Writing Death and Thesis Stuff

It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m sitting at McDonald’s with a black coffee and a little bit of motivation. While my original plan to write my senior thesis under these golden arches between the hours of one and five in the morning, my writing habits have been a lot less coordinated than I anticipated. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m writing everywhere, and doing so pretty consistently too.

What my thesis is supposed to accomplish is argue that coming to terms with our insignificance in the cosmos has become a part of actualization in the postmodern psyche. It sounds good in theory, but I’m trying to accomplish this with a selection of short stories. Almost regrettably, the stories are becoming a lot darker than I anticipated. Last night, while I munched on stale bread sticks in the cafeteria, I finished the final scene of one of these stories. It was the most gruesome thing that I have ever written, but it seemed to come out fluently. For some reason this bothers me a lot.

My original approach to this subject was to take a stance against what I see to be the isolation of existentialism and show that salvation comes from the relationship between the self and the other as we stand in the shores of cosmic disposability. I guess what really irked me was that in all the writing I’ve done up to this point, I’ve never actually written a death. I’ve done extensive writing about death in my nonfiction workshops, but this was the first time I’ve actually been responsible for one of my character’s deaths.

I’m sort of in disbelief that it’s taken this long for the dilemma to come up in my writing. Death is something that’s always lurking in the back of our minds. Mortality is something we’re always slightly conscious of. But there’s something otherworldly in bearing witness to, something that lifts the veil and shoes us there’s something more dreadful than student loans or losing our Netflix subscriptions.

So I’m backtracking now to finish a different story in the thesis. It’s a little lighter, but has an unfortunate ending as the character submits to capitalism.

Fried Clam Day

You know those days where you see that the cafeteria has fried clams and you get very excited? But then you taste them and it’s as if they’ve been dead since 1948 and the texture is like poorly aged cardboard. It’s one of those days.

Blurring the Lines Between Workshop and Literature

One of the drawbacks of being in a very small humanities program is that there isn’t the courses offered tend to reflect the size and demand of the student body. Here at Southern Vermont College, the current generation students of the humanities are primarily majoring in creative writing. It’s not that this is good or bad, but it’s what our department has to work with. While I’m in the hybrid major (combining writing and English studies), I tend to identify myself more so as a English major; I’m first and foremost a student of literature. However, in the current bracket the presence of English studies is lacking for students.

This means that the literature courses that are offered are primarily dominated by students pursuing writing degrees. While I like discussing literature with people of different backgrounds–especially psychology, sociology, and sometimes even history–I find myself becoming increasingly frustrated with writing majors.

Typically, a student of writing here would undertake a writing workshop every semester to fulfill the requirements for the curriculum. Like most writing workshops, each writer completes certain magnitudes of work to which the class is to critique and comment on. In the writing workshop, everything is still part of the process and nothing is considered definitive. In a literature course, typically a student is asked to interpret, understand, and argue different aspects of a novel or play, a poem or essay.

What’s been frustrating me in this literature course I have been taking is that it’s overwhelmingly writing majors and the classroom in itself is being treated like a workshop. While I don’t consider any text authoritative or flawless, I try to hold a certain degree of respect for the choices in which the professor assigns us to read. With the majority of writing majors, the depth of our class discussions are students expressing their disinterest or anger with things like the writer’s style or description. I see a lot of comments regarding whether an author should have used third-person narration to get their point across. But when I ask one of these students to articulate what ‘point’ the author was trying to convey, I’m always met with dull stares. Two students have even told me that they’re resorting to Sparknotes because they ‘just couldn’t get into’ Du Maurier’s Rebecca. This is where I tend to lose a little respect for my peers.

Should we fight to keep a scholarly atmosphere within the English class or does the demand of student interest shape the curriculum? I’m usually quick to disregard notions of authority, but I feel that in this crossing of curriculum, the student’s disinterest is what’s shaping the program.

 

Instead of doing some assigned reading

I found this to be much more relevant to what I SHOULD be doing with my studies:

In a Screwdriverless World

I spent some time gathering resources in the library today. This means I spent even more time bullshitting on the internet, finding information on authors I might care a little more about. Something I stumbled upon today in my expeditions was a book review on one of my favorite authors—Douglas Coupland.  The review, ‘The Gen X Files,’ was written by the critic Laura Miller and was published in The New York Times Book Review. In her review of Coupland’s novel Girlfriend in a Coma, Miller was a little harsh.

A metaphor she used to describe Coupland’s writing at the time Girlfriend in a Coma was published was, “Reading Douglas Coupland’s recent fiction is like watching someone use a butter knife to remove a screw. That, you think, is not the right tool for the job, and however worthy the intentions, the effort is clumsy and frustrating and will probably fail.” If I was a postmodern scholar, I’d probe the metaphor for instability. I’d question, looking for underlying specifics that aren’t inherently present. But I’m not.

Miller’s metaphor is self-defeating. It’s directed at the appropriateness of Coupland’s writing, attempting to illuminate the point that it’s not worth the effort (unless for parody). This is sort of a blunt marginalization. One will look at a screw that needs to be turned and quest for a screwdriver. What is the availability of the screwdriver? I think this metaphor works in favor of Coupland, seeing as his characters are perpetually caught in struggles of self-definition in the technoculture. One could spend their lives in conquest of a screwdriver, but it doesn’t change the immediacy that a screw needs to be turned. If one is limited to a butter knife, then who is to say that they can’t approach the issue with that which they carry. Miller’s metaphor is a pragmatic illusion, assuming the preconceived literary notions of ‘identity’ and ‘meaning’ can inherently be unraveled with the same formula for everyone.

Week Four, Already Fried

This is what my day looks like:

 

(Coffee not included)

So… It’s a busy semester. I’m worried about paper deadlines approaching also, but stress isn’t worth the damage it causes.

Augmenting the Gaze

Most of the things I find on the internet come from Twitter. I think a part of me depends on its democratic method of showing me what may or may not be important. Yesterday, something took me to this page called ‘Antagonistic Couture.’
Other than the text, the only image on the page is that of a female silhouette standing on the right side. She’s outlined in black, juxtaposed against clean, white background. Within the silhouette, icon-sized images of unclothed males in erotic positions encompass the surface. Its purpose, the site reads, is subverting the male gaze through fashion design.

I find this manipulation very intriguing, though I’m not sure I entirely agree with the notion of ‘subversion.’ The text on the main page depicts a scene that insists a female in NYC would have trouble walking through the streets without ‘invit[ing] gawkers, propositions, and unsolicited commentary.’ To my understanding, the mission of the Antagonistic Couture is to create something reflexive, to defer the gawking and commentary.

What I’m uncertain about is the effectiveness. In a setting where academics are attempting to dispel the binaries of homo and heterosexuality, I fear that this could in turn augment the gaze rather than subvert it. However, regardless of its effectiveness, what this production represents is an attempt to fight back against an elaborate structure of dehumanization—a fight I find very admirable.

‘a network beating a hierarchy’

http://www.benhammersley.com/2011/09/my-speech-to-the-iaac/

 

I found this link that William Gibson posted on his Twitter account. It’s a speech made by the journalist and cultural critic Ben Hammersley made to the IAAC.
Hammersley presents a vivid analysis in the awareness as we shift into the technoculture. One of the strongest examples he gives is the mutation of the phone number, where numbers were once geographically locked, they’ve now become somewhat of an augmentation. After this, he states that “the point is that this switch of the meaning of phone numbers, from place to person, has created a complete change in social behavior. New technology does that. It creates new norms.” Yes, it most certainly does.

 

More importantly, what this speech does is illustrate the cultural shift that validates (and potentially exploits) the opinions of all, rather than the critics of high culture. I feel that this is something I’ve wanted to hear for a long time. While this doesn’t entirely explain the culture lag, what Hammersley is doing is attempting to establish some common ground between ‘Those who grew up before the cold war, and those who grew up after’—those who are our elected officials and those who embody the technoculture.

 

Whether you’re afraid the machines have won or happily Tweet seven to eight times a day, this speech is about you.

Prodigal Son

I’ve recently finished reading the novel Frankenstein: Prodigal Son by Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson.

 
What disturbed me about this collaboration was the abundance  of stock characters used in popular fiction. Readers are introduced to Carson and her partner, two detectives with rogue tendencies and a quiet romance brewing between them. While these characters can provide a lens of morality in the context of the law, their potential is overshadowed by the relationship between Victor Helios (formerly referred to as Dr. Frankenstein) and Deucalion (formerly referred to as Frankenstein’s monster). The detachment I experienced from the text was that over two hundred pages were devoted to developing the detective story, while the heart of the book was left to readers who endured the  pages of guessing games.

There are a few relationships in this book that I think are worth highlighting. First, after having lost his wife to the hands of his creation two hundred years prior, Victor has genetically produced for himself a series new wives, the most recent being ‘Erika Four.’ She’s a member of his New Race, which he intends to supplement humanity with. The ideology with which the New Race is instilled is one of blunt materialism. In Erika Four’s recollection of Victor’s words, she argues that, “there is no world but this one. All flesh is grass, and withers, and the fields of the mind, too, are burned black by death and do not grow green again” (267). What I find to be remarkably interesting about this is that it fits the model of Percy Shelly’s The Necessity of Atheism. It’s been recorded in the work of James Reiger that one of the influences Percy had in this manuscript was in the recommendation in the creatures’ desire for companionship, a theme that arguably has helped the novel endure the canon. I believe that as Helios and Deucalion switch morals, so does Percy’s target.

What is the significance of a connection like this? Percy’s nihilism has conquered the mind Victor. Attentiveness only to causes and effects of the natural world can be as corrupting as they are liberating. In one scene, Victor is shown ordering a meal of live, infant rats, unable to even open their eyes. Shortly after, we see Deucalion, who is stitched together by the skin madmen and murderers, interacting with a bird fluently, earning the creatures with the slightest raising of his hand. While both characters (in one sense or another) use the phrase ‘I bow to no one,’ it is Deucalion who also expects no other creature to bow to him. I feel that this is evoking some sense of humility that becomes not only self-revelatory, but is the keystone in the conflict against the nihilism. Back to Erika Four and her development, we see her learn this through her reading. She is attracted to one poem in particular by Emily Dickinson that speaks to her about a recurring theme of hope, something to take flight from within herself.

Erika Four displays the biggest progression in the realm of character development than either Victor or Deucalion, but this may be because we’re getting a contemporary glimpse into what those two have been through over the last 200 years. In viewing this text as a collaboration with the original Frankenstein, we see an ultimate reversal of roles between the doctor and monster. In the most prominent sense,  the death of Erika in Shelly’s work contrasted with the death of Erika Four in Prodigal Son, Victor describes recreating Erika stronger in every sense except for the frailty of her throat. In this he takes control of her transgression himself and repeatedly strangles her to death (this being the third time) putting himself in the place of his creation. In an abbreviated recollection, Koontz develops Erika Four’s stand:

Savoring the moment, Victor was surprised to hear her say, “I forgive you for this.”

Her unprecedented audacity so stunned him that his breath caught in his throat.

“Forgive Me? I am not of a station to need forgiveness, and you are not of a position or power to grant it.

[…]

Quietly, calmly, almost tenderly, she said, “But I will never forgive you for having made me.”

Her audacity had grown to effrontery, to impudence so shocking that it robbed him of all the pleasure the he expected from this strangulation.

[…]

In her dying, Erika had not only denied him but defeated him, humiliated him, as he had not been in more than two centuries. (405-6)

Interestingly, Koontz refers to her in her death as Erika and not Erika Four, where as throughout the text he has been so careful to make the distinction.

A frustration I had in reading this is that Koontz repeatedly says that Shelly merely based her book on legend. I feel that this text in collaboration with the original story (similar to how Gardner’s Grendel coincided with Beowulf), it would have been much more effective. It felt like an easy way to sneak into the story. Regardless, I read it with an interest to Shelly’s work; therefore, I already had my prejudices surrounding the characters and probably explains my fixation on the shifting notions of humanity. I have the second novel City of Night sitting on the shelf and I’ll probably pick it up in over the next month.