updated proposal

Getting away from too specific of an event (the particular Our Lady of Angels fire in Chicago), I’ve decided to take a few examples from Foer and have a family history linked in tragedies. Lemme explain:

My planning so far consists of a plot outlined in a thirty-or-so-years-old woman as a reporter linked to a Columbine-esque school shooting in the late 1990s. Her past consists of her younger sister having died in a school fire when they were young children; the older sister had stayed home from school that day. I haven’t worked out every detail so far, I plan on much revising throughout the actual writing period. I do however want to focus on the older sister’s need to protect her younger sister, yet she was helpless when it was needed most. Having to objectively dive into the darkest details of an innocent child massacre brings her back to coping with the loss of her sister.

project proposal

1) What specific experience will you undertake the task of, and take responsibility for, expressing? What is the concrete historical context?

I will intend to express the inexorable grief and shock of a family bereft of their son who dies in the Our Lady of the Angels School fire in Chicago, Illinois. The story will be told from the view of the son in the minutes leading up to the actual chaos and from the grief-stricken family, namely the older brother, left in the wake of this disaster.

A. Historically, this tragedy broke out shortly before classes were dismissed on December 1, 1958, at the foot of a stairway in the Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, Illinois. The elementary and middle school was operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. A total of 92 pupils and 3 nuns lost their lives when smoke, heat, and fire cut off their normal means of escape through corridors and stairways. Many perished while jumping from second-floor windows (which were as high as a third floor would be on level ground). Another 100 were seriously injured. The cause of the fire was never officially determined. A boy, age 10 and a fifth grader, confessed in 1962 to setting the blaze and subsequently recanted his confession. He was more afraid of confessing to his mother and stepfather than to the police.

B. The family in question will be the Ostrowski family. Elie Ostrowski perishes in the fire with his fourth grade class, his older brother David survives. The Ostrowskis are Polish in a very diverse city, yet with great ethnic diversity comes racism as each subgroup attempts to cling together for survival. Therefore, many nationalities rely on their religion as a common element in order to assimilate in America. Elie is the younger brother to David’s seventh grade self, yet the elder survives while the younger does not.

2) “Explanation” or “account” of this experience from a conventional view? What is the dominant understanding?

In this time period, dropping your child off at school did not come with the fear that they might not make it through the day. In our day, school shootings happen. In 1958, however, the Columbine shootings had yet to occur, which were the main starting point for greater safety concerns in schools. To lose a child in any way will always be a horrible catastrophe that often will emotionally cripple a family. Though to lose only child, the other can be left the victim of “survivor’s guilt.”

3) Personal resonance for you in the present?

While I have never lost a brother or sister (and I certainly hope I never go through that) I am incredibly close with my younger brother and sister. If anything, the familiarity of needing to protect my little brother and sister from the world and any harm at all resonates very strongly with me, particularly now that I don’t live with them. Our lives are in-sync only part-time now, and while there is no comparison in the the enormity of “missing” a loved one between the two instances, I feel as if I can know the pain and responsibility associated with the death of someone who is yours to shield from harm.

4) One cultural narrative or image that is prominent in your memory (any media)?

Through the eyes of a parent or even older sibling, losing someone of such a tender age will always remind me of Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” no matter how over played it now has become.

” . . . Beyond the door
There’s peace I’m sure.
And I know there’ll be no more…
Tears in heaven . . .”

5) One “forgotten” (or overlooked, neglected) aspect or element?

Because a characteristic of assimilating nationalities was to fervently cling to a religion as an anchor in a foreign environment, the particular significance of the fire destroying a religious institution could very well shake someone’s foundation of belief. The death of nearly 100 innocent children is going to bring about questioning of faith.

6) One lesson (abstract) and one technqiue (specific) from one of our relay novels, that you will implement?

The implementation of disjointed vignettes and flashbacks will help piece the different focalizations between the characters I choose. I feel as if grief is not a gradual undertaking, but rather something that rolls and tears through the body in waves. I’ve always been rather delicate emotionally, but I use my family as a source of strength. I’m interested in how the hole left by the absence of a family member impacts the whole as they do not fill that hole but attempt to bridge the wreckage with memorandum. Certainly familial and religious/cultural ties will need to be disclosed as we experienced in Ceremony in order to not only give depth to the family, but to add to their subjectivity. Everything about them creates a different circumstance and experience from another family who loses a child.

7 ) A potential interface? and A potential figure (expressive)?

I feel as if the utilization mixed media, namely photography, will be most expressive in conveying the intended affect. Pictures tell a thousand words, and if it’s impossible for me to write of a disaster, maybe I can make someone feel by seeing.

For figures, while water immediately comes to mind (the “answer” to a “problem” of fire, purifying, rebirth, baptism, sustaining life, thirst-quenching), I think I need something less related to the question of fire and more to that of absence.

name signature

Erin

(e)rin:

in Scottish; taken from tae rin

1. (South Scots) to run

Gallagher

gal(lagher):

Irish; from Old Irish < Proto-Celtic *galā (“‘ability’”); cf. Welsh gallu (“‘be able’”)

Noun

1. valor
2. steam

Norwegian; from Old Norse gala (“‘sing bewitching songs, in actuality bewitched by magical singing’”)

Adjective

1. insane; crazy; out of one’s mind
2. with a very strong interest in (love, the need for speed, etc.)
3. incorrect; erroneous
4. unfortunate
5. wrong; illegal; morally reproachable

(gal)lag(her):

Irish; From Old Irish lac < Proto-Celtic *laggo- < Proto-Indo-European *(s)leh₁g-, cf. slack and Latin laxus (“slack”)

Adjective

1. weak

(gallagh)er:

Old High German; from Proto-Germanic *airiz, whence also Old English ær

Adjective

1. earlier

OR, as wholes . . .

erin:

Dutch

Adverb

1. in there, into it

Hiberno-English derivative of the Irish word Éirinn

1. “Éirinn” is the dative case of the Irish word for Ireland – “Éire”, genitive “Éireann”

gallagher:

Anglicisation of the Irish surname Ó Gallchobhair (or a newer spelling form: Ó Gallchóir), these being masculine forms; the corresponding feminine forms are Ní Ghallchobhair and Ní Ghallchóir. There are at least 30 recorded variants including Gallacher, Gallager, Gallaher, Galliher, Gallaugher, Galagher and Goligher

1. derivation of the surname Gallagher is “foreign help” or “foreign helper” from the Irish gall meaning “stranger” and cobhair meaning “help”

 

while my name is incredibly Irish (my middle name is Kathryn and I went to Catholic School, it’s peachy) there are other possibilities. so my signature could end up something along the lines of:

erin: to run, Ireland, in there, into it

gallagher: valor, crazy, with a strong interest in; weak; earlier; foreign helper

 

PART1

Shrinking and imprinting itself into my obsession, the muted post horn wove itself into the shaded brush strokes and spirals of a painting by Lloyd Branson. The pony express rider mocked me, as if he refused to deliver me the news I needed to hear. What can I do? Pierce is probably laughing.

“Oh, Oedipa,” he would say, “you can’t really think that something like this is real, could you? Maybe now you’ll realize how mundane your new Mucho-filled life is. The world was mine by connection, you could have been a part of that. Well, now you are.”

I suppose the joke could be on me. Wouldn’t someone tell me? Yes, that must be it. A sham for the sake of a petty laugh? Not even Pierce had that kind of wide-spread influence. Rather than influence, for what purpose? Perhaps . . .

OH MY! Could Pierce actually have planned and plotted this plan because he knew I would investigate so many great links in his estate? He must have known not even I am so dim to dismiss such blatantly related events. What if he left me this trail for the purpose of eventually having me give in to the part of me that does see this to be a delusional wild goose chase with no end? PIERCE, I NEED ANSWERS! Thurn and Taxis, Tristero, W.A.S.T.E.– they really are related!

My entire body aches with the familiarity of this sinking thought: I didn’t reach an end, just a turn. The more I learn, the less I know. The Paranoids are winding down for the night and the last stragglers move in from the pool deck into the lobby. With heavy eyelids and a sour outlook on justice, I shuffle my way to bed. Somewhere, sometime, the pieces must fit.

 

 

The RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGG! of the Maas telephone woke Mucho from his nap. He hadn’t even realized he had fallen asleep, much less that the phone was for him. After several more shrill alerts from the old circular dialer, Mucho picked up the receiver.

“Good morning, this is Mucho,” he said. It was seven o’clock at night. The sun had just begun its descent into the Californian horizon. The colors splashed across the sky mirrored those Mucho was beginning to see in his dreams, but in more sensitive waves.

“Hello, this is Randolph Driblette. I am calling in hopes of speaking with your wife, Mrs. Oedipa Maas. Is she available?” the voice said.

“Oedipa? Saw her a few . . . days ago? Or a week? I don’t know. I don’t think she’s here. Is it really important, Mr. Doublette?” Mucho offered.

“Oh, I see. Well, I suppose I’ll try back later. If she has a certain apprehension toward returning my call, could you say that, she uh read not enough into her connection from Couriers? I don’t know if that helps or not, but it is rather important that she contact me rather than continue her meddlings.” He ended.

“Sure, sure thing. Your name again?”

“Driblette, Randolph Driblette. The director.”

“Groovy, I got it,” Mucho replied as he let the telephone back onto its resting place.

What is Oedipa up to, he thought. She has been gone for a while, or maybe I’ve been gone. One or the other.

 

 

How could I let myself into this? Oedipa thought as she hastily fastened the buttons of her blouse and searched for her hastily strewn shoes. Nefastis was asleep in the bed next to her, mouth wide but no sound or answers to be found emitted other than a low snore. Another dead-end, she thought, as Nefastis really did not hold the information she sought. Or rather, she could find no connection between his ramblings on finally defying Newton and her hunt for a Trystero finale.

She lifted her lifeless body from the edge of the bed to fix her hair in the mirror before sneaking out while he slept the night away. Weaving her fingers through hair that reflected the broken spirit of a woman utterly hopeless in the wake of such cataclysmic events, she saw a letter addressed from a Mr. Genghis Cohen. Genghis! she thought, a caring name.

Reading the letter that appeared to have been read more times than necessary for such a short correspondence, her jaw dropped in shock.

“We’ve barely redirected her attention to the auction. We have reason to believe that Mr. Driblette has somehow managed to attempt a leak of information to the outsider, and he has been removed to another location under our careful watch. Guard your words, this is a warning. — Genghis Cohen”

Oedipa’s eyes grew in terror at the new nature of her secret. Not only was Driblette alive, but she was also being watched. The room went black as the weight of her new information made itself felt by her mentality. Oedipa hit the ground with a thud; she was unconscious.

Critical Analysis

Throughout the plot of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the narration is clogged with vague clues, ambiguous metaphors, and hazy references. Therefore, I find it quite appropriate that neither the protagonist nor the readers are given complete closure at the end of the novel in the sense that the mystery is “solved” or that Oedipa’s life regains some form of harmonious discourse. Since the book is filled with empty symbols and meanings, the empty ending should not surprise us.  By redirecting our focus off of “what happens” at the “conclusion” onto the multiple narratives that he presents, we can intuit that the “answer” or “truth” being uncovered either does not exist or is more complicated than a connection of everything. However, whichever way the explanation leans, it can be said that Pynchon means for this to be taken: it does not matter, because the idea of “alternative” information repeatedly rears its ugly head to torment poor, simple Oedipa. As the narrator says, “Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be alternatives.” Another way to view The Crying of Lot 49 is that it paints for readers a fragmented world in which there is always another forked road or possibility that arises, in which Oedipa’s questions afford her new information and the knowledge of how little she really knows. With such a downpour of new fumblings in communication, people feel compelled to impose interpretations that might not fit for the simple reason that they want some sort of generality or organized belief system to hold onto and categorize their findings into. The Crying of Lot 49 is a detective story, but the twists and turns it makes its way through in search of  precise and logical answers are infinite. There is no “answer” to infinity, there is only voyage. In trying to create order from the entropic environment now surrounding her, Oedipa alienates herself from the very world she is trying to organize. As discussed in Abbott with “lack of closure”, the meaning behind this vague ending is entirely accomplished even with the absence of closure to Oedipa’s hunt. As our story demonstrates in the conspiracy of Tristero that Oedipa vainly attempts to solve, in the “ending” that is not standard in its ending at all, there can be no complete answer, no real ending, ever.

The resonance between the narrative accounts of the beginnings of Tristero during the 1500s and that of the W.A.S.T.E. mail operation under the Peter Pinguid Societye accounts for much of the “conspiracy” theme. The anecdote concerning the origins of Tristero during the time of William of Orange and Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera’s attempts of undermine and overthrow the postal operations of Jan Hinckard relates to communication of information, specifically through mail. The Peter Pinguid Society opposed the U.S. mail monopoly, much like Tristero created an underground system to combat the prominent transit of postage in the Habsburg Empire. Rather than seeing a simple coincidence, Oedipa assumes that they must be linked and that the radical Pinguids are even the present-day surviving Tristeros. The effect on Oedipa is her slow sinking into mental despair and obsession, while the reader is able to see that when a causative relationship is not necessarily the only possibility, that the incidents might be just that: coincidence of chance. The consequences for Oedipa are depression and a sense of hopelessness when she is constantly confronted with new information and questions, but no answers. She shows up at the auction for finality and closure to her questions, yet the purpose of the novel has been accomplished. Oedipa’s life has come unhinged in the tide of her detective work and endless yearning for the truth. A consequence for the reader could be that our world could be entirely discordant and entropic as Mr. Pynchon suggests, or at least that we should question it as such.

As we discussed in class, from Pynchon I have taken a new distinction between simple binary logic and a network of communications in binary assemblage. Oedipa sees everything as related to Tristero and Pierce, as though nothing were simply coincidental or sub-conspiratorial. Binary logic is obviously useful in data collection, the world of computers (HELLO blogging!) and the world of cubicle work, but in our attempts to grapple with human experience and subjective affect it not only falls short of making the grade but is entirely dissonant in the mode with which we should approach the medium of life and experience. The idea of resonance was new to me, that events can create harmony in how the past only resonates with us when we are attuned to certain frequencies. In other words, the subjectivity of one person will always lend them a unique affect compared to someone free from the other person’s experience.

partTWO

I feel that that Eric’s  approach to Oedipa’s sense of hopelessness and confusion accurately depicts what it is exactly to feel as if all answers are elusive just at the moment you realize where to find them. Her obsession with figuring out the links between Tristero, Thurn and Taxis, the Inverarity Conspiracy, and Pierce that her mind cannot escape pondering the connections. She travels incessantly in “search” of the truth, as if it is a tangible being to meet and shake hands with. Disappointment comes to this woman whose belief that there must be a resonance between the recurring events and motifs is met with her usage of “either . . . or” methodology. As we discussed in class, and as Eric shows in his vignettes, the idea that everything is causative or intrinsically connected goes against rationality — she must approach the events as made by assemblage. She assumes that Nefastis is a conspirator or even part of the Tristero and attempts to pry information from him. Her detective work leaves her exhausted in more ways than one, as “A Hard Day’s Night” embodies. She BELIEVES Nefastis to be a part of this network that she has now let absorb her life and energy, making her a somewhat fanatic in her convictions.

the modeling of an interface

From Silko’s Ceremony, Morrison’s Jazz, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , we see many different mediums that, when imbued into a narrative serve greater purpose in connecting the narrative to the express experience being purveyed.

Silko interrupts the flow of narrative to provide myths that make up the Laguna culture and therefore enrich the novel that expresses the experiences of a soldier who turns to culture for healing. We’ll let her mode fall as belief because of the myths.

Morrison is a bit more sly in her design, mimicking the flow and harmonious workings of jazz music rather than explicitly interjecting jazz music – - which I guess is a bit impossible in text, but whatever. She uses it as background music for the wider picture, placing her artistic infusion in the aesthetic category.

Pynchon, being the engineering man that he is, opts for a protagonist in search of the truth. In the logic category, she rifles through the masks that hide what she seeks.

What we can take from this is how the authors seek to bridge the gaps between the three modes in our apparatus. Much like the Demonic Machine in The Crying of Lot 49, our goal is to express experience perhaps even through other modes of interface.

reading response five

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the passages of Laguna myths woven into the narrative serve two purposes: 1) to emphasize the importance of the Laguna ancient culture in Tayo’s recovery process, and 2) to reinforce the intrinsic value of storytelling in that ceremonial rebirth. In the frame with “Thought-Woman,” we’re introduced to the creation of the Earth and all of mankind through the spinning of these stories. “She is sitting in her room/thinking of a story now/I’m telling you the story/she is thinking” reveals the crucial function that storytelling serves in the Laguna culture. Storytelling is more than entertainment or even the passing on of history and religious beliefs to the next generation; it is a ceremony that serves as a link between the mythical deities and the people themselves, whose ritual life is based on the myths passed on. Therefore, the survival of the mythical deities and their importance in the culture is reliant upon the continuation of storytelling and the survival of the myths. In this manner, Ceremony is not only a story about Native Americans, it is a Native American story because of the sharing of tribal secrets and the method used to tell such a story. We learn of Tayo through this manner of telling a story in order to reinforce the importance of actually explaining a story how it is, rather than describe what it is like. Storytelling in Ceremony is relative to our definition of expression of experience because the precise emotion of how it is to be half-Laguna in a modernizing reservation is expressed through Tayo’s life. He seeks out the ancient ceremonies to repair his wounds of white men’s war. This opening poem comments on the power of stories to create and change the world, a world as great as the Laguna culture and the white man or as small as just Tayo and his sense of guilt.

This relation of myth and experience creates a medium through which Tayo may have a chance to heal his war trauma: storytelling like his ancestors. It provides the first instance in Tayo’s life when he finds an identity of his own as he takes on the traditions of his people; to become part of the community that is so greatly tied to the land that brings him peace to work and to actually belong to. Tayo can be seen as writing his own story as he takes up this new identity of a true Laguna and accepts the inherited stories as a new part of him. He is burdened with the responsibility of being the “son” that came back from the war when the life planned for was Rocky’s. He was seen as a burden by his adoptive parents. He is alone in the world and gains a sense of community through his rich culture. By “remembering” the stories of his ancestors, he is able to for get the horrors of a war that was not his to fight.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut attempts to write a meta-fictional account of his experiences in Dresden in order to create a mental peace for himself. The storytelling-as-therapy method was the same for both Tayo and his people. They created myths to explain the existence of such a cruel white mankind in the world, and also to provide a way to deal with the loss of their land, people, disintegration of their culture to the modern white culture, and a loss of their health as radiation poisons their people. The process of storytelling is therapeutic in much the same way as modern psychology uses psychoanalysis: talking about a problem enables one to deal with it in both the objective and subjective manner once it is heard aloud.

november the sixth

The process of storytelling in Ceremony is representative of their distinctively oral and traditional Native American culture and the many legendary stories that define their “history,” but also can be seen as a form of medicine in itself. In modern Western medicine, psychologists attempt to cure pains and mental injuries that cannot be fixed through the distribution of drugs by talking about them. The stereotypical “Tell me what is wrong” and “How do you feel about that?” approach aims to reconcile victims of trauma with their pasts much in the same way that Tayo’s Laguna storytelling ceremony does.

In this manner, the inclusion of poems and cultural “stories,” both mythical fables and partially legitimate histories serve to heal the wounds of those tragedies that the people cannot change: the invasion of the whites, the war they were drafted to fight in, the little they can do to protect their lands, and the disappearance of their culture as many Lagunas assimilate to the European ways. While the abandonment of a culture can be helped in a way, Tayo remembers and reenacts the old stories in order to hold onto something that has nothing to do with what he has seen in the war and gives him a feeling of community: something that he never felt before the war.

Deep-dreaming

In Toni Morrison’s Jazz, the characters we meet are individually molded by their unique yearnings and expressive yearnings in a period marked by a kind of hunger of the soul. What I mean by this “hunger of the soul,” is that every aspect of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance; in all of their romanticism of city life’s freedom, richness of culture, new ways of expression, the modern rebirth of a distinctively African-American identity, jazz music; swirls together to comprise a mood of rich desire. In this atmosphere of desire is Violet Trace. Rather than explain what is like for Violet to long for someone to adore, love, and nurture when Joe is indifferent, Morrison expresses exactly what Violet feels. Violet was raised to be tough through her experiences of abandonment, routinely by her father and later by her mother’s suicide. The abject poverty she lives in, as well as the greatest impact of her mother’s suicide is expressed as “The important thing . . . Violet got out of that was to never have children. Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?” (102). In her youth, she desires a life of her own, outside of the life of caring for brothers and sisters. She and Joe escape the rural cycle of impoverishment to the freedom of the city; the ironic crux of the symbol of fulfillment of a migration and also the expression of longing upon arrival.
In the later years, Joe sinks into a depression that she can not reach him through. She has experienced the loss of two miscarriages, and because “Joe didn’t want babies either so all those miscarriages . . . were more inconvenience than loss” (107). The sting of not being able to carry a child, however, does not sink into Violet’s affection until her later years of depression. There is no simplistic term for what she feels: she longs for someone to care for, a child of her own, to feel the express need of being the nurturing mother that her own mother had forfeited. The pain of a longing that “became heavier than sex: a painting, unmanageable craving” (108) cripples her emotionally and mentally, as she reaches inside to her imaginings of what her miscarried child, particularly the last, would be like. “She bought herself a present” (108), the baby doll that she began to sleep with, and hid it from her husband who had turned away from her needs and became introverted in his own feelings mirroring Violet’s cravings for someone to adore/adore her. We, as outsiders, can therefore not legitimately judge Violet’s outbursts — stealing the child, the rude nature in which she often speaks to Alice Manfred about her niece, or even the slashing of Dorcas’s face — as either right or wrong because her experience of longing and loneliness, “drowning in it” (108), like only a childless mother and husbandless wife can sets her completely in an experiential mode of expression apart from reason. In fact, such is her need to be a mother that she goes so far as to imagine caring for Dorcas as her child. Morrison writes: “Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb?…The two of them, mother and daughter, could have walked Broadway together” (109). What she felt literally drove her mad, such was the power of the longing Morisson directly expresses through the implementation of a mournful jazz narration and the fluid melody of Violet’s heart-wrenching pain. The motherly narration reinforces Violet’s mythical child, such that all of the characters are represented as a part of the narrator’s maternal watch over Harlem via the tenderness she expresses for each of their desires.