“Is it painful being ugly?”
I found this when I Googled the book. It’s a movie now?
I’ve completely neglected this whole blog thing lately, but here we go, I’ll try to get back into the swing of things.
Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star was like nothing I’ve ever read before. It was half philosophy, half fiction. Is it metafiction? Is this what metafiction is? The writer (though masked by the character of Rodrigo S.M.) is writing about writing a story? Normally the idea of writing about writing just seems intrusive, but in this it worked. When Rodrigo interrupted his story about Macabea, the reader felt that he really was frustrated and overwhelmed thinking about her–the way that one does often feel when thinking about someone they love, as he claims to love her.
But is Macabea real at all, or is she something that Rodrigo just made up? I couldn’t quite figure that out. The end, after she’s been hit by the car, makes it seem like he controls her fate, whether she lives or dies. At the end of the story, Macabea, or at least the stories Rodrigo tells us about her seem to all be fabrications from his own mind.
What makes this story so tragic is that Macabea was happy in her ignorance. She didn’t care that she was poor and ugly because that’s what she was and it was all she had. She wasn’t covetous or jealous of others. She was pure in her ignorance, like a child. She doesn’t think she can have things better than they are. It is only after she goes to see Madame Carlota and is told that she has a miserable life and that she could have fancy clothes and a rich husband that she feels misery. It is the imposition of society (Mme. Carlota) on its inhabitant that causes sorrow, in this case Macabea’s sorrow, and the final thing she feels.
It doesn’t really seem like this has to be set in Rio de Janeiro. In fact, the city didn’t seem to play that much of a role in the story to me. There is obviously a subculture of these “unfortunates,” but every city has its poor and its destitute. While it did provide a juxtaposition against what one usually associates with Rio–Carnivale, nude beaches, party time vs. poverty, loneliness, misery–it just seems to me that the story could’ve taken place anywhere and would have been just as good. The city didn’t seem like a character as much as it has in other novels (Mrs. Dalloway, The Passion.)
So do we only feel bad (lonely, ugly, inferior) because society tells us that we should have more? Does society tell us that we all have a bright future, when in actuality some of us could be dead tomorrow? Is this what causes unhappiness? Is ignorance really bliss?
Also, this is beautiful and true:
“I am alone in the world. I don’t believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they’re making love. I find that people don’t really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I’m alone.”
Toni Knows
“Or did he get the message–that she said, “My parrot” and he said, “Love you,” and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him–”
Usually I think that when one says, “Love you” instead of “I love you,” it doesn’t mean as much, that it’s a cop out, but if it’s a parrot, I guess I’ll give it some leeway.
This passage was very upsetting for me, even though it was a parrot, unrequited love is just the worst thing. Obviously the parrot/Violet relationship parallels Joe and Violet’s relationship.
I don’t know, this just makes me sad, and I don’t have much else to say. Maybe it’s because I’m in a mood. Maybe it’s because I’m talking to my boyfriend. Maybe it’s because I’m listening to (embarrassingly enough) The Honorary Title. But unrequited love is horrible.
The New Yortex: Isolation within the New Yorks of Frank O’Hara, Weegee, and E.B. White
Frank O’Hara’s most noted poem, “The Day Lady Died,” about the death of Billie Holiday, exudes the belief that New York is a vacuum, a bubble, disconnected from the rest of the world and isolated, but within it a place of common experience. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, also did so with photographs. In his photo “Crowd at Coney Island” the viewer, though looking down from a raised perspective onto the people packed shoulder to shoulder on the shore, feels like a part of the crowd, part of the New York vacuum. The viewer of Weegee’s photograph is made to feel special by the fact that all the captured faces are looking at him. Similarly, the reader of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” feels like he is on the inside because of the conversational way the speaker of the poem addresses the reader. Both the image and the poem create an air of familiarity between speaker and viewer/reader. As E.B. White writes in his essay, “Here is New York,” “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races, and breeds, into a small island and adds music…” (21). Frank O’Hara’s New York, the only world he knows, consists of places he’s been. His repetition of place names, names one would only know if they were “in the know,” makes the reader feel one of two ways: excluded and outside of his New York or sucked into the vacuum. Ideally, the reader becomes part of that poem, part of the compressed island. O’Hara mentions the “GOLDEN GRIFFIN” (O’Hara 25), the “PARK LANE / LIQUOR STORE,” and the “5 SPOT” (O’Hara 26). These are all places he has become accustomed to seeing on his walks during his lunch break, and the reader becomes familiarized with them, too, as he continues to namedrop. Setting the scene with names of familiar places is not the only way to draw a reader in and to make him feel as if he is experiencing the same thing as the speaker. The frame is entirely filled with bodies and they all are looking at the camera, at the viewer. They are the literal image of White’s concept of New York as life compressed into a small island.
O’Hara contrasts his personally familiar locations with a historical reference to Bastille Day in the first stanza: “three days after Bastille Day” (O’Hara 25), making the historical references seem more personal (Lowney 259). Though his references seem arbitrary and the poem reads like a list of what was seen on his lunch break—until the final stanza—each reference has a purpose. His use of Bastille Day instead of just saying July 14th puts Holiday’s death, “In the context of . . . official oppression of artists” as a means for him to comment on “the state of the ‘avant-garde’ artist” (Lowney 259). O’Hara’s reference to the, “Poets / in Ghana,” is also loaded. Ghana had only gained its independence two years prior to this poem being written in 1959 (Lowney 258), linking Bastille Day when France gained its freedom from monarchy to Ghana’s newfound independence. Ghana is also a carefully chosen reference because Billie Holiday was, obviously, of African-American descent and Ghana was a hotbed during the slave trade (Lowney 258).
O’Hara also inserts international brand names into the poem, “Strega,” “Gauloises,” and “Picayunes” (O’Hara 26) to certify New York as the center of culture and a place with endless selection (Lowney 259). As E.B. White says in his essay, “Every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle” (15). There are endless choices to be made in White and O’Hara’s New Yorks, and those choices define a person: “All of the actions represented in ‘The Day Lady Died’ are acts of selection” (Lowney 260). White also writes, “Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and morale” (White 16). The speaker chooses to have a hamburger and a malted; he chooses “a little Verlaine / for Patsy” though faced with other authors to choose from; he chooses Strega for Mike; and he chooses “a carton of Gauloises and a carton / of Picayunes.” The speaker is faced with endless consumer selections that define him in society.
In Weegee’s photograph, the subjects, or at least the subjects that are close enough to be aware that Weegee is photographing them, are faced with a choice: whether they are going to try to stand out for the camera or just carry on with their own business. Those who would choose to act out want to separate themselves from the masses, they are, “…Trying to distinguish themselves by any means possible from the mass of people surrounding them” (Orvell 36). These people feel lost in the crowd. They feel lost in the masses of the city, packed full of bodies, like the beach, but no one noticing one another. White calls it, “The gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” (White 9). The isolation from the rest of the world along with the isolation within the city can be disheartening. O’Hara, too, does not notice why Miss Stillwagon doesn’t, “Look up [his] balance for once in her life” (25), only that she has forgotten to do it. The oddity of the situation to the speaker shows the importance of the scene to the reader (Lowney 260).
O’Hara also uses the made-up word “quandariness” to describe the way he felt at having to choose from so many authors for Patsy. To internalize the quandary of having to choose a gift for Patsy is significant. It emphasizes the importance of the choices one makes. O’Hara juxtaposes “quandariness,” or what would seem like a state of agitated unrest and confusion against the beginning of the line, “Going to sleep…” To go to sleep when in a state of agitated unrest is contradictory, but O’Hara implies boredom, a feeling of being jaded, with choice (Lowney 260). O’Hara and White both write about the importance of choice within the microcosm that is New York City. Weegee on the other hand shows people actually making choices and how those choices define them on a visual level rather than socially.
The first stanza with its references to time, “It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes / it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine / because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton / at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner” (O’Hara 25) tie into the memorializing of the day by Holiday’s death. The use of time creates a sense of importance for the day before the reader knows what has happened. On a normal day, one would most likely not remember what time they stepped off the train, but on a day when everything changes, one’s actions take on a new significance. Time also gains significance in this poem because it is contrasted with death (Lowney 258). Especially since Billie Holiday died relatively young, there is a feeling that life is hurried created by the documentation of time. It is constantly ticking away until it’s all gone.
The final stanza of O’Hara’s poem brings the title in with the rest of the poem. It’s clear that he has been recounting his actions on the day Billie Holiday died, and that after discovering that she is dead, his actions no longer are the same. They have gained more importance and are now the things he did the day Billie Holiday died. Just as those people on the beach were having a normal day until Weegee showed up with his camera and immortalized them for life. Now it’s not just the day they went to the beach, it’s the day they went to the beach and now they’re in a famous photograph. This stanza becomes much more heartfelt than the others because of the revelation of the true subject matter. While the others are conversational in tone, they are clinical and very much a list. The final stanza shows real emotion from the speaker. His breath is taken away by news of her death as well as by the memory of seeing her perform and hearing her voice. There is an intense reality to the lines, “I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of / leaning on the john door” (O’Hara 26). The reader feels his own sweat gathering on his brow. O’Hara’s words are unguarded and emotive, like Weegee’s photographs, like Holiday’s voice, like New York itself.
White says of New York, “There is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with . . . the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled” (26). There is endless suffering in New York, and constant loneliness. Even with the commonality of the New York experience, some days, its residents feel completely isolated in their actions. Some days, those days that one remembers forever, there is nothing to do but sweat it out alone against a bathroom door.
Works Cited
Fellig, Arthur. Crowd At Coney Island. 1940. New York. Amber Online. 15 Feb. 2008 .
Lowney, John. “The “Post-Anti-Esthetic” Poetics of Frank O’Hara.” Contemporary Literature (1991): 258-260. JSTOR. 15 Feb. 2008.
O’Hara, Frank. “The Day Lady Died.” Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.
Orvell, Miles. “Weegee’s Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban Disorder.” American Art (1992): 36-37. JSTOR. 15 Feb. 2008.
White, E.B. Here is New York. Warner Books, 1988. 9-27.
Quicksand
I really did not enjoy this book.
For one, Larsen’s writing is very unclear and awkward. Sentences like, “She carried herself as queens are reputed to bear themselves, and probabbly do not,” show nothing about the characters. Larsen repeatedly tells and explains, rather than shows with well-crafted imagery. It just doesn’t work. I mean, what does, “These things irked her with great irksomeness,” really tell us about how Helga felt? Not a lot.
On another note, Helga is a completely unsympathetic character. She longs for human contact and bonds, but consistantly separates herself from blacks because she is of mixed race. At times, she even seems to think she is better than them because of this. The scene in the jazz club makes her a very unattractive main character, and the reader, or at least I, wanted nothing to do with her. She calls her friends and the other black people at the club “jungle creatures” and adamently tells herself that she is not one of them and watches in disgust.
Helga just comes off as greedy and wishy-washy and unpleasant. With the exception of her difficult upbringing, there is little to sympathize with her about.
The combination of Larsen’s writing style and Helga’s attitude towards herself and others just made this book painful to read, and I really don’t know why Larsen is so exalted as a writer.
Fight Club
Tonight we acted like six year olds, or 13 year old boys.
We threw things.
We wrestled.
We ripped each others’ underwear.
We bit.
We punched.
And it relieved any and all sexual-, school-, relationship-tension, etc.
I highly recommend it.
“Midnight Cowboy” Brings Out the Worst in Humanity.
I was appalled by our class at the end of “Midnight Cowboy.”
The movie is a portrait of the people in this world who come to the city to make it big, to strike it rich, and never reach that apex. They do what they can to try to survive, stealing doesn’t seem wrong anymore, it’s necessary. Fucking a man when you’re straight is just what you do to eat. Not everyone gets to go to $40,000 college and eat in a cafeteria with both vegetarian AND vegan options! People shit all over them because they are the underbelly of society and everyone thinks they are so much better than them.
And our class shit on them, too. The fact that anyone would ever laugh at Ratso’s death, when he was so close to having finally fulfilled the one dream he had left after constantly failing all his life, only to fail again, but this time forever, is disgusting. Maybe those who laughed are just so used to getting everything handed to them on a silver platter that they just don’t understand what it is to struggle; maybe their mommies and daddies always told them that they were special and that it was okay if they didn’t do well in school, because, you know what, you’ve got other talents and you’re their little angel, that they just don’t understand what it is to not get what you want.
This film portrayed everything that’s terrible in this world. No matter what the pair did, they always were shot down and there is nothing more frustrating, but they kept on trying. And Joe Buck did everything he could for Ratso. For him to die when they were so close would be devestating.
Yes, it is just a movie, but there are a lot of people out there cheating, stealing, and fucking because life has dealt them a shitty hand, and they don’t know what else to do. It’s not so easy to get a “real job” when you have a ketchup stain on your crotch.
To laugh (in this context) just shows a lack of mature emotion.
On another note, Ratso was in love with Joe Buck, right? It was more than platonic, wasn’t it? Or was it just a deep bond between two people who need each other to get by?
Winter Wonderland
The city changes when it snows.
Everyone looks clean in white.
Elizabeth Bishop: Country Bumpkin or City Girl?
So can Bishop aliterate or what?
In her poem, “From the Country to the City,” Bishop compares America(?) to a clown, at the head of this clown is the city. And while she did not specify which city she was referencing, I automatically associated it with New York.
For one, it is obviously on the edge of the country. She rises upwards from the, “league-boots of land,” I thought of it as a clown laying across the length of the United States, his boots being the West Coast. And his head, his head is the East Coast, or more specifically New York. The “satin-stripes on harlequin’s trousers tights” she uses to represent miles of winding asphalt across the country. This is the first line she introduces the concept of the city–for all intents and purposes, we’ll say New York–depicted as a harlequin.
“His tough trunk, dressed in tatters” is the Midwest, the hardened and worn Dust Bowl of America where farmers have struggled, especially in the early 20th century.
But then you arrive at his head, his brain, with its “tall dunce-cap” and “shows and sights.” The brain, the city, New York, is done-up and painted to look flashy “with lamé and lights” but really it is just the ridiculous head of a harlequin. It is, as she says, the “wickedest clown.” It, typically New York, draws in the sons and daughters of the rest of the country. They drive across those “satin-stripes” to arrive in a city where they’ll probably never make it, despite their hopes and dreams.
Her use of aliteration: “The long, long legs, league-boots of land…” “his tough trunk dressed in tatters,” implies repetition. The pilgrims who consistantly make the journey to New York to escape the monotony of their homes only to fall into the monotony of the city.
At the end, the rest of the country, “the long black length of body,” begs the city to, “Subside,” and send its children home.
Greenpoint Rats Do It Better
I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t been to Greenpoint before, I have. But I did have an entirely new experience there and found out things I didn’t know through my research for this project.
Greenpoint, the northernmost part of Brooklyn, part of Brooklyn Community Board 1, “Little Poland,” was originally founded by the Dutch like the rest of New York. However, it has become a haven for immigrants, especially Poles. It has, unofficially, the second highest population of Polish immigrants in America, next to Chicago.
It made its name in the shipbuilding world and now many of the working-class residents, especially the immigrants, are being pushed out by gentrification and hipsters: it is following the same pattern in gentrification that Williamsburg used.
According to the 2000 census, there were 8744 families living in Greenpoint. This does not include rat families.
When I was in Greenpoint earlier this evening, I saw something I had never seen before and, honestly, never thought I would. I saw two rats mating. Or trying to mate. It’s hard with a group of college kids watching.
In the safety of the Greenpoint Ave. subway station, these rats were putting on an amazing show for us. At first, we weren’t sure if they were really trying to mate, maybe they were just playing. The larger male rat would mount the smaller female one for a split second, but mostly they would just run around chasing each other. The female would play like she was going to run into a pipe in the wall but then she would run in circles and chase the male. I did some research on rat mating and found out that this is perfectly normal. What we couldn’t see from across the tracks was that her vagina was apparently gaping open, which is also supposedly perfectly normal, but weird and a little disconcerting.
The male rat really had some persistance. He would grab her by her scruff and try to mate but then she’d run away. Although she’d always come back; she wanted it. We could even hear her make these little squeaking noises. And it just went on like that for at least ten minutes. Sometimes he would run away, then she’d scamper around the mountains of trash looking for him, sometimes she would run away and he would look for her. But sometimes, sometimes, he would succeed. Apparently it’s also normal for the male to repeatedly mount the female for very brief sessions, although I didn’t find this out until afterwards. We weren’t sure if this was normal or if we were watching Rat Rape.
I was amazed most that when the train finally started pulling into the station, he kept trying to pull into her station. They seemed completely unfazed by the screaming of the train. How could their little rat ears handle such a loud noise? Rats have pretty intense hearing, too, and still they kept flirting and touching like silly teenagers. I realized that love, or maybe just sex, makes us do silly things. And even if it’ll deafen you, you, or a rat, will do anything you can to be with the one you love.
Also, Mae West is from Greenpoint. So is Pat Benatar which is even funnier because I was just listening to “Promises in the Dark.”
Weegee
“The Joy of Living” Weegee (Arthur Felig)
The irony in this picture is just perfect. There’s not much else that has to be said.
I don’t think this is one of the photos we looked at in class, but that’s alright. Weegee’s work has always been so appealing to me because it’s so raw and unabashed. He’s not afraid to show you the hand hanging over the white-clothed stretcher or the blood on the sidewalk. He shows New York in all its grit, grime, and glory.
