Author: Angst Bear

I know the blog post section of this class has passed. Thanksgiving has come and gone; 2017 is drawing to a close. Seeing as class presentations are here, finals are imminent, and something called a “thesis” is coming next year, I thought you all might enjoy a morale boost of blog links. This morale boost is a mandatory portion of the class. Open blog links and laugh heartily to earn full credit.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/faq-the-snake-fight-portion-of-your-thesis-defense

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html
This one has a part two if you’ve got time (of course you do, you procrastinator).
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

When I first had set out to write about Apocalyptic fiction, it was on the heels of reading author and blogger Cory Doctorow’s Wired.com article “Disaster’s Don’t Have to End In Dystopias.” With his new book Walkaway, Doctorow discusses how civilizations respond to disaster, in that they either try to formulate order or fall into disarray. He argues that, “The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails.” (Doctorow) I found this a delightful but confusingly complex realm to explore. It left me with many open ended questions about what it means to fail as a society. It seemed paradoxical that a utopia could fail. As Doctorow views it, the perfect state is a “daydream,” one which does not account for new and unknown hazards. This reminds me of the theory of “risk societies” brought up by Ulrich Beck, and how each fictional world is one imagining of a society fallen victim to a threat it has not anticipated.  Doctorow continues by adding that the problem in Walkaway has become society itself. He argues that many dystopia disasters feature “prepper instincts,” as in instincts of survival of the fittest pitting man against man. But what if man controlled this instinct, and became self-aware of the violence started by scarcity? This is the beginning of the weirdness in Walkaway. I warn you, this will become a bit difficult to process without having read the novel.

Doctorow defines Walkaway as a utopia, despite the evidence of a world falling apart around his characters. In Walkaway, Doctorow imagines a world in which much of the world has exiled-itself from the brutally efficient society of the ultra-rich. The exiles, or “walkaways”, attempt to create a post-scarcity civilization while being slaughtered by the zillionaires who fear their radical ideology. To elaborate, they have achieved post-scarcity by sharing resources in a perfected form of socialism. All members of the community have equal means to create what is necessary to survive using various future-technology appliances. Their ultimate goal is to perfect the digitization of the human brain, making themselves immortal. Ultimately, the novel balances dystopian and post-apocalypse and transhuman motifs. As you can guess, this novel has been the newest, most complex, and most problematic book on my list.

The book follows Hubert, Natalie, and Seth, three early adults seeking a new like in the walkaway community. Walkways live in areas of the country abandoned by environmental disaster and decay. They recycle abandoned material and land, using advanced 3D-printers to suit their needs. Traditional society, called “default”, rejects them for various reasons. They could not find work. They were thrown out by their family. One character even cites her non-binary transgender identity as a factor for not agreeing with “default”.  The walkaway community replaces this with absolute freedom. On paper, this sounds ridiculous. Somehow, Doctorow makes a logical pattern out of this “better nation” community in Walkaway.

Jason Sheehan wrote an NPR review that shares many of my views on Walkaway, especially on the matter that it is too strange to articulate certain aspects into words. I enjoyed how he called the novel “what comes after the slow burn apocalypse” in that like the Genesis story of Noah’s Ark, Walkaway discusses how “After the flood, this is how we rebuilt…” (Sheehan). This perhaps links well back into Doctorow’s Wired article on Walkaway, in that he mentions in passing how 2017 itself was full of disasters. Whether the disasters of this year will lead to a rebuilt utopia or a downward dystopia is for us to decide. After the flood, how will we rebuild?

I had originally turned-away from discussing this novel and article. I struggled to deal with the “digital singularity” aspect of this novel. Digital consciousness became a kind of “cop-out” to me, in that the characters “escape” the crumbling physical world for a digital landscape. Likewise, the social-political argument of class warfare between the ultra-rich and ultra-poor seemed like a thesis in itself. So I moth-balled this article, yet left Walkaway on my reading list.

As it is my tradition, I shine the house lights on you, dear reader, and ask:

What does or does not make sense about Walkaway to you? Are you more inclined to read some of Doctorow’s work? If you were me, what aspects of Doctorow would you include, if any?

Works Cited:

Doctorow, Cory. “Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias.” Wired, Conde Nast, 2 June 2017, www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/.

Doctorow, Cory. Walkaway: a Novel. Head of Zeus, Tor Books, 2017.

Sheehan, Jason. “In ‘Walkaway,’ A Blueprint For A New, Weird (But Better) World.” National Public Radio, 27 Apr. 2017, www.npr.org/2017/04/27/523587179/in-walkaway-a-blueprint-for-a-new-weird-but-better-world.

Recently, I have written a post for another academic blog on Jean Toomer’s Cane, a novel set in Georgia and the south on the suffering of black community similar to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book is written in a blend of prose, poetry, and rhetoric that makes it difficult to categorize by genre. In two sections, it covers multiples stories alongside poems that respond to the images and themes that are contained within them. Some of the most powerful moments of the book such as “Esther”, the story a storekeeper who is fascinated by a black man who returns to her town not as impressive as she once thought. A two-page story, “Rhobert”, also caught my eye as a fascinating image of a run-down, black home in the south. I also liked several poems in the book, including “Song of the Son”, “Reapers”, and “Harvest Song”. In my initial blog post, I connected several themes of the end and death to apocalypse, in that the poem’s images of darkness, death, and ends. But these were shallow close-readings of the images. I titled the piece “The Gentle Apocalypse”. But it is not always gentle. One story, “Blood Burning Moon”, confused me as it was a strikingly violent story of lynching that stuck-out next to my examples. This example was not the exception. My idea of the “gentle apocalypse” was the exception. I addressed Toomer’s use of female objectification, violence, and  brutality in the south toward the end, but I am troubled as to how well I accomplished that.  The goal of this re-reading of both the post and Cane is to pinpoint where I could improve the accuracy in my analytical writing.

Some aspects of the blog post had commendable aspects, despite several notes it could have addressed several errors in my writing or expanded my argument. It was a good thought to lead with a definition of apocalypse inspired by Susan Bower’s “Beloved and the New Apocalypse”. Apocalypse is looking into the boundary or edge of one realm to another, while observing both and anticipating change. Despite my definition being worded quite differently,  I realized I should have cited her and explained the quote in more detail. In editing the post, I have added the citation for ethical reasons. I realized this post, while confined to only 250 words, had become blatantly “1-on-10” as Writing Analytically would put it (WA, 207). I mention images in Cane like, “dusk and night” at first, but forget to mention locations of this conversation such as in the poem “Song of the Son” (Toomer, 17). The poem literally addresses, “for though the sun is setting on / A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;” among other lines that compare the dawn and dusk to an eternal memory of slavery. The example of the story “Esther” in Cane could have gone farther. While it stated Esther changed her, “perspective of the town possibly because she lost her reason to stay”, I failed to acknowledge that this was in reference to a scene where a girl was disgusted to have almost slept with Barlo, a man many years his senior. There needs to be more discussion of how Esther was humiliated into changing her perspective of the town, that her reason to stay was lost due to becoming an object of sexual objectification. Finally, I needed to wrap together how these images of departure, of violence, and of time passing in dusk and dawn, culminates to this definition of apocalypse. This conclusion would further ask how Toomer imagines the future of the South. Any blog post could be tighter and more composed if it recognizes it’s key point or definition and concludes by bringing it to a new stage of questions. Which is what I am about to do right now:

Toomer once called Cane a “swan-song of the South” after observing how the black folk spirit of the south fading with the Great Migration. Can Morrison’s Beloved be seen as a text which can converse with Toomer on Slavery? Is this apocalypse of the south also a Slave apocalypse, a South apocalypse. Or both? I favor both as an answer, but I wonder if the two apocalypses should be considered separate epochs.

As for my original blog post, how do you think I did with my self-study? Visit the link and let me know what you think.

Works cited:

Bowers, Susan. “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture, Toni Morrison’s Fiction Contemporary Criticism, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 209-228.

Toomer, Jean, and Rudolph P. Byrd. Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co, 2011.

The 2011 film Melancholia by director Lars Von Trier synchronizes it’s ending with the end of the world, which runs the risk of overshadowing the characters and story of the film. Peter Szendy, author of the 2015 book “Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World”, believes this ending is the true ending of apocalypse cinema. Szendy feels he “disappeared at the same time the last image [of the film] did,” in which he became one with the last moments during the finale; The small planet Melancholia destroys the Earth with a flash, a cloud of smoke, and the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Szendy, 1). For Szendy, the ending embodies a “true” apocalypse genre theme: The end of the world should correspond to the end of the film itself. The majority of this chapter on Melancholia in “Apocalypse Cinema” spends a great deal of effort explaining the scene’s importance to him, but not it’s importance to the entire story.

Szendy praises the fact that that the film lets “the last image be the very last image” of “all past present and future” (Szendy, 2). Like the characters displayed in the film, the film audience too experiences a kind of “death” by cutting to black. Szendy’s experience of being “in the black screen” the film plays tribute to how the audience shares existential finality of death here (Szendy, 1). Szendy calling this image “past, present, and future” becomes erroneous in interpreting importance in Von Trier’s film and Apocalypse cinema in genre. It is erroneous in that the impact of Apocalypse is still in the before and after of the story, not the apocalyptic event itself. If you took this last image alone, you would be missing out on the rich character dynamics of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the sisters who hold hands with Claire’s son Leo in the final scene. You would miss Justine as she sinks into a depression spurred by the stress of her dysfunctional family, her manipulative boss Jack, and cheating on her newlywed husband with Jack’s nephew. That includes missing her apathetic- depressive personality as a result. You would not witness Claire panicking about Melancholia while her husband John dismisses her fears in a patronizing way. You would miss the confrontation in which Justine’s acceptance of the end conflicts with Claire’s fear of death. Each of these plot points reflects personal devastation within the characters themselves. The world is both literally and figuratively ending for Justine and Claire. If you, the audience, only took away the final moments of the film as Peter Szendy implies are most essential, you’re missing 99% of the actual apocalypse conversation.

“The earth is bad, we don’t need to grieve for it, nobody will miss it.” Justine concludes to Claire (Melancholia, 2011). The fact that she been hurt by Jack, and has hurt by Michael affects her. The way she mentions “Earth is bad” gives evidence to how she has distanced herself from her own reality.  Justine mirrors the dysfunctional attributes of her family from the earlier in the film in her difficulty in coping with the past and present. By bringing Justine’s depression into the story as a form of apathy for everything, Lars Von Trier juxtaposes depression to the apocalypse. Justine calls Claire’s plan to spend her last moments together, “ a piece of shit” with deadpan eyes, mocking the “niceness” of her gesture (Melancholia, 2011). Justine wishes Claire to stop caring, or to “grieve for it”. Her emotional and physical state are both facing annihilation.  The arrangement of the scene has dim light, which only illuminate the each actresses’ expressions. The soft classical music that transitions each scene gives the film a dream-like quality. Szendy calls the last image an “end of cinema” moment in which the film itself perishes when the world ends. Von Trier’s character and film form evoke emotions related to the apocalypse as well as 

Szendy’s point on Melancholia’s final scene has merit, but his claim to it being the truest Apocalyptic film falls short by not imagining events that could complicate. A flashback would have been more meaningful. Keep in mind the ending of the ending of Matt Reeve’s Cloverfield (2008), in which the ending cuts to a found-footage flashback from before the film. He compares Melancholia’s ending to the ending of Ted Posts’s Beneath the Planet of The Apes. In Post’s film, an atomic explosion ends the world, followed by a narrator dialogue explaining the world “is now dead”. The post-film exposition was only meant to set up a sequel and is therefore not as apocalyptic as Melancholia according to Szendy. What’s wrong with events happening after the end? Can’t an apocalypse have a post-apocalypse?  The point of an apocalyptic fiction’s plot  isto show us the events leading up to the end and of what happens after, not to gratify us with an explosion. There is more of a narrative to an apocalypse genre fiction piece than the scene where “it all ends”, since it should be widely known that “true apocalypse” fictions are also the ones in which the narrative leads up to and continues after the end.

Sources:

Szendy, Peter. Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. New York : Fordham
University Press, 2015.College Complete.

Trier, Lars von, et al. Melancholia. 2011.

Update:

I wish I had a place to put this in the rest of the blog. After writing this piece, I found two other movie that fit into Peter Szendy’s definition of the “true” apocalyptic cinema. Go watch (or rewatch) Miracle Mile (1988) with director Steve De Jarrett if you have a chance. Miracle Mile has a similar “ending”, in that a nuclear weapon is dropped on LA in the last moments of the film. Seeking a Friend For The End Of The World (2012) is another film I had forgotten about until the last minute. Will Ferrell and .  It’s unfortunate that I could not rewrite the entire post in time to discuss it further, but it adds to the point that Szendy’s concept is not unique to Melancholia.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved features a transformation of consciousness through the power of slave song, in which songs become a companion of a slave narrative that must be laid to rest. This is the case for Paul D, who once took refuge in the music from his chain gang suffering.“The songs he knew from georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding”, in that the songs are tightly-knit with the components and actions of his chain-gang (Morrison, 48). The spiritual songs themselves act as a metaphorical material of slavery, in which songs are buried inside Paul D’s heart much like nails become buried into the tracks. The songs, like the nails, become immeasurable. His history as a chain-gang member is infused in his head via both the sensory details of his labor and the lyrical tune of the chain-gang music that accompanied it. The spiritual songs and the labor both have a rhythm as the “pounding” of the flat-head nails acts as a meter. This description of songs as an element of the hammering nails  prefaces Paul D’s description of chain-gang slavery that connects singing slaves songs to painful memories that Paul D wishes to reject.

Though no man in the chain-gang can directly intervene with their suffering, Morrison depicts singing as an acts of power and defiance. Between shouting “Hiii” to their guards, paul D details two-step dance the chain gang juxtaposing the “music” of the iron (Morrison, 127). The wording creates a cruel irony of the free-expressive nature of dance and music juxtaposes the limitations of the bindings. “They sang it out and beat it up”, as they chain dance over fields and trails, “garbling the words so they could not be understood” (Morrison 128). Morrison makes “it” ambiguously count as both song and nail. The whole provides a glimpse of how songs required encryption from their oppressors. While their bodies and dignity were robbed from them, spiritual songs became a treasured source of pride. If these slurred songs could be hidden from guards and masters, it gave hope. Songs held promise and power as a ethereal possession that could be shared.

“They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs.” (Morrison, 108)

While songs about women are typically about old lovers, it is possible they refer to mothers and family. The children they had been recalls innocence while the stories of taming invoke power. While they could not be heard by guards, they could talk about their owners uncensored. The “shamelessness of life” refers positively to living carefree, while remembering graveyards and sisters long gone celebrates past lives. Each item of the list may be entirely unqiue, but are bound by the fact that they express the men’s inner feelings.  These songs represent the values that motivate beyond mere survival, but into prideful memory that remembers better times before daily labor. The uplifting power of spiritual songs comes from their ability to draw on fond memories during hardship. They want to remember peaceful domestic life. But Paul D lives in the peaceful domestic life. Now these songs do not inspire hope but instead memories of the chain-gang. This kind of uplifting power shines now due to the oppressive atmosphere of the chain-gang, due to the fact that they are the only way to survive the suffering.

But for Paul D, these spiritual songs have no use while out of bondage besides reminding him of his past. Sethe’s home represents a new beginning for Paul D, which is much like the life that the spiritual songs sought to find. “But they didn’t fit, these songs. They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in…” (Morrison, 48”) The songs themselves “didn’t fit” as though the songs had a physical presence that dwarfed 124, and would make the “little house” burst. Paul D himself could emotionally burst if he sang the songs with feeling. The songs were “loud”, not in volume, but in meaning and power. To equate the depth of emotions felt in the chain-gang under duress to the chores of his . The songs no longer had the power to let Paul D remember times before slave labor, but instead have the power to never lose his past. While other characters such as Baby Suggs can reimagine their past narrative into new narrative like the sermons in the clearing, Paul D refuses to acknowledge his old songs. Paul D models how to handle an emotionally powerful past through constructive reimagining, but by exorcising the songs like a ghost.

While writing this post, I was struggling to make clear sense of the layered symbolism in Beloved. It occurred to me that the slavery experience of one character like Paul D not only vastly differed from others, but had it’s own set of complicating factors such as songs. The emphasis the book places on power juxtaposed to song made me curious about exploring it further. I’ve learned that spiritual songs become further complicated in the moment and in retrospect from Paul D. As a motif, song may be more subtle than death and ghosts, but the memory of song haunts and terrifies Paul D much like a ghost does.

Canon can be defined as more than just literary but possibly it’s polar opposite of non-literary media. Gasp! How could I say such a thing as that as a scholar of literature? For Jonathan Culler, author of Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, there is a considerable debate between literary and non-literary canon. A definition from the Oxford English Dictionary dated from 2002 suggests it is a, “A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study”, but I find this definition only correct as far as “body of literary works”, while the rest presumes too much. I say literary canon is now on-track to fuse with popular canon, as I look at an entertaining read in Ready Player One (2011) a novel by Ernest Cline. The first few chapters can be found online. The science fiction story focuses on a virtual reality contest in 2044 based around a teen’s 1980’s-inspired scavenger hunt that describes popular culture as it’s own shared consciousness canon. What all three can agree on is that the definition of literary canon is going to need to expand though they need to also include non-literary popular culture multimedia formats.

Jonathan Culler believes that literary canon may be endangered to its diametrically opposed popular culture non-literary canon counterparts, but can still be seen equal rivals. While cultural studies may be “all encompassing”, literary canon has an exclusive division of quality. I can relate to his argument that some works in the literary canon have also eclipsed the more ‘minor’ works compared to larger works such as Shakespeare’s plays. Culler summarizes that the two canons may not need to compete, in that, “close reading of non-literary does not imply aesthetic valuation of the object,” a statement that holds true in the enjoyment of Ready Player One.(Culler, 55) If anything, I happen to agree with Culler’s analysis of the binary.

In Ready Player One, the main character Wade Watts competes in a videogame-based scavenger hunt designed in a canon of popular culture references from the 1980’s, which in itself is a kind of commentary on canon. After the death of James Halliday, founder of the first total virtual reality experience, a post-mortem online video challenges the world to follow his challenge in order to secure his inheritance. As a result, “The Hunt, as the contest came to be known, quickly wove its way into global culture.”(Cline, 7) In a way, a popular culture canon is a kind of contest in which we put effort into committing works to memory as a kind of trivia. The global aspect is also fascinating, in that popular culture has permeated more global spheres than traditional literature. Thus, “Fifty years after the decade had ended, the movies, music, games, and fashion of the 1980’s were all the rage again.”(Cline, 7) This obsession with the 1980’s mirrors realities obsession with deciphering Shakespeare’s plays and historical background. The Bard, while rough 400 years old, has the same affect on our world as Halliday in Cline’s. As the contest continues, movies and music references abound. Cline’s fiction novel reads like a love letter to a bygone popular culture canon filled with Matthew Broderick and Harrison Ford films alongside Wham! And Rush. While very little of the references are tradition literary text in format, the new media and the spirit of canon remains.

In honesty, I fill this blog post may have taken too many liberties with canon as a concept in literary theory. The definition from the OED would find my close reading of Ready Player One a misuse of the word, but I insist that canon’s definition is not broad enough. To only suggest the most academic works deserve canonization is a disservice to the potential of new minor works in the future. Like Culler either side of this debate has a legitimate point.

An interesting “turn” that made an impression on me in Good Bye, Lenin (2004) was the celebration of German unification in the film with aesthetics of cultural liberation. While Alex is trying to distance his mother away from word of the unification, even he is can not help but get swept up in mass celebrations and gatherings. In fact, I counted three “parties” in the film. Alex’s “date” with Lara thrums with energy and extremely “out-there” costumed oddities. In between small-talk with Lara, Alex also narrates his observations on the fluctuating world of Berlin. I blinked though a whirlwind of images: abstract art, scenery, and a bombed-out apartment that looked abandoned since the Second World War. And would you believe it? This party scene is just roughly two minutes and thirty seconds, and I’m being generous by adding the last few beats of the previous scene. Honestly, if I was Wolfgang Becker (The film’s director), I would have been tempted to just cut this whole scene for being so short and out-of-place.  But it has a purpose. Not only for advancing the relationship of Alex and Lara, but highlighting how Berlin is celebrating German unification in the months after the fall of the Berlin wall.

So, let’s see how far I can close read into two minutes and thirty seconds: First, Alex’s sarcastic comment that “we finally had our first romantic rendezvous” which does a quick cut to the the loud costumed party has it’s own set of implications that Alex is interesting in flipping the old conventions of a date. He calls it a “rendezvous” not a “date”, implying this was meant to be a private date after meeting in a public place. Alex and Lara try to get away from the music and lights of the party through a series of rapid camera shots. While I’m no expert in cinematography, I can definitely appreciate how the rapid pace of the scene matches the mood of the party. Each member of the band looks unique, as two of them wear different styles of masks and the other appears to be half-naked in body paint. Their appearance is a reminder that neither their music nor their fashion would be allowed under the GDP, and that a gathering of this size would have likely been raided by police. Then there’s the graffiti room. This struck for one as an artist’s expression of how it feels to be bombarded by GDP messages, with the color displaying a polarizing effect on the people. One is either black or white, East or West. The party also gave an impression that these people maybe had little else to do after the government collapsed, much like Author Christian Mackrodt who wrote  Ostkreuz. Coming of Age during the Transition about feeling confused in post-GDP. In a few short months after the wall fell, the creative minds of East Berlin were free to make parties like Alex’s “rendezvous”.

When the Alex and Lara get to the top of the building, they find privacy in a bombed-out apartment that captured my attention. Alex discusses the transition of the city with hope, in that, “The winds of change blew on the ruins of our Republic. Summer came, and Berlin was the most beautiful place on Earth.” (2004) Since the two are in a ruined room with an open wall, the winds literally blew into the ruins. While destroyed, I could also find that this living room  had a pretty 1940’s aesthetic. It is possible it was never changed or demolished since the Fall of Berlin in 1945. The juxtaposition of old with new (the winds of change and the party around them)  in this scene connects especially well to Alex’s new relationship with Lara. I say this because Alex mentions, “We were the center of the world, where things were finally happening. And we went with the flow.”(2004)  This entire comment can be focused on the party, where celebration of unification brought life into parties in East Berlin. The popularity of open air parties meant spaces like this needed to be adapted to make things happen. At the same time, I also believe Alex’s new relationship with Lara felt to him like “the center of the world”, in which he feels fulfillment in his own life was “finally happening”. As a result, this party scene is not only about celebrating liberation and unification, it is about Alex as he discovers bond with Lara.