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