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
Sunday, December 7, 2008
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.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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
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.
Friday, November 7, 2008
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?
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