Brief thoughts on The Smoker, Atonement, and Borges.

The Smoker...well, as I stated in class, I found the characters to be a bit OVER developed. It was almost as if there was too much continuity; a little inconsistency would have made the characters seem more well-rounded. And I think that applies to all of the characters, major and minor. (For instance- when Rhonda Phelps blurts out "He's a Machiavellian bastard,"- how pretentious does that seem? I mean, yes. I GOT it that she was exceptionally bright, but honestly.)

(Side note: Am I being too informal with this? I'll stop, just in case.)

Also, the fact that Nicole was almost twenty was just too (to use your term, Chia) convenient. As if the author wanted to write something controversial and different, but just couldn't force himself to go all the way. Because of that one detail, the story lost some of its credibility and meaning to me. It would have been much more effective if she had been 17 or 18, or if he had been 47 instead of 31. I was a little suprised when the idea of the story being a dream sequence was brought up; it never occurred to me while reading it, but I think its a very interesting proposal. The absurdness of the whole situation, the fact that you could detect a not-so-hidden desire for Nicole from the beginning, even Paulette's repetitiveness, all could go in support of that theory. Though, personally, if anything I think it's more based on what the author may have desired at one point in his life, rather than the character.
In regards to the title, which seemed sort of out-of-place, the connection I came up with was that when Nicole's family selected Douglas to marry her, he felt the same sort of honor and privilege he had felt when he was picked by the Smokers to box as an adolescent. Maybe he wasn't even aware of the connection, (although, I don't know why else he would have brouth the story of the Friday Night Smokers up) but there was a definite corrolation between the two events, the two feelings. (And, additionally, I though the choice by Schickler to make the name of the school St. Agnes was interesting, seeing as she's the patron saint of engaged couples.)

And now we come to Atonement. I enjoyed the story tremendously, and it was easy to lose myself in the book- a very quick read. Still, I wouldn't exactly add Ian McEwan to my list of favorite authors. He's more of a novelist than a story teller. As in, I got the impression that he created stories and contexts in order to write a novel, as opposed to someone who writes a novel in order to create stories and contexts. If that made any sense.

More on Atonement later.
(Brevity has never been a strong point of mine. Nor has formality.)

For my Lit X paper, I have started reading Ficciones by Jorge Louis Borges. And I'll admit straight out- I'm more than confused. I understand the words he's saying, I'm enjoying what he's telling me, but I'm not GETTING it. For example, the first story in Ficciones is called "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Now, from what I understand, it is a story (if it can accurately be called a story, because it reads like non-fiction, except for the fact that the book he's discussing isn't real) about a man (who I assume is Borges himself) who comes across an encyclopedia of a completely fictional place. A whole world, in fact. A completely fantastic world that was created by a league of specialists- the biggest organized literary construction known to man. Now, the story never goes into the fictional world, it's just Borges explaining what he read in the encyclopedia.
His other stories are very similar. It's him (for I don't know what else to call the narrator) telling the reader about the extensive works of mysterious literature he's come across. Just plot summaries, really.
Not that the stories (within the story) themselves don't have their fair share of interesting, mystical, and even endearing qualities. Tlon, for instance, has such idiosyncrasies as having a school that "has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon." Undeniably, this detail has significant metaphorical meaning. I'm just having trouble processing the delivery.
Another aspect of the imaginary world which I particularly enjoyed was the different dialects in the southern and northern hemispheres of the planet. In the south, they speak only in verbs and adverbs. So "the moon rose over the sea" would be expressed as "upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling" And in the northern hemisphere, they speak in adjectives.
"One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky"
The literary brilliance of such ideas are irrefutably poetic, interesting, and meaningful, but I would much prefer to read the stories that he's talking about rather than his description of an encyclopedic article of the fiction.
I guess that's the significance of Borges- to create fantastic worlds (with surprising brevity, which I myself can't seem to grasp the concept of) within the heavy constraints of realism.

One quotation about the literature or Tlon especially intrigued me- "They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature."
So, in turn, does that make Borges' fantastic literature (for that's his genre) a branch of metaphysics? Or does Borges himself consider it to be?

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

I'll start with the main character, because that seems like the logical thing to do.
(Deconstruction: WHY does that seem like the logical thing to do?
Just playing.
It's because that's where I want to start.)
I didn't feel frustraited or disapointed with Dina's actions, though I know a lot of people in class did, especially in regard to Heidi. I thought she was just the type of person who NEEDED failure in order for things to have significance. Or not even for them to have significance, but just in order to feel/recognize it. Her consistent resistance to human interaction and companionship was like a compulsion, a tick that needed to be satisfied. For example, when Heidi was looking for comfort after her mother's death, Dina said "Fine...And she's going to be dead for a long time". Though she realized it was not the correct thing to say, that it even "sounded stupid", she finished by revealing to us that it felt good to say it. "As though I had my own locks to click shut".
I don't think it was Dina's goal to make her life more lonely and difficult; she was just subconsciously making sure that life lived up to her expectations, or lack thereof. Only after her relationship with Heidi ended did she reflect on what it could have been, and I think for her that reflection- the unknown possibility- was much more safe and satisfying than the real thing.

(Looks like I'm also ending with the main character.)

I'm very aware of the fact that I'm well overdue for a blog,

and now that we've got the Sound and Fury essay to work on, I can avoid it no longer (which is exactly what I've been doing: avoiding this thing).
So here goes.
I guess considering I don't live with my immediate family anymore, I should have a fairly different outlook on what the whole thing means than students who still live with their parents. But I don't think I do.
Because my family (and when I say family, I mean my mother's side) is extremely close, verbal, and intrusive- of the traditional Hispanic variety- when I read about the Compsons, whose individual members were so isolated from the rest, I had to view it as a completely different entity. In a way, I went into the book having already suspended my personal views of what defines a family. Now, after the book has been read and I've had weeks to mull over what was said in class, one of the many possible conclusions that I've come to is that The Sound and the Fury isn't so much about a family, but a group of individuals in the context of a family. Family, the surname "Compson", was only an excuse for these people being linked together. They seemed to be more connected by old traditions and dysfunctions rather than by feelings, or, as the family line decomposed, even blood. So what does that mean for family in general? I don't know. It's all relative, I guess. (Oh, god. I in no way intended that as a pun. Sorry.)

There's one thing I want to add about Quentin that I never got a chance to say out loud in class, before I change blogs and topics. Concerning Quentin's obsession with time, I had the impression that it wasn't so much based on Quentin's inability to "see himself going on" or because he was stuck in the past. Rather, I saw it as a morbid obsession with the passing of time- he knew his time was limited, and almost masochistically, could not help watching it literally slip away. The smashing of the clocks, I thought, was an attempt to deny what he already knew was inevitable- his death.

That's it.