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.

nights at the circus x spectacle of her gluttony

Reading The Spectacle of her Gluttony was really interesting to me because while I was reading Nights at the Circus, I did take note of Fevvers monstrous appetite and the gluttony with which she devoured everything ut in front of her. I can definitely see how this is meant to make her seem stronger and more confident as a woman than if her character just stuck to eating salads or if there was really no mention of how much she ate. It is clear that her bad manners and large appetite are her way of showing that she doesn't need anyone and doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks either. However, after reading the article, the part when they are lost in the woods and Fevvers refuses to eat becomes more significant.

"They gave us hot tea and ardent spirits and offered us cold roast, I think, moose, but I could eat nothing, I was overcome by silly weeping at the sight of food, which Liz said, then, was the effect of shock, but afterwards assured me that to see me off my feed was the first real cause of concern I'd given her since I was a baby."

At this point in the story, we know that she and Jack Walser both have feelings for each other that each are also unaware of, and with Jack missing in the Russian wilderness, she is finally acknowledging her emotional dependence on someone other than herself. Before this, both Fevvers and Liz were both very Feminist characters in the fact that they were adamant that they didn't need men, like the woman murderesses who escaped from there prison, but after the separation from Jack, Fevvers takes on a new form of Feminism. Instead of becoming the maiden in distress who waits to be rescued by her prince, she decided to reverse the roles and set out to find Jack and make him hers. This, I thought, was a good way for Carter to end the book on a note that would be satisfying to the reader (Fevvers and Walser get together), but would not compromise the Feminist message of the novel by having Sophie melt in the arms of a handsome man at the emd.

nights at the circus

There is definitely a discrepancy between the way Sophie Fevvers sees herself and the different ways that others see her.  During her shows, Fevvers puts on this completely regal act full of carefully rehearsed showmanship. The dramatic buildup to the show with her in a cage, the elaborate costume and hair, the corny show music, and the end when she seems to stay on stage waving and blowing kisses for so long. "Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvelous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch.... Look! Hands off! Look at me!" She puts on this really over it and confident persona onstage because she knows that "on the street, and the soirée, at lunch in expensive restaurants with dukes, princes, captains of industry and punters of like kidney, she was always the cripple, even if she always drew the eye and people stood on chairs to see." She is self conscious because she knows she's a freak. However, because Jack Walser is investigating her and trying to figure out if she is real or not, the way he sees her is completely different from the way her audiences do. While they see her as a kind of enigma, he scrutinizes and judges everything about her. We can tell that he is really trying quite hard to figure her out because of the amount of long passages in which he is going over and analyzing her every more, trying to find somewhere where he can poke a hole in her identity. He questions the fact that she has arms, analyzes the unnaturally slow speed of her flips, and ponders whether or not she has a belly button. Unlike her audiences who suspend their disbelief for entertainment's sake, Walser sets out to expose her as a fraud, so her can never really take her at face value and will always be questioning something.

money pt 4

I read Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man by Elie Edmondson in addition to the Money reading and while I'm actually pretty pissed that it gave away the ending of the novel, it also gave me a lot of good insight into Amis' decisions as the author. The article also answered some general questions about the novel as a whole that I had been thinking about, such as "Why would an author make the main character/narrator of a novel such an incompetent slob?" and "Why did Amis introduce himself as a character in the novel?"

Edmondson explains in the article that Amis does two main things in Money that make it such a strong narrative. First, he "introduces a protagonist who is so obsessed with an illusion that he cannot function in his world, cannot even recognize his real environment when it is encountered." This of course, is John Self, whose obsession is money. I began to understand Self more as a character when I read the Saul Bellows excerpt in the article describing the Postmodern Man. "He is certainly in many respects narrow and poor, blind in heart, weak, mean, intoxicated, confused in spirit--stupid." John Self is clearly meant to represent the Postmodern Man here. He is obsessed with money, therefore he has no real center and his "primary emotions are fear and shame". In the midst of his narrative, he has flashes of self awareness that are very distinct from the way that he normally thinks, and that confuse him because he doesn't even know why he is not happy, even with so much money.  He sometimes comes very, very close to realizing what is wrong with his life, but even if he did have that realization, he still would most likely fail at improving his life because he is literally so stupid that he wouldn't even now how.

The second thing that Amis does is "[distance] the reader from anything resembling authority within the text". Usually, a narrator is either omniscient, or is just a character telling the story from their first person point of view. In Money, however, John Self is clearly not omniscient, and isn't even trustworthy enough to narrate objectively, so the audience really gets no sense of security about what is going on in the story at all since the narrator is blacked out/delusional/just wrong for most of it. However, I feel like when Amis introduced the character of Martin Amis into the story, I found myself looking to him to be the voice of reason or moral authority for the novel. To explain the presence of Martin Amis as a character in Money, Edmondson writes, "in Money, Amis himself appears as a character in the text and speaks to the protagonist, John Self. Self then directly addresses the reader, giving his gloss (always wrong) on what the author-character meant. Amis therefore implicates the reader in the narrative by putting him inside the character's head, and at the same time distances the reader by drawing attention to the text as a piece of fiction.... As creator, he shows that the concept of a fully refined and omnipotent consciousness is, by definition, deluded: Consciousness is at one level a narrative that the individual creates through action, but on another level, that individual's reality is constituted by a larger narrative."

money pt 3

I have no idea why but I did my last post on humor instead of the narrator's voice, so I guess this post will be about the narrator's voice instead of humor.

"Lorne had gone on to explore Garfield's sumptuous lifestyle, the art galleries he superintended in Paris and Rome, his opera-nut vacations in Palma and Beirut, his houses in Tuscany, the Dordogne and Berkeley Square, his Barbadian hideaway, his stud ranches, his Manhattan helicopter pad… And as this fizzy old dog bayed and barked into the night, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, with a budget of, say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though, I wasn't so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered."

In this passage, John Self is sentimentally thinking to himself about his movie while Lorne Guyland has been droning on in the background unnecessarily and absurdly trying to change different parts of it. The way he describes the movie as "my project, my poor little project", shows the reader that he thinks of the movie as he would a small puppy who is being abused. In this case, the abuser is clearly Lorne Guyland, who is completely changing his whole character to better fit his maniacally huge ego, even though his alterations would make the movie not make sense at all. John Self's musing here also somewhat contradict his money obsessed lifestyle when he says that the considerably larger budget is actually detrimental to the quality of the end product. However, he immediately contradicts this single reasonable thought in the next sentence, saying that making a good movie didn't matter, the movie itself doesn't even matter. Only money matters to him. I thought this part was interesting because I felt like when he says "But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered."he is trying to convince himself of this, especially at the end when he repeats the line, "Money mattered" twice. Is there a small part of him that we will see later that actually knows that money is not really everything?

money pt. 2

I really enjoyed the series of passages in which Amis introduces the character of Martin Amis into the story. He first comes up when John is describing his neighborhood and neighbors to the reader:

"Oh yeah, and there's a writer who lives around my way too.... He gives me the creeps. 'Know me again would you?' I once shouted across the street, and gave him a V sign and a warning fist. He stood his ground, and stared. This writer's name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all?" (71-72)

He reappears later when John Self actually encounters him face to face at a bar the night before he goes back to America.

"I was just sitting there, not stirring, not even breathing, like the pub's pet reptile, when who should sit down opposite me but Martin Amis, the writer. He had a glass of wine, and a cigarette - also a book, a paperback. It looked quite serious. So did he, in a way. Small, compact, wears his rug fairly long...

I was feeling friendly, as I say, so I yawned, sipped my drink and whispered 'Sold a million yet?'

After this, they have a fairly long conversation that I found humorous because Martin Amis' character is so obviously put off and disgusted by John Self.  For the most part, their interaction consisted of Self making unfunny jokes, asking stupid questions, and at the end, having an unnecessary, confrontational outburst which he directed at Amis. Amis' responses to Self are basically all one word answers, and send a clear message that he does not want to be wasting his time talking to Self at all. My favorite moment like this was when the character Martin Amis replied "Fancy." to Self's statement "I haven't read any of your books. There's, I don't really get that much time for reading." I thought this was funny because by introducing a character who presumably is supposed to be a representation of himself and making him openly dismissive of Self, Amis is showing the reader that he disapproves of the type of person whom John Self is; slovenly, gluttonous, indulgent, and materialistic. I also think that in this conversation, Martin Amis the writer purposely had John Self say and ask things to Amis' character that Amis the writer hates having said to him. For example,

 'Hey,' I said, 'Your dad's a writer too, isn't he? Bet that made it easier.' 

'Oh sure. it's just like taking over the family pub.' 

'Uh?'

Here, the character of Amis openly mocks John Self, and Self doesn't even get it so he can only respond with "Uh?". This conversation, especially at the end when Self drunkenly takes Amis' goodbye the wrong way and screams in his face, makes the reader see Self as even more of an absurd, disgusting fool. I think that this part is more of an example of Quintilian humor because while it is humorous because Self is being made fun of, Amis uses this humor to achieve a "particular end". In addition to being funny, it also "dispels more serious emotions". It is clear that it is no coincidence that a character named Martin Amis who is a writer has appeared in the story. I also saw that a characteristic of Quintilian comedy is that it "refreshes members of the audience and revives them when they have begun to be bored or wearied by the [speech]". While I obviously would not agree that Money is boring to read, the novel is not exactly plot driven and consists mostly of John Self's internal narration so the introduction of Martin Amis as a character certainly made things more interesting and made me want to see how their relationship plays out.

money pt. 1

I was really intrigued by the first 50 pages of Martin Amis' Money mostly because of the writing style he used. The first person point of view, stream of consciousness style, and the fact that the John Self frequently addresses the reader really pulled me in and made me personally invested in his problems, especially his problems with his girlfriend, Selina. I'm actually still trying to really figure out who he is, what his motivations are, what his relationship with Selina is like, and why he is in New York. I love that he mentions things, like something bad he heard about Selina or the strange phone call he received at his hotel, but then tells us he'll explain it all later and waits until you almost forget to do so. This obviously made me think of so many questions about what was going on and made me want to keep reading and find out what it is he was keeping from me. Usually in novels, I've noticed that the reader is usually exposed to more information than the characters and might find out important information before the characters do, but in Money, Amis makes sure that we are always just as ignorant of what is going on as John Self is, or even more so.  Here is a passage that really grabbed my attention:

"My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is going to burst."

This initially grabbed my attention because I like the way he uses different areas of New York City to reference different parts of his face (he does this in other parts too, not just this). It also intrigued me because so far I have not yet gotten a real read on what he thinks of New York. It kind of seems to me like he doesn't want to be here, so the fact that he is referring to parts of his body as parts of New York was interesting, especially since it is also apparent that he does not take good care of himself at all. I'm glad that this is a continuing metaphor because it makes it so the way he views himself affects the way he sees the city, and vice versa. Overall I'm really excited to read more.

cronenberg's crash

I think that Cronenberg's movie adaptation of Crash would have been much better if I had watched it without already having read the novel. I will admit that I think it did a really good job of bringing to life the small world that centered around the highway that Ballard created for his characters, although it ended up not being set in England as it was in the novel. It is easy to create such a limited setting for a novel, because all Ballard had to do was think of it, but for a movie it seems like it would be rather difficult to confine the action of the film to such a small number of places: the road, James' house, the hospital, etc. However, I think that this aspect of the film is what stayed the most true to the novel. One thing that I did have a problem with however was the absence of James Ballard's narration. What makes the book so interesting is the fact that he is constantly describing in the smallest detail all of his sexual fantasies, analyzing everything that happens to him, and projecting his thoughts onto others. In the film, none of this was done so it made the character of James much less arresting than he was in the novel. We never really know what his motivations are in the movie because we cannot experience his thoughts like we can while reading the book and this makes him and really all of the characters much flatter and two dimensional. Also, the ending of the movie clearly differentiated from that of the novel, which made it so I came away from each experience with a completely different idea of what it was really about. At the end of the novel, James and Catherine are walking away from Vaughan's crash and James begins to plan out his own crash, presumably to end his life as well. But the last scene of the movie is James following Catherine in Vaughan's car, driving her off the road and making her crash, then having sex with her. To me, the conclusion of the movie has a much different meaning than the ending of the novel was meant to and it changed the whole experience of the movie for me in a negative way.

crash ending

Throughout the majority of Crash, I never really called into question the realness of Vaughan as a character. Actually I did once, but wrote it off thinking it was too "fight club-y", then remembered that Crash was actually written a long time before Fight Club. Anyway, at the end of the novel it became really unclear to me whether Vaughan is supposed to be a real character or a manifestation of some part of James Ballard's subconscious, especially during the last time they see each other before Vaughan dies when they do acid and have sex. First of all, during the "last period" of James' relationship with Vaughan, he describes Vaughan as always being subdued, depressed, and indifferent, not the way that Vaughan has acted throughout the rest of the novel. He also describes seeing signs of self mutilation on Vaughan's body. Vaughan as a character seems to be slipping away and losing his will to keep existing. Second, the way in which James describes Vaughan's body and scars is so familiar that if you didn't know better, you'd think he was describing his own body because of the level of detail that he goes into. Also, since Vaughan is a more dominant character than James, and kept a lot of people such as Seagrove, Vera, and Gabriella "under his thumb", it seems like when they had sex, it shouldn't have been James who was dominating Vaughan, but Vaughan who was dominating James. Also out of the ordinary for Vaughan's character- throughout that whole scene, there is nothing that describes Vaughan as doing anything at all, not even reacting to James fucking him. He was completely passive and submissive to James and didn't even try to have an orgasm himself at all. In fact, the way Ballard wrote it, it kind of doesn't even seem like anyone else is there. This makes more sense to me under the assumption that Vaughan is a part of James' being that he started to experience after his initial car accident. If we think back, after the accident, James first sees Vaughan in the hospital, then repeatedly after that, like Vaughan is following him, which he finds out was the case. The way James dominates Vaughan in the car feels like James' efforts to fight off the dangerous ideas and obsessions that Vaughan had implanted in his mind. After their sexual encounter and after Vaughan tries to hit James with his car, James never sees nor comes in contact with Vaughan again except for when he follows Catherine daily as she drives to and from work. He is almost like a ghost. He has a presence with them but has stopped taking direct action in their lives and controlling them. Then he dies, and at the end they seem more at ease than they did at any other point of the novel. However, what bothers me about the ending is when James narrates, "Already I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car crash". This one line makes it seem like Vaughan actually was real, and that his death is causing James to start to think more seriously about what his death will look like in the form of a crash.

a transgressive fictional story

It started on the roof, I was staring up at the sky trying to find at least one star when the faint scent of something sour, like lemons and something earthy hit my nose and I came back down to earth. That smell. It's so familiar to me, every time I'm instantly back at home surrounded by trees and mountains in every direction. Whenever I smell it walking around here I pause and look around in every direction for a quick moment, then keep walking. I shook my head fast two times to clear my mind of thoughts of home and looked down at that little brown tube in my hand. This is my favorite part. Sticky little green leaves wrapped up so carefully and neatly in brown leaves, like a newborn baby tenderly wrapped in it's warm, soft blanket by loving parents. Not too loose and not too tight. Just right. No loose parts or weird edges sticking out anywhere, nothing falling out or anything like that. A perfect little cylindrical package almost ready to be sent into the sky. I heard someone speak and looked to my right; someone was trying to give me a lighter so I took it. It was cheap, made of transparent green plastic and there was little to no fluid left in it. I tried to flick it on a few times, but when it didn't light I threw it off the roof dismissively and extended my hand again. This time the lighter that landed in my outstretched palm was heavy, made of black matte metal, and it seemed much more trustworthy. When I flicked it on the sound was so satisfying, the unpleasant smell of lighter fluid briefly met my nostrils but was almost immediately replaced by the strong, slightly sweet, smell of the thin stream of smoke that had started to stream out of the tip of the perfect little brown cylinder in my hand. It's always at this point that I feel a small tinge of sadness, like the way one feels when they realize their efforts are going to waste. In this case, my effort was literally being burned and soon there would be nothing left. This feeling only lasted as long as it took for my hand to reach my mouth, for me to breathe in, breathe out, and watch my little cloud rise into the sky.

"I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."

 J.G. Ballard on the reasons why he wrote Crash, as quoted in "From Wales, A World Apart" by Jeff Miers in Buffalo News (7 January 2005); also in "The Body Horrific : Cronenberg Classics at the IFC Center" by David Sharko at Tribeca Film (17 February 2009)

kjhflkshf

The ideas of negative theology and apophasis in the Menippean Satire reading reminded me of the way morals and sexualities of the characters in Crash are portrayed by Ballard. So far in the novel, there have not been any outright declarations of what is considered right and wrong in the characters' minds or in the world in which they live. However, we can get a pretty clear but hard to articulate idea of the characters' moralities based on their actions and reactions to different events in the novel. For example, when James gets in his first car crash, he is never guilty, shocked, or repulsed by the fact that he had killed a man and was covered in his blood. He and his wife openly cheat on each other, and in the case of his affair with Helen Remington, even encourage the affairs. He and the other characters think of the world in such detached and "abstracted" ways that almost nothing is off limits to them. For example, on page 102 James talks about the possibility of a sexual act happening between Vaughan and himself in an unemotional and unaroused tone: "However carnal an act of sodomy with Vaughan would have seemed, the erotic dimension was absent. Yet this absence made a sexual act with Vaughan entirely possible. The placing of my penis in his rectum as we lay together in the rear seat of his car would be an event as stylized and abstracted as those recorded in Vaughan's photographs." The characters of the novel are not connected on any emotional level, none of them truly care for each other. Even James is pleasantly surprised when his wife Catherine acts slightly worried for him after his crash. They see everything in such analytical and abstract terms that while gaining freedom, they lose connection with others, a critical aspect of being human. Anyway, back to the main point, although we are never told straight out what these characters' belief systems are, we are able to find out through their actions, which makes the novel much more engaging for the reader. Why keep reading if we already know why these people do what they do? I also thought that the part about that "withdrawal of the author as an identifiable presence" was definitely applicable to Crash. The fact that Ballard named the main character after himself makes the intent and mood of the novel that much more real and visceral because it feels like the events in Crash really happened and the novel is really a memoir that was written by James Ballard, the main character. This feeling also comes from the indicate details and explanations that Ballard weaves in and disperses throughout James Ballard's narrative. It is almost as though he is remembering tiny things that he hadn't before just because he is going back in his memory to recall the events of the novel.

Crash pt.1

After devouring the first four chapters of Crash, I can definitely see the truth in Martin Amis' statement that J.G. Ballard's work appeals to a part of the mind not yet discovered. While initially one may be shocked and/or disturbed by Ballard's graphic imagery and the degraded morals of his characters, it is still impossible to stop reading because it definitely appeals so something inside of us that we can't put our finger on. Much of the novel's transgressive nature comes from the eccentricities in each characters sexual being and the way they deal with them. Vaughan makes no effort to hide the fact the he is aroused by imagining and looking at graphic, deadly car crashes and pictures of the wounds of their victims. "To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology", the perverse technology here is the automobile; everyone has one yet they kill so many people in the most gruesome of ways. In the novel, the things he does to get off are portrayed as normal, while in real life the same acts are only seen in crime shows and the most depraved minds in our society. Catherine to me seems extremely sexually open but at the same time disinterested in making emotional connections with others. She is intimate with both men and women, but what really attracts her is the concept or idea of a sexual encounter, that she will relive in bed with her husband, James, the narrator. He, like Vaughan is also fascinated by the concept of wounds inflicted on people by automobiles, but in a less blatantly sexual way. Since he is the narrator, we see more depth in his personality and sexuality; he seems more "normal" because we are experiencing his mind at work. On the other hand, we only know about Vaughan and Catherine what we are told by the narrator, making them both seem distorted and slightly not human (not really sure how to explain this, it's just the feeling I got). Maybe the reason that this book is so gripping is because we see how open they are about every aspect of their sexualities and wish we could be that uninhibited. I think this is also an indicator that the setting of the novel is not exactly "real" life; because in our society today it is normal and expected to repress expression of something that is necessary for life to even exist. Is Ballard making a statement about how absurd it is that we openly accept so many things that can take our lives but try to hide what literally gives us life to begin with?

cut up poem

visions of glossy syntax
are soon retired to the waning floor
as i rhymed hirudin stubbed upwards
with mirrored in pub awards
and my unwritten novel's maggoty shelf fear
is realized before it's even written
time for me to start thinking of a replacement major
maybe i'll be a side vet- a vet on the side?
or an awkward engineer,
a criminal amatuer
discretion voting in test bungalows,
raring circulation bioengineering
or should i just join the charlie sheen church and
win

Nabokov

Nabokov's Natasha quickly drew me in because of Nabokov's simple but revealing language and descriptions. Even adverbs used to describe the actions of different characters are somehow so telling, like they way Wolfe "thoroughly and satisfying washed and dried his hands". Nabokov's use of descriptive language in many ways helps shorten the distance between himself as the author and his audience by recreating the imaginary world in his own mind in the mind of the reader. However, while he chooses to use very expressive language in his narration of the story, the three characters' dialogue is kept simple and pretty brief, except for, interestingly, when they are lying. In addition, he narrator's task in Natasha is limited to setting up the physical surroundings and circumstances of the characters. The narrator here never reveals anything anything about the characters that a third person would not be able to discern, but instead narrates their physical reactions in order to give the reader insight about what they might be thinking. For example, When Wolfe brings Natasha out to the country for the day, there is a scene where he talks about his world travels to far and exotic places in detail, but I could still tell something about his stories was off because of the way that the Nabokov describes his physical actions in that scene. He falls silent, fiddles with a pinecone, touches his face, gives Natasha a strange look, and speak to her "in a cold, opaque voice". These are not the normal behaviors of someone who is reminiscing about probably the best experiences of his life. The relationship between the functions of the narration and the dialogue in Natasha made me think of the idea of "showing rather than telling" that is discussed in the Bahktin article. Natasha is definitely a polyphonic piece of writing because every voice; Natasha, Wolfe, Khrenhov, and the narrator; all are equally present and important to the story as a whole. The narrator is not meant to be omniscient here either, because if it was, the ending would have been written much differently (the narrator would have revealed that she did not really see her father outside) and would have had a drastically different effect. Also, importantly, the dialogue between these voices is never resolved or finished even at the end of the story, which I actually liked a lot. Nabokov easily could have continued the story indefinitely, but the fact that he ended it when one of the voices in the story was no longer able to contribute made it much more powerful.

W.S. Burroughs

In terms of Burroughs being "transgressive", it definitely seems like he had it out for the society he lived in. I noticed that two common topics in almost all of the excerpts from Burroughs' writing were disease and society. Basically every one of his cut up poems included the words "cancer" or "virus" and gave off really ominous vibes, which is interesting because he made them out of actual news stories. Maybe that's just what he wanted his audience to realize; that society is really creepy and dark if you look at it in a more creative way. In the first excerpt from Naked Lunch, Burroughs illustrates how Bradley the Buyer is overcome by his own kind of disease: an addiction to "contact" with junkies. In the second and third paragraphs of the excerpt, we watch the physical symptoms of Bradley's "disease" overcome him. "He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out." He's always sucking on candy bars, which is really weirdly disturbing to imagine because he doesn't have teeth, and his skin turns a grayish green color. When he asks a junkie if he can rub up against him in order to satisfy his addiction, the junkie asks why he can't just get physical "like a real human". This question and Bradley's actions after really reinforce the imagery that Bradley has turned into some kind of weird subhuman golem-ish creature who gets off by "[making] himself all soft like a blob of jelly" and rubbing and touching junkies and government agents and then becomes covered in green smelly slime when he climaxes. One of Burroughs' greatest strengths here is being able to make the reader feel and experience exactly what he wants them to. I think this makes him transgressive because he is able to control his audience and make them feel things they don't want to feel. This is of course also true in the second excerpt from Naked Lunch, which left me feeling confused, violated, and kind of paranoid even though I don't know why. I also noticed that the two different excerpts from Naked Lunch have no similarities that would make anyone think that they came from the same book. This reminded me of what Burroughs said in the interview about picaresque novels and how they have no real plot but are just a collection of "transformed and exaggerated" series of events. Every aspect of the plot and dialogue of the second part was so absurd and wrong on a really specific and dark level, like the way Dr. Benway is so nonchalant about performing "surgery" in a bathroom with no regard to hygiene, intricacy, the right equipment, or the patient's life. I was especially drawn in by the passage, "Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible sucking sound", because it just made me feel real weird on the inside. Maybe it's just because I haven't yet figured out what his intent was or what point he is trying to make here. Is he even trying to make a point at all? I think he is because in the interview, he doesn't seem dark or disturbed at all. In fact he just seems really calm and reasonable, even when discussing different remedies for withdrawal symptoms, creating a myth for the space age, and being hassled internationally by the American Narcotic Department.