As the end of the semester approaches and I write my final blog post, I am beginning to reflect on the beginning of the semester and how I felt about the idea of blogging for this class as opposed to writing the traditional essays that I’m used to. Continue reading “A Blog Post About Blog Posts”
America the Monument
The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people; but they have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character….Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Horners, their Wilberforces?—where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys?—their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys and Malthuses?—their Porsons, Parts, Burneys, or Blomfields?—their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes?—their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or ONeils—their Wilkies, Laurences, Chantrys?—or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of’ the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples?
—Sydney Smith, “Who Reads an American Book?” 1820
I knew I wanted to write something about monuments, and so I went back to the syllabus to try and find a way to connect my thoughts to the texts of the course. This quote, monumental in itself, immediately stood out to me. To me, this quote is trying to “define” American culture, to assign America a monolith identity or character. What makes this quote especially humorous to me is that Smith can only seem to understand American culture through his own critical lens. Smith’s quote suggests that the only indication of genius is a resemblance to the Great Figures who have come before. This perception seems counterintuitive to the way I think about genius, as a spark of something entirely new, but I can’t say it’s not a perspective I’ve encountered in academia.
Disarming the Audience
I said that my next post would continue the epic saga of homeless people in Victor LaValle’s Big Machine, but I think that post will percolate for a little while more while I write out this post. Percolate, or to bubble and warm up, is an SAT word that is a very useful word to know. The SAT, however, was a test created by upper-middle class white men to admit people with similar backgrounds into college. I will be talking about some of those examples in this next post.
In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Susan-Lori Parks uses a character called “The Naturalist” to serve as a narrator for the confusing plot. Instead of blending in, the character, with his white skin and holier-than-thou attitude, stands out amongst “them roaches” (Parks, 29) that he has been studying. This character archetype is incredibly familiar to many of us, and in my group, we discussed characters like…
Did Ricky’s Faith Fail Him?
For this post, I’d like to look at “faith” and “trust” as two separate concepts. I have used them interchangeably in class, and even in previous blog posts, though they do not always have identical meanings. We have talked a lot about trust in Big Machine, specifically Ricky Rice’s trust in others and his trust in institutions. That is something I would like to get back to. Right now, I would like to look at Ricky’s faith in religion. His faith in the Washerwomen.
Observation vs. Engagement
After discussing Suzan-Lori Parks’ Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, it was interesting to think about how art is performed and what people (those acting in the audience role) consent to when observing the art. At least from class there appeared to be a simultaneous scopophilic and scopophobic response to theater: people want to view the actors yet don’t want to be viewed themselves during a play. This makes sense considering having actors stare at the audience might lead to some discomfort but, whether they like it or not, the audience is a part of the performance. Continue reading “Observation vs. Engagement”
Sydney Smith and “Who Reads an American Book”: Some Remaining Questions
“The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people; but they have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character….Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Horners, their Wilberforces?—where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys?—their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys and Malthuses?—their Porsons, Parts, Burneys, or Blomfields?—their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes?—their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or ONeils—their Wilkies, Laurences, Chantrys?—or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of’ the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples?” – Sydney Smith
As we approach the end of the semester, I feel like it’s necessary that I grapple with one thing that has been perplexing me for the past few months. It is something that I think I should make sense of before the class is over. I’m not saying that a class that leaves questions unanswered constitutes a failed attempt; rather, I want to explore one item that has been floating around my head with no real explanation for most of the semester. I am referring to one of our course epigraphs, the one from Sydney Smith’s “Who Reads an American Book?”. Continue reading “Sydney Smith and “Who Reads an American Book”: Some Remaining Questions”
A Threat and a Call to Action
If you are reading this post and recalling whether there was a post with a similar title to this, you are absolutely right. This post is a continuation of my previous post, which happened to be my first post on this blog. Like the fractals, the figure of the homeless person returns in full force to the pages of Big Machine, and this permutation of the homeless person rears its head in a unique way.
Commodity Fetishism in Big Machine
A recurring motif in Victor Lavalle’s Big Machine is immense amount of detail and narrative space given to clothing and particularly the clothing of the scholars as it is described by Ricky Rice, the narrator. I read The Talented Mr. Ripley last semester and noticed Patricia Highsmith also described clothing through her narrator Tom Ripley, in a painstakingly descriptive way. Continue reading “Commodity Fetishism in Big Machine”
Learning Without Knowing It
My last post was about Big Machine, by Victor LaValle, and I had written about my experience reading the novel as one that is very different from past novels I’ve read in aspects related to plot, theme, and general timing of the release of information. You can read it here. The reply I got from Dr. McCoy with my grade for the post mentioned how the book calls back to some of our base course concepts, such as Snead, Eglash, Barkley Brown and Parks, to name a few. When I read this comment I felt like I was physically turned from the cave wall to the light, and this post is me walking fully out of the cave, so to speak (thanks to Plato for the Allegory of the Cave, by the way). Continue reading “Learning Without Knowing It”
We’ve been there… We’re returning
In the documentary “The Last Angel of History,” the statement is made that “black existence and science fiction are one in the same… we’re not believed… people don’t believe us.” I wrote this down immediately because it felt like an idea that held a lot of possibilities within it. I was reminded first of the uncertainty of our language during Bloodchild when we spoke about T’Gatoi. Was T’Gatoi a person, a being, a creature? Was T’Gatoi the alien or were the humans alien? The other presence in my mind while watching “The Last Angel of History” were the first photographs of a black hole, released recently. I’m currently enrolled in an Astronomy class, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the language and color we assign to the less-understood phenomena of the galaxy: black holes, brown dwarfs, dark matter, dark energy. I can’t help but see a pattern of language which associates darkness or blackness with uncertainty or unknowability. “The Last Angel of History” features a series of artists who seem to find inspiration and power in that nebulous, uncertain identity. “We live estrangement,” one artist said. Another, “We’ve been there [to space]… We’re returning.” Continue reading “We’ve been there… We’re returning”