atmosphere- the abusing of the rib

Last class I think it was Becca who made the connection between trains and train tracks to heroin addiction and track marks. That immediately made me think of the second verse of this song, which seems to be about someone who is in love with someone who is addicted to heroin and wants to understand their addiction and use that understanding to save them.


Lyrics:

i wanna follow the footprints across my lover’s stomach
i wanna call out her name before i plummet
i wish i had a map of the terrain
so i could step around the landmines
avoid the beasts under the bed they breathe at bad times
i wanna find these here so called treasures,
the pleasures, the trinkets, the never ending weekends
acknowledging, yet i’m still just a piece of the sequence
but seeing these different footprints got me needing to show my weakness
timelines, time zones, 
i cross 'em with my eyes closed
memorize the landmarks and learn the cycles,
the weather patterns, how the seasons effect the
east and the west of each region, learn the cycles,
forget about the fact that many trails have been tracked
maybe its a plus that there’s a path
if this was some uncharted land
i'd have to be a smarter man
willing to travel the farthest to unravel the harvest
the natural resources are unlimited
exploration only requires some desire and initiative
take your time to find the right way to climb
it aint safe to play games with natures mind

if i could show you, you would never leave it 
and if i could show you, you would never leave it 
(repeat)

i wanna ride a train up my lovers arm
stop off at the brain to hop out and find out what’s going on
cut through trees and ride through rocks
and synchronize the universal sundial to my watch
i've seen a lot, but not quite as much as her
to top it off the memory and the imagination blur
but i know she’s been put through hell,
i can feel it
and i know she’s touched heaven as well,
trying to steal it
it came on and it taught her a song
it strung her along and it caught her when the guard was gone
now till the break of dawn, she’s trying to feel that fix
and all her family and friends is trying to seal them lips
but i aint dumb
i can hear that train come from miles away
setting obstacles to stop the arrival
i’m gonna blow up that iron and wood road
from what i understood those be the orifice of its survival
my recital? yet another tantrum
because she's highly excitable
swinging moves at random
no happy endings always off to a bad start
addictive, voyeuristic to the track marks

and if i could show you, you would never leave it 
and if i could show you, you would never leave it 

(repeat)

Addicted-Amy Winehouse

Tell your boyfriend next time he around 

To buy his own weed and don't wear my shit down 

I wouldn't care if he would give me some more 

I'd rather him leave you then leave him my draw 

When you smoke all my weed man 

You gotta call the green man 

So I can get mine and you get yours 

Once is enough to make me attack 

So bring me a bag and your man can come back 

I'll check him at the door make sure he got green 

I'm tighter than airport security teams 

When you smoke all my weed man 

You gotta call the green man 

So I can get mine and you get yours 

I'm my own man so when will you learn 

That you got a man but I got to burn 

Don't make no difference if I end up alone 

I'd rather have myself a smoke my homegrown 

It's got me addicted, does more than any dick did 

Yeh I can get mine and you get yours 

Yeh I can get mine and you get yours

Here, Amy's feelings about sharing her stash with others is similar to those of the characters in Trainspotting. While mad that someone has been smoking all of her weed, she makes it clear that she wouldn't care "if he would give me some more", showing us that she is really just apathetic to everything except her drugs. Also, when she sings, "Don't make no difference if I end up alone/I'd rather have myself a smoke my homegrown/It's got me addicted, does more than any dick did" reminds me of Alison when she says that heroin "beats any fuckin' cock in the world". 

bull

While reading Bull, I was very interested in the mental changes that the appearance of the vagina in Bull's knee pit brought about. Bull's emotional transformation is very different than Carol's in Cock when she grows a penis because while she grows colder and more aggressive, Bull becomes very vulnerable and sensitive- more womanly, altogether. Even before he finds out the truth about the vagina and still thinks it's a burn/wound, Bull can still feel the effects that having the vagina has on his mind when he debates going to a bar: "Bull visualized the interior of the Bald-Faced Stag. It was dark and thick with acrid smoke. Big-pig men stood about in suits leaning against things. As the door swung open to reveal Bull, their dead brown eyes tracked him across the carpet tiles, stripping away his clothes.... That was it! I feel really vulnerable, realized Bull with a shock." Here, the reader can see that he is clearly thinking about the bar in the mindset of a female because of the way he describes how uncomfortable and singled out he would feel walking into the bar. Of course, the men in the bar would really just see Bull, a seemingly normal other guy, but Bull, his thinking influenced by his new vagina, is still subconsciously put off but doesn't know why. However, during Bull's violent, desperate outburst when Alan tells him the truth about his vagina, he comes to a realization about the confused, vulnerable feelings he had been having recently: "Bull understood it all. Understood the feelings of vulnerability that had been troubling him all day; understood the difficulties he had had in analyzing the sensations that the wound, or burn, had provoked in him.... Bull understood certain deep and painful things about himself that had always shamed him." Bull's reaction to having sex with Alan is also that of a stereotypical female: "Will I see you again?' Bull was shy, almost blushing."So now we have the interesting if not humorous juxtaposition of a burly, broad backed rugby player, very masculine, with emotions similar to those of a shy young girl. Carol's transformation in Cock is much different than Bull's because she became alienated from the world, raped and killed her husband and blamed it on another man, and became an aggressive vengeful person to make up for the weakness that she used to have. However, Bull changed in a much more positive way by becoming very much more open and sensitive to the world.

the beginning of a story

Last Wednesday night at around 3 am, Joan's eyes inexplicably flew open. She knew something was very, very wrong. Or at least she felt it. Her stomach was twisted into knots and she felt how you would normally feel when you have just been delivered horrible, life changing news. But nothing horrible or life changing had happened. She was overwhelmed by an unbearable sense of dread, but had no idea why. She tried to go back to sleep, hoping that it would go away, but the feeling persisted and she ended up spending the rest of the night staring at the uneven bumps on the ceiling and worrying about...well, absolutely nothing. What is happening? Why do I feel like this? She asked herself over and over. Nothing is wrong. You are fine. She repeated, over and over. There was no reason at all that she should be feeling this way. While her life was certainly not glamourous and filled with never ending fun, nothing really ever went wrong her her. In terms of looks, she was above average, and had a very nice, straight nose and somewhat pretty blues eyes if she put her makeup on right. She had enough friends that all liked her a lot and had never really had any problems with men. She even had fairly good sex pretty regularly. She should be alright. But the next day, things had not gotten better. Joan went to class. It was just a normal day, and she even got back a paper she had written with a solid A- on it, but still the mysterious feeling of unease consumed and distracted her from everything she did. She went out to dinner with her friends, something that she normally would have enjoyed, but was so caught up in her bewildering anxiety that she mostly just sat there, quietly staring into space. She continually felt like someone had just told her that she had a month left to live, but of course, this was not the case. A week later, and nothing has changed. She can't shake this all consuming worry, nor its accompanying stomach pains and dull headaches, from her being.

how i feel about cock

The most interesting aspect of Cock to me was the convergence of the stories of Carol and Dan and the narrator talking to "the don" on the train. For the majority of the book, up until the last 15 pages actually, I was pretty unclear about the significance of the narrator/don story, questioning who the narrator really was and wondering if the don was the one narrating the Carol and Dan bits. However, starting on page 131, everything started to come together, not too quickly, but slow enough that it felt satisfying and not contrived at the end. After I finished, the questions I had earlier were all answered, and additionally I became aware that many passages that had grabbed my attention while reading were actually allusions to the end of the novella and the exposition of the don's true self. For example, the don tells the narrator at one point: "I like a story to tell me no more or no less than the storyteller intends. I don't go looking for hidden meanings, I don't try and pick away at the surface of things, pretending to find some 'psychological' sub-structure that I really have placed there myself" (102), and warns him more explicitly later:"I hope for your sake that you aren't regarding Carol's penis as anything but what it is. I hope you aren't deriving and signifiers or symbols from Carol's penis" (105). Initially, it is made very easy for the reader to assume that the story has some sort of feminist, anti-men message, and this is directly addressed in the above two passages. We see at the climax of the story when the don actually undresses, revealing both a vagina and a cock, that he had been hinting at the literal-ness of the story and Carol's penis the whole time in a way that the reader cannot really guess at until the very end. Overall, while obviously disturbing, I thought that the convergence of the two plots at the end was refreshing and kept me on my toes and interested in what came next.

mirrorball

The first thing about Mirrorball that stood out to me as being very different from the "British style" was Mary Gaitskill's intense focus on the characters' internal issues rather than having the plot be externally based. Because the actual physical plot is minimal, Gaitskill had to spend a lot of time getting deep and exploring and analyzing the emotions of the boy and the girl, so most of the story is a really drawn out (not necessarily in a bad way), narrative of the different emotions that they both experience as well as elaborate personifications of intangible things like souls and desire. I think that the way Gaitskill shows us what is going on in each of their minds is really honest and clearly shows how conflicted they both are. For example, the boy shutting of his emotions toward the girl: "Thoughts of the girl came to him, and with those thoughts, fear that he didn't understand. Because he didn't want to be afraid, he had contempt for her. He thought that would work", or the girl projecting her feeling for the boy onto other things: "She would suddenly weep at the sight of an old woman on the bus, or bewilder a friend with her excited analysis of a television character. But the intensity of feeling was misplaced and did not satisfy her. Her mind seized on triviality and substance without being able to tell the difference between the two". It is clear that they are both thinking about each other a lot and in a romantic comedy would be reunited at the end, but I think Gaitskill's ending is so much more honest and realistic because of all the weird, subtle, obsessive insecurity and doubt that goes into a relationship like that and ends up crumbling it.

guts

Let me just start off by saying that if I had not been laying in bed while reading Guts, I unquestionably would have fainted too. Palahniuk's first anecdote, about the lost butthole carrot, gave me the idea that Guts was going to be a funny short story because other than a bit of lifelong familial awkwardness, nothing bad really happened to the kid. The second, about the kid who got wax in his bladder while trying to replicate "how the Arabs get off", was still pretty funny to me except for the fact that he didn't get to go to college because of it. Basically, nothing could have prepared me for what happens in the third anecdote of the story. I didn't even know that was possible. In Palahniuk's essay, The Guts Effect, he says that the majority of the people who fainted dropped when they heard the bit about corn and peanuts, but for me it was when my confusion about what was going on lifter after I had to reread the three paragraphs before the corn and peanuts part three times, where he describes the "snake, blue-white and braided with veins" that has attached itself to his asshole. For the rest of the story, I just felt numb and made no effort to conjure up any emotional response to what happened after. I was just too scarred. Palahniuk's style here reminds me of Martin Amis' in Money because he is telling the story from a first person point of view, and manages to do so in a way that, especially in the not okay part, I felt just as thoroughly confused and then panicked about what was happening as the character/real life person (still can't believe this) did when it was happening to them. Similarly, in Money, particularly in the parts where John Self is drunk, I definitely felt like I was in his shoes: wasted, bewildered, interpreting situations 100% the wrong way. This is quite obvious when you think about it, but I also thought it was smart how Palahniuk organized the story to have the three anecdotes in order of severity in order to build up the drama of the story and to keep readers caught up in it.