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I drove back from NMU on Wednesday - goodness, almost a week ago.  I live in the suburbs, fortyish minutes outside of Detroit.  It has been mostly gray here.  I am not yet adjusted to being home.  The adults here understand more than the highschoolers I have come back to, and it is nice that they bother to ask.  I don't feel like the proper puzzle piece.  I have happy moments, moments I am intensely grateful for, moments that make me forget any sort of bad feeling, but I am not out of Northern yet.  I think it will be easier to adjust once I am taking my summer courses at the nearbye community college, once I am working, once it warms up so that I can complain about the heat.  I am drinking Celestial Seasonings' vanilla honey chamomile and it is divine.

Tonight, I am going with my best friend and a few boys she has collected to a strip club called Deja Vu in Flint.  I expect it to be hilarious or insanely awkward.  But I am glad of one thing: I will let myself look pretty.  I haven't bothered to try being pretty since I came home.  It's embarrassing to run around town and through the mall in plaid pajama pants and oversized cardigans (always to the chagrin of the perky departmentstore workers).  I look forward to "prettying myself up."  I'm also glad of Atlas Shrugged, which I bought in light of the movie (yes, I am a little ashamed).  I was researching Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, and it's apparently closely related to Rational Egoism, which I DESPISE.  I plan on reading Atlas Shrugged to decide whether or not I hate Rand as well.  It should be interesting.

Hopefully I adjust soon.

Literary Theory

What’s “literary theory” for?  What good is it?  What can and can’t, should and shouldn’t, we expect it do for us?  Refer to any three (at least) texts we’ve studied to make your best case.

            I used to have a big problem with the concept of literary theory, on the grounds that it was so unavoidably linked with literary criticism; a concept which, as both a reader and writer, I deeply resented.  What I resented was not merely the analytical way in which literature was treated, but the way in which every word and phrase was analyzed not to death, but to humdrum comatose by our secondary education English teachers.  What also upset me was the “Death of the Author” concept.  It infuriated me, the way a critic could revoke the author’s personal insight into—and, as I later deduced, the very ownership of—his work, of his own words.  The gross injustice of this sanctioned thievery, and how widely it was accepted especially by academics and scholars, had the power to momentarily pulverize me.  I know I was not alone in the feeling, since the most common complaint among my high school classmates espoused resentment of overcomplicating and over-dissecting the books once cherished, now despised.  It was as if freedom of speech had been ripped from the individual in order to be flung haphazardly to the selfish (and self absorbed) masses.  It got to a point where the words “literary criticism” alone could boil my blood.  An explanation offered by Dave Barry in College served only to kindle the angry red heating system of veins, and it goes as follows:

“Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.”

            If Herman Melville didn’t roll in his grave over that, I am sure I did enough reeling—and spitting and ranting and raving—to make up for it.  It is not that I don’t believe a reader can’t identify personally with a novel.  Far from that, since I myself have on numerous occasion, and think that literature itself it held together on a foundation of universal humanistic concordance (I wanted to write identifiability, but apparently that is not a word).  What upset me was the disregard for both the writer and the written work itself, since oftentimes interpretations of a text deviate from context within the story itself, fueled by humanity’s willingness to assert itself onto that which it doesn’t own.  Feudal lords at least had to fight to claim another’s land before raising it to the ground.  Moby Dick was not a metaphor for the Republic of Ireland.  Closer to home, I would like to argue that every single mention of water in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was not a metaphor for sex, as was recently proposed to me.  The Awakening is one of my personal favorites, and reading it directly after learning of Virginia Woolf’s suicide resulted in the story holding particular sway with me.  I can understand if a person identifies Edna’s drowning suicide to be an expression of ultimate freedom, or if they correlate the Gulf of Mexico, as Edna sees it, as a metaphor for force of will or  freedom from societal repression or a release and relief from her own ego and superego. But to say that every mention of water, from the glass of water on a table to a puddle on the street, is a symbol of sex is to read where the lines have not only stopped, but never thought to go.  Sometimes people drink water because they are thirsty, and sometimes a puddle exists because the natural phenomenon we call rain has recently occurred.

            However, literary theory is not the quest for symbols in subtext (or untext, as I would prefer to call it), and when it is applied in such a way as to seek those symbols, it is the applicant’s misdeed rather than the concept’s.  When it comes down to it, literary theory is the interrelation of and speculation on moral, ethical and social philosophy, humanistically relevant history, and, of the utmost importance, emotional content.  Literature—in particular, the novel—has and will always transcend film, dance, and even music, in its ability to both move and express the human condition.  Music, while able to move the human spirit, is still an indistinct medium of expression.  The nature of dance is similar.  Film, while a combination of theatre and visual art, fails to fully convey the whole of the inner workings and the distinct ipseity of  individuals.  I believe the immediacy of film, rather than the quality of its ability to express, is what draws the masses to today’s movie theaters.  More than any other medium, books are able to express the contradictory cruxes of humanity: the individuality of selfhood and the amalgamation of social interaction.  The novel not only divulges the profundity of existence, but draws readers into situations which, while not their own, hold enough emotional and logical truth to acknowledge the similar world and complexity of spirit within a like and dissimilar human.  Memores acti prudentes futuri.  Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice aptly demonstrates my newfound opinion of literary theory itself:

“Novels…present persistent forms of human need and desire realized in specific social situations.  These situations frequently, indeed usually, differ a good deal from the reader’s own.  Novels, recognizing this, in general construct and speak to an implicit reader who shares with the characters certain hopes, fears, and general human concerns, and who for that reason is able to form bonds of identification and sympathy with them, but who is also situated elsewhere and needs to be informed about the concrete situation of the characters.  In this way, the very structure of the interaction between the text and its imagined reader invites the reader to see how the mutable features of society and circumstance bear on the realization of shared hopes and desires—and also, in fact, on their very structure.”

Literary theory’s purpose is identifying the complimentary aspects of human experience for those bound to benefit: mainly, readers.  But “reader” is not a person’s sole status.  The world is made up of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and friends families and peers and colleagues and overseers and workers and chance encounters and lifelong searchers and philosophers and adventurers and home-makers and bachelors, and the things we learn from books do not remain in the mind of that interspersed creature, “the reader”.  The magic of literature is that it is not purely logical, relying only on sense and reason; books deal in all the realms of selfhood and for your time and attention reciprocate with an understanding that is wholly human because of its encompassment of emotion.  We can expect literary theory to aid us in understanding both our personal character and the guiding temperament of our surroundings, but we cannot (and should not) expect literary theory to interpret a novel according to the whims of any current scholastic pretension.  Literary theory, in closing, is to be understood as and used as a spurring of the personal comprehension of what it means to be human via the medium of novels.

Why I Write Terrible Poetry

I have realized, in my sleepless stupor-no-more, that poetry is humanity's always failing attempt to express the id.  Freud's id.  Which you know already.  And now I see why I write fiction, not poetry.  The id is not all there is.  The ego and the super ego are realities, even if the id is really me.  Artificially constructed, or construed, as they may be, they are alive in my conscious and my unconscious will never successfully be unleashed because it is my unconscious.  But perhaps my unconscious is what is spurring me to write, write, to write and not sleep and search for answers and push myself until I am delirious enough to speak something like the truth.  But you see, there is the barrier of language.  Even if a lion could speak, we would not understand it.  Who was the one who said that?  An intelligent man, but that is the problem.  My head tells the guts to spill, but it is my heart who obliges.  Yes, my heart!  And there lies the problem!  Poetry is wrung from the brain and the heart, when it is the guts that should be spilling!  It is the guts that throb inside us, the guts that defy expression!  Man always gets it wrong!  Heart, mind, heart, mind, fighting back and forth.  Enlightenment, Romantics, Victorians, Lost Generation, and so forth!  Of course, the "Lost Generation" comes the closest in a while to finding itself.  Hemingway pokes at the guts, Fitzgerald sticks his toe into the mess and wiggles it around, coming out with nonsequitors that try (and fail, of course, as always) to express that gut.  Close.  He comes close.  But they rely too heavily on the gut!  Like the poets of today!  The poets who know (and therein lies one problem) that rhyme and meter take away from the inherent chaos of the id, the lack of rhythm.  Silly Milton, who sat in his orderly rooms, scratching away in his orderly costume, espousing his "ideas" through that rhythmic sound over sense.  Silly, adorable Keats, who shivered and quavered in his humble dwelling, quivering out the yearning lines.  Silly, violent Byron, spiralling about in a nature many others would imitate, so that the blazers of Oxfordians needed patches at the ripped elbows, all that flailing and beating of chests and gnashing of teeth and glaring, seething of eyes.  And now, there is the poet who sits naked in his room, scrawling over the walls and scampering over the ceiling in an attempt to unleash, unfurl his guts.

But it is not so simple!  Poetry, ultimately, fails.  Yes, it stirs our passions and plucks our heartstrings and prods our minds, but never all at once.  Why do I write fiction?  Because my reality is more than my id.  The ego and superego are now just as real, and far more tangible, than the id.  They - the indefinable "they", because I have forgotten precisely who "they" are (I'm relatively certain "they" are connected with the sixties) - deny the importance of the ego and superego, tell us to free ourselves of those bonds.  Why free ourselves from the bonds that touch two thirds of the trifecta, the heart and mind?  The guts, or id, are not everything anymore.  Perhaps they once were, and perhaps some argue that they should be, but the fact is, the id is not all.  People call the Holy Trinity an oxymoron, or label it at the very least "paradoxical", and yet it makes sense to us that one person can be split into the ego, superego, and id, each contradictory and conflicting and seemingly impossibly interwoven.  Yet, here we are.  Poetry, I see now why I fail you!  You fail me!  Or you fail to fully express me!  And so the job of poetry will never be fulfilled, because it has been handed the wrong job.  Perhaps fiction will always fail as well, but that is yet to be determined (by me).  Fiction does not cut out the unnecessary as modern poetry does, because the unnecessary is necessary.  The unnecessary is a combination of the ego and superego.  The ego and the superego are a part of life.  This makes them necessary.  Paradoxical.  But sensical.  Fiction, or good fiction that tries, spares no aspect of humanity.  Tries to spare no aspect of humanity.  Give me the mundane, give me the actions and words of the people, and try to express what they do not express and perhaps to not consciously consider.  Of course, fiction is bound to fail also, since language is the medium.  But it comes closer.

I do not think it is true that white noise is the ultimate human expression, either.  It is too solid, too consistent.  Jazz is quite a bit like humanity, but sound too is limited.  Humanity is like humanity.  There we go.

I know the clock on my blog is behind.  It is 4:17am.  Unfortunately, no tea tonight.  Don't want tea.  I really would like some meat.  I look a fright, a lioness with a furrowed brow.  Too bad the library isn't open.  I'm in a mood to read Sylvia Plath's Ariel.  I've no copy of my own.  I really should own one, so I can mark it as my own.  Like when dogs piss.  I watched the movie "Sylvia" tonight, the one with Gwyneth Paltrow.  They got her all wrong.  It bothered me that they skipped right up until their meeting.  Sylvia wasn't herself.  Not pseudo-confident enough, not the sociopath, the attempt at lady lynx, the man-toyer of her diaries.  No mention of Richard either.  I'm such a creeper, reading all of her diaries.  I don't even love her, exactly.  I have great affection for her.  She reminds me of Lydia.  I fear for her, always, even though her death-by-oven was...almost fifty years ago.  Where has the time of Sylvia Plath gone so quickly?  Forty years is not so long.  Forty years isn't fifty.  There is plausible deniability in the age of forty?  Fifty is past prime.  That is crazy.

The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple

I'm drinking Yorkshire Earl Grey, a gift from my best friend.

I believe I am in love with Christian Lorentzen.  Read it and weep.  For joy.  I did.
http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new-york/8355/why-the-hipster-must-die

Sometimes I pretend my literary idols are watching me.  Oscar Wilde has been filling my head with one-liners all night.  They're ALL going into my essay.

Stick That In Your Pipe

Tonight I am drinking chamomile and mint tea.

Every time I sing this song, I feel something swell inside me, a fantastic jitterbug.  I want to dance with Mr. Tambourine Man.  In the jingle-jangle morning, I'll come following you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QjhYeN3Il4

Tonight, talking to Chris, I stopped believing in coincidence.  There is freedom laced in the bonds of fate, friends.  Fate knows each of us intimately, and it shapes the course of our existences based on who we are.

Tonight I also learned I could carry on four simultaneous (and successful) conversations.  Hurrah, Monsieur Internet!

Professor Brahm, if you still read this, I want you to know that I'm writing my essay on the misconceptions of conformity.  I am putting forth the argument that, by labeling oneself a "nonconformist", you are binding yourself to the concept of conformity.  If one lives in constant fear of conformity, one has not escaped it's grasp at all.  I am asserting the idea that an attitude of indifference toward Das Man is the only way to truly step beyond the limits of conformity.  By embracing oneself, one's own essence, leaves no room for reflecting over whether or not one's actions conform or not.  So, hopefully that will last me 7 pages.

In Brahm's class I came to the conclusion that the sixties made criticism a commodity, and that everyone equipped with exclamation points is a poet nowadays.

Attention, everyone: cynicism is not cleverness.

Oscar Wilde: "What is a cynic?  A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
(Put that in your pipe and smoke it)

Speaking of which, I have a pipe now!

Black truffle tobacco = happy Amber.

Please forgive this post, I haven't slept in quite a while.

For Alex

Mirth + Melancholy = Milton

Okay, so, we all know all-nighters are not conducive to the best essays in the world.  However, it can't be helped, and at least I'm finished.  It was for a Milton course, and the blasted thing finally meets the word length.  No, I didn't add words where they needn't be, but I kept adding random points to my argument that probably didn't need to be there.  The prompt I chose was "2. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso describe two psychological states. Discuss the ways in which the poems articulate not only the oppositional but also complementary aspects of the relationship between mirth and melancholy."  Theoretically, I answered soundly and correctly.

Guess what?  In less than two hours I can sign up for summer courses downstate!  Guess what?  I'm nervous they'll all be taken by now!  Poo!

Lent has officially started.  No more coffee, candy, pop, smoking or drinking for me.  Coffee and candy will be the only hard ones on there, to be honest.  But LORD, will they be difficult.  I've also taken on writing 5-10 solid pages a day.  It can be in diaries, fiction, poetry (although a poem a page long counts as half a page), and this week, essays (I have two more to finish, but luckily they have been started and won't result in more all nighters).

What am I drinking?  Orange and spice tea.  Pro tip: don't drink it without honey.  It is yucky without honey.  Lack of honey in this tea = gross tea.

Sadly, I have no honey.

Here's my essay.  Critique, please.  I know it's not great.  It's weirdly colloquial and poorly organized.  But hey.  It's an essay that didn't exist three hours ago.

Milton’s Mirth and Melancholy

            It is interesting to read John Milton’s Il Penseroso directly after reading his L’Allegro.  The contrast is readily apparent, even upon an initial glance at the titles of each respective poem.  The word allegro translates to joyful, cheerful, mirthful.  In the poem L’Allegro itself, Milton is invoking Mirth itself as a “Goddes fair and free” (L’Allegro, 11) to bring jubilance and pastoral merriment along with the break of day; meanwhile, Il Penseroso (the pensive, the thoughtful, the somber) invokes Melancholy appear, a “Goddes, sage and holy” (Il Penseroso, 11).

            The most immediately interesting aspect of both L’Allegro and Il Penseroso is the denunciation of its counterpart within the first ten lines of the poem.  L’Allegro introduces the concept of melancholy and night before hinting at merriment, perhaps to amplify the brooding drear it perceives in pensive darkness.  Strangely, Melancholy is described in the first stanza as “unholy” (L’Allegro, 4), despite the fact that, of the two, Il Penseroso takes on a religious tone while L’Allegro is immersed in mythology and folklore.  Meanwhile, Il Penseroso criticizes Mirth’s inability to profit from its merriment, calling the fanciful notions of the lighthearted “As thick and numberless/As the gay motes that people the Sun Beams” (Il Penseroso, 8-9).  This is interesting to me, since it seems that only an imaginative mind with time for fancy takes note of the dust particles illuminated by sunlight and connect those meaningless little motes with Fancy itself.

It is interesting that both invocations pronounce Mirth and Melancholy to be goddesses.  It seems there is perhaps a distinct difference between the two invocations that goes beyond the conflicting natures of the two themes.  It stands to reason that Mirth would be represented by a mirthful deity and that Melancholy would be represented by a melancholic deity, but the associations are not nearly so evident as one would assume.  Mirth is represented as a Classical goddess of antiquity, later compared to Venus, the three Graces and nymphs (L’Allegro, 14-15, 25) and is aligned with Bacchus, Zephyr—or “Zephir”—and Aurora (L’Allegro, 16 & 19) as well.  Melancholy, on the other hand, is represented by Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth.  It is interesting that Milton chose the equivalent of Hestia to represent Melancholy, considering the sister of Demeter and Hera gave up her seat to Dionysus in order to tend the fires of Mount Olympus, separating herself from the original Greek Pantheon.  It is also interesting to note that Vesta is, by all accounts, a virgin goddess.  It can be inferred that the invocation of Mirth is an entreaty to the idea of mirth itself and its personification of a halcyon deity, while the invocation of Melancholy takes on a more religious connotation.  Perhaps, by affiliating Melancholy with a goddess represented by ever-burning fire, Milton means to connote the fiery passion of prayer, and asserts that the intensity of intellectual and spiritual devotion trumps the lighthearted spirit of Mirth.  This would explain why the second stanza states that Melancholy’s “Saintly visage is too bright/To hit the Sense of human sight” (Il Penseroso, 13-14).  Surely, Milton’s definition of melancholy must differ from that of the Merriman-Webster dictionary.

Mirth and Melancholy are not only likened to goddesses.  Milton associates Mirth with the fantastical, mentioning the “Faery Mab” (L’Allegro, 102) of folklore and a “Goblin” as staples of mirthful conversation.  Like in many other of his works, Milton seems to grapple with a love of legends and a desire to uphold religion above all and any mythology.  In order to satiate this desire, Milton personifies Melancholy as a “pensive Nun, devout and pure/Sober, stedfast, and demure” (Il Penseroso, 31-32), and requests that she “Forget thy self to Marble” (Il Penseroso, 42).  By linking Melancholy with marble and, later, with lead (Il Penseroso, 43)—a metal said to be a metal associated with the Roman god Saturn, the contemplative god—almost appears to be Milton’s method of grounding his own zealousness in favor of “Contemplation,/And the mute Silence” (Il Penseroso, 54-55).  Though composure is a staple of Milton’s concept of melancholy, he allows himself to be carried away with an irrepressible fervor, which is alternately presented and chided by the poet.  This is where I feel we encounter the writer’s spirit.  There was a reason for writing both L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.  Firstly, it appears Milton wanted to prove the superiority of Melancholy.  Secondly, and less obviously, it appears Milton was conscious of a war waging within himself.  Perhaps war is too strong a word.  A conflict broke out within the young Milton, one he half knew the answer to: which should I live by, mirth or melancholy?  While he clearly chose melancholy, I believe Milton could not repress a fervency within himself, a passion for more than marble and lead.  Thus, Il Penseroso—the more complex of the two poems—wavers between the approbation of the somber, stern and silent, and the emancipation of spiritual ardency and ripe emotion.

Mirth and Melancholy are associated not only with goddesses and pious women, but with birds.  Mirth, personified by both the cock and the lark (L’Allegro, 41 & 49), signifies the coming of day.  Melancholy on the other hand, like that phantom someday to come from Leroux’ novel, disdains the garish light of day and seeks refuge in “Philomel” (Il Penseroso, 56), the nightingale who, paired with Cynthia of the moon, pulls the shade of night and “shunn’st the noise of folly” (Il Penseroso, 61) that day inevitably brings.  But the night of Il Penseroso, by the end of the poem, does not seem to be brought about by nature.  Rather, the “Mossy Cell” (Il Penseroso, 169) of the ivory tower constructs an artificial night, a constant hour of contemplation.  Perhaps that is why the lark wishes to “startle the dull night” (L’Allegro, 41); perhaps, even if only subconsciously, Milton sees a flaw in his isolated hermitage.

One odd complementary aspect of the poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso is their mutual claim on Orpheus.  Or rather, both claim that the assistance of Mirth, or alternately, Melancholy, could have gained Eurydice back from the dead.  The invoker of Mirth ends with the story of Orpheus, and states that if Mirth could succeed where Orpheus failed, he would live by Mirth’s ways.  In Il Penseroso, the invoker states that Melancholy could draw tears from Pluto and make “Hell grant what Love did seek” (Il Penseroso, 108).  While neither have sound reasons for claiming Orpheus, it is said that nightingales sang over his grave beneath Mount Olympus.  If that is the case, favor would learn toward Il Penseroso.  One wonders if Milton took that knowledge into account while writing both poems.

Though L’Allegro and Il Penseroso deal with opposing theories and doctrines and lifestyles, Milton’s arguments for the each poem suggests that he does not desire a clear, decisive, outright winner.  Though L’Allegro is not as concisely defended, it does not doubt its own premises in the way Il Penseroso does.  It is not in Mirth’s nature to doubt itself.  It is Melancholy that is suited to observation, reflection, and intellection. Mirth, on the other hand, is a celebration of imagination, vivacity, nature and, at its utmost, life.  Both poems require the ability to appreciate an aspect of existence, and though Milton subtly aligns himself with Il Penseroso, it is certain that Melancholy acknowledges the merits of Mirth.  Mirth, in turn, has no reason to reflect on Melancholy, unless to provide one quick smirk.  This is as it should be.