Passing

Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday night, or so the paper tells. I was sitting in the car about four years ago when my Grandma said that her favorite novel was Slaughterhouse 5. I made a mental note. She didn't elaborate on what the book was about, but she mentioned something about it giving her an idea of what my Gandfather experienced in WWII. My Grandfather, who joined the Navy when he was 17 so that he wouldn't get drafted into the Army, because, silly, in the Army, on the ground, there were bugs and dirt, and in a ship, things were a little less...insect-ridden. He ended up on a destroyer in the South Pacific, and never talked about it, except to mention one incident when his ship gunned down Japanese planes, and when it was brought to the attention of the captain that there was a survivor in the water, his captain gave orders to run the survivor over with the ship. Having been both raised on cartoons and having heard that story for the first time when I was probably five (when you are a middle child you often get to hear the things meant for the child six years ahead of you), I didn't see the tradegy, or the moral implications of the story until much later, when struggling with own existence.

I read Slaughterhouse 5, and was depressed. I couldn't see how this novel could be anyone's favorite, as the contents filled me with anxiety. But it stuck with me. I have, since reading it, thought often about it. I have thought about the horse that they use for transport without caring for it, and the man eating the spoonful of molasses and bursting into tears, the wooden shoes that they made the jerk-guy wear, the fire-bombing, and the people in the alien glass, and of course, the explanation of time being strung out, and all events happening at the same time, eternally.

The book came to mind when I was living in my parents guest house, a converted garage, and in stead of the garage door, there were glass panels and glass sliding doors, and my parents dogs (a big lab and a border collie) would saunter over to our glass and look in at us, like we were in a cage being examined by the dogs. It was disconcerting at times.

I haven't read any other Kurt Vonnegut, but I probably will; I think we will be reading him later in the semester. His cyncism hits close to home, and it hurts. He seemed like a sweet guy.

Girl Talk

Everyone, I told her, has their issues. I told her it wasn't real tequila, it was just agave wine, and that's why I could take shot after shot on this holy day and not feel sacreligous. But the flow of the hardcore added atmosphere, and I could pretend like I wasn't talking fast and idiotic, like a newborn doe speaking seriously about anything, while stumbling and learning to walk. I told her, sure, we can all think that the I is real, that it is us, that we are us, and that it matters. George, I said, is making everyone pay for who he thinks George is, and you didn't even know and he doesn't know, that George doesn't exist. Once I gave up the idea of I, I started laughing more, I told her. I just up and started laughing the bejesus out of things.
How? she wanted to know. Well, I told her, I just thought, how would I react to this usually, this man telling me what I should be doing, and what my responsibilities are, and what face would I normally wear, and what idea would I usually formulate, and looked at this I, and I shot her into a black hole, and I was afraid at what I would be left with, and I was left with a body and a mind and a heart that was filled with air, and it might have been helium for the silly, childish laughter that came up uncontrolledm so that I had to bury my face into the towels, fresh from the dryer. She looked at me with this look of wonder, and then looked down at her margarita with real tequila, and said, how nice.
It's not as if I don't have my issues, I said, quickly and reassuringly. I can't do it all of the time, and I can't laugh all of the time, either, but when you bow down to it, and worship it, and throw gold and pansies at her feet, and you aren't even aware that you're at her feet, but you think you are at the feet of God, it's easier to bite and swallow down your loved ones, and push pins into hearts, and throw your sugarbabies into prison like uncommon prisoners with strict orders to live on crusts and brack. Yeah, she said, he'll visit the baby, but his wife hasn't even seen her once, and keeps making these excuses. That must hurt a great deal, I remarked. I know, she replied, it's so stupid and selfish, but he's been taking care of my mom in Kansas, and was with her for about four days after the surgery. I always have such a good time with your mom, I said. Me and your mom stayed up until two in the morning once talking about the universe, I told her, but the first time, or one of the first times I ever met her she told me that she had been raped, and that her boyfriend had shot her, and that once she had seen a fairy sitting on her stove top, a little man, with a green hat. Yes, she laughed, she had been raped and that her boyfriend shot her, in the arm, and that the bullet went through her arm. I have enjoyed spending time with your mom, I said, even if she is afraid of Stephen Hawking and his chair. Everyone, I continued, trying out my knobby legs and almost twisting into a pretzel, is an idea, and you can take that idea wherever you want to.
My mother had a split personality for a while, she reminded me. She had a personality called Strictor, and she was mean, we didn't like it when we came home from school and Strictor was there. She was really butch, and wore a huge belt buckle, and janitor keys, and boots. She was awful. Mom started laughing just the other day, and I said, what? and she said, oh, Strictor just said something funny. I asked, oh, no, mom, Strictor's not coming back, is she? No, my mom said, with a fond sigh, and smiled.
I felt a soft hand on my shoulder then, or saw a kind face come out of the wall, or saw a box open with a genie inside, or felt a professor in my heart put down his pencil and take of his glasses and say, you can't walk yet, my dear, please don't try to race.
Well, everyone has their issues, my mother, sitiing beside me at the table offered. She's in therapy, she went on, pointing at me, making it okay and shameful in the same instant. I didn't laugh that time.
Isn't she beautiful, she said to her cousing by marriage, sitting with us. Yes, her cousin said, I have actually been looking at her this whole time thinking, what a beautiful girl.

Absalooooooong.

I really like this book, but it's a difficult read. It's taking me forever. I've completed a second novel and begun a third while reading it. And I still haven't read my assigned reading for this week.

I feel like analyzing this book would be like being assigned an archaelogical dig space the size of Supten's Hundred and told to unearth the important things, but not having any clue what these might be, and having to archive the finds in a made up language code that can't be spoken out loud.

I knew I'm going to have to re read them all. Dying, Sanctuary, and eventually Sound, because there are these sentences every once in a while in Faulkner that I find are core pieces of the puzzle. If I could (I should just be post-it tagging them, duh, I couldn't make it THAT easy on myself) I would have the quotes needed for a major thesis, perhaps my senior one. Silly, isn't it? That I should just be itty bitty me and what ever it is I think I've got somebody else has probably laid claim to long ago, but I'm too invested, too invovled. I'll slip it in between tea and vacuuming. Like, religious studies,laundry, paint toenails, watch Jeopardy!, LOST, and The Tudors, paint watercolors with my neice, write thesis on the real invisible narrator of Faulkner that is channeled through all major storytelling charaters (could it be called, Faulkner's Ghost? or The Invisible Southern Judge?), polish granite counter tops, scrub toilettes, sweep balcony, memorize Biology, sleep (in).

I have a new XBOX, and I'm too afraid to get a game. But it's a magnificient console, beautiful even. It looks nice just sitting there.

Oh, last night of my Spring Break, you are divine. Your baby pink sunset is heart-breaking. Your city lights are happy. (Next break -- New York, Boston, and New Orleans -- but not in that order. Volunteer work in New Orleans. I wonder where Faulkner was burried?)

Dungeon Magesty Featuring Leslie and the Lys

This a most fabulous short film featuring Leslie Hall, the Gem Keeper and renowned beaded sweater maker/wearer/rescuer, and the kids behind Dungeon Majesty. The music video is for Leslie Hall's song, Willow Don't You Cry, off her latest, The Door Man's daughter. Leslie is the voice of midwest white girl hip-hop. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.



Get more Leslie at www.gemsweater.com -- and buy (if you can handle it) Leslie's current album at iTUnes, ya heard!

(Also, my favorite L.A. artist, Michael C. Hsiung, makes a few appearances. See his brilliant work, of which I am an owner, at www.michaelchsiung.com)

Sanctuary

Twisted, twisted, twisted.

This is really a story about a serial killer, and once again the white woman is at the center of the plot. I read this novel in two days, so I'm with Faulkner that he wrote it for mass consumption. I'm not really disturbed by this story, not half as much as As I Lay Dying, or Absalom! I'm a little ways into The Sound and the Fury, and it is REALLY hard to read.

But back to Sanctuary, isn't this the novel that won the big prize? Wait. No. Other works received the Pulizter, but he did with the Nobel Prize for LIterature. There are lines in Santctuary that are pure Faulkner -- especially in the mouth of Miss Jenny, and when Horace has learned has to learn his lessons with Ruby. A few characters really stand out -- one character that caught my attention was the old man. Blind and deaf, he is a relic from the old South, and he is powerless to help Temple. I also think Ruby was a strange one. Why does she keep telling Temple that she'll be alright? I like when Horace tells Ruby that her actions seem to dictate what is going to happen -- the violation of Temple, the lynching. There is also a lot of symbology going on with the name Temple, the fact that although she was known as a slut in town, she really was a virign, and the associations with virgin and temples, contrasted with the defilement of white (crazy, deluded, serial killer types, who were addicted to something, alcohol, or cigarettes) men who, impotent, seek to violate what they can't possess. I'm a little surprised at the tone toward's alcohol in general in this novel. When Hemingway is writing what could be called his Odes to the Still, Faulkner is writing this horror story about the evils of moonshine, especially concerning Gowan, the half villain who's hangover almost gave me a headache. I love how Faulkner describes him trying to read something when he is blind drunk -- Gowan tries to focus and he mentions something like trying to hold his eyeball still in order to focus.

And Narcissa? Lovely name. I get more a feeling for Mrs. Tull, the preachy woman from Dying, when the Baptist women of the town go around gettin' things done. I sense the big country/townsfolk rifts. I think the point about sex and violence is driven home by the manner in which Goodwin was lynched, after being in some heinous way violated sexually, those people couldn't wait to do it to him, and people who are from out of town wonder that they had a trial at all. There is also Popeye's mutilation of the animals, the "love birds" and the "kitten." These animals are symbols of sexuality, but innocent, and pure. Popeye reveals an early lust for domination by killing them so brutally. I struggle to find Popeye's real purpose in the novel. I know he's the prinicpal villain, and he is creepy, but what is his purpose? I like how Gowan struggles to protect Temple, mumbling about her "honor" and how he needed to protect it. Popeye is impotent. He still manages to violate Temple, in a rather excruciating way. He then watches as Red has sex with her. Temple starts to call Popeye "Daddy," increasing his pimp status, but really hates him and desires Red. Popeye kills Red, after he finds out that Temple has feelings for him. Somehow Temple gets away, rescued by her father, tipped off by Snopes? I can't remember. Popeye is a bad man, for sure, born sick from a mom with VD, and not right, from the beginning.

I reread the beginning. Was Popeye pimping out Ruby to Goodwin? Maybe that makes more sense. She had come from money, just like Temple. Also -- maybe Little Belle is at the center of this whole thing. She is who Horace thinks of while at the French House, and who he talks to and the end of the novel. Horace is scared that what happened to Temple and Ruby could happen to her, too. Horace is perpetuating the White Womanhood myth in a way. Ruby knows it to be a farce, she tells Temple that she will be writhing in the mud and muck for more treatment. Horace is really in a jam. He doesn't want to keep walking those shrimp to his wife, but he at the end it appears he feels the need to protect his white women. Popeye cold be a symbol for lust and power or sexual violence, and its seductive quality, that it emerges out of the lions of a sexualy diseased womb -- a white womb, I might add -- and is constantly overcompensating for what it percieves as a loss of manhood. Then the novel could be a metaphor for the loss of slavery to the south, and how white men were exposed as the real culprits of sexual violence, and how white women were doomed to forever pay for the masculenity lost when white men were no longer legally entitled to protect their women from black advances. Something too, about the ways in which the two men were so disgusted at the prospect of the black women in the "colored" whorehouse. This is where Snopes like to hang out, but the younger white men have no interest there. They're interest is in the white women of Memphis. I'm really spun on this story, folks.

There's Temple herself. Faulkner is really fascinated with women, and the feminine. I can see a lot of Sanctuary in Tennesse Williams, the stuggle for dominance between the male and female esp. Perhaps I'll write my next paper on Streetcar vs. Dying, and see if I can't come up with something about the white woman myth.

*4/5/07 Edit*

The more I think about this book, it becomes more of an ode to the South, post-reconstruction era. It's all there, loss of manhood, prostitution, alcoholism (which is not unique to the South, but the way the back woods moonshiners are presented is so Deliverance, and the way that the book describes the little boy getting drunk off of the beer and vomiting and Gowan's binging, it's not exactly Jake sitting in a cafe in Paris drinking Pernod out of a glass), crooked and racist politics, domestic violence, religious zealots who do nothing but practice antiChristianity, and the typical Faulkner character, who can't accept this life as reality, and is powerless to do anything about it, forced to watch his client, not just hang, no, no, but be raped and burnt to death.

So the ode that Faulkner sings is bluesey, and the only solace whatsoever is the jungle, the nature that is claiming the land again. It's no place for Temple's high heeled slippers, Popeye's suit is covered with mud at one point, the weeds almost guard the French House. It's a wild place, and the civilization that tried to tame it with stolen lives forced into perpetual servitude is rotting in the mire and covered by the vines. They are violated by the crops they forced others into raising for themselves. Speaking of slavery, the only time Horace ever seems to have peace of mind is when he cleans his own house. (I think Faullkner really like this expression, this metaphor -- "clean the house" or "cleaned my house.") Horace remarks that he didn't know it would be that hard -- he thought any body with an arm and a bucket could do it. The only people who would have felt that way were privildged whites, who never had to do any of the housework. Horace gets to experience some pride from this hard work. It's harder work than any of the men in the novel do, except for the moonshiners, maybe, but that work isn't honest.

I'm still mulliung over Horace's last acts of going back to his wife and calling his step-daughter to see if she is "okay." I don't know if this is a cheap, sentimental ending, or if he is revealing white man's weakness in the face of his animalistic desire to protect his white woman and child...I'm not sure if this is to regualte Horace as a character, and show that he is trapped by his culture, or at least no better than it. His wife and step-daughter could be seen as metaphors for the south itself -- abandoned by America, unchaperoned, in need of protection, both in society and nationally. Horace leaving them could be seen as the government abandoning the South after the civil war, leaving behind the micro-civil-wars of the cities that were collasping in on themselves, like the South was in chaos from the civil war, then the First World war was fast on its heels, ready to take the men away again (as in the case of Goodwin). There is scant justice in Sanctuary. Even Horace's return to his wife is a little sketchy -- although he has been talking about her the whole time -- especally to the people of the French House.

There are also several orphan-types in the novel -- Temple (maternal), Popeye (Paternal), Little Belle (Paternal), Horace and Narcissa (they're holding on to Aunt Jenny, though). Any paternal (the law/Judge figures, and maybe the old man), or Maternal figures (the Mistress where Temple lived, and Miss Jenny), are really powerless, unless they are corrupt. You have Snopes, the D.A., and the Madame, and they are only looking out for #1. There is no real justice, and the ethics are questionable. This is a people, starving, like Temple, for attention, and morality. Any leftover morality (like the religious fanatcism), is selfish fuel for violence. Everything that was on the fringe in Dying is fully examined here. The rapist-type boys at the drugstore, the abortion-wish, the corrupt and lustful preacher -- these are not kept back, like in Dying. They are the main attraction. I wonder if anyone has even made a mural of the fictional county that Faulker created? You have the Bundren's over here, minus a recently deceased wife and committed child, with the daughter pregnant picking cotton, and the youngest now a mute fisherman, the French house over here, with now only a not even widow raising a baby that is a narcoleptic, and a man that seems cannot die, and a rusting and useless still in the back, she can be seen on very rare occasions counting pre-war gold coins by candlelight, and somewhere I have to find Quentin and Co. We'll get to that today.

I was talking about my education tonight, and I actually spoke the words, graduate school, out loud. This made me think of the scholarship, and then I read Brandon's post about being an English scholar, and about what that really means.

I think about how I got to here, the place where I am. I just walked up, after having gotten my trade school education, and said, please, let me in so I can think some more. I have not studied grammar beyond the eighth grade. I don't know how to dissect a sentence, but I have some idea of how to organize an essay. I stress some idea. I have read a great deal and acknowledge that most of my skills are reflections of what I've read. I don't know of any famous or published literary critics that I would admire, except of course, my instructors with their heavy and luscious PhDs; I imagine these titles gilded and polished, me trying to hold them and feeling the cool slickness of the metal; mmmmm a cool, slimy-slick PhD. I need reading glasses just to fantasize about it.

No, I don't really know how to write. My grandma calls it having an "ear" for English -- or more clearly, an explanation for being good at writing without formally studing the language. I want to understand it, this grand language, and really, it is a grand one, even though everyone goes, oh, only one word for love, but that's rediculous -- who needs thirteen words for love when you have a bagillion for bad? I think our mishmash language is brilliant, even if I don't have a proper command of it.

I liked your illustration, Brandon, about how you were more impressed with essays that took a steeper risk, and didn't do so well, than with a more boring paper, that has 1,000 references. I want to steer that way in my writing. I'll work on it. Splash.

This comes after 2.5 days with the neices, 3 and 7, the girls that I dearly love and dearly love to give back to mommy and daddy when I'm about to snap. They are angels, of course. They do nothing truly sinister, they just do the not listening and not responding, but I ascribe a lot of that to T.V. damage. It's amazing, though, when children throw tantrums, and like, really inconvienent tantrums, bent on making you look bad and out of control in front of a large crowd. I'm kind of a crazy aunt, a mash up of Santa Claus, the lady that teaches them to time/space travel in A Wrinkle in Time, and my own mom. I was really obsessed with my neices for a while, and now I'm finding it acceptable to think about having my own kids, but I'm still really scared of that feeling I get when I'm absolutely finished with children, and I'm like, if you don't bring me that pitcher of beer I'm going to beat your grandma to a pulp. And you can see how competetive I am. Kids would be the most humbling experience ever, and...I'm in no hurry to step off of the soapbox.

This post was supposed to be about how for my entire life I have always had a soft spot for the American dream of the 1950s, but not as it is commonly referred to or remembered, and therefore not really accurate, but something to do with not having a lot, but keeping it polished. Living in Long Beach for the past ten months has brought me ever so close to very poor neighborhoods, you know, the 'hood, and I was driving through my hometown of Whitter, not 20 miles from here, and I was looking at these houses and neighborhoods that I would normally "ick" at, and I was thinking how there were sparkly and enviable compared to the 'hoods that I now encounter. I mused aloud to Todd, in true over-priveledged white girl fashion, "why don't they even hose off their driveways, or pick up the trash that is on THEIR property? I mean I know I've passed the SAME trash WEEKS apart..." and he said, "it doesn't occur to people to do things if they've never been taught that they should do them..." and it reminded me of when my friend Charlie was doing social work where he said that he would go into certain low-income families homes and teach them how to do chores, shop for groceries, and care (bathe, feed, clothe) for their children.

This kind of thing fascinates me. I've always had a small idea in my head that if you have a meager living, you should take pride in that living. Is that only because of some statistics, like -- white, middle class, married parents, consistent beliefs, no financial or physiological crises growing up...etc? Or it is residual American Dream syndrome? Give me a patch of ground with a stucco house and a lawn to mow, and though it's not much, I will mow it and scrub the toilettes and pay taxes and it will be mine and I will wave to my neighbors. (As I'm writing this at 11:33 pm a stabbing just occured about a block away, Todd got it on the scanner, alerted by the two helicopters circling alarmingly close to our buildings.) I have an obsession with the post WWII era tract homes of southern California: cookie cutter boxes, sometimes with dutch accents, green lawns and white cement driveways. In older parts of the Southland there are Spanish/Medditerrainian style stucco houses, the ones from the 1920's with pine floors and arched doorways. I love when every once in a while I see the metal T bars of an old washline, and my heart sinks and years for a time that I don't even know really existed.

It's not that I really believe that was a simpler time in any other way but this -- noise. I can't stand all the noise of the modern world and gadgets. I despise the sound of a cell phone ringing, espeically when it's mine or my husband's. I hate the sound of traffic, and I hate the so called "white noise" of eletronics or fans. I hate this new noise of helicopters, almost everywhere in the 'hood. I think of life when there was less noise and more waving and more faith in the idea that if you went to war and killed the enemy you could come home, you might come home, and get a box and it wasn't much but you could keep it clean. You could pick up the trash.

Long Beach is an old town. The suburbs are old. Somehow, every post war development got spliced and diced, so that one lot now houses four residences on average. More people, less space, more trash. After what I see littering all these streets I will no longer swim in the oceans around here. The stagnancy of the Long Beach breakwaters is nauseating, even though the reports show that it is a cleaner beach than its ritzy OC and LA counterparts. The people. Is that what I'm trying to reconcile in my head? That the trash is there because there are too many people crammed in too little a space? That can't answer it all. Why was the American idea of pride stuck in my head so that when I was small, under five, I knew that if I had one Barbie, one cheapie Barbie with one bathing suit, it would be okay -- if I kept her nice and clean and cared for. That's just it. A small person, okay, a young person, doesn't think of those things, I must have been told them. So maybe they aren't told these things. Why? Why? Why? I want to trace the string back in time and see the flow chart.

(The white person stabbed was in a gang called somethng like, The Crazy Smokers, and his moniker was Bad Ass. He got stabbed by what he described as a crack head transient, black. For some reason I don't buy it. Not when your name is Bad Ass. Scanners are nerdy.)