the Throes of Thesis Writing

I'm not sure how many people read this, but here's my little bit of procrastination for the day... I've only recently become inspired [at least a little bit; I'm forecasting that it will only last for at most 10 pages worth of writing before I run out of steam] and am really excited about writing my thesis. I've decided to combine a formal thesis and a more creative, personal (one might even say encyclopedic) aspect on the analysis of representations of cities and travel in literature, of course with an emphasis on some passages in the books we've read. I didn't want to share anything during the workshopping in class because I didn't feel I'd really pulled together or focused what I was going to write about. How's everyone else doing?

More Pynchon resources for your summer enjoyment

I've posted the "plot grid" handout given in class to our webpage: http://ic.ucsc.edu/~ksgruesz/ltel190f/PynchonGrid.htm

. . . And also, a link to the complete list of published reviews of the book: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm

. . . And a plug for the "Chumps of Choice" blog, a kind of reading group: http://chumpsofchoice.blogspot.com/

Enjoy your further forays, and have a great summer!

Pynchon sources; what's Iceland spar?

Check out this link to the Against the Day Wiki, a collective creation of many devoted readers. Some of the material is decorative but unenlightening (a vintage logo for Pinkerton's Detective Agency, e.g.), and some of it just cross-references to Wikipedia, but some of the entries are great.

The entry on "Iceland spar," for instance, was truly enlightening (pun) to me. It really does create double images. Here's a photo demonstration: http://geology.about.com/library/bl/images/blcalcite.htm

thoughts from class yesterday

so during class i was furiously writing down all these connected and not so connected thoughts to the discussion that was going on. i wanted to post them to see if it could maybe start or continue a discussion for tues. these are going to be in a bullet point kind of style because my train of thought kept changing. continue on if interested-but remember they are just thoughts and works in progress
-i was thinking about the theme of colonization, (and possibly thinking about just doing a traditional paper on this topic, because the creative one is freaking me out) and how the talk of colonizing the sky, and time, and everything else could be seen as happened already, in our time, and perhaps this is one of the many messages of the novel. the colonization of places such as the sky tie into the colonizing mission of many turn of the century expeditions, and the rise of modern medicine and science could be argued as the colonization of the body, delving down to the very atomes of existence to conquer and master the why and how of the human body (which applies to many other things as well) this colonization of the bosy is also a colonization of time, because science is mobilized through a discourse of health and longevity, the idea that the more we know about the body and how it works through new scientific technological breakthroughs, the longer we can prolong life and stave off death. beings that (as we can comprehend and understand it) time is a phenomenon that life seems dependent on, to colonize and master and control the body is to essentially control or colonize time as well.
-why/what is pynchon trying to archive?
perhaps that the ability to archive is impossible-the 'post-modern' idea that one idea flows into another and can not be separated, just like these stories seem disconnected but connected somehow-
how the past is shaping the present and the future (and benjamin states something to this effect-that the past is not dead but an active agent on the present in helping to shape the future) and this is done by the disconcerting time/space thing going on, especially 128-137.
there is no neat linear way of thinking through things-just like the way in which this novel does not progress in a linear fashion, neither do our lives follow a trajectory we assume it will when we wake up, things pop up, detours occur, and it is interesting that the phrase most commonly used (in my experience) when this happens is "hey, that's life" or "life happens". if this is the norm for most people, why do we continually lie to ourselves about linearity and a forward or progressive model of life?
this issue of messy connections also ties into the question of whether this is a novel or a history-where does the fiction end and the hitroy begin? where do the historical facts end and the fiction begin. it is not something that can be separated or pointed to, but something that we can read is present in the book. how is this possible?
it is also interesting to think about the resistence that pops up when reading fiction when the narrative voice is authoritive, but generally when reading something 'scientific' or 'historical' or anything with the word 'fact'- why does one tend to have more resistence to one but not the other? if one believes that all history is a fiction, and all fiction is a history- i would find it more interesting to think about what the narrative vioce is trying to do.- is it authoritive for a reason? what kind of feeling is it creating between the reader and the words- what relationships are being built between the text/reader/narrator? what is it making the reader pay attention to?is it sarcastic? self-concious? factually authoratie? intellectually authoritive? parentally authoritive? governmentally authoritive?
um, so that was my bit of thought ramble for thurs-
cheers
levi

Accordian Crimes depresses me...

I started reading Accordian Crimes and am partly through the third segment/story. And as beautifully written as it is, it depresses me about American nationalism, history, immigration, and cultural assimilation. Each story has a character that ends up hating or denouncing their cultural heritage, which I think really has potential for rich analysis. Though I can see the similarities with Melville's Moby Dick "book of everythingness," I find Accordian Crimes much more interesting in its wholeness of people and places.

Moby Dick and "Thickness"

“Thick”

I could not slim down all the synonymous and related words that “thick” and “density” conjure for me in Moby Dick. I began to lose my harness on the original word and anything which was not narrow, shallow, thin, or simple suddenly seemed “thick”. So I noticed Ishmael’s trend to digress on vastness, broadness, width, fat, immensity, ubiquity and the most fun—the infinite! Suddenly the whole book seemed all about the thickness of living and ideas and oceans and whales and books and endless everything and endless nothing and basically whatever we see and find in it all—whether madness or a nice, juicy steak. So, I felt a desire to show something which was thick, and dense and bulky and odd and which would make me want to digress while making it and looking at it also. I felt obliged to show the vast white whale himself. And the think spurt of blood and I was admittedly baffled at how to describe Ahab’s broad madness… so I cut out a large hole—to let us all question that one. I showed a big bloody hunk of blubber, lots of britty clusters, dense, twisted rope, the herds of shark, the sea, Queqeegs’s intricate and infinite tattoos and his golden, bulk. I also felt obliged to show great amounts of pages and words. So by the semi-white whale’s tail I also placed pictures of books words books and words and globe and a lobster at rest on a book.

All things 'accordion' to plan. . .

Here's a link to a PBS documentary on conjunto music on the Texas border titled "Accordion Dreams": http://www.pbs.org/accordiondreams/main/index.html

Teach yourself how to play different musical "languages" associated with the accordion! http://www.homespuntapes.com/catagory/default.asp?catID=8&ctype=i

And finally. . . accordion jokes galore! http://www.accordions.com/index/fun/jok/fun_jok.shtml

Michael J's surfing parody; Rigo's "firefly squid"

Levi's Dog/God parody

Jaslo's parody

A "druid priestess" offers monomaniacal extracts and ruminations on all things Scottish.

Reception studies: Moby-Dick in the Information Age

DOES THE INTERNET GENERATION HAVE THE PATIENCE TO READ ENCYCLOPEDIC NOVELS?
With television and other media constantly bombarding people with fast moving images and short quick cuts it is no wonder they lose interest in a novel written in such a manner as Moby Dick. In a world with cell phones, GPS, myspace, and IPODS no one knows what is like to be isolated and have nothing but your thoughts to entertain you. There is a lack of understanding by some readers who immediately look for plot and moments of action as they are used to hour and forty five minute movies and thirty minute sitcoms. But even with this being said about modern society’s take on the novel it was still considered by many to be far too long when it was first written. This makes me think then that it is a misunderstanding of the encyclopedic novel on a whole. Without classic plot or character development many people don’t know how to read Moby Dick or search for meaning in it, so they find it boring and give up after the first 20 pages and deem it necessary to blame the length of the work for their misunderstanding. –Justin H.

Popular entertainment is direct and sensationalistic, directed toward people with busy lives, or short attention spans, perhaps. It is no wonder that readers such as this one would find Moby-Dick a drag. Melville expected that people would have to devote their time to understanding his method, yet the readers of today are more audiences (given the largeness of visual culture) who do not want their time taken from them. Splitting Moby-Dick into [two different books, as this reader suggested:] a concise tale of revenge against nature apart from a lengthy explanation of all its components would be much more convenient to these kinds of people, as the reviewer seems to indicate. There is disagreement between this person and the author about what encompasses a story. For the reviewer, and perhaps many audiences of visual culture today, a story is linear. –Jessica

Overall, I feel as though each of these young critics are struggling to 'get something' out of the novel. Furthermore by being a big undertaking the struggle is magnified through mere size and devotion of the novel. They want something in return for all of what they put into the novel, and obviously the digression on whiteness, or the Cetology discourse, is not what they are looking for. I’m not quite sure what this means for our culture as a hole, but I will say that I don’t see the encyclopediac book, even one with a rich history and high acclaim, playing a large part in the future of the literary world. –Michael W.

IF MELVILLE WAS REALLY SO AHEAD OF HIS TIME. . .
. . . after Melville’s works Typee and Omoo, he became known as an author of sexualized books, and he himself became known as a sex symbol. This idea of a “sex symbol” is different than that of our own. . . We think of sex symbols as the actors or musicians who grace the covers of tabloid magazines, their status mainly coming from their bodies, not as much as their bodies of work. In Melville’s time, he seems to have gained the reputation more from his mind than his body (which seems hilarious to think about, even if I have never seen a picture of him). Who considers author’s sex symbols? --Sophia

I feel as though the more interesting question here would be what if Moby-Dick was released now? Is it that the present critics of literature understand the processes, the styles and the idea of ‘literacy’ better than the critics of the 19th century? Would MD still be the one-true whale narrative it has been for centuries? How would critics connect Melville to his text if it were released today? . . . Moby-Dick would find itself in a grouping of inconsequential novels, probably thrown away for fifty years, just like it was when it was actually published. In a time of post-modernism and memoir fiction, MD would come out as a rambling whaling narrative that would not peak interest of a present day reader. –Danny

Reception studies: blaming the book's structure

SIZE MATTERS
.It seems that many readers and critics alike tend to focus more on the books length and wide range of subject matter rather than focusing on the content or attempting to understand what Melville was trying to accomplish. This is one thing that has not changed over time. One critic wrote, “He spreads his subject out beyond all reasonable bounds; until the scene becomes altogether too long for the motive, and the finest writing will not prevent it from being tiresome”. . . . . To me this is a reflection of the misunderstanding of the supposed encyclopedic novel. While the fact that Moby Dick may be too long and cover too many topics for some readers, for others this is exactly what makes it so great. —Justin H.

WHAT CONTRACT DID MELVILLE VIOLATE?
Clearly, according to most of the reviews [on an online forum apparently populated by mainly younger readers], the "story", is composed of the events and physical 'moving forward' of the novel's plot. The 'story' becomes the novel itself. Furthermore, it seems as though many of these readings are extremely cinematic, were the reader desires the story alone. Being a student of literature I know I have been disillusioned to the fact that some, dare I say most people read novels for the story? It is not mystery that within these reviews, the acclaimed, “cool” parts were said to be the story itself (mamette), rather than all the other, “poetic crap”(Ibis). –Michael W.

Moby Dick has grossly offended the [1851] reviewer’s expectation of a novel and of chronological storytelling, and the reviewer ends his article by accusing Melville of refusing to learn “the craft of an artist,” where his previous works indicate he is possible of doing so. “There is a time for everything in imaginative literature;--and, according to its order, a place—for rant as well as for reserve,” but it seems the two are not to be thrown together, nor to be “interrupted by the facts of Scoresby and figures of Cocker.” The reviewer sees Moby Dick as a bizarre, confusing hybrid, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster. --Irene

In this [early] review, the author somewhat upbraids absurdity, a crucial characteristic of modern writing. . . This critic believes good literature should have continuity and should make sense. . . these qualities described by the critic as disfiguring are the very same qualities which I find redeeming. For the purpose of comedy, absurdity has ironically worked its way up from a damaging to a redeeming quality. --Celeste

MELVILLE, WE LOVE TO HATE THEE
Critics may or will criticize—Who couldn’t with such a bizarre novel as this?—but the importance is that fascination. I imagine that even the most disgusted reactions were, in a way, fascinated. From what I’ve read, few reviews simply state that the book was boring, formulaic, unimportant and measly piece of you-know-what. The negativity of the book for these critics lies in its absurdity, which fascinates. . . It seems that people nowadays focus on the digressive nature of the narrative, Melville’s historical present, the inability to decide whether the novel is incredible or horrible, and most importantly its strangeness or uniqueness. --Patch

I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE CALLING IT “ENCYCLOPEDIC”
I was amazed at the amount of times people [on Amazon] referenced the novel as like an encyclopedia, though almost always in a negative way. A review entitled “Fairly Convulted”, which awarded the book only a two-star rating, states “The first thing that put me off was the fact that huge pieces of the story were simply the author explaining things like an encyclopedia” (Daniel S. Gruss). Another review, entitled “Get on With It”, though it awarded the book a 3/5 rating, states “Hey Herman! - were you trying to write a story or a friggin' encyclopaedia” ("cgoesel"). It was interesting to me that these reviews, and at least one other, actually used the term encyclopedia in their reviews, and they used it in such a way as to suggest that the novel was the worse for its encyclopedic traits. –Andrew

Reception studies: on reviewer bias

AGE MATTERS
Kimball [an older man reviewing on Amazon] argues that our school systems are currently designed to shove these literary masterpieces down the throats of students who may not be ready to read them just yet. This forcing can, and does discourage many young readers from continuing to read after they have finished school. Like Moby Dick, many works of writing are only seen as “great literature” when they are read at the proper time [in one’s life trajectory]. –Ann

What about children though? Reading is fun for them—would Moby Dick be? I decided to check out the reviews for the Great Illustrated Classics version. 5 reviews, all of which the kids gave positive reviews. Were they positive for the same reasons as the older reader? Well, no. Here, the kids raved over the fact that the whales were really cool, and how there was even a cannibal in the story! Even though these versions cut down books to just their plot, it was still really sweet to see how enthusiastic they were. For those cuts that were cut out in the Great Illustrated version, the older readers seemed to grab those up and read those parts the most voraciously.—Mabel

NATIONALITY MATTERS
One particular passage in the review [London, 1851], betray[s] the author’s distaste for popular fiction of the time. Of subject matter of such fiction he states, “it is indeed ‘refreshing’ to quit the old, wornout pathways of romance, and feel the sea breezes playing through our hair, the salt spray dashing on our brows, as we do here. One tires terribly of ballrooms, dinners, and the incidents of town life! One never tires of nature” (603). . . . He is sick of the same domestic stories told over and over, each time held up as a brilliant example of brilliance, weary of the reactionary reproduction so closely tied with Romanticism and Victorian writing. He is looking forward to “originality”, to seeing the genius in creating something nobody enjoys (yet). . . Whereas many American writers and reviewers were seeking to shoulder their way into the established literary world of England and Europe and achieve “high culture” through words, as if to prove themselves, English reviewers had the clarity of being inundated with such a culture – they had the secure space from which to praise experimental work.–Justin B.

[on the same review:] It’s equally “refreshing” how accepting of Melville’s writing this reviewer appears to be. In this review, Melville is mentioned with the likes of Hawthorne and Poe, forming “the big three” of American romantic literature. Though Hawthorne was a popular writer in his own time, Poe and Melville’s work wouldn’t be canonized until well after their deaths. The reviewers comment on tiring of the “town life” expressed in British novels of the time is very revealing of their own personal sentiments. This reviewer recognizes a changing of the guard, and expresses a viewpoint that American authors should no longer be subjugated by the old world, and recognized in their own right. . . . Equally bold is to distinguish America, a foundling country, unrecognized for its culture, as a leading place of literature, more in tune with the world than Europeans. –Michael J.

NOVELISTS CAN MAKE LOUSY REVIEWERS
I read through most of them and decided to start by discussing the very last and most recent review by William Faulkner entitled “I wish I had written that.” Right off the bat, I couldn’t help but notice how grandiose he presumed himself to be by comparing his desire to rewrite other people’s works to the supposed desire of angels for correcting “the Lord’s” creation of the universe. As a matter of fact, most of the review was not even about Moby Dick. It appeared to me that Faulkner was more concerned with mentioning all the great works that he could have perhaps written better. . . Faulkner compares Moby Dick to the simple and brilliant works of the Greeks, and this reminds me of the ethnocentric manner in which Americans of European descent give the Greeks and Romans most of the credit for contributions to society while ignoring all of the “third world” contributions that have been made. This is a blatant disregard for all the other non-western influences that affected the writing of Melville’s novel. –Rosa

Reception studies: on canonization

THE BOOK’S CANONICAL STATUS LENDS IT “CULTURAL CAPITAL”
About ninety to ninety-five percent of the reviews on Amazon.com for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary edition of Moby-Dick are four to five stars out of five. These reviewers, of course, are mostly people who champion the book as a classic, a masterpiece, or “the great American novel.” –Jessica

Nearly all of the positive reviews ended in some sort of slightly cheezy line, such as “take my advice and pick this one up before you read anything else” (an unspecified reader), “don’t pass up the opportunity to read this amazing novel” (BuckMulligan "Andrew"), and “so, ‘Call Me Ishmael’, because I love this book” (RJ "screename254"). --Andrew

The anonymous reviews of Moby Dick included in the Norton Critical Edition are incredibly similar to the reviews on Amazon.com given that we are not entirely sure of the character and training of the reviewer. Amazon.com has one individual claiming to be in the 7th grade, which gives us a glance at the variety of people responding to the text. On a superficial level, the modern internet reviewers respond positively to the text where the older reviews are overwhelmingly negative. This leads me to believe that canonization of Moby Dick has impacted the way people respond to the text. –Maggie

The review of Moby-Dick from Amazon.com opens with the reviewer telling the reader…rather, ordering the reader of the review to “Forget everything you have heard or think you know about this book”. This presupposes that the person reading the review (hence forward simply referred to as the reader) has a bias/knowledge about the book before even having read the novel. . . that they are aware of the impact Moby-Dick has had on the world since its publication in the 19th century. . . . This need to (not so subtly) declare one’s reading of high-brow literature demonstrates where society places the importance of reading in a contemporary sense. That is to say, instead of reading simply for pleasure, reading solely for the right to say “Oh yes, I’ve read [insert classic/dense novel here]”. --Megan

The fact that Moby-Dick is still read in university, considered a ‘classic,’ and studied means that it has withstood the test of time, and squeaked by this the rest of the ‘classics, ’ but does not mean it is necessarily good. But what it does do is create dialogue and discussion about issues such as category and genre, and trouble these kinds of organizational thinking, and I think this is the bulk of what both the positive and negative responses to Moby-Dick are dealing with; does one believe or not believe that genre and category can and should be disrupted? Those who think not give negative reviews, those that think yes give positive reviews. --Levi

CANONIZATION CAN HAPPEN IN POPULAR CULTURE, NOT JUST THE CLASSROOM
Another trend I found within the Amazon reviews was the constant retelling of how the reviewer decided to even read the book. The most common motivation was mandatory reading for a class, naturally. One review from "neokalis" written in February, 2007 stood out to me as another reason one might read Moby Dick. "I became interested in Moby Dick after watching "Star Trek: First Contact." Toward the end of the movie Captain Picard refuses to let go of his anger with The Borg and another character compares him to Ahab. This leads to an emotionally charged moment where Picard quotes Ishmael, "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a [cannon], he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." Naturally, I had to look up the quote on the Internet, and in the process I began to read some comments and reviews about Melville's classic," (Amazon).
Popular culture has been using images from Moby Dick as one of the most iconic symbols of obsession and after seeing this over and over one might want to go to the source to better understand its origins. The cultural capital gained from having read it allows for many opportunities to show off given that Ahab and his whale are referenced everywhere from cartoons, web comics, and even as the name of a bar located in San Francisco. This phenomenon had not occurred at the time of writing, due to the poor reception of the novel and one of the major drives for people to patiently read didn't exist. Canonization of the text was one major change that opened up numbers of forced readers, but I think the greater change is the popularity of the iconic images of the novel. -Maggie

Pirates of the Pacific?

Thinking about Americans in the world . . . look at the passage on 197 (ch. 53, "The Gam") that discusses the question of how ships from all over the world can communicate with each other at sea, and the custom of the gam. A little swagger, on Ishmael's part, about how many whales Yankees conquer compared to Englishmen, and then a run-down about how the kind of ship determines the kind of conversation one can have. Whalers, he says, are very sociable; slave ships run away from each other; and pirates ask each other, "How many skulls?"

See, pirates were already funny. But the jibe at slave-ships was pointed. Abolitionists liked to borrow the epithet, "pirates of men," to describe slave traders.

What if cars on the highway had gams?

Moby race?

The episodes describing Stubb's "supper" of whale-steak (yummmm), chapters 64-65: racial burlesque? It reminds me of an old black & white (pun suggested) comedy reel--Laurel & Hardy, maybe. Who's more comic, Stubb or Fleece? Why the backstory on Fleece?

the sea, the land, and other observations from South Bend

So here I am in South Bend, Indiana, between the Great Lakes, which were once ice shelves, and the vast expanse of suburbia that was once prairie.

Sarah, if you're out there (Sarah is also away on a trip), tell us more about this obsession with prairies!

Chapter 58 ("Brit") compares two seemingly endless vistas: the sea, and long fields of waving grass or wheat. Nice little micro-poem he creates with this metaphor. Then we hear about the ways in which this analogy does NOT hold up: the sea is not so like the land, after all. "Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one." Superficial? Compared to what?

225: "Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as theis appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

Translation/gloss, anyone?

"Monstrous Pictures. . . "

217-218: "Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait." Anyone who's ever been whale-watching and seen an elusive fluke or tail, with a hint of a shadow of the rest of the animal's bulk, would agree.

You can only see the totality of a whale if you're under the sea, in the whale's own element, and this is out of the realm of human possibility (at least before modern dive gear--hey, it's 1851 here). Out of the whale's element, if you expose him to the air, "his precise expression the devil himself could not catch."

So . . . the decipherability, the readability, of a thing depends on seeing it in its proper element. But the catch is: it's impossible to be in that element. Our perspective, because it's coming from a standpoint "outside," will be skewed. Is this problem of observation, this limitation on what we can know, what makes the whale so particularly interesting to Ishmael/Melville? Or could the same be said about anything that's observed?

"The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last."

Introductions

This is the blogspot for the eclectic senior seminar at UCSC, "The Book of Everything": an exploration of encyclopedic novels and other Big Questions in literature. Main webpage: http://ic.ucsc.edu/~ksgruesz/ltel190f/