Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway is a good followup to Do the Right Thing because it’s another story that happens all in one day. However, Woolf’s novel uses the form in a different way. She uses a single day as a lifetime, dissecting each moment in order to show the way it reverberates both back and forth in time. On page forty three Clarissa remembers a scene at the lake of her youth that shows the way one’s life can accumulate and dissipate, how parts of yourself can seem lost only to appear in a flash of memory that sat dormant for years.

“For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.”

It’s hard to sink your claws into your own life, to bundle it up, step back and objectively view it. We can’t look directly at it, but must always see ourselves through some kind of medium: a mirror, a moment, a person. By becoming her whole life, both child and woman, Clarissa is able to see all of it. Her action could even be interperated to be a witnessing of her own birth–the way she is described to set her life before her parents like a foundling child.

In a way, the entire book tries to do what Clarissa feels she did at the lake. The book unifies Clarissa out of all her pieces. Peter’s account of things joins to hers through the reader and so do Septimus’ thoughts. His mind chips off and clings to ours like barnacles, and in turn, everything we collect is projected onto Clarissa.

Do the Right Thing

I was really moved by this movie and I don’t usually like to analyze art that is so beautiful. I like to leave it on the level of emotion and wordless expression. For it’s possible, perhaps, to bring new life out of a work of art but never to heighten the art itself. I think it can only be as powerful as its content. But I was struck in discussion afterwards by the idea that the characters are merely stereotypes and caricatures. It’s true they are all stock characters: the drunk who tips his cap, the gold-chain-wearing unbuttoned-to-the-fourth-hole Italian pizzeria owner, the tough black-power radical. They don’t get fleshed out much further than that. Yet, Do the Right Thing somehow makes you feel deeply, and if not for the characters, what or who for?

One thing that’s unusual about the movie that perhaps makes up for some weakness in the characters, is the continuity of it. The almost unbroken one day period stacks all the actions on top of each other until they seem practically simultaneous, till they become a single mass of movement: the essence of the day. And the day is hot. All the people are molecules rapidly ricocheting off each other and it’s getting hotter, coming to a boil. The heat makes Do the Right Thing believable because it elevates, takes every pitch up three octaves, sets people vibrating like violin strings, until the caricature is natural. We find fault in the stereotype because it is simplified, it is unnatural because it is too direct and compact. Yet the heat of the day simplifies everything, cuts out the characters’ inessential qualities and reduces them down to their most basic, their most stilted and animal two-dimensionality. Operas operate on the same principle. They are totally unnatural, with every bit of dialogue sung and every character well-defined as to where they fall between good and evil. Yet, since the tenor is maintained throughout an opera, the simplicity and intensity do not seem false.

Putting the movie in the context of an opera also helps to answer the question of whether Do the Right Thing is a political movie. Even though it is broad and beyond the scope of the characters involved, it is not about racism or civil rights. It’s broad because it’s about time piling up, about the old men sitting against a blood red sunset wall while the fire hydrant’s bucking children off its saddle and the pizza parlor’s all a clatter and the baby’s crying and the sun’s rising higher and the needle’s on the record and even though it’s all happening at once and all this activity’s squashed tight together in Bed-Stuy it’s so hard to feel your way into another person that you’ll never make a connection till his blood’s on your knuckles, caked onto gold rings LOVE and HATE.

Jazz Pt. 1

“The boy ushers’ hard hands–knuckle-tough from marbles and steelies, from snowballs packed to bullet strength. . . . .–these hands were reaching toward the blade she had not seen for a month at least and was surprised to see now aimed at the girl’s haughty, secret face” (91).

There are so many sharp contrasts and irregularities in this passage. The boys’ hands are hardened not by mean, dogged, labor, but by street games. Yet the games are not light and easygoing, they are precise and regimented (“snowballs packed to bullet strength,”) training for youth that is as important as anything their parents ever taught them. The packing of a snowball is an especially resonant image since the action echoes the shaping and molding of their lives that is their constant occupation. Then there is the strange role the ushers are playing: holding back a woman that might as well be their mother. She is, however, unsure of, and surprised by, herself, while the boys are decisive and forceful. Later in the chapter, Violet is with Alice and wonders out loud who the adults are now? Are THEY them, to be looked up to, and heeded? The funeral scene makes it clear that age doesn’t clear up the world’s mysteries, and shows that the self-assuredness of most adults is a front and an illusion.

The Next Slum?

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Here’s another article about the changing American landscape.
People are moving back to our country’s major cities, and as a result the suburbs are beginning to be deserted. One study cited in the article finds that by 2025 40% of homes built on a 6th of an acre or more will be un-needed if housing trends continue. The houses won’t just be abandoned though. In a reversal of recent history, as cities become more and more gentrified, the poor will be forced out to the suburbs, turning Mcmansions and their cul de sacs into tommorow’s slums. See what you think.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

Quicksand

Quicksand is certainly not a literary masterpiece, as a few in class have already noted, but it does provide a look into a very complicated period in the history of black American cultural identity. A black middle class was beginning to develop, and with it came an intense debate about what the race should be striving for. It was perhaps the moment when blacks were most openly divided. On one side of the debate were those who abandoned black culture for a comfortable life. They moved downtown, adopted white manners of speech and dress, and often married white men or women. They were unconcerned with the rest of the black community, and tried to distance themselves from their roots.

On the opposite end of the spectrum were followers of Marcus Garvey, who believed in boosting african-american status by embracing their blackness.

They advocated the development of black-owned businesses and took pride in their African heritage. They wanted little to do with whites and looked to Africa as the future home of all the world’s blacks.

In-between those two extremities lay many gradations of sentiment. Helga’s friend Anne Grey is one example. She hates whites (and blacks that are mixed up with whites.) She believes fiercely in the advancement of the black cause, yet spurns black culture, its speech, fashion, and music.

Helga herself embraces many schools of black thought over the course of the novel, changing her mind in firecracker pops and never turning back. Each time this happens she undergoes such a transformation that it’s hard to think of her as a single character, but despite this and other literary flaws, the novel serves well as a framework upon which to explore the American black experience in the early 20th century.

Midnight Cowboy

I love the strides in that movie–Joe’s easy longhorn gait and Rico’s hot-coal soft shoe say so much about them. Joe moves through his life the way he walks. Like Abe Lincoln, I reckon he’d walk six miles just to return sixty five cents that he overcharged a customer. He’s got time the way he’s got distance in his step. Rico’s just like his walk too. He’s always half in schizophrenic agony and half in intricate pickpocket delicacy. When they dance to an orange juice commercial on the radio, Joe and Rico hit more than their own stride, they hit New York City: their dance is like sitting on a radiator that’s burnin and warmin you all at once and that’s like New York I think. It consumes you in really lovely, jittery flames.

Joe is my kinda boy. He makes everything happy. He knows beauty when he sees it.

Say Thank You Most Kindly To All That’s Holdin The Door

    There are so many stories in this city. So many lives wrapped up in swaddling clothes.  Here’s something from the New Yorker about your doorman.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/02/04/080204ta_talk_widdicombe

And by the by if anyone wants to go to the Meytex cafe–the Ghanaian hangout mentioned in here–holla at me.

Detroit Arcadia

This is an article from Harper’s about Detroit and the way that it seems to be returning to wilderness. It finds hope in the city’s decay, finds beauty, and a new idea of a city, one that sustains itself solely off of itself. Read it boysies. LUV FROM THE MITTEN.

http://docs.google.com/View?docID=a4w3qmhgdwb_252hnsgc4&revision=_latest

Wednesday Lecture

This silent Coney Island was one of my favorites. The summer glow in the background is like the shed skins of cicadas–an echo of the sweltering cotton candy noon day. The light is also beautiful in each of the beach’s thumbprints. It dips just a little way in, as if digging for water, then gets lost in the inky well down there. The man is peaceful and lonely. He’s a whole life locked in sleep.

I liked what Dominica said about Robert Frank’s ability to find beauty in the most horrifying scenes. The picture of the gawkers at a lower east side murder definitely succeeded, mixing up grins with faints and curiosity with agony, all these things painted–or at least smudged– on people’s faces.

Marine Park Brooklyn

Flatbush Ave./Brooklyn College. Last stop on the #2 train, the #2 red dye train. It’s nice to keep on once the train can’t keep on no more. Makes me feel like ol’ Genghis Kahn and his brother Don in that Dylan song (“they could not keep on keepin on.”) Out the station my boy and I found ourselves on Flatbush Ave and avenue H. Out there the streets go all the ways to X. If it’s alphabet city in Manhattan I think it’s alphabet soup, or maybe alphabet swamp, there. It starts off dense and hopping in the tail end of E. Flatbush. Everybody sparkling that’s standing around outside the rim shop and there’s fifteen people jammed inside a delivery van, all the doors open, goin no place, just catching a little windshield sunshine. As we walked the road got wider and the houses farther apart. They started to add flourishes to themselves–bits of cornice gingerbread and wrought-iron icing–started to bulk up and spawn garages. The city gives itself over to the suburbs so quickly there that I wondered if I wouldn’t find myself in a forest in a moment. A little earlier, less suburban, probably still in East Flatbush I said that it was my favorite neighborhood ever, but I can’t really remember what it was that I liked so much. I think it might partly have been the van I passed with writing on the windshield in wax pencil: “Gobbler Junk” it said, then the price. It was too sunny to have clear judgement, too glorious a day to put reasons to your feelings.

We turned onto Avenue U and my friend said don’t you think we need to get some sodas or something? Reminded me of the boys in Gummo shooting cats for dough so they can get some milkshakes. I laughed. He got ice tea I got some peanuts for shelling. We came to the edge of Marine Park (the biggest in Brooklyn and only 48 acres smaller than central park) and turned onto a dirt path in between some handball courts and a cricket pitch. Then we really found ourselves in the wilderness. It was like a corn maze, except taking place of corn was a ten foot tall reed called elephant grass. Even though we were surrounded by grass we could see more of the horizan than we’ve been able to for a long time in New York and we knew that water was close.

Little bit of city left though. Passed a man sitting on a rock getting head from some other man. They didn’t seem too startled when we came by–all business.

We got to some water, not Jamaica Bay itself, but a tidal river that led into it I’m sure. Looking across it reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of Eastern Europe, with factories and low houses in the background, winter sun going down. We walked back to the #2 down Flatbush, talking about our mothers.