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