Milkman

The book keeps getting stranger, the surreal mentality of those who live on Not Doctor street becomes more obvious every time, the characters seem to lead a perfectly normal life but there are little bits and pieces of insanity that tweak the way we look at them. Milkman is a perfectly normal kid inside and out: rebellious, confused and inexperienced but he is able to have a standard social life simply because he has become an expert at hiding the fact that one of his legs is shorter than the other. The leg is a symbol of how Macon Jr has to try harder than most to be average ever since they found out about his mother's secret, its represents Milkman's strength as he deals with embarrassment from day to day, having to cope with something that is not his own fault in the first place, "The deformity was mostly in his mind" (62) a shorter leg is something you're born with. Like the everyone else that lives on Not Doctor street, Milkman has no reason for staying but does anyway. He was born the alleged reincarnation of the man who jumped off a building and the first signs of him wanting to fly away have started to appear. "Why everybody on this side of the street?" (78) he wonders, questioning the natural state of the inhabitants. When he starts seeing the nonsense after living in it his whoile life, he separates himself from the rest of the Not Doctor people, he looks at them with a critical eye like they have looked at him his whole life and begins to discover that there is nothing keeping him there, that he can cross the street whenever he feels like it. I still feel bad for Milkman but now I see he has hope.

First Impressions

Song of Solomon so far has been surreal. I feel like the author wants to shock the reader at a realistic level, all the characters and the events that have happened so far are completely possible but incredibly unlikely. It takes certain kind of community for these things to happen, one that doesn't punish severely, one that gives a lot of freedom and one that is too shattered to care anymore.

The African-American population described int his book is one that had been put down for so long they have lost care for the line that divides acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. Those are people that have seen so much that they cannot be easily surprised anymore. It takes a mother breast-feeding her eight(or so)-year-old child or a man jumping off a building with silky blue wings strapped on to really earn attention.

Control

The preconscious awesome.
It is having control of you body without having control of your thoughts. It is knowing what you are saying but now knowing where it came from. Being honest with yourself is not only an incredibly generic piece of advice but it is also impossible to do. Freud' theory hat dreams were the representation and interpretation of our deepest, most repressed ideas was refuted and replaced with the theory that dreams are nothing but the processing of thoughts.
Our brain works really hard to make us socially acceptable and the best way to do this is to repress any behavior that wouldn't be approved of by the people that surround us and thus assuring us of survival. The more taboo a though becomes, the more we keep it hidden and the less we dream about it. I Marlow was really in a preconscious state we were hearing what he thinks happened, not what really happened. His mind and his brain are convinced that what he describes is what really happened but there is an angle between reality and Heart of Darkness.
Under different circumstances Marlow would've simply not said anything but the preconscious brought out his thoughts and put them into words that his tongue speaks but his superego is a stranger to.

BIg Fish, Little Fish

I try to be as open-minded as possible when it comes to foreign cultures, they sometimes have beliefs that I don't agree with but it doesn't hurt me to respect their freedom. Cannibalism is one thing I cannot bring myself to justify. It makes me sick thinking about people eating each other, cooking human parts and selling them separately, it simply cannot understand how it ever seemed like a good idea in the first place. Not even after I did some research.

There have been many cases of cannibalism attached to cultural behavior as well as people resorting to it in cases of extreme need. You hear the stories of stranded hikers that end up having to eat one another for survival and facts about bugs eating their hubbies for natural selection purposes but it surprised me to see how many documented cases of cannibalism there actually are. Criminals that have an obsession for human butchering, a rugby team that got lost in the Argentinean Andes mountains and those who eat those who are already dead. Cannibalism is more common than I though it was and it just makes me wonder where the boundaries of human insanity really are.

When the colonialists first saw acts of cannibalism with their own eyes their realities must have cracked. You can't live through something like that, learning about cannibalism is different from having to see it happening. The European men had this as proof that the native Africans were an inferior beast-like community. Anything that is strange or is "wrong" according to our standards should be criminalized and avoided and suppressed because a life time is enough to get you used to certain ideas. They used this behavior as a justification for their own cruel acts of treating people like cattle an treading them like they traded human limbs. Were the natives really that different?

Both tribes, the European and the African, have no sympathy for their fellow humans. They both had a demeaning view of those they "owned" and consumed them for their own benefit. The "savages" didn't put themselves in the position of those they consumed but the Belgians didn't either. "Consuming" has a flexible meaning, in this case it refers to both the act of devouring as well and the acts of slowly killing trough menial work one can't be bothered to do.

Cannibalism may not be okay for me still but I can understand at least the basic idea behind it, one that has a will haunt our behavior forever, the idea that using other humans for our own benefit is simply survival.

1+1=?

With my focus being the lighting in "Heart of Darkness", I took some of the quotes that prove my theory of light representing knowledge, (Light=Knowledge). Knowledge is a funny thing because it can cause as much harm as it can bring benefits and Conrad shows this in his trademark metaphor-filled narration.
Marlow is telling the story of his life experiences and how they cast a light on himself, "No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light"(70).
So, if Light=knowledge, then Light+ Journey= Discovery, in this case self-discovery, a complicated process that even in the situation that bring out your raw personality we aren't able to absorb a lot of it by fault of denial. Denial= -Light.
Marlow then makes an important connection, he states that when he was given the power to drive a steamboat he became an "emissary of light"(76). Marlow is a white man and by having the possibility of traveling he becomes light, he will obtain light as well as spread it through out traveling. The savages on the other hand, cannot absorb knowledge according to Marlow and his men. They are trapped in a primitive state of perpetuate ignorance that will be given the variable Darkness. White= Light. Savages= Darkness. Light + Darkness= 2Light. Light absorbs darkness.
Knowledge "Lighted up everything and collapsed"(90). Fire is light. Fire brought by the Belgians is used to destroy, it is uncontrollable and the savages don't know how to use it to their advantage to the extent of creating firearms like the colonizers.
Fire destroyed the hut and spread and conquered the savage race. Ligh x Light= Fire.
Fire + Darkness= Light.

PS:I searched "Conrad" on Google images and Lauren Conrad came up. Turns out she's a writer too.

The Eagle Ray Sensation

Heart of Darkness is filled with paradoxes. I though the word “paradox” meant “a popular belief, a universal truth” but I was wrong. According to Princeton (haughty haughty) a paradox is “a statement that contradicts itself”. For example, when Marlow says he is “tired of resting” (p.70) we can say it is a paradox because being tired of resting beats the purpose of resting in the first place.
Or is it irony?
Princeton defines irony as being an “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs”, so if Marlow rested he expected to be revitalized but ended up getting tired of that too it would be irony. If I look at the types of irony I don’t see this fitting in any of them but at the same time it stand pretty close to each without really stepping fully inside of a definition.
Another example of this paradox/irony comes in the phrase “the serenity became less brilliant but more profound” (p. 66). Since we’re talking about seamen I find it appropriate to point out how this immediately made me think of the sea. In shallow waters everything is vibrating, all the tiny little rainbow fish are friendly and you can see them even form the surface but one you go deeper, you can’t see much and you’re skin is covered in goose bumps but once a big, gray eagle ray swims by it makes sense you’d submit to the shivering and the boredom. The contradiction comes in as the “serenity” loses some qualities but gains others of a completely different nature and manages to remain serene.
The reason I don’t feel satisfied no matter how much I read is how Conrad takes a simple phrase and turns it into a never-ending philosophical debate between me and myself. As you look at every single bit closer you find that a single idea branches off in a million directions that have branches of their own which give me headaches.
~wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Greyscale

I’m going to make a confession: my book is highlighted all over. This means I can see what whoever did it was seeing that moment and certain patterns are created slowly. I complement the pink ink with notes of my own, little piece of paper stuck everywhere with arrows that point here and there bringing ideas together.
What I noticed upfront was the insistent appearance of dark, darkness, gloom. He describes the end of the world as being “the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke” (68). The image that comes to mind of a windy sea drawn in pencil, it brings to oneself a feeling of and infinite space lacking of promises. A sailor must feel like that when he is at sea, surrounded by a capricious mass of water millions of times bigger and stronger than he is.
In the middle of a very grey and dark environment Kurtz manages to find a speck of light. As Marlow begins to speak he describes the light brought about by the Romans “We live in the flicker- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (68). I chose to interpret light not only as life, but as knowledge as well. The Romans were the imposers of great quantities of civilization in their time and I think Marlow refers to their ability to sail- they sailed around the world conquering here and there, bringing light through the water.
The River Thames is also mentioned to be a connection between men, a mean that brings all men together under the same goal and the same passion for discovering and therefore sailing. A boat filled with light making its way across the water waiting to arrive and break the darkness that was there "just yesterday."

Don't Tell My Momma I'm on It

Some say adrenaline is the best of drugs but I beg to differ: catharsis is.
When I discovered there was a word for it I was so happy I forgot to buy the book it took me an hour to find. I wondered what catharsis would look like to I could get it tattooed, so I could draw it all over the place and show the world the reason I read, the reason I like theatre and dense movies.
I used to try to share my romance with film but failed every time because when the credits rolled I heard no passionate sigh in the room but mine and once again the classic “I’ll pick the movie next time, yes?” It was heartbreaking and my hopes of sharing my obsession with certain lyrics or tiny book quotes went down the drain because there was no way of putting into my own words what true artists hadn’t been able to- hence said quote or said lyrics.
But there it was, an entire galaxy of mute frustration conquered by nine letters and three syllables.

ROFL

Comedy is what I live for.
I eat, sleep and brush my teeth with it.
When I get home I eat and then sit on the computer and watch stand-up comedy until I don’t find any of it funny anymore and so I give up and do homework. That’s where I’m at right now by the way.
When I heard all I had to do was blog about comedy I though It’d be an easy job but then I realized I didn’t know where to start, there’s so much to say about it!
To me the beauty of humour is that it is completely inexistent. You can’t write something that everyone’s going to find funny because “funny” is a concept that changes from one person to the next. Being funny is the hardest of jobs because it requires complete control over the language you are speaking and the culture you are living in. It is mandatory to have a connection with the audience you are dealing with so they’ll understand why what you are saying is funny and you have to trusts their brains to be okay enough to see the pun or understand the twist.
You laugh at something because most likely you just reduced a complex concept into a simple one, because you had enough information to grasp what the speaker was saying, because you thought you were the only one or because a huge coincidence just happened. Next time you laugh at something, try to think why you laughed at it and I’m sure the answer won’t some easy.
I have a mania of questioning simple things to the point I annoy myself, I decided form now I won’t share my queries with nobody but myself… and Google.

Conspiracy

It was hard for me to understand what was going in this act as I sleepily read through and found no landscape in the tone of the story to keep me aware that something important had just happened. Usually I can get away with doing my reading when It’s late and I’m tired because I can just follow through an pay attention when something sounds (inside my head, I don’t read out loud) important, but with Chekhov’s little people yelling at the most unimportant details and ignoring the most heartbreaking of stories it’s not easy to see when something really matters with eyes half-closed.
I was thinking maybe Chekhov did it on purpose: a conspiracy against drained students.
Not really, but what he did do on purpose was try to hide the most shocking parts of his play within the play. As an audience we follow the character’s lead to understand a story but when they lead us away from emotion and into boredom it can get a bit strange. As realistic at Chekhov’s writing is, I don’t think that as a real person I’d ever be able to hear a story like Charlotta’s and let it slide just like that- I may be an awful person but I’m not all screws and tin. I’ve been trying to think why he would intentionally make his play boring and all I can come up with is lame and predictable “he’s trying to mirror real life and life is uninteresting and so are we blah blah” blah.
I’ll keep thinking about it I promise.

Cheer Up Chekhov

Chekhov is a jerk… in a good way. Whenever I think of him the image I get is that of a bitter old man, very smart, but an outcast. He seems to me like one of those who at family gatherings sit silently in the corner and watch as they mentally reduce everyone around them to drooling, synchronized mice. An arrogant a**hole who you don’t really want anything to do with in fear of falling captive of his excruciating judging, but then again there’s no use in complaining about his personality when every time you try to take a stab there’s a hard concrete wall that in big white letters remind you Chekhov is infinitely smarter than you… and to him you are nothing.
But that’s just me.
By reading his work you can see he doesn’t think highly of society and what stings the most is that those shallow, dull, dumb characters he lays in front of you actually remind of this or that person. What truly had me devouring the pages was the semi-psychotic search for which of the characters I fit into. Was I the uppity maid? The self-victimizing peasant? The shapeless child?
Chekhov interests us because it bring a certain discomfort we can’t our finger on, I started off thinking it was a boring old-people play but then I saw the twisted eye behind it and I liked it.

What Makes it Okay?

There are certain awful traits that have followed the human race throughout time persistently and have caused us more trouble that we realize. Pleasure is dangerous (which is probably why some doctrines advise to avoid it all together) since we will do anything to acquire it. The most satisfying form of pleasure is pride and it allows us to live a happy, seemingly fulfilled life until the day death do us part. It makes us proud to make fun of others and it makes it easier to exclude others if we do it by color-coding. Racial stereotypes are inevitable, you will hear thousands throughout your life and will have to suffer the consequences- and maybe even sometimes the advantages- of seeming or being a certain race. Ministrel shows based their humor on the racial stereotypes of African-Americans just like nowadays we enjoy the low-brow "Dumb and Dumber" due to its "dumb" protagonists and their misadventures that we feel superior to. These types of shows were considered a "racist caricature" by the author of "Blackface Minstrelsy" and us modern readers find it easy to see why it is wrong to generalize a race as dysfunctional. We find racial stereotypes funny because we identify with them and they don't seem wrong to us as long as it is all in good fun. Many comedians base their acts on racial stereotypes and many more musicians gain their audience through it and promote it. The fact that a certain race identifies itself as gramatically incorrect and economically inferior it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy everyone has helped to build. Accepting discrimination as comedy affects hte way in which we classify and judge people but there also has to be a limit to the ammount of evil we designate to aknowledging racial characteristics. Where is the line and how do we avoid crossing it?

N1Gg3®

"New Huckleberry Finn edition censors 'n-word'" by Benedicte Page talk about the censoring tat has been applied to the recent version of Huckleberry Finny by Mark Twain. Some say it's right and some say it should definitely be censored but either way, it is undeniable that the lack of the "n-word" is a modification to the original work and that it takes away from the intention of the author.

The "n-word", also known as "nigger" nowadays make us cringe and it has very strict rules about its use. If a non-african-american person were to use they'd be in trouble for racial discrimination but if a legitimate african-american uses it it appears to be socially accepted. That's the 21st century for y'all.

Back in the 19th it was okay to say the word and nobody would condemn you to seven year of bad luck if you said "black" or "coloured" instead of the new and improved denomination that was accepted at the moment. "Niggers" were slaves: worthless, soulless and sub-human. That same thought was what Twain criticized in his novel, showing the power of the denomination and how it lead "owners" to actually stop thinking of them as their human counterparts.

Those who are mature enough to be able to understand that the book was written more than a century ago and that people (hopefully) have changed since then will be bothered to find themselves with the censored version. It is shameless meddling of Twain's work and it affects the way the reader perceives the harshness of realitynotsolongago.

On the other hand, there are those who want to read the book but get hiccups every time they see "nigger" splashed across the page so they buy the "n___" version of the novel and live happily ever after. The "abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day reader" (Gribben) who in my opinion has the right to be sensitive to racial issues, but should behave like a good reader and take the novel as literature. There, there... have a biscuit.