I always wanted to be a hobo...

I'm going to take the train places. I'm going to get this figured out.

I have two very good friends that live in the Burbank/Glendale are. This is about 70 miles round trip. My current gas guzzler gets about 14 miles to the gallon (less if it's a sweltering day), so round trip it's $25 dollars in gas I'm spending to see them, and I like seeing them, a lot. Plus I'm over the milage limit on my car lease. I'm not cheap, and I'm especially not cheap when it comes to my friends. I like to lavish time and attention on my friends. But. I hate paying petroleum companies money to see them. I hate oil. I want to take the train.

The train would only cost me about $5 round trip. I know that there is still energy expended, but I like a good rail system, and I think I'm going to buy into it. It's actually not "the train", but it's the train system. It would take three trains to get me to the valley limits. I'm a little scared to, because time tables can be confusing, and we don't teach time tables to little children like we should -- we teach them how to budget for gas. However, I think I'm going to go for it. Todd is horrified at the concept -- he imagines me getting lost, I think. Plus, he loves convenience more than I do.

Did I mention I hate oil? I hate oil. I love Daniel Day-Lewis, but I hate oil with a passion that borders on stupid. However, I love convenience. I love independence. I love cars. I love driving. This, the oil companies and their associates know. But I have to take a stand. Now this doesn't mean I'm going to start riding the bus -- because I hate buses almost as much as I hate oil. But I like trains and I like bicycles, and if I was less of a stumbler, I might even like skateboards. I like scooters, but I don't want to get pulverized by some smoke-belching bus whilst riding on one. Well, maybe for around the neighborhood or something. I also like trolleys -- and sometimes commuter buses, or shuttles, are OK. But big imposing road-hogging city buses are awful to imagine. I would if I had to, but I'd rather not.

So I'm going to pack my usually over sized bag anyway, and try the train. The Long Beach Blue Line heads almost directly to Union Station, and I live less than a quarter of a mile away from the Long Beach Transit station. It's time for those of us who have had our heads up our tailpipes to get on the train. Now I will have no excuse for not finishing A Room With A View -- and who knows, I might even have a conversation about it on the way.

Where is my mind?

Sometimes, especially in the early hours of my day, I forget things. Mostly I forget things like overdue movie rentals and library books, but today I pulled a bigger stunt and forgot my phone and my wallet. I remembered this as I was in my car in the parking garage, but as I was just barely going to make it to class on time if I sped out of the garage immediately, I decided to just go to school without these things for the day. Plus, I figured I could swing back by and pick them up before my class at DH.

Well, when I got on the freeway I realized that I was almost out of gas -- I had maybe thirty miles to go. That's okay, I thought with my exhausted 7AM brain, I'll just get gas on the way to DH.

After the most boring class in the universe ended at 10:30AM, I split to get to DH in time to print out the materials for class. I passed the Chevron on Harbor without a further thought, and as I was trying to merge into traffic I happened to look down at my digital fuel reading: 2 Miles. I instantly get a sinking feeling in my bones, as the last thing I need is to run out of gas on the 91 FWY and have to call AAA...so I exit Brookhurst in a kind of controlled panic, and plead for my car to make it to the Chevron on Orangethorpe. I make it! Yay! I pull out my...my...I don't have my wallet.

I at least have a car phone, a hands-free cell phone built into my car's system, and I called my Mom, who drove over from Whittier and rescued me and gave me $45 worth of gas (10 gallons worth).

As I sat in my car and waited for my Mom to arrive, I thought of how much driving is a part of my life, and how much I take it for granted. I began to be ashamed of myself when I discovered I was a little bit scared that I could be stranded (Todd was in Sacramento today) with no money and no way to contact anyone. I mean, I think I remember how to collect-call someone -- and I think I have at least a couple of phone numbers memorized...actually, I would have been really out of luck. I guess I could have walked back to FC from the gas station and tried to find Blythe, or maybe I would have had to convince Phil that I was worth giving twenty dollars to (I swear I've met Phil at least five times), or maybe I would've had to walk the seven miles to my brother's house.

That would have taken a while.

If we ever have to give up our vehicles we are going to grieve. We are going to feel lost. Of course there is always relief when we lose our attachments, but shoot if it isn't a little bit frightening to think about.

Personal Truth

I recently checked out Judith Butler's book, Gender Trouble, from the university library. I haven't read it yet, but I'm hoping to find some good support for my theory on Gatsby, and maybe just learn something in general.

In related news, I just finished reading M. Butterfly, and if I wasn't at a coffee house I might have let myself shed the tears that welled up in my eyes as I digested this heartbreaker. I like its political comments, especially now that it seems China is more America's master than ever before. But really, of course, I enjoy a good love story, especially one that argues gender as a performance, and quite persuasively I might add. I read this play for the Masks class I am taking for the Humanities requirement, and I wish I was going to write my paper on this play instead of a photograph of a mask. I might be able to -- I might be able to convince him to let me write about a mask in literature (provided I can include as many quotes as possible). That will be a great paper to write, and a welcome break from learning about Western Civilization.

I titled this post personal truth because it something I feel that all literature revolves around. It's not the personal truth of the author alone, but the collective personal truth that lies in the unconscious nature of humanity. It is the tendency to mask that gives us literature. It is overwhelming, and needs a shroud to be understood -- it's sort of like an invisible entity that only appears when a sheet is thrown over it -- the sheet is not the entity, but it is how we can verify that the mass exists. We wield many sheets -- we use many masks to identify this truth. For Rene, the truth about his sexuality lies in the mask that he places over the object of is desire -- he imagines it as woman -- but "woman" is the mask, and the personal truth is revealed as genderless. Words are even a mask. Words are maybe the first mask, the most ancient mask. Without words, we lose more than the ability to communicate, we lose our identities, and maybe, as Westerners, we loose our grip on the fear of death. For without an identity, what do we have to lose? The more we reinforce our identity, with words, with titles, with categories, with names, the more we have to lose.

Chapters SIx Through Nine of Gatsby: "I disapproved of him from beginning to end."

I am dissatisfied with the finale of this book. Hemingway was right, Fitzgerald is so romantic and predictable that he ends up diving headlong into cliche. The Sun Also Rises is much more satisfying as a novel; somehow Hemingway lets all the right people live, and all the right ends left unravelled. Hemingway throws a rotten tomato onto a canvas, and then lets it dry -- Fitzgerald does the same, and then tries to make a torte out of it. Still, I find Gatsby quite fascinating, and I will have such a good time analyzing it.

I think I identify most with Nick. It may seem like I've slammed him in previous posts, but I've really come to love him. He's so scared and confused, and I find myself feeling empathy for the way that he can't tell the truth. He doesn't search himself for the true feeling; instead, he searches his thoughts for right feeling, and then presents such as the honest emotion or the passionate conclusion. That he ever "loves" Jordan is laughable. Their final meeting is so perfect -- it was the only thing I really liked about the ending.

What I didn't appreciate was the violence that suddenly erupted. Compared to the violence in The Sun Also Rises, the death of Myrtle and Gatsby and Wilson left me a little perturbed, but perhaps that was the intent. I much prefer it when everyone gets to suffer indefinitely, as Brett and Jake do, when they vanish into obscurity at the end of the novel.

Last semester I read Judith Butler's 1988 essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," and remnants of this work have been popping up in the my mind as I've examined the characters in Gatsby. Statements like "gender...is an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts," and "is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self," have cast a pretty convincing shadow over the novel, and have persuaded me to watch the characters actions and understand them as struggles to form a gender identity. I know the story consistently presents images of money and industry and class structure, but I can't help but see the drama enfold and enter into chaos through confusion concerning gender, and what Butler calls the "heterosexual contract." Lines from this essay are almost essential to my ideas about Moby-Dick and Gatsby, one of the best being:

As Foucault others have pointed out, the association with a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural "attraction" to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.

My only fear is that I'm, as my literary criticism instructor often put it, using literary theory like a sausage machine -- you put the work into the system and get a pristinely packaged thesis. I'm also a novice -- so I consistently have to test out my new legs; they're wobbly, to say the least. I can attest, however, that my ideas about Moby-Dick and gender and reproduction were formulated long before I read Butler or Foucault, and I'm going to allow myself a small measure of pride in authenticity for that, even though it's quite apparent that theorists like Foucault have been such an influence in general that my ideas could have been shaped by him without a formal knowledge of his existence. Still, I don't know that Melville or Fitzgerald have been analyzed in this way yet, and if the essays are any good. I wonder if I have a book of my own on my hands, or just single works.

Also, is my syntax terrible? I need an editor.

Chapters Four and Five of Gatsby: "My family all died..."

I really love that in Gatsby's telling of himself he kills off all his family. I suppose you could form a mythological allusion here -- scream -- Oedipus comes to mind, but I would rather include this in my overarching conclusion that American Literature often features the orphan. Only when people are orphans do we see them having wild adventures at sea (Ishmael has no one/nothing on land), or getting impregnated by a Puritan minister (daddy, where were you?), or controlling the your family from the grave (Addie, and her tale receives double points for both including an orphan hero/villan and also having that hero/villan creating orphans in the story, and I'm sure there are many more examples. I am also aware that there may not be anything highly significant in the American orphan character trend, for it seems that America is in turns an orphan and a parent society. We like to trim our roots and start over here, hopefully with the result being lots and lots of money. Still, I love that Gatsby's mask is first and foremost an orphan. Maybe there is a mask of origin to be analyzed here.

Remember when I discussed Nick's habit of leaving off relationships with women when he feels threatened by another man? Isn't it fascinating that when Gatsby merely mentions his awareness of Jordan and Nick's tea date, that Nick responds in the extreme?

Gatsby: You'll hear about it this afternoon.
Nick: At lunch?
Gatsby: No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Baker to tea.
Nick: Do you mean that you're in love with Miss Baker?

I mean, come on. It's almost as if Nick wants Gatsby to be interested in Jordan, so that he can dump her.

I also want to bring up the scene where Jordan narrates the times of Daisy's romantic youth. There are several things I'm interested in here.

"...she went with a slightly older crowd -- when she went with anyone at all."
"...her mother found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York...she wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks."
"Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mine..."

Daisy is awfully mysterious, according to Jordan. Chapter four really drove home for me Nick's infatuation with Gatsby, even if it's just in his way of speaking about himself, and Daisy's role as the rich cheerleader outcast. She rejoins society, but only to become the outcast in her and Tom's marriage.

And what about when Gatsby almost makes a prostitute out of Nick?! The exact terms of Gatsby's "proposition" are not defined and the language used implies that Gatsby is trying to become Nick's pimp; my guess is that Gatsby wants more control over him, and that he is trying to be like his predecessor, Dan, and "adopt" a little poor scamp of his own. The job happens to be "a rather confidential sort of thing,"...hmmm, meaning illegal? Nick says, "...because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there." At first read this just seems like Nick defending his "white collar" status, but in the light of my focus on desire, I like to think of it as his stubborn refusal to be paid by Gatsby instead of loved and valued for other reasons and in other ways. It's like Myrtle saying, "Daisy!", instead of just keeping her mouth shut and buying a new dress. The thing is, Nick is having his relationship with Gatsby through Daisy, a much more fulfilling connection with Gatsby in terms of desire -- if Nick has a secular relationship with Gatsby there's no outlet for desire, but when Nick gets to watch Gatsby and Daisy interact there is a satifcation gained from getting to participate in the connection. It's amazing that when Nick is prompted to stay during Tom and Myrtles liason, he is moved to have his own tryst with McKee, and when Gatsby and Daisy have their first meeting he leaves alone. It's as if his desire for Gatsby is satisfied through Daisy -- but his desire for Tom, if it exists, is not satisfied through Myrtle, who he describes as corpulent in her femininity, and overly sexual (he describes seeing her pump gas when he's in Gatsby's car: "...I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.") The figures of reproduction -- the bodacious female body -- not in fashion in the 20s anyway, although Tamara deLempicka painted some fantasically meaty nude females during this era -- is not exacly rejected entirely, not by Tom, anyway, but defintely seems replusive to Nick. He likes Jordan, this "clean, hard, limited person," who thinks he is an idiot.

Patterns are emerging.

I thought better of it...

I had the idea that I should keep my random thoughts about the universe and my (sometimes) focused blogs on literature separate -- but who am I kidding? I can't divide my love of literature from my fascination with life -- I think the two feed each other and maybe even should always be presented together...on an informal blog, anyway.

It just didn't feel right and I thought better of it.

Know Thyself

The narrator in Gatsby is turning out to be an endless source of fascination for me. I was talking about the scene in chapter two were Tom punches Myrtle in the face, and it occured to me that McKee and Nick leave the scene of violence in such a manner that suggests they might be next. Mrs. Wilson recieves the blow because she defiantly refuses to obey Tom's demand that she not speak his wife's name. She has overstepped the bounds of mistress (as defined by Tom), and stepped out of her role of compliant prostitute -- I think this role is played up and indicated by all the shopping she does before they go to the apartment -- into one of rival wife, in order to give her and Tom's relationship validity. Tom's violent reaction can be attributed to his state of inebriation, but since we have already encountered Tom's brutality with the presentation of Daisy's broken finger the message is one of both a brutal master and an irresponsible alcoholic. I'm also interested in the detail of these attacks. Tom only breaks Daisy's finger, while he punches Mrs. Wilson in the face, breaking her nose. It is like Mrs. Wilson was sticking her nose in Tom's business and perhaps Daisy was pointing an accusing finger at him. Whatever the case, Tom squashes these domestic rebellions with unethical violence, and neither Nick or McKee intervenes at all.

Neither Nick nor McKee intervene, console or defend Mrs. Wilson, or do anything that signifies they are apalled or concerend about what has happened. They simply are aroused from a stupor, and when they have adequately assessed the situation, they head for the door. I was thinking today that they do this, not because they are upset, but because they feel that they both rely on personas that could easily place them next on Tom's list. They leave together, slinking away from a volitile situation, and the possibility of having to confront Tom disappears. It seems that even their presence could cause them to be at the end of Tom's fist.

The tone of Nick's actions is that he needs a strong masculine presence around dictate his actions. Nick seems to sympathize with his cousin in her sorrow over Tom's affair, but his assesment of women in most other chapters is that of disdain, or apathy, or, even when it seems like he is really attracted to one, fear and weakness -- as is the case in chapter four when he is pained by the idea that Gatsby might have an eye on Jordan. This sort of blissfull surrender to a strong man's will would merely imply submissive compliance -- if we were talking about a dog. But we are talking about a human, with what I would hope are inately human desires and wants, so his consistent submission to a male seems to reflect a deeper unsung desire. The part of the novel that really drives this home for me are Carraway's remarks that he wishes he could have "unknown" affairs with the wealthy women of fifth avenue. This concept is so confusing...why unknown? Why not unknown? I mean, if he wanted to, couldn't he have an affair with anyone willing? I think it really means unknown to himself. The concept of having a valid affair with a woman is not appealing as knowledge. The fiance that he left back in the midwest has become knowledge, and we know how Carraway has danced around that one. The affair with the woman in New Jersey became knowledge to her brother, and with some unpleasant looks it was stopped. The only hook up that hasn't become knowledge is the one with McKee. It hasn't even become clear to Nick.

Alright, I know that its only chapter four and that I haven't read it all yet, but I have the feeling that Fitzgerald is asking us to discover what Nick doesn't know, or doesn't want to accept, about himself -- and I don't think its just that he wants to rich. BTW -- I searched for anything about Carraway and his sexuality on JSTOR and Gale and EBSCO, and guess what? Nothing. This novel apparently needs some dusting off.