Ha! I heard he did enough coke to kill a small horse. He was probably jacked on blow when he wrote that.
Thanks fer the link Leah. Your the best.
- B
22.3.08
20.3.08
Click here for uncanny
No worries, my friend, you got the name on point. However, it looks like Freud doesn't even know how to spell his own name. See:
19.3.08
18.3.08
What passes as uncanny in waking life?
Yesterday morning, around 8 or 9 a.m., I returned to my 11th floor bedroom of my giant apartment complex (over 20 buildings) in Manhattan. The window that houses the air conditioner was cracked open and upon entering my room, I saw a figure perched on the a.c. It was a red-tailed hawk, staring directly at me. When I acknowledged him and froze, he squawked and then flew away. I watched from my other window as the majestic bird, with a wingspan as wide as I am tall, glided between buildings and cast a great shadow as it rounded the corner of my building.
As a native Northwesterner, I have encountered much wildlife usually while hiking about in areas where one would hope to encounter such creatures. One is lucky to catch a glimpse of an eagle and may even enjoy a visit from a raven once in a while as long as it is not dropping by to raid your rations. However, I find it rattling not only to meet with such a symbolic creature in Manhattan, but at my window out of thousands nonetheless.
I was wondering if Freud would agree that such an encounter would qualify as uncanny. When a recognizable, yet unfamiliar creature enters a familiar space, such as my bedroom, I would say yes. What struck me further in making this connection was that it made the familiar unfamiliar at once. I immediately began to think that this was so strange an occurrence that it must mean something. I began researching red-tailed hawks in New York City and made this other connection to our material with regards to Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung and Greek myth. Much like Freud's concept of the uncanny, Jung had an idea about synchronicity, which is either an expansion of the idea, or perhaps a digression. At any rate, this information lends insight when thinking of the Odyssey or hawk visitations.
In The Body of Myth, J. Nigro Sansonese writes:
"The ancients believed strongly in what Jung has called synchronicity: coincident events have coincident meanings. They were sensitive to omens, often morbidly so, and in particular to animal omens. If a Doric hunter on setting out in the morning chanced to see a wolf, a skilled predator, he anticipated good hunting. Moreover, to the hunter, the wolf was sacred to Apollo, indeed was Apollo in the guise of an animal. Thus the hunt and the god were knitted together meaningfully in the mind of the hunter. From our more skeptical point of view, the “truth” of the matter lies in whether the hunter did in fact have a good day, and in general we tend to suppose that the sighting of a wolf or a hawk is irrelevant. Yet that is perhaps to dismiss too casually beliefs and practices having 10,000 years’ experience behind them. The skilled omen reader would not look solely to the appearance of a predator for heavenly sanction but to everything in the environment that caught his attention at that moment. Was there a cloud passing over the sun? If so, the shadow on his path was not a good omen, for Apollo was also associated with the sun, and thus the god’s affections were ambiguous. Did a raven croak? That would be a warning from Cronus. Because, apparently, the trance of omens is potentially large, vaticination (omen reading) could be dismissed as unfalsifiable, hence unscientific; but also, because the number of omens is not arbitrarily large—as a practical manner, the hunter cannot notice everything in his environment at that moment—the truth or falsity of synchronicity ultimately rests with the skill of the vaticinator, which cannot be prejudged. His skill depends crucially on a high degree of concentration, amounting to trance. Vaticination then is a form of samyama, momentarily frozen awareness, as it were, of the immediate environment of the vaticinator” (63).
We could also look at vaticination in terms of selective narration. What does Edgar Alan Poe choose to tell us in the story of the Black Cat that allows the meaning of the black cat to accrue throughout? Who becomes more strange or estranged? What does Poe or the narrator leave out that would otherwise detract from the overall mood and metamorphosis in the story. I think this "frozen awareness," can be quite a useful way to see writing. Many critics and writers talk about what moves the reader, but I think we should not forget about what arrests you.
(exhale)
Lia
7.3.08
Class Summary
For those who missed class on March 5, we missed you! Here are some notes that occurred to me while writing an e-mail to an ill absentee who asked what she missed:
Laurie Schaffler spoke on Ezra Pound's Canto One comparing it to the opening of Book 11 of The Odyssey [Robert Fitzgerald’s translation]. She noted the liberties Pound takes in "translating" 130 lines and reducing them to 66. It was pointed out that this reveals an aesthetic that prizes condensation, compression, and the lyric impulse at the expense of leisurely narrative. The importance of this aesthetic in the modernist revolution sparked by Pound and Eliot. The use of Tiresias -- the blind prophet from whom Odysseus takes counsel in the underworld -- in Eliot's "The Waste Land" and in "Canto One." Can it be that Pound carved his canto out of Book 11 of The Odyssey (in which Odysseus visits the underworld) in part because it affords him the chance to appropriate Tiresias as a prophet regarding his own journey of "The Cantos"? Surely the Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson bears a closer resemblance to that of Homer than does the Ulysses in Pound's Canto One.
Laurie noted that DL spends summers in Ithaca, NY.
Speculation on the symbolic resonance of the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, and the Cyclops as perils facing the universal mariner. The first two categories are easy enough to understand. But the cyclops? The suggestion was advanced most shyly and tentatively that the cyclops as a beast was "a one-eyed monster," pure phallus with only hungers, no spiritual or intellectual dimension. Matt Cunha pointed out that the cyclops was indeed "a dick."
David West spoke on Ulysses as a character in Dante (canto 26) and Tennyson. Odysseus's last voyage: the inevitability thereof, as how could a man who lived for adventure ever feel quite at home staying in one place, administering the kingdom of Ithaca? Rebellion against age, "rage against the dying of the light" (as Dylan Thomas put it). Condescension to Telemachus. Conception of heroism. Individual lines of Tennyson were quoted and analyzed for their uncanny poetic effects. Cavafy's poem on the importance of the journey, rather than the destination is seen as consistent with the view of Ulysses in Dante and Virgil.
Auerbach's essay was reviewed in brief . Statements about Penelope and Odysseus as a couple equally matched in wits and wiles were summarized. A poem based on the Scylla and Charybdis episode was read aloud.
A heartfelt thank you to Laurie and David and all who spoke out in class.
-- DL
Laurie Schaffler spoke on Ezra Pound's Canto One comparing it to the opening of Book 11 of The Odyssey [Robert Fitzgerald’s translation]. She noted the liberties Pound takes in "translating" 130 lines and reducing them to 66. It was pointed out that this reveals an aesthetic that prizes condensation, compression, and the lyric impulse at the expense of leisurely narrative. The importance of this aesthetic in the modernist revolution sparked by Pound and Eliot. The use of Tiresias -- the blind prophet from whom Odysseus takes counsel in the underworld -- in Eliot's "The Waste Land" and in "Canto One." Can it be that Pound carved his canto out of Book 11 of The Odyssey (in which Odysseus visits the underworld) in part because it affords him the chance to appropriate Tiresias as a prophet regarding his own journey of "The Cantos"? Surely the Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson bears a closer resemblance to that of Homer than does the Ulysses in Pound's Canto One.
Laurie noted that DL spends summers in Ithaca, NY.
Speculation on the symbolic resonance of the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, and the Cyclops as perils facing the universal mariner. The first two categories are easy enough to understand. But the cyclops? The suggestion was advanced most shyly and tentatively that the cyclops as a beast was "a one-eyed monster," pure phallus with only hungers, no spiritual or intellectual dimension. Matt Cunha pointed out that the cyclops was indeed "a dick."
David West spoke on Ulysses as a character in Dante (canto 26) and Tennyson. Odysseus's last voyage: the inevitability thereof, as how could a man who lived for adventure ever feel quite at home staying in one place, administering the kingdom of Ithaca? Rebellion against age, "rage against the dying of the light" (as Dylan Thomas put it). Condescension to Telemachus. Conception of heroism. Individual lines of Tennyson were quoted and analyzed for their uncanny poetic effects. Cavafy's poem on the importance of the journey, rather than the destination is seen as consistent with the view of Ulysses in Dante and Virgil.
Auerbach's essay was reviewed in brief . Statements about Penelope and Odysseus as a couple equally matched in wits and wiles were summarized. A poem based on the Scylla and Charybdis episode was read aloud.
A heartfelt thank you to Laurie and David and all who spoke out in class.
-- DL
5.3.08
Spot The Bible Story
It's fun spotting Bible stories in literature and art. There were Abraham and Isaac, right below my nose, as I recently reread Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). The main character, Okonkwo, "well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond" for his strength and fearlessness, faces a challenge of biblical proportions when the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves decrees that Ikemefuna, Okonkwo's adopted son, must die. However, unlike the Abraham story, the village elder, who passes the message on to Okonkwo, forbids that he take action. He says: "Do not bear a hand in his death."
Instead, a group of village elders plan to seize the boy, take him to the outskirts of town, and perform the sacrifice. Okonkwo accompanies the group on the mission. The boy does not know what the trip is for, and wonders if he is being taken back to his native village. Then the terrible moment: "As a man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, 'My father, they have killed me!' as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak." In the end, it is Okonkwo that takes Ikemefuna's life.
What is Okonkwo afraid of? His gods, his people, a wounded son or his wounded pride?
On the level of narration, the sacrifice of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart brings to mind Erich Auerbach's comparison of narration in The Bible and The Odyssey. As in most literature that comes after these two texts, the sacrifice of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart combines both an elusive narration and the patent tell-all, foreground-friendly nature of the Homeric narrative. As the men walk through the forest, we are privy to Ikemefuna's thoughts along the way: "Although he had felt uneasy at first, he was not afraid now. Okonkwo walked behind him. He could hardly imagine that Okonkwo was not his real father..." Later, at the moment of sacrifice, the narrator tells us that Okonkwo is afraid (see above quotation.) However, the narration is maddeningly, beautifully elusive, too. There are no clear answers. As in the Abraham episode, the reader wonders, "How could Okonkwo do that? What was he thinking?" Okonkwo's action is beyond comprehension, and yet, it is of a slightly less mechanical nature than Abraham's, because the narrator makes it clear to us that it is fraught with woe all around.
Poor Ikemefuna. His legacy is strong, however, not unlike that of martyrs or youth gone too young. I was just watching a film called "Ezra" about a former child soldier in Sierra Leone who recalls the war in a so-called "Truth and Reconciliation" forum. In one scene, probably my favorite of the film, Ezra and three other soldiers are relaxing before a night mission in which they will have to raze a village. They discuss Things Fall Apart, and Ikemefuna, and one of the soldiers says, "We are like Ikemefuna," children sacrificed for no apparent reason. And so Isaac becomes Ikemefuna, becomes Ezra, Mariam, and Moses, becomes a baby left in the back of a livery cab, innocence cut down, these sacrificial lambs.
Anyone got another Bible story embedded in something they're reading?
Instead, a group of village elders plan to seize the boy, take him to the outskirts of town, and perform the sacrifice. Okonkwo accompanies the group on the mission. The boy does not know what the trip is for, and wonders if he is being taken back to his native village. Then the terrible moment: "As a man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, 'My father, they have killed me!' as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak." In the end, it is Okonkwo that takes Ikemefuna's life.
What is Okonkwo afraid of? His gods, his people, a wounded son or his wounded pride?
On the level of narration, the sacrifice of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart brings to mind Erich Auerbach's comparison of narration in The Bible and The Odyssey. As in most literature that comes after these two texts, the sacrifice of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart combines both an elusive narration and the patent tell-all, foreground-friendly nature of the Homeric narrative. As the men walk through the forest, we are privy to Ikemefuna's thoughts along the way: "Although he had felt uneasy at first, he was not afraid now. Okonkwo walked behind him. He could hardly imagine that Okonkwo was not his real father..." Later, at the moment of sacrifice, the narrator tells us that Okonkwo is afraid (see above quotation.) However, the narration is maddeningly, beautifully elusive, too. There are no clear answers. As in the Abraham episode, the reader wonders, "How could Okonkwo do that? What was he thinking?" Okonkwo's action is beyond comprehension, and yet, it is of a slightly less mechanical nature than Abraham's, because the narrator makes it clear to us that it is fraught with woe all around.
Poor Ikemefuna. His legacy is strong, however, not unlike that of martyrs or youth gone too young. I was just watching a film called "Ezra" about a former child soldier in Sierra Leone who recalls the war in a so-called "Truth and Reconciliation" forum. In one scene, probably my favorite of the film, Ezra and three other soldiers are relaxing before a night mission in which they will have to raze a village. They discuss Things Fall Apart, and Ikemefuna, and one of the soldiers says, "We are like Ikemefuna," children sacrificed for no apparent reason. And so Isaac becomes Ikemefuna, becomes Ezra, Mariam, and Moses, becomes a baby left in the back of a livery cab, innocence cut down, these sacrificial lambs.
Anyone got another Bible story embedded in something they're reading?
3.3.08
W.S. Merwin
Here's a poem by W.S. Merwin.
-Alina
Odysseus
Always the setting forth was the same,
Odysseus
Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unravelling patience
He was wedded to. There were the islands
Each with its woman and twining welcome
To be navigated, and one to call "home.''
The knowledge of all that he betrayed
Grew till it was the same whether he stayed
Or went. Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure
Perils that he could never sail through,
And which, improbable, remote, and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?
-W.S. Merwin
-W.S. Merwin
1.3.08
Kate Angus' Poem
On Circe’s Island
I had been given a plant to save me; nacreous white flower ascending from the deep sea-dark of the root. But I did not want--entirely--to be saved. Ithaca’s rocks rise far away. Skin craves pelt sometimes--a forest of hair that the soul can hide in--and I was tired. I wanted to be mountain lion, pig, wolf. I wanted to be animal nature. At Troy, I had been horse--both in its mind and its silence. I was the engenderer of the idea of horse, I impregnated horse with warriors, and, in the dark night, opened the door so that horse birthed men and the death of men. I have been the spume on the waves, I have hidden myself behind my own words so entirely that words become their own body and I am ghost. Do not misunderstand me: I wanted return, but for a moment just as badly I wanted the borders of my flesh to be the only new country I would travel through--I wanted blood and bone alone as home.
-Kate A
I had been given a plant to save me; nacreous white flower ascending from the deep sea-dark of the root. But I did not want--entirely--to be saved. Ithaca’s rocks rise far away. Skin craves pelt sometimes--a forest of hair that the soul can hide in--and I was tired. I wanted to be mountain lion, pig, wolf. I wanted to be animal nature. At Troy, I had been horse--both in its mind and its silence. I was the engenderer of the idea of horse, I impregnated horse with warriors, and, in the dark night, opened the door so that horse birthed men and the death of men. I have been the spume on the waves, I have hidden myself behind my own words so entirely that words become their own body and I am ghost. Do not misunderstand me: I wanted return, but for a moment just as badly I wanted the borders of my flesh to be the only new country I would travel through--I wanted blood and bone alone as home.
-Kate A
Poem from class
Dinner Party Strategy
We must sing or else clouds will reach down and paint our hairs grey
This green tablecloth will replace their flag. Our finest wine, brought from Deer Creek will be sprinkled down upon their heads. If they wish to drink, they need only look up. The clouds will wink at them in a gesture of kindness. Our tubas will be thrown down, for they are instruments of jest and suitable only for parades and birthday parties. Our banjos we will raise to our heads. Everyone knows that eight banjos can overwhelm harps strummed on the ocean floor. Our neighbor fish have been making a racket with their harps and petitions. Yes, the banjos will even reach the Mountains of Saint Abacus Park.
The numbers are unaware, we will sing, they are unaware and content in their respective countries. Then we'll modulate and play the end of the chorus in D-minor --we want to be true to tone of the eagles. This is how we'll entertain our guests. We give each other winks, and before tuning our banjos, we pop cough drops into our mouths.
-Alina
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