Clubbing yourself to death with it

In honor of my final blog post for a writing-intensive course, I'm going to write about the ups, downs, explorations of writing.  Because, for some reason, it seems far more appealing to talk about clubbing myself to death than clubbing to death a story of a dead baby.  I'm just kidding (mostly).  Beloved is an excellent book, I'm just not in the mood to sob over an unbalanced combination of a sad story and a bad headache from thinking too hard.  Instead, I'm feeling reflective.  Thus I invite you to join me on my journey backward through this wonderful semester.

 

"I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head.  It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it."

-Richard Matheson (http://writingquotes.tumblr.com/post/36351942769/im-sitting-in-my-office-trying-to-squeeze-a-story#notes)

 

"A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thought of the moment.  Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured because they seldom return."

-Francis Bacon (http://writingquotes.tumblr.com/post/36457430495/a-man-would-do-well-to-carry-a-pencil-in-his#notes)

"When you write, you are telling a story . . . to yourself.  When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself . . . over and over again."

-Kai Strand (http://writingquotes.tumblr.com/post/36281784961/when-you-write-you-are-telling-a-story-to#notes)

Upward mobility:  First of all, I would like to point out how happy I am that every post has been based around a direct quote.  It was a stretch sometimes, but at least I can say that goal was accomplished.  Through this course, I have no doubt my writing has gotten better, especially with the outlet this blog provides.  While a big part of this improvement was motivation to make something I'm proud of, I think the thing that moved me most to keep trying was that I wanted to know myself better and affirm my writing style.  The more effort I put into my writing, the more challenges arose--challenges that I hadn't even considered would be a roadblock for me.  But as I continued to write, learn, and explore, I've gotten increasingly closer to conquering them.  It's still a work in progress, of course (and I fear it will be for a very long time), but all hope is not lost.

Now for those roadblocks:  The biggest problem I faced this semester was writer's block.  It wasn't something I'd never experienced before, but i hadn't consistently dealt with it in writing up until now.  Suggestions can be given--and many helpful ones were--but it's a battle that ultimately you must face alone, because only you can know what works and what doesn't.  Through experimenting with solutions, though, it was clear that I need to loosen up.  I have a horrible habit.  I have the subject all planned out; all of the points and details float around and attempt to organize themselves in my head.  The problem is, I end up staring for what feels like forever at a white blank page.

 

I prefer to edit as I go than jot everything down in a rough copy then edit and sort it out.  One reason for this is simply that I get bored reading the same thing over and over again to myself.  I revised one paper this year, and, while I think it's one of the better things I've written, it was also one of the hardest things I've done.  Another factor is that once the words are written, they feel permanent.  I have trouble letting go of that desire to only write something down after I map out the perfect sentences in my head.  But when exhaustion kicks in and the right words aren't coming, the process turns into an unproductive waste of time, ending up no further than it started, which is always a discouraging feeling.

 

Right now I'm experimenting with keeping "a pencil in my pocket," so to speak, and writing down everything in a separate document.  That way, I have a hard copy of my thoughts, which can trigger other thoughts and almost organize themselves.  I haven't decided yet whether or not this method works for me.  I definitely feel more productive, but I've been ending up with too much to talk about, and it still takes me hours to fit everything together in a way that feels right.

Despite the challenges I know I'll continue to face, I'm glad they're there.  It's a sign that I'm writing enough and know myself as a writer well enough to encounter them.  Without problems, it doesn't mean that problems don't exist for you necessarily, because there's always a possibility that the issues haven't been revealed to you yet.  This class, especially through the blogs, has made me a more confident writer by allowing me to practice writing on topics I want to write about.

"An envious heart . . .

*OLD POST* Having publishing difficulties.  I recommend that you continue scrolling down and read my next post.

. . . makes a treacherous ear."  Janie's friend Pheoby speaks this lovely line in Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Janie's clearly of a higher status than the others in her community, as is made obvious by the responses when she walks in for the first time in apparently a long time.  "Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times.  So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish."  These women in the community are insanely jealous of Janie.  They can forget about her while she's gone, but eventually all the stored up energy has to pour out.

"It was a weapon against her strength and even if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level someday," the narrator says about the women on the porch in regard to Janie.  This is a perfect example of the strategy fifth grade girls use to tear down their peers, trying to feel better about themselves by making another feel worse.  The important thing to emphasize here is the method they use to destroy.  Their method is to substitute their visions over reality.  Sound familiar?

"An envious heart makes a treacherous ear."  Because they're blinded by their envy for Janie, the women are overlooking the fact that they're all trying to delude each other into thinking that she's a much worse person than she actually is.  (Thank goodness they're not the narrators of this story!)  Janie is able to remain confident because she has discovered the power of her invisibility.  Nothing the ladies say can bother her, because she knows they aren't really seeing her, but rather their perception of her.

In Invisible Man, people see the mask.  The narrator literally puts on a disguise and he's seen as an entirely different person.  He can act submissive and undermine them with grins if he chooses, and that is exactly what they will see.  For example, Mr. Norton sees the narrator as "his fate" at the beginning of the novel.  It makes no difference what the narrator actually does, for Norton has already placed this image of what he expects the narrator to be.  Likewise, the gossipy women in Their Eyes Were Watching God have placed their image onto Janie.  As if maybe if they blind themselves with their "truth" enough, they'll actually feel better about themselves....

Nothing ever dies

This book is posing many difficulties.  Not necessarily because of quality or content--quite the opposite, really!  First off, I have a confession.  You see, over the weekend, after finishing the allotted pages, I realized I was too into the book to put it down.  I continued being drawn into the book.  For several hours.  Until there was no more book left to be drawn into.  Unfortunately, I have now tangled myself up in two frustrations: longing to talk about it and figuring out what I can talk about.  I cannot get over the intricate beauty of this book.  All I want to do is write about it and work through the details with other people.  Neither of which I can do, because spoiling is considered a bad thing.  Hmph.  Adding to the trouble, I'm having trouble figuring out what I am allowed to discuss.  Time is so convoluted in this book that I can't know what's happened without going back through and rereading what's happened.

Some novels are nice and clear and place everything in chronological order.  But Morrison's not playing nice here.  She's playing hard and thought-provoking, which is fantastic!  Just not for finding passages and figuring out where we are.  It takes so long to look for a quote in this book that I might as well read straight through it again until I find the part I want.  The events in Toni Morrison's world of Beloved don't happen in a chronological order.  These immortal pasts occur in the order they arise.  Instead of asking what's happened in the character's life so far, it's more accurate to ask what has been revealed to the reader so far, which is a complicated question that's sometimes hard to define.  The timing of the memories depend on both the moment they make themselves known to the characters (in order to draw a parallel) and the spot it is absolutely necessary that the reader learns something new.

Time is circular.  Things change when Paul D., a member of her past, enters the picture.  However, a lot has happened to both Sethe and Paul D. since they've last seen each other.  Both characters have pasts that they're suppressing.  Sethe's suppression is upfront and honest; she knows she is cramming it behind her.  Each day, she faces "the serious work of beating down the past" (87).  It's not obvious at first that Paul D. is doing the same thing.  He, too, is beating back the past, but he's more indifferent to the images.  In his quest for manhood, he shoves his scarring past away.  "He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  Its lid rusted shut" (86).  The primary way we see the emergence of Paul D.'s suppression is through the subtle glimpses of thing we don't yet know about.  Until his past between Sweet Home and Ohio is revealed, there are only little hints that there's a bigger story there.  Paul D's heart has gone so cold, his tobacco tin so rusted shut, that the suppression is almost unconscious.  However, it's interesting that, when their lives are merged, Sethe and Paul D. not only draw the stories out of each other, they illuminate and clarify the vision of the past.

Perhaps a more important question is this: why do the characters feel the need to beat down their pasts?  Paul D. feels the need to defend his manhood.  Originally a Sweet Home man, later treated as an animal, he's had a rough life.  He's been through Hell and survived--but has he loved?  I'm not sure what to think about this point.  Would loving make him more or less of a man?  Does that explain why he starts to break during his time with Sethe?

Sethe, however, has a whole lot she feels she must defend.  She's running away from her Sweet Home horrors along in addition to the murder of her baby that's forever on her conscience.  I am pro-Sethe here, but I'm not entirely sure that the book is.  The whole sense of the novel seems to be that if you confront the past, you can move onward to the future.  When you run away from it, you only get deeper into it.  Her fear of Sweet Home directly leads to the murder of her daughter.  Is this implying that it would have been better for her to face Schoolteacher and subject her children to that life?  I don't see that as the case.  Sethe was right between a rock and a hard place, and she did what she saw best for both her and her children.  But her fear of Sweet Home causes her to hold back the stories, inwardly dwelling on them, making it seem like they're happening over and over again in her head.  "Some things just stay . . . . Places are still there . . . . The picture [of Sweet Home] is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; . . . it's going to always be there waiting for you" (45).  Early on in the novel, Sethe lectures Denver about why she can never visit Sweet Home.  It's a sign of her past rising up and engulfing her present.  In Sethe's world, because she can't move forward, the past is always there, occurring and repeating on an endless loop.  Beloved is literally the past coming to life.  Sethe feels that she must continue to remain stationary and mourn in order to justify and apologize for what she's done.  She feels indebted to her lost child.  This lingering guilt causes Sethe to continually push back her past.

Unfortunately, you can't have a future without a past.  The only case of a past-less future is a baby.  For babies, there is only a future.  This is one of the big reasons that killing babies is so much more horrendous than killing adults.  Killing a baby is taking away an indefinite future, full of maximum possibilities, because as you age and develop your character, there are less paths to choose to go down.  Sethe sacrifices her future to give her baby one.  This is where it becomes important that Paul D. is there.  He both offers an outside view and offers hope of a new life.  As his past lies side-by-side with Sethe's, they can see how their stories entwine.  Without connecting life stories and sharing pasts, it is impossible to move on to create a future.  A past held back is a volcano waiting to erupt.

This post has gone off in many directions, and I wish it had trailed into many more.  There's so much to talk about, because everything is a reaction.  Many are circular, where one event leads to another, which leads to another, that ends up right back at the start.  Others are catalysts, where something runs into another, setting both off in different directions than expected.  When time is measured in terms of these collisions between the past, present, and future, it makes sense that we see things in the order thoughts collide and are pieced together.  It doesn't lend well to mental organization, though.  If you get nothing more from this, take away the moral of my story: don't read ahead.  The immediate gratification of discovering what happens is nothing compared to the torture of having to suppress the desire to discuss it.

I wasn't born to make them happy

"Scoby's eyes reddened and he started to sniffle.  He was cracking under the pressure.  Watching his hands shake, I realized that sometimes the worst thing a n----- can do is perform well.  Because then there is no turning back" (118).

It's the first scene we see Nick starting to break.  When you're perfect, all the pressure is put on you.  So many are putting their faith and hope in you.  After all, isn't perfection what we all shoot for?  While some are putting their faith in you entirely, others despise you.  They hate you for being the perfect one, especially if that you is black.  Shouldn't the perfect one be the "racially perfect" one as well?  It's sick, the hatred that's out there.

Gunnar, realizing both the consequences of perfection and the signs that his best friend can't bear that burden, takes Nick's spot.  Gunnar definitely seems to be the second runner up, a follower of Scoby.  Very self-aware, he recognizes his apathetic tendencies and knows that that's what will allow him to carry it for Nick.  Nick is the truly reluctant leader.  He should be the leader in this novel, but if he were, he wouldn't be able to handle it.  He knows that's not where he wants to be.  Yes, Gunnar is also a reluctant leader, but not as reluctant.  Gunnar sees himself rising up and does nothing about it.  He's reluctant more just because he doesn't care.  All he cares about is Scoby, so he takes on the load for his friend.

Even then, he knows that Scoby's losing it.  Gunnar can't take it all away, because Scoby's amazingness just cannot be concealed.  While writing to Yoshiko during his time away for basketball, his concern shines through.  "I think Scoby is going insane.  The scrutiny he is undergoing is unbelievable....They would be a lot better off if they simply called Scoby a god and left it at that, but no way they'll proclaim a skinny black man God" (192).  It has got to be hard getting cups thrown at you nearly every game.  Gunnar just happens to have a special, unrecognized talent to not care about anything and make a joke out of everything.  This, coincidentally, happens to be Scoby's weakness.  Other people get to him easily.  He wants to be a part of something, rather than apart from everything.  Nick Scoby's a wonderful, well-developed character whose gifts drag him down into a depression that doesn't end until his death.

How does the music make you feel, man?

In the midst of the L.A. Riots, jazz instrumentalist Eric Dolphy blasts through the headphones of Nick Scoby.  "I feel like I'm dry heaving while free free-falling from fifteen thousand feet" is Gunnar's description of the style.  His description is scarily accurate.  Dolphy is considered to be on the forefront of "free jazz."  For example, his tune "Out There" is definitely free.  Free-falling and trainwrecking.  (In a good way, though!)

Dolphy acts outside the limits of jazz.  In "Out There," dissonance is everywhere and  key signatures are so hard to identify that many times throughout the song you get a sense of atonality.  It creates a really curious, cool, surreal effect.  Switching between flute, alto sax, and bass clarinet, this guy can do anything, and he does.  His goal was to make his instruments sound as close to human or animal as possible, playing on the music the occurs naturally.

One of the best ways to get to know someone is to look for patterns in the people he/she hangs out with.  Dolphy's two longest musical partners were Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.  Bassist Charles Mingus, as we discussed in class once upon a time, was a musical genius.  Very full of passion and emotion, Mingus enjoyed things such as moaning while playing and having everyone solo simultaneously.  It worked well for him; he's one of the few well-know bass players.  Then there's incredible tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.  Personally, he's one of my favorite artists.  Known for his abstract techniques and crazy speed, Coltrane loved to take advantage of multiphonics, overtones, screeches, and the altissimo register.  Basically, he experimented with his sax and regularly used methods and notes that there aren't keys for.  Magazines described Dolphy and Coltrane's combined works as "anti-jazz."  Eric Dolphy's two best friends were (lovably) crazy.  His music definitely reflects that.

What interests me most, though, about Eric Dolphy is his death.  In June of 1964, Dolphy collapsed on stage.  Everyone, including the doctors, assumed he was a drug addict and collapsed as a result of overdose, so they didn't bother testing him for anything else.  It turned out that he was a diabetic and had gone into a diabetic coma.  But the stereotype of black jazz musician drug addicts took over, and he was judged without a fair trial, without any tests, so he died.  It's a prime example of the way masks are automatically thrown up without a second thought that maybe there's something wrong.

All in all, Dolphy's one of the most influential, out-there jazz musicians to this day.  "Dolphy's horn matched the streetside cacophony flutter for flutter, screech for screech" (130).  His music was real.  It symbolized real life.  How does the music make me feel? Inspired.

Armed With a Spray Can Soul

Coldplay's latest album, Mylo Xyloto, was released in October of last year.  Chris Martin, Coldplay's lead singer, says the album is based significantly on the 70's New York graffiti. "I've spent a lot of my life playing it a bit safe or conforming to something, even though I didn't agree with it.  So I have respect and admiration for people who don't," said Martin (Michaels).  The band also made a comic strip to go along with the album, and much of it had to do with painting the town with colors to wake it up, while others try to silence them, as shown in the music video for it (shown below).  I recommend looking up the lyrics, too.  They're all relevant to this post, though it would be overkill for me to analyze the entire song here. This website is pretty accurate.

This song, "Hurts Like Heaven," is the first full song on the album, about the empowerment that comes with the graffiti.  "On a concrete canvas under cover of dark/ On a concrete canvas I'll go making my mark/ Armed with a spray can soul."  Graffiti is a form of expression.  It's a magical feeling, like you're making an impact somehow.  As one of the artists in the movie said, "I did something to make your eyes open up, right?"  It's about the expression.  It's about being seen.

As we've seen in the the books we've been reading, it's easy to place a mask on a person by not looking deep enough into them.  We walk past people all the time, not bothering to go deeper.  Seeing phrases pass by on a train, or even poetic lines scrawled out on desks, it's a whole lot harder to pass it by without some of it sticking.  It's because we identify with it.  We have no one to place a mask of insanity on.  There is no choice but to think about it in the context of yourself.  "When you use your heart as a weapon, then it hurts like heaven."  Pouring something out for all to see, without a face associated, causes more hurt, thought, and impact, than anything else can.

(retrieved from http://www.coldplaying.com/forum/showthread.php?t=88316)



Michaels, Sean. "New Coldplay Album Inspired by Graffiti." The Guardian.
     Guardian News and Media, 26 Nov. 2010. Web. 14 Nov. 2012.
     <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/26/
     new-coldplay-album-inspired-graffiti>.

Lords of sounds and lesser things

It's around election time, and once again I'm hit by how uninformed I am.  My peers sit around debating the debates while I'm left clueless and confused.  Honestly, though, I'm not complaining.  Although I know I should be, and I'm sure I'll get there someday, I'm just not interested enough to follow the latest politics and develop solid opinions.  It's not that I don't care how the country's run; rather, it's more that I care enough to not insert my blind, parroted opinion into the middle of the madness.  But at the same time, I have yet to work up the motivation to educate myself.  Perhaps this is perceived as bad, or lazy, or unpatriotic, but really.  Right now, all I can see politics doing for me is causing stress and arguments.

I'm not just this way with politics.  I'm always one of the last to hear the latest gossip.  Lunchtime conversations often leave me puzzled and irritated.  But once again, I don't have a whole lot of desire to hear this gossip or engage in these discussions.  To me, it seems to be an unnecessarily wordy (not to mention potentially hurtful) waste of time.  This is probably what threw me off most about Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Zora Neale Hurston made her novel especially focused around this society filled with rumors.  The stage is set with Janie strutting into town in her overalls while people are talking behind her back.  "They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs.  It was mass cruelty."  Mass cruelty? What kind of a place is this, that it's glorified and identified by its cruelty from the very first chapter?  Sure, it seems like a happy pleasant place while skimming through it, but mass cruelty?  Really?  This is worse than physical violence, because, as we saw in Invisible Man, words have a deep power.  Words stick.  They hurt and the hurt takes quite some time to heal.

Could it be, though, that the gossip war was meant to show Janie's strength?  "Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until after her gate slammed behind her."  It takes a lot of effort to hold your head up high while walking through a group where you know people were just talking about you.  This image is very different from that of the young girl daydreaming under a pear tree.

What's even stranger is how Hurston manages to change the reader's perspective on the gossip.  Earlier in the timeline of Janie's life, she admires the ritual of the people on the porch of the store chatting.  The Mule Talk, based on the number of times it's mentioned, seems to be pretty prominent in the functioning of the community of Eatonville.  Janie longs to participate in these gossip circles, but is always forbidden.  It's a completely different perspective than I'm used to.  But I think I can see why it's fantasized so much.  Everything seems better until you get to the center of it.