this, an egregious disservice. So, in true alturistic fashion, holding tight to the Bohemian ideals of truth, beauty, love and freedom to which I cling so tightly (as well as the Boy Scout Law), I will type the conversation out for you.

"Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty year old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from"

This seemed to animat him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.

"Those are ugly things, aren't they?"

"Yes they are."

"Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chichi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face to face."

"Name the part," I said. "All right. Laces."

"Laces. One to teach shoe. Proceed."

I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.

"Sole and heel."

"Yes, go on."

I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.

"Proceed, boy."

"Theres not much to name, is there? A front and a top."

"A front and a top. You make me want to weep." [I think this is very funny!]

"The rounded part at the front."

"You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?"

"The tongue."

"Well?"

"I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing."

He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.

"You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names."

He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.

A plain black everyday clerical shoe.

"Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel."

"Yes."

"And we've identified the tongue and lace."

"Yes," I said.

With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.

"What is it?" I said.

"You tell me. What is it?"

"I don't know. "

"Its the cuff."

"The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter."

"That's the counter."

"And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter."

"The quarter," I said.

"And the stip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy."

"The welt."

"How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?"....The Father continues naming parts of the shoe from the vamp, eyelet, aglet, grommet and last, and ends by saying to Shay,

"Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said.

"Quotidian."....This excerpt from Underworld ends with Father saying to Shay, "So you signed. The others where shitting, Father, So I shat." in response to Shay signing a political petition in favor of Senator McCarthy during the Red Scare.

I think this conversation is very interesting. The final political statement reminds me of a saying my Godfather, a very smart man, told me: "If they're doing it, that is a good reason not to," which is how I respond to the "vote or die" pressures of the immediate. Why should I vote for someone, either way, if I don't completely agree with them, like them, or am informed of them? It goes against certain principles, I feel. Second, but primarily, is the connection with finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, the hidden pieces of knowledge, displaced fairy tales that are in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. We just need to know what to look for, like the grommet or the Cinderella Story--Its all right there!

The second piece from Rosseau is a response to what is a book and what is a child. From Emile, it begins, "I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about," and it continues, "Is there no way of correlating so many lessons scattered through so many books, no way of focusing them on some common object; easy to see, interesting to follow, and stimulating even to a child? [which will remind us of Phillip Sidney saying the intent of poetry is to entertain and delight] Could we but discover a state in which all man's needs appear in such a way as to appeal to a child's mind, a state in which the ways of providing for these needs are easily developed, the simple and stirring portrayal of this state hsould form the earliest training of the child's imagination." It is like Dr. Sexson says, we must achieve the condition of a child, and look at ourselves through those eyes. Continuing, Rosseau mentions Robinson Crusoe, which, at the time of publication in 1719 was widely regarded as a children's novel. Rosseau says, "Since we must have books, there is one book which, to my thinking, supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature...What is this woderful book? Is it Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe on his island, deprived of the help of his fellow men, without the means of carrying on the various arts, yet finding food, preserving his life, and procuring a certain amount of comfort--this is the thing to tinterest people of all ages, and it can be made attractive to children in all sorts of ways. We shall thus make a reality of that desert island which formerly served as an illustration....Let [the child] learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. Let him think he is Robinson himself; let him see himself clad in skins, wearing a tall cap, a great cutlass...This is the genuine castle in the air of this happy age, when the child knows no other happiness but food and freedom." My interpretation is that, according to Mr. Jean-Jacques, is that the primal comforts of food and shelter, those forced upon Robinson and his man Friday, are the primal joys of a child. For a child to imitate Robinson, his self reliance and relationship with nature, is a great way to manifest his imagination. Moreover, and more importantly, I think Rosseau credits Robinson Crusoe for the novel's displacement value for the child. To act as if that world was his own world, to imitate Robinson's actions. So these are not answers to our questions, but their interactions with each other. Maybe we can't describe one exclusively as it is to itself, but the novel, child, and nature only exist in their interactions with each other. How the child reads the book about nature reflects these reading into their own relationships with nature and the book's character's to manifest their own imagination.

Jason Walker, a ceramic artist, explains how our interaction with nature is his muse, his inspiration of his work. Above is a sample of some of his work, I absolutely love it and you can click Jason Walker to view his artist statement and more of his pieces. I think his work exudes a particular DeLillian post-modernism, contrasting our technological existence and dependency (contrary to those of Robinson Crusoe) to the natural world. Again, it is the connectivity that gives meaning,

Friday's Question

What is a book, a child, and nature? Class is in one hour, so forgive my short answer. I think that each is a source of life, a genesis of animalistic tendencies just waiting to surface. As the child matures, nature blossoms, and the book is read, each is somehow symbol for regeneration, a renewed life cycle. The book changes the way we see the world by recreating dead metaphors, nature grows and dies with each season, and children, a little rose bud, the first word of a novel, begin the cycle all over again. Old archaic notions of spontaneious generation believed that mice came from soiled clothing and wheat huskes, maggots were spawned from rotting meat, geese from pine resin and sea salt, frogs from river mud, rats from garbage, aphids from morning des, and Eve came Adam's rib. Its interesting though, when we consider the eating of meat in nature and life cycles and circular, repetitious relationships, Ovid, as we may recall said, "Come, all of you who claim mortality should look on meats as poison to your bodies--unholy fuel to feed unholy fires. Here are the fruits of life--of field and orchard. Even Hitler had very stringent animal protection laws, such as: It is frobidden to put out one's domestic animal for the purpose of getting rid of it. Richard Brautigan once wrote a poem wherein he witnessed a Livingston man abandon his dog on the side of the road. Well, in revenge, Richard followed this guy home and the next day dumped a truck load of chicken shit all over his front yard. It would seem, given these few examples, that nature is to be respected, and children as well of course. I think that a book is an agency of respectfulness, wherein we may describe how interesting creatures seeming come from nothing its justification from the innocense of children. Below are some stanzas from a W.B. Yeats poem in the summer issue of Lapham's Quarterly:

Out of Nature

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect

II
An aged man in but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its moral dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have saild the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium

The Three Little Pigs

Joab Johnson and Minnie McHugh Johnson were a young couple, newly graduated from college, who planned to be married in September and had a third addition, Little Jiminy Johnson, due in two months, just after the wedding. They were living together in their first starter home, a little two bed one bath located in the northwest part of town. It was small, quaint really, with off-green closer to blue siding and a well kept walkway free of weeds and erosion that led to their little stoop where they rocked in their wicker love swing drinking wine in the evenings. Having so recently graduated, with degrees in Nothing In Particular, they were still undecided as to their career choice (as though it must be absolute) and continued to work the same jobs they had in college, already in debt with over $90,000 in combined student loans. Fortunately, they had purchased their little abode, the “Chateau” as Joab like to call it, at an excellent, unprecedented, historically low sub-prime interest rate of 3%, adjustable after four years, after which the interest rate would adjust to prime. Well, the plan was, at least what Joe Crocker at the bank told them, was that in four years when they would most likely want to sell the house, and it would be worth thirty five percent more what they paid for it. But the times are different now, for the Johnsons and for the rest of America. Real estate values have dropped, it’s a buyer’s market and people are unable to sell their homes and pay their mortgage payments, which, for the Johnson’s, has gone up to 8%. They are unable to pay their mortgage payments of $800 a month on a $400 a month salary working for wages. So one fine Wednesday evening, when Joab and Minnie had gotten home from their respective jobs as a pizza maker and a barista, a knock came at the door (and not so unexpectedly). They opened it to see Joe Crocker, the short little bald man with circular glasses, standing on his custom orthodics near, but not on the welcome mat. And he was clearly not welcome here, at the Chateau, a home built with youthful exuberance and hopefulness, with the NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE in his hand. The thin veil of happiness covering them like a bubble had burst with the rest of American real estate.

Displaced from their homes, they were forced to move in with their closest relatives, Minnie’s brother, Len McHugh. Len was an aspiring Hollywood producer, living well beyond his means in the hills west of Beverly Hills in an exclusive subdivision known as “The Woods”. Joab and Minnie found their lives in The Woods quite lavish and full of wonder. Len was living in the nicest house either Joab or Minnie had ever been in, opulent really, but portraying all the characteristics of the “More-money-than-taste” disease . But Len’s wealth hypothetical—he was living off of borrowed hypothetical dollars, future potential earnings, and driving a BMW sports car off of them too. He took out a loan of $800,000 dollars on a $1,000,000 house; however, he did not have the $200,000 to put down on the house (which is to say he was flat broke, with no money) so he made a deal with Joe Crocker at the bank and Joe worked out an 80/20 loan—which is to say Len was charged 6% interest on the $800,000 dollars and %15 on the $200,000 loan. The home, of course, was expected to nearly double in value by the time it needed to be paid. And that little bald man of a banker, Joe Crocker, stood at Len’s doorstep, huffing and puffing after climbing the flight of marble stairs that led up to it, with a NOTICE OF FORCLOSURE in his hand. And on the front lawn, just beyond a fountain of three little angles peeing into the water was a NOTICE OF PUBLIC AUCTION SIGN. Len had purchased a bad mortgage with outrageously high and unfair interest rates from the bank, a mortgage he would never be able to make good on as an “aspiring actor”. The bank, Joe Crocker, had in turn sold it to the larger firm of Lehman Brothers who filed for bankruptcy because they could not collect the full value of the home because it’s value and depreciated instead of appreciated. This, of course, was happening all over America, and the Federal Government (who had appointed the people who approve these bad loans) is now using your tax dollars to bail these companies out who invested their money in loans approved by Joe Crocker!

And there they were, two college graduates and a pseudo-Hollywood executive, bums on the streets of Southern California, displaced from their own fairy tale lives. Together, the three of them went to Saul Goldstein’s house to stay in Mendocino County, California. Saul was a nervous, freckly-faced audio-visual expert in high school whom Len had somehow, by what was mishap and now seemed like a good stop on Fortuna’s wheel, a lucky deal of kismet, kept in touch with Saul over the years to make sure, if at the very least, he was not found as a windsock in a windless barn. Len had, when Saul opened the front door of his perfectly charming, viable and seemingly self-sustaining brick home to greet his houseguests, expected to see the too frail, too blemished, too self-destructive Saul he had remembered from high school. But Saul seemed to be doing just fine from what Len noticed at a welcoming glance. Saul had ameliorated his unsightliness (which had had him arrested a time or two on the streets for indecent exposure) to a degree of average, but what struck Len, especially amidst the social turmoil that had brought the trio of vagrants to his doorstep, was how well rested and calm Saul was. There were no Asian accents decorating his home, which would have led Len to believe Saul’s apparent wealth of inner peace had been a result of Eastern practices; in fact, Saul’s house reeked of simplicity, even parsimony, to Len. They drank tea together upon settling down, though, but it was not a potent blend of Oriental anything that might induce one into a deeper sense of self-awareness, just Lipton. The three little vagabonds each had a cup, but Saul had three or four, or five or seven, with each pour from the kettle in the kitchen reusing the tea bag. Minnie and Joab had noticed this and commented on this Saul’s slight idiosyncrasy, wondering if the tea loses its flavor.
“Waste not, want not, “ said Saul, tipping his chin up long before the teacup reached his lips.
“That’s an interesting saying,” Len said, with semi-childlike interest, “Do you have any others?”
“Nothing I’m sure you haven’t already learned,” Saul said, staring into the depths of his pale brown tea, dissolving into it another sugar cube.
“What is it that you do,” asked Minnie, leaning into the conversation.
“I’m retired.”
“Retired!” punctuated Len, “You’re my age, give or take, it’s only been twelve years, give or take, since we graduated together. You must have made a killing somewhere, was it the market? You must have an astounding portfolio, though if that’s the case your abode might look into the finer things, like a flat screen, a Porsche, and fine cigars!”
“No, no, wasn’t the market or anything that would encourage the cultivation of other such practices you mentioned,” Saul said, re-engaging himself into the conversation. “I made a modest earning buying and selling audio visual equipment. You make your money when you buy things, buy your straw hats in the winter, and you never make money working for wages, as my father always said. Anyways,” Saul carried on making eye contact with his three listeners, “I saved what I earned rather than spending it on expensive cigars and cheap women, lived beneath my means, not spending more than I earned, and paying with cash instead of credit. I’ve managed to stay out of debt by living simply, as though I were in The Woods. It may not be much, but everything I own I own free and clear, everything I’ve borrowed I’ve been able to pay back, and the investments I’ve made have been smart and intuitive ones, though my accountant and broker usually disagree.”
“I see,” said Len, trying to appear enlightened, “so what you’re saying is that, in life, the bulls make money, the bears make money, and the hogs get slaughtered!”

The Learning Curve

In class Dr. Sexson had mentioned this nation's aversion from smart people. "We want leaders who are just like we are...STUPID!" he exclaimed after lamenting the anger felt towards smart people. Dr. Sexson also jokes about losing friends when they catch just a whiff of your brilliancy and intelligence. This week I received in the mail Vol. 1, no.3 of Lapham's Quarterly. It is a publication that takes a general topic that has a great deal of influence in our lives, such as money or nature, and compiles, in about 300 pages, quotes, excerpts, and articles from a diverse selection of literature. This Fall the topic of choice was learning. The opening essay from the editor, Lewis Lapham, discusses the crisis of learning in our culture, and among this issues contributors on learning (and its efficacy, or lack thereof) are Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgeralt, Helen Keller, Carl Jung, Don Delillo, Descartes, Quintilian, and Buddah, to name a few. I'm about half way through and one excerpt, on children, is very relevant to our class. The except is from Maria Montessori's The Secret of Childhood, and was written in the Netherlands (where many fairy tales originate) in 1936. The piece essentially says that a child's mind is not inactive and in need of molding by adults, but very active, forming a potent psychic live within the child only waiting to surface. Adults and teachers take it upon themselves to manifest a child's imaginative capabilities before they have a chance to do so and adults "have looked upon such assistance as a personal responsibility and have imagined that hey were the molders of the child and the builders of his psychic life. In so doing, adults claim for themselves an almost divine power, making themselves gods to their children, and applying to themselves the words of Genesis: "I will make man in my image." Pride was man's first sin; his attempts to replace God have been the cause of the misery of all his descendants." These are awfully big words, but they have raised one of the more interesting points in all that I've read, except for maybe Booker T. Washington suggesting that slavery was, in a way, good for African Americans because it gave them an industrial education and a great deal of self-reliance. But, in postbellum America, African Americans started to receive a more liberal education. Motessori's main point is that adults need to allow a child, who "is like a soul in a dark dungeon striving to come out into the light, to be born, to grow, which slowly but surely animates the sluggish flesh, calling to it with the voice of its will", the time to externalize their internal, psychic self on their own. But things like fairy tales, which help a child to realize his imaginative capabilities through an agency created and passed on by man and not by the child himself, corrupt a child, Montessori argues. It is as if we force feed the child the apple!, corrput them before they have free will and are given to the mercies their instructors and teachers, made in their image and likeness! Like Francis Picabia said, "Knowledge is an ancient error reflectiong on its youth."

Shelly, Freud, Chomsky, Thompson

My approach this blog is to list some of the main points and seemingly random interjections and explamations in class, try to connect them and offer any further suggestoins or links to the material. Last Wednesday we learned that fairy tales have deep structures, or underlying structures that we all know and understand, regardless of how the fairy tale is written. The linguistic topic of surface and subsurface sentence structure was widely explored by Noam Chomsky in Syntatic Structures (. He is the antithesis of postmodernism in a very cynical world and believes that science and the technologies of today are a good way of understanding history and ourselves. Here is an example of two sentences that demonstrate his surface and subsurface (deep) structures as illustrated by Chomsky : "John pets the dog" and "The dog is pet by John." Both sentences have different surface structures but their deep structure is the same. This point was made by Dr. Sexson in class with his reading of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and also James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."— The opening line of Finnegans Wake, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line. For those of you in Dr. Sexsons Literary Criticism class, Structuralists and Psychoanalysts love the book. It works as the human unconscious works, that is to say, non-linear with cross references, making it hard to read. Although it is regarded as one of, if not the greatest, novel of all time, it met initial harsh criticism I learned. D.H. Lawrence even said of it "what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" But that is was Dr. Sexson says it is too...nothing is really new, everything repeats itself and is retold. We hear and use the same mythologies and fairy tales everyday, they permeate our lives and pulse through the circulatory system of our unconscious, the point of arts and literature, the reason for so many versions of the same fairy tale is to make our language new to us again. One of my favorite critical essays, and piece of literature on the whole, A Defense of Poesy by Percy Shelly, says that the entire point of literature and art is to rejuvenate old hackneyed metaphors and to make our language new to us again. This is the type of essay that explains why we are English majors! Some points read: "Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replensihing it with thoughts of ever new delight...", "We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise...the poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating process...", "Poetry is indeed something diving. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science...", and "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man...It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chos...and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being." Isn't the great stuff!!!?

Other Vocab Words We Learned:
Dithyrambic=melodic, lyrical songs (originally sung for Dionysus
Didactic=Pedagogical=Intended to instruct
Interpolate=instert something between fixed points (as in the details for our fairy tale displacement)

Quotes from Dr. Sexson "You don't get to go back and be a child, but you must become as a child. You must achieve the condition of a child," and "Its not what does it mean, but how does it mean?"
We understand these quotes in the context of the psychoanalytic aspects of Fairy Tales. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and because fairy tales are so dream like and work subliminally on our minds so much so that they are dictating forces in our lives, we may approach them in the same way we do a dream. Freud believed that one cannot interpret one's own dreams, but should instead lay back on a couch facing away from Freud, who does it for you. It's all very complex and I am completely unable to do it, but if you're interested read Freud's The Dream Work, its also on the MSU top 100.

Dr. Sexson also talked about the Universal Quest (also known as a monomyth or the epic hero's journey) of Separation, Initiation, and Return. We are first separated from the familiar (our backyard, Kansas, or Troy), initiated into the unfamiliar (The land of bOZman, the land of OZ, The Sirens, for instance), and are returned and reunited (with a different perspective and possibly a new moral). This got me to thining back a couple of years ago to a social anthropology class I took. Rites of passage in all cultures are very similar, explained Dr. Carucci, in that they involve a separation and an initiation (into womanhood or manhood), with the exception that they have points of liminality in between. A waiting period, purgatory, or possibly a porthole of sorts. I think we can find the Universal Quest, which is very much like a rite of passage, in all of our lives. When we wean ourselves from our mother (I'll do it, one of these days), leaf the nest (Ha!) and strike out on our own, maybe one day to return.

Sam and Sutter sitting in a tree... Peter and Iona Opie are world reknowned folklorists and children's street culturalists who edited the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes as well as creating some of our favorite patty cake games.

Also in passing Dr. Sexson mentioned the Aarne Thompson Motif Index, or the ATU Classification system which contains over 2000 numbered and catalogued motifs for Folk and Fairy Tales and was first construed in 1928. Because there are so many different types of the same fairy tales (mostly due to geographical location) there needs to be a motif index to help classify different plot points of the same folk tale but for different folk. Snow White is listed as 580 or 709 in English versions (the numbers inbetween denot a subcategory which becomes too convoluted. Here is a list of some of the numbers I got from http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html to show you how this works:

ANIMAL TALES
Wild Animals 1-99
The Clever Fox (Other Animal) 1-69
Other Wild Animals 70-99
Wild Animals and Domestic Animals 100-149
Wild Animals and Humans 150-199
Domestic Animals 200-219
Other Animals and Objects 220-299
TALES OF MAGIC
Supernatural Adversaries 300-399
Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative 400-459
Wife 400-424
Husband 425-449
Brother or Sister 450-459
Supernatural Tasks 460-499
Supernatural Helpers 500-559
Magic Objects 560-649
Supernatural Power or Knowledge 650-699
Other Tales of the Supernatural 700-749

Once upon a time...

I was scanning through some books on children's literature, more specifically scholarship and criticism surrounding it, in the library this evening and found some interesting things. One book, Feeling Like a Kid, by Jerry Griswold, stated five main themes that coarsed through children's lit: Snugness (as in blanket forts and mole holes); Scariness (Little Red Riding Hood); Smallness (Stuart Little), Lightness (Peter Pan), Aliveness (Pinocchio). These, Griswold explained, are some emotions or observations that children associate with. One book, by Jack Zipes, said of Fairy Tales which completely, unequivocally disagrees with what I said below of the moral of the story being just that, "Fairy tales are not ageless, universal, and beautiful in and of themselves, and they are not the best therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them." What I think he means by this is that, in another clarifying quote of his, fairy tales are "made to ligitmate or criticise the course of Western Civilizing process". Fairy tales change with the times, they are a type of subconscious social commentary (and I am sure we'll have plenty of Blog posts about Freud and the subconscious) which has a proufound effect on adult life, and they are ever changing, yet ever rendolent in our lives. As such, there are as we have seen, many different renditions of the same fairy tale in order to occupy a new and vacant social issue or more of present day. It, in a way, becomes a copy of a copy of a copy as in Plato's big problem with poetry as I mentioned below. We have Cinderella and we have the Gregory McGuire novels which have more socially pertinent plot points and endings, where maybe not everything happens happily ever after. Maybe someone has to die. There are movies where fairy tale figures are displaced into reality (Enchanted) and reality figures are placed into another world through some befuddling porthole (usually a Martin Lawrence film). Fairy tales (and other childrens media) are adapted to fit the social climate, and subvert it in many ways as well (Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling!!!). And why should this not somehow reach the adults? Over 90% of purchases made by parents are influenced by their kids. They are a marketing, money making jack pot (media wise)! And their attention span and reading level is comparable with that of most adults as well!

So tonight, Sam and I were walking around Movie Lovers and she suggested we get a fairy tale. We rented Penelope, with Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore. I don't want to give any of it away and I highly suggest renting it. It had some great fairy tale puns in it; some political and social commentary; generic, repetitive, but lovable plot cliches; and it ended happily ever after! She used a two way mirror as her portal to see from inside of her fairy tale room to which she was imprisoned by her misguided mother to look out and view her possible suitors in a library/parlor filled with hundreds of first editions! And when it was over I wanted to watch it again. You also might want to read some reviews. There were some movie critics who were apparently upset by the fact that a "fairy tale" opened and ended with "once upon a time," and "happily ever after."

I had also read earlier today that fairy tales popularize the conflicts that we humans inherently have as moral animals. This got me to wondering whether or not the five main conflicts of Mythological Literature (learned from Dr. Sexson in Mythologies) can pertain, in some arbitrary way or another to children's lit. These conflicts are: woman v man, individual v. society, man v. god, young v. old, living v. dead. Can any one think of how these conflicts are embodied in children's literature? Who are the characters? Cinderella is young, and her step-mom is old, then you have the Fairy God Mother, the Society Ball which she must return from by the stoke of midnight, and the way she interacts with Prince Charming, and death is what presumably ensues if things do not work out "happily ever after". Can we add any other conflicts? Human v. Animal, perhaps?

What's any of this worth?

We talk about canonical literature as having literary value, or worth, in a scholastic environment, and more importantly, having a resounding impact on society. I like to consider myself a bit of a rare book collector, having a small library of first editions. So I started to look up book values on the internet for first editions of some of my favorite childrens literature. These prices are usually dictated by the condition of the book, it's popularity and importance, however, are what makes it worth collecting. For instance, the Magna Carta sold at auction this year for 38 million dollars. In the Auction business, most emphatically with art and collectibles, an items appraised and fair market value are heavily influenced by provenance, or where the item has been and where its going. What cultural significance does it import, and what will its significance presumably be sixty years down the road when you want to sell it for a profit. So what of childrens literature? Here are some values for first editions. We can ascertain from some of the prices that art makes its value and everlasting importance (like aurauchs and durable pigments)that much greater.

Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White, $2500.00
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roahl Dahl, $17,000
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, $35,000
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss, $14,500
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, $118,800
Beatrix Potter watercolors, $80,000 to $120,000 at auction

Moral or No Moral

In the introduction of our book we find that the principal difference amongst fairy tales is that there either is or isn't a moral. This reminds me of two things. I discovered in my 300 Lit Crit class that, according to Phillip Sydney in his Apology for Poetry, "Poesy therefor is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimeses, that is to say, a representing...a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight." Well, the same could be said for fairy tales, I think. Their aim is to both teach and delight, or maybe just one or the other, but these are its basic aims. Furthermore, fairy tales, to a more eccentric degree than poetry I would think, are a representation, but of what I might ask? Are they representations of the soul, or caricatures of reality, or of an idea? But once the idea or conception or what have you is represented through the art and language of the fairy tale, we see representations of it, and thusly its displacement. Its displacement becomes representation of a representation. This is Plato's idea of the three beds, each one being further from the truth (the idea, the actual, and the representation), but, in the case of a fairy tale, there may never have been a basic, conceptual truth to begin with, only an abstraction. How near or far it is from any truth or aspect of reality seems arbitrary in a fairy tale, as it might be in any sort of literature and poetry, as long as its intentions are to teach and delight.

On the other hand, let me suggest of fairy tales without morals. I was scrolling through my Mythologies blog from a previous class and I had written about how Nathaniel Hawthorne displaced certain stories from Ovid's Metamorphosis into two children's book with apparent morals. They were called the Wonderbook for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales, respectively. Their intention was to teach a moral through the fantastic images and narrative style (a story within a story) of the fairy tales adopted from Ovid's stories. But as we learned from Dr. Sexson about The Metamorphosis, "There is no moral!", or, "The moral of the story is the story". It is not necessarily a life lesson or broad societal impacts that makes a fairy tale or story great, but it is the story itself, in and of its own beauty. And just the same, it's damn near impossible to extract an inkling of righteousness or morality from the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela as it is from the Juniper Tree (in both stories someone is chopped up and fed to a loved one). But both are great stories, beautifully imaginative and originally oral.

Memory

Memory and oral tradition plays a very important role, I think, the all of the foundational literature, especially mythical and whimsical. I thik this is primarily due to the fact that they were, and needed to be, comitted to memory. This is most especially true with those canonical texts that were contrived before the printing press. It seems interesting to me, though, that everything that is worth remembering is written down, and promptly forgotten because it has been written. Most of the fairy tales that I know (and not very well at that)I have never read but have remembered from my childhood. Incidentally, I was making enemies and losing friends the other day as I was explaining that Memory, or Mnemosyne to someone who wasn't particularly interested. I had recommended to her Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and we were discussing it. Nabokov, I told her, was also a lepidopterist (butterfly enthusiast and collector) and discovered his own butterfly which is named after him. Nabokov has written several other books, including one entitled Speak Memory, which he was forced to title so because his original title, Speak Mnemosyne, would have been unprounancable by his readers. "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Nabokov, Lolita. What Humbert Humbert is saying in the final lines of Lolita is that through the everlastingness of art, its durable pigments of paint and ink, immortlity may be had. The only way Humbert's love for Lolita may last forever is if he writes it down (while in jail). It seems that would be the same for the literature of our childhood. Had it not been written, and magically illustrated, it certainly would not have had the same effect, would not have been so salient in our imaginations and our sensibilities.