History as Fiction -- Elizabeth

                  The narrative structure of DeLillo’s Libra is (probably intentionally) as bewildering and disorienting as the real-life understanding of the event it describes. Yet in contrast to how the reader’s understanding of the plot is constantly elusive, one of the most prevailing themes in this novel is how the characters themselves are always very confident that they can find order in the chaos of the narratives they inhabit. Throughout the novel, these questions of patterns, order, and randomness appear in many different forms, and offer insights into larger themes.                   Lee is a striking embodiment of these questions. He is the human expression of the sense of confusion that permeates the historical record surrounding the Kennedy assassination: there exists an enormous amount of information and facts about him, but none of it makes his actual character and actions make ...

                Back in January, at the very beginning of this course, we had various discussions about the nature of postmodernism and how we might understand it in our own lives. Through these discussions we ended up landing on the topic of memes, the distinctive “Gen-Z nihilism” brand of internet humor, and how the current popular culture we (by “we” I mean The Youth) have grown up in arguably incorporates tenets of postmodernism into our most fundamental worldview. As the novels we read have gotten progressively closer to the present day in terms of when they were set and published, it seems to get more and more interesting to look at how postmodernism in literature is related to the postmodernism that we see, now, in our everyday life.                 As we’ve been reading Libra , one of the ways it is different is how, compared to all of our previous novels, the historical event it is centered around...

Disclaimer: this blog post has nothing to do with what we’re reading in class, I was just thinking about some stuff and curious about other people’s thoughts on it. Also, I realize I kind of made Oklahoma seem like a terribly racist and awful musical which it isn’t. It’s a fun time, the music is good, everyone involved has been working very hard and doing a genuinely great job -- please do come see it!!               Wednesday is opening night for Uni’s production of Oklahoma! , a heartwarming story of two melodramatic love triangles and the good-natured (I think?) conflicts between the Farmers and the Cowmen. So far I’ve seen the whole thing about four times from the slightly-obscured viewpoint of the pit orchestra. In doing so I started thinking about the ways in which the musical Oklahoma! is actually really interesting to think about as an expression of many of the same themes we’ve been discussing about history as fiction in this class. ...

             After being absorbed in Vonnegut’s borderline-nihilistic Tralfamadorian philosophy for about a month, you could be forgiven for being relieved to open up Octavia Butler’s Kindred instead. Finally, a character who actually cares about the plot, and who seems to actively seek to exercise agency and influence their own fate rather than resigning themselves to being another meaningless cog in the abstract machinery of history. And it’s true: for the first few chapters, it’s clear that Dana does genuinely care -- and not only out of the self-interest inherent in her task of saving her ancestor. When she meets Rufus when he is a child, she wonders if she can beat the odds of the time period and prevent him from becoming the kind of person his father is. When she first pieces together that he and Alice must be her own ancestors, she instinctively begins to think about Alice and Rufus being married when they’re older -- despite the fact that in 1...

In my group’s panel presentation our article brought up the question of what Vonnegut actually meant with his humor. Our article claimed that the novel at face value presented two “antithetical” options: either Vonnegut’s humor was meant to inspire “political quietism” or it was meant to instill, with its lack of moral distinctions and constant irreverence towards literally everything, a need for both realism and actual meaningful societal change, in the reader. Our article also brought up evidence that Vonnegut himself seemed to fall, at least in his writing, more into the “fatalistic resignation” camp. In class discussion, there was no real straight answer, which makes sense. The novel offers plenty of material to justify either idea. For a novel that’s anti-war, there doesn’t seem to be many efforts made to make the reader angry about war’s injustices or violence: instead, all moral weight is essentially erased. The narration of the novel treats the death of both champagne and 130,...

One of the central conflicts of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is the narrative of how Jes Grew is struggling to “find its text.” Although it originally is ambiguous what, exactly, that means, it becomes clear that on some level there is a literal “text” that describes the history of Jes Grew and the world. However, like Jes Grew itself, this text has been suppressed by the Atonists and their wallflower order. The vivid story that Papa LaBas describes about Osiris, Set, and the rest of Jes Grew history is replaced by the more sterile, monotonous narrative that the Atonist view believes in In the larger context throughout the novel, there is a theme of events in the novel being obviously fictional, but nevertheless very parallel to real-life themes and ideas. For example it’s not exactly correct to say that Jes Grew “is” jazz music, or a specific type of dance, or something like that -- but it does suggest elements of all of those ideas. In a similar way, I think that the idea of Jes Gre...

           In our (admittedly limited) trek into Mumbo Jumbo so far, the primary conflict centers around the rapid spread of jes grew and various characters’ reactions to it. Although it seems to have a lot of parallels with the spread of jazz music and other African-American art forms throughout America, at the same time, it’s not really clear what, exactly, jes grew is. The imagery and descriptions of it in the narrative conjure up the feeling of a disease, and it’s called a “plague” outright several times. But it’s also described as an “anti-plague” -- and the only consistent symptoms being so overcome with jes grew that the infected population begins dancing uncontrollably.            There’s also one more essential quality of jes grew that makes it uniquely alarming to the white lawmakers such as the one we meet on the first page of the novel: it originated in black communities, and now has begun to spread rapidly to white...

            Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most constant aspects of Doctorow’s Ragtime is the persistent reminders that nothing really is constant. Instead, throughout the book there is the feeling that the world is rapidly changing on a large scale, and each character is simply swept up in the current, left to deal with it as best they can on their own.             The time period Doctorow chooses, the first few decades after the turn of the century, is a time of profound, and complicated, political, social, and economic change. There was increasing wealth and prosperity that followed growing industrialization, and yet still deep poverty and exploitation perpetrated by those same industrialists. The same racial exploitation that had always existed in America was experiencing a resurgence -- D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a hugely influential film that played a large part in furthering white supremacy in the 20th cen...

Have you ever walked into a classroom and suddenly remembered how many other classes you’ve had in that same room, and how each time it was a slightly different version of you that existed? Like in room 218, today you’re a senior typing essays for Nonfiction Writing, but three years ago you were in here falling asleep during Mr. Butler’s slideshows, and a year before that, you were in world history. Each time you were different. Or maybe you’ll be in chorus and suddenly a song will take you back to the same risers but four years ago, and suddenly you’re engulfed in the unexplainable feeling of remembering the person you were the last time you sang the song. Everything around you is the same, but you aren't. I think it's because I'm a senior now, and it keeps getting more and more real that soon I'll be leaving Uni forever. I keep thinking about how Uni is (relatively) permanent, and all of us aren't. When I graduate, Uni will have been the static backdrop of...

                 I was glad not to take the PSAT yesterday, but I realized today that one thing I will miss about it is the memes. It’s a little sad to suddenly, after two years of being included, find yourself on the outside of such a massive inside joke. It makes me wonder if this is what it’s like to become an adult and watch the young whippersnappers’ pop culture get more and more unintelligible. It also made me think about memes more generally. When I was younger, I used to be one of those infuriatingly self-righteous people who refused to ever use internet slang and corrected people on their grammar at every opportunity. I thought internet memes were at best pointless and juvenile and, at worst, intellectually damaging. But today I have a different view.                  I think memes and, more generally, internet slang, have started to serve a really interesting cultural purpose. When tal...

            Once upon a time, on a pool deck not so far away, there lived a large spiky cricket who wished to live a long and happy life. Unfortunately for him, the chlorine-infused teenagers governing his fortune had other ideas. No sooner was he spotted hopping along the tiles when, with one fell swoop, his back leg was crushed by a black croc birkenstock sandal wielded by a shrieking member of the Uni swim team. Still, our valiant warrior persevered.  He continued his journey, slower since he was dragging half his body behind him, but never giving up -- even though the freedom of the outside air was at least fifty meters, four doors, and countless stomping feet away from him. As we watched his noble struggles, we argued about whether or not to put him out of his misery with another hit with the sandal. One brave chlorinated soul decided to take the responsibility upon herself, and hopped out of the pool to retrieve the poor six-legged adventurer. ...

               Last Friday was the Uni swim team's last day of practice at the Urbana Indoor Aquatic Center, and we were all incredibly happy about that because UIAC is an excruciatingly disgusting location to have practice at. The water is never a normal temperature, the items lurking at the bottom are not limited to items a pool should normally contain, and there’s a particular scent, indescribable but distinctively nauseating, that permeates the entire facility. Not only can you smell it every time you take a breath, you can almost feel it, too, seeping into your lungs and hair the entire time you’re in the water. The second you get out, it’s a race against time to get home and be able to wash off the crust -- of chlorine, that aforementioned mysterious smell, and other things it's best not to contemplate -- that has plastered itself onto you. You might be tempted to try and grab a shower in the pool locker room, but don’t: that’ll only make i...

               It was supposed to be. I’ve been screaming at myself to write some kind of a draft of that essay since August and until this Monday I had literally nothing. Making it into a blog post gave me a deadline, which is what I needed. Now I have 1200 words written in a Google doc, which, if you do the math, could be two complete iterations of the eventual essay. But really it’s still a mess: two introductions, both of which were richly, eloquently, and unnecessarily embroidered and thus 250 words long and had to be cut, and seven body paragraphs when only four could possibly fit in the real thing and none of them remotely make sense. There’s no hint of a conclusion yet. I keep hitting 650 words halfway through the story and without making any of the point I’m trying to get across.               This is the story I’m trying to tell. During the first shift I ever worked as a lifeguard, I failed three co...

             I was tempted to choose the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana , or the overture from  Marriage of Figaro , because whenever I think of the St. Pat's Youth Orchestra I think of those first. Almost three years later, the opening notes still pull me immediately back to the very first rehearsal I went to: Judah’s band room at 9:30 at night, sitting in a roomful of musicians who I didn't know yet but already greatly admired, and laughing at the conductor's truly wild mid-conducting anecdotes. Unfortunately I could barely read the music for either piece: we were playing from grainy pdfs printed straight off imslp. By the end of the first concert, though, I was hooked. Church acoustics are addictive.               My second idea was the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th symphony Pastoral . I remember practicing over and over again the idyllic opening lick that floats through the strings, and then ca...