riverrun

Friday night I laid down in my bed, utterly exhausted and, admittedly, a little more than buzzed. Usually I am not able to dream on nights like this but I was soon immersed in an ethereal landscape, never before seen, but somehow familiar. Oddly enough, my dream began with a river. This river was shallow and erratic, flowing every which way, never changing depth, lazily moving across a grassy, marshy plain. Wading the river with four other people, I constantly found myself tangled in branches, hindered by beaver dams or woven in webs of rushes and grass. As I always feel intense emotions in my dreams, my feelings at this point were that of frustration and anxiety. My heart was heavy and I began to feel an emotion akin to dread. After wading the river for what seemed like an eternity, we reached an electric fence. Once again, I felt anxious as we gingerly crossed the fence, avoiding the wires. Soon we came to a small house haphazardly connected to a large barn. The house was yellow and dilapitaded, leaning slightly to the right. Upon entering the house we found nothing but a small kitchen that led into an even smaller dining area. There was a closet directly opposite the door that looked like an airplane bathroom and a mirror to the left of it. After finding nothing of interest we left the house and Brian, one of the other people in my group, left and caught a steer...

This is when my dream took a turn for the worst.

I'm not entirely sure if the steer had any significance but immediately after it was caught I found myself in an entirely different scene. My sister and I were in our barn at home, each of us with a horse. Sally, my sister, had her horse Urf Quake and I had mine, Stanley. Urf was extremely sick and he kept falling. As I left Stanley to help Sally with her situation, he followed me into the stall. As my sister's horse went down for the fifth time, Stanley was crushed underneath him. I somehow managed to drag him into an adjacent stall and as I sat trying to keep him alive he metamorphosed into my border collie, R.P., my dog that my parents had to put down less than a week ago. Crying and yelling for help, I sat on the floor of the barn while my dog died on my lap. I think this may have constituted as a nightmare.

Nooteboom in Relation to Borges

I was reading The Following Story and a passage caught my eye. In relation to what Ben Leubner was talking about in class today, the theory that everyone is a part of everyone, this concept fits perfectly. "The first hours no one spoke. A priest, an airline pilot, a child, a teacher, a journalist, an academic. They made up the group, someone or no one had decided: these were to be the mirrors in which we would see ourselves." (Nooteboom pg. 67) On the page preceeding this passage, another, more subtle reference to the same theory emerges. "All of us stared at the process, all those different eyes, which would become so familiar to me during the next few days..." (Nooteboom pg. 66). The piece about the eyes becoming familiar to the narrator is of little importance, but the idea that all of these people's different eyes are looking at the same thing connects them in some way.

The Best Epithet

Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson here.

Finnegan again and again

So I opened Finnigans Wake, on a whim, the best way I suppose, and decided to look for a repetitious description. Needless to say, it took less than a minute to find such a passage and here it is: "...and the whole mesa redonda of Lorencao Otulass in convocacaon was this disinterestingly low human type, this Calumnious Column of Cloaxity, this Bengalese Beacon of Biloxity, this Annamite Aper of Atroxity, really at, it will be precise to quarify, for he seems in a badbad case?" (pg. 179). As usual, this passage succeeded in obfuscation, but I am not too proud to admit that this will be my lot throughout the entire book. Although I didn't understand it entirely, it made me laugh. Maybe that's because he deems it "precise to quarify" when there is no quarity or clarity, that's how I understood it, in this book. It's cruel irony. Plus, his so-called quarification, if I may use his word, conists of words such as Cloaxity, Biloxity and Atroxity, which are a slap in the face of clarity.

Iff Only

Iff only my room weren't such a disaster, a pig sty, in utter disarray. I find it nearly impossible, almost implausible to even begin to divulge the disaster that is my domain. Although I could, should, and will eventually clean it, at the present moment, time present (and regretfully in time past) the area which I consider my cave is unspeakable. In using the simile cave I would like to divert any future confusion; I am not referring to myself as a bear, or bat, or anything like that, but rather strictly defining my room, which is small, dark and used expressly for sleeping, nothing else. As I believe myself to have deviated, went on a tangent, strayed from the topic at hand, it is incumbent upon me to return to the original problem, which is that of my room, cave, what have you. Now, as a person of few words, I would like to close this with a regretful declination; I wish not to offend, affront or eschew the intended topic, but for the sake of every possible person partaking in my blog, I will avoid such descriptions.

Finnegans Wake

The page I chose, at random of course, from Finnegans wake is page 179. This should be interesting.

A Brief Lifetime

Although I may not understand the twenty-minute lifetime fully, I will give it a shot. My perception of this phenomenon, in every day life, is when a person makes a concious decision that will alter the course of their life drastically. I know that the twenty minute life time we have been speaking of in class refers more to literally feeling the aging of a lifetime in twenty minutes, but for more practical purposes I suppose my thoughts on it will suffice. While making a life changing decision, time slows down and drags to a near halt. This could be part of the feeling of a life time, but I would rather see the true lifetime as an aftershock of that decision, which was conveyed or decided in twenty minutes. An example of this could be when a person decides between two careers while choosing their major for college. If one path is taken, the life of that person will be completely different than if they had chosen the alternate path. Although this may have seemed like a comparatively small decision, measured against a lifetime, the person may not realize the gravity of what they have decided. This, in my opinion, is an everyday account of the twenty minute lifetime.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

I found this story to be vastly entertaining and really enjoyed reading it. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was representative of human emotions and the effect they can have on every day life. Throughout the beginning of the story, the inhabitants of the town without a name, the town with the sadness factories, are in constant lament and despair for their situation. Towards the end, though, even when the town remains the same (except for the remembrance of its name), the people cheer themselves. In doing so, they show that the mood of a group of people, even the mood of an entire town, is controlled by the people's own will. Rather than feeling sorry for themselves, the people in this town, now named Kahani, make the best of thier situation.

Along with the representation of human emotions, this story entertains the reader with allegories of other occurrences. Interestingly, one would think that the only representations would be in the alternate world, on the moon of Kahani. This is not the case in this story, though. Before even entering the world of Iff the Water Genie and Butt the Hoopoe, Haroun encounters the Dull Lake, which displays the emotions and characters of the people on and around it. The Dull Lake, paradoxically, is not dull at all, but instead is brilliant and capturing. What makes this lake dull, though, is the general attitude of its occupants. When the evil mayor is gone at the end, the lake's inhabitants cheer considerably and are able to see the brilliance of their world. This, I beleive, is the case in any situation. If a person chooses not to see the brilliance of thier surroundings, they simply won't.

As many people, as well as Dr. Sexson, have mentioned, the theme the Myth of the Eternal Return plays a huge role in this novel. While Haroun is searching for answers for what seems to be a concrete problem, ie the loss of his father's "gift of gab", he comes to realize that what he is really searching for is a new, or perhaps old, beginning. This beginning is to be found with his mother, at home, singing, as usual, and his father retaining his position as the "Ocean of Notions". New beginnings, in this particular novel, seem to be synonymous with old beginnings, in accordance with the Myth of the Eternal Return. While seeking out a new beginning, a new and better life, what Haroun really seeks is the recovery of his old beginning, his old life.

High Brow vs. Low Brow

I am really looking forward to this class and am excited to explore the dynamic of high-brow and low-brow further. My perception of high-brow literature is that it is less popular throughout the masses, but intensely popular in certain groups. Those who understand this dense, complicated form of literature become enthralled by its trappings and meanings, making it very popular in its own right. Low-brow, on the other hand, is deemed popular by large quantities of people, or possesses the conventional definition of popularity. Although low-brow literature may seem less important to some, it is undeniable that a book with the approval of millions must hold some merit. On the same bent, high-brow literature can't be overlooked because of its lack of general approval. Perhaps, some may say, the "quality" of readers outplays the "quantity". This is merely speculation, and I am not one to judge any type of reader, so please no one take this personally.