Friday, April 29, 2011

Ur-Texts: Goodbye?

While I realize that I only have a few more ur-texts left on my list (see below), I am postponing the project. I have too many good books building up on my shelf that I need to read. Working at a bookstore, this happens. The book that tipped the scales though, was not from the bookstore. It was a hardcover copy of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that I bought for a dollar at a local church yard sale. Joel has been recommending this book to me for over a year, and I decided it was time.

A few loose ends to wrap up (for now) on the ur-texts project:
1) The boundaries of the project (ONLY reading ur-texts) slipped, and I recently read Coffee: A Dark History. I hope to post on it soon. I also began reading in Ched Myers' commentary of the Gospel of Mark, Binding the Strong Man.
2) I realize that, at the inception of this project, I had a list of ur-texts to read. I will now post the (slightly amended) list, featuring links to my posts on the various texts. Starred texts have been added since the project began.

- The Dharma Bums (Kerouac) posts I and II
- One Man's Meat (White) posts I, II, and III
- Moby-Dick (Melville) posts I, II, and III
- Cannery Row (Steinbeck) posts I, II, and III
- The Prophet (Gibran) struck from the list; see the post
The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawrence) the post
still unread are
- various poems (Berry)
- The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) which I strike from the list for timeliness's sake.
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) which I strike from the list since it is merely a favorite, and not an ur-text.
- *The Art of War (Sun Tzu) a surprise for many who know me; I hope to write on this book soon.
- East of Eden (Steinbeck) the book I name when asked for my favorite book of all time.
- *Freight Train (Crews) the ur-ur-text; the first book I ever read.

*     *     *

So there it is. It feels freeing to put the ur-texts to rest for now. Having gone just over halfway down the list, I hope to finish at some later date. For now, I can say that a common theme to many of my re-readings is the importance of context. The books that most shaped me shaped me to some degree because of the books themselves, but also because of where and when I read them. Or, as Melville says in Moby-Dick:

"Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts."

Friday, April 22, 2011

Boil Water Advisory

I only found out about the water-boil advisory when  Heather (who has now moved to Harrisburg) and her housemate Liz reported that they had no water pressure. By that point, I had already had a few cups of contaminated city water, and figured that I would be no worse for the wear. That was on Tuesday.

Wednesday, we heard that water pressure would be restored in affected areas, but that we should continue to boil all water for 1-3 minutes. This meant that at home, the dishes mounded up in the sink -- more than they usually mound up in the sink, anyway. At the cafe, we refrained from serving iced drinks, limited our menu to tea and coffee.

Thursday, we were expecting the advisory to be lifted, to no avail. Bottled water sales spiked, and visitors from outside the city, when reminded that we were not serving ice, did a double-take, then nodded in sympathy.

Today, the city's website held this disheartening notice: "Mayor Thompson said today there is optimism in the City Bureau of Water that the water boil alert, currently in effect, could be lifted by Sunday." I boiled another pot of water and resigned myself to the stink emanating from the dirt sink in the apartment.

Then, the city posted this notice:

"City Mayor Linda D. Thompson has just announced that the 'Boil Water' alert, active in the City most of the week, has been officially lifted by the City Bureau of Water.
'The water tested clear today, for the second day in a row,' Mayor Thompson said this afternoon, 'so we're in good shape to lift the alert and just in time to celebrate the holiday weekend!'"

Never before have I celebrated Easter by welcoming the resurrection of potable tap water.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Muppets

So I read this in the now semi-pay-walled New York Times, which reminded me about how, about a year ago, I used my waning access to Swarthmore's resources to educate myself on The Muppets.

I had never seen any Muppet texts (movies or TV), so I watched a season's worth of episodes selected from seasons one and two, and read the entirety of this book.

I can't remember anything in particular that I learned, but it was very nice to finally be conversant in a well-known, hilarious media text. I tell you this, mostly to get you to read the New York Times piece at the top, so if you haven't used up your allotted 20 articles this month, go to it!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Reservoir Dogs

I saw this early Tarantino film a few weeks ago, and it has been occupying that part of my brain that thinks about films, both because it is interesting, and because I haven't seen anything else very recently. 

My thesis is twofold: Firstly, I argue that the violence in Reservoir Dogs is non-redemptive. Secondly, I argue that this is a meditation, not on real-world violence, but on movie violence.


I) Non-Redemptive Violence

Not a really badass crime movie, despite publicity photos like this one.
"Reservoir Dogs" is incredibly violent. Unlike so many Hollywood films, however, almost none of the violence is redemptive. Rather than engage in a lengthy discussion of Walter Wink's "myth of redemptive violence," I will simplify the notion of redemptive violence to "violence that ennobles the perpetrating character." Most instances of violence in Hollywood films fall into this category: Luke Skywalker killing Emperor Palpatine; the "heroics" of the platoon in "Saving Private Ryan," etc. Even if these movies contain instances of non-redemptive violence (the empire destroying planets), the dilemmas raised by those acts of violence are resolved by more acts of violence (destroying the death star).

"Reservoir Dogs" first piqued my interest when I realized that (with one exception) none of the violence ennobles the characters, and that the subsequent acts of violence do not resolve the dilemmas that the violence has created, except in that SPOILER ALERT all the perpetrating characters end up dead at each others' hands.


II) Temporality

Part of why this works is that the movie uses flashbacks. The advent of the violence is thus disconnected from its causality, as in the cut from the early slow-motion "walking down the street" sequence to the scene of Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) comforting the visibly wounded Mr. Orange (Tim Roth). Were the events arranged sequentially, the violence would seem more meaningful and ordered; the flashbacks, while still allowing us to (eventually) understand the motivations for the acts of violence, allow us to experience the effects of violence (Mr. Orange bleeding out on the warehouse floor) in tandem with the events of violence themselves (the botched jewelry store heist).


III) The Exception

The only act of violence that is in any way redemptive occurs during the famous "Stuck in the Middle With You" sequence. SPOILER ALERT. Just as Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is about to immolate the captured policeman (Kirk Baltz) Mr. Orange, barely alive, shoots Mr. Blonde, saving the officer's life and revealing himself as the police informant. This is the film's only ennobling act of violence. Shortly after this (in diegetic time; a series of flashbacks intervene in non-diegetic screentime), the officer is killed, rendering the only redemptive act of violence meaningless; redemptive and meaningful in terms of the development of Mr. Orange's character, but meaningless in utilitarian terms.

Mr. Orange ennobled.
It could be argued that Mr. White's actions in the standoff at the film's conclusion also ennoble him. He draws his gun, and ultimately shoots one friend (Joe) in defense of the honor of another (Mr. Orange). This situation is complicated firstly by the fact that he shoots his old friend Joe, hardly an ennobling act, and secondly by the fact that his friendship with Mr. Orange is revealed to be a lie. When Mr. White learns that he has been betrayed, he also kills Mr. Orange, undoing whatever redemption he may have earned himself in the standoff.

Even though we sympathize with the characters committing the acts of violence, particularly Mr. White and Mr. Orange, "Reservoir Dogs" gives us no way to justify their violent actions.


IV) Movies

So, having arrived at the conclusion that "Reservoir Dogs" implicates systems of violence as being non-redemptive and meaningless, I initially thought "whoa, what a great pacifist movie!" This then led me to wonder about the movie's bearing on other systems of violence in the world, and I came to the conclusion that this is a movie, not about systems of violence in the world, but about systems of violence in the movies.

My first clue was the closed-off nature of the movie: It occurs, diegetically, within the confines of a warehouse. The violence that occurs occurs within a closed system (Mr. Orange is shot by the bystander, and then shoots her), affecting nothing beyond itself. This is not true to real-world systems of violence, which have all kinds of far-reaching effects beyond themselves.

My second clue was the fact that this is a Tarantino film. Tarantino is famous for making movies about movies, and this is one of the movies that gave him that distinction.

My third and most telling clue was the temporal positioning of the movie itself. Though it was made in 1992, the movie hearkens back to 1970s gangster films: the cars, the soundtrack, the famous "badass slo-mo scene," even the casting of veteran crime-film actor Harvey Keitel. Why make a movie set in the 1970s when the story would play just as well set in 1992? This movie indicts a particularly seminal period and genre of Hollywood filmmaking, and, by extension, Hollywood filmmaking in general.


V) Conclusions

While I enjoyed thinking about a movie with (almost) no redemptive violence, I was disappointed that its lessons could not be applied to real-world violence, except in a bluntly moralistic sense. Nonetheless, a movie that indicts movies for their unquestioning embrace of the myth of redemptive violence is good movie to have around, and it will be hard for me to see any onscreen violence without parsing it though the lens that "Reservoir Dogs" has afforded me.


Reservoir Dogs at IMDB and Wikipedia, two resources used in writing this analysis.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Ur-Texts: The Practice of the Presence of God (and The Prophet)

This book has a lot in common with "The Prophet." Rather than being written by an early-20th-century Lebanese-American poet, this one was written by a late-seventeenth-century French monk.

They are definitely not the same book, don't get me wrong, but reading them back to back has illuminated the connections between them. I still hold to my statement that "Practice... etc." is one of my Ur-Texts, while "The Prophet" is not.
 

I) Formal Similarities: Retelling

"The Prophet" works as a series of poetic/philosophical monologues, each prompted by a question from a citizen of Orphalese, whence the titular prophet is preparing to depart.

"The Practice of the Presence of God" engages in a similar sort of framing: rather than the townspeople inquiring of the soon-to-depart prophet, Father Joseph de Beaufort informs us of his conversations with the already-departed Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection.

This distancing paradoxically gives weight to the accounts; while historians value the primary source, literary myths gain value from repetition. Thus, the fact that the sayings of the prophet and Brother Lawrence are coming to us "second hand" (metaphorically, in Gibran's case, and more literally in Joseph de Beaufort's) makes them more credible.


II) Content Similarities: The Smallness of Large Things

"Practice... etc." is about the smallness of large things; or rather, of the largest of things, God. Though he lives in a convent, Brother Lawrence does not report of finding God at prayer times; indeed: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."

So, too "The Prohpet" sacralizes the mundane. Each citizen asks a question relating to his or her daily pursuits, and the prophet shares the spiritual resonances of that thing, just as Brother Lawrence creates/participates in the sacrament of the washing of the pans.

I had trouble, while typing this, deciding whether to call this idea "the smallness of large things" or "the largeness of small things." On the surface, they sound synonymous, but they accent different parts. I chose the one I chose because these books are not, for example, about making the washing of dishes great, but rather finding the greatness in the washing of dishes. Thus, the smallness of the large things (general spirituality in "The Prohpet," and a Catholic/Christian conception of God in "Practice... etc.) is revealed. It is not only in the large place ("upon my knees at the blessed sacrament") where the largest thing can be found, but also in the smallest place ("in the noise and clatter of my kitchen").