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”
What Selena Gomez Got Right
“Modern poetry aims at creating a semantics that is seemingly without syntax, which is to say a semantics in which the opposition between word and thing — between the two articulations of language or between the opposition of linguistic and motor activity — pushes toward the ‘rediscovered truth’ of a simple rather than a double articulation.” ~ Ronald Schleifer
Have you ever heard that one Selena Gomez song, “Love You Like A Love Song”? You know, the one that goes, “I, I love you like a love song, baby / I, I love you like a love song, baby / I, I love you like a love song, baby / And I keep it in re-pe-pe-peat.” Linguistically and musically, it’s not the most stylized, polished, or sophisticated (or necessarily likable) song, but, jinkies, can it get a point across. The repetition throughout the chorus forces the song into your (or, at least, my) mind and keeps it there for eons. As nostalgic as I am (not) for my early teenage years, this song does not come to me unprompted; rather, I was reminded of it when thinking over the relevance of repetition in the context of art and communication. Continue reading “What Selena Gomez Got Right”
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.
How We Observe
After reading Tayler’s post about Suzan-Lori Parks play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, it made me think more about the way in which we learn about slavery and observe the continent of Africa. I feel as though the idea of an audience viewing a theater performance and feeling uncomfortable when being called out, strongly relates to the way Americans view Africa. Within Park’s play, the characters only view Africa through the tv from the show “Wild Kingdom,” pointing out the way that Africa is stereotypically viewed as a “wild” place. In our group discussion in class, we looked back to the beginning pages of The America Play and Other Works, we saw this diagram labeled Imperceptible Mutabilities: Continue reading “How We Observe”
I Spy
The things that Prince depicts in his artwork pertain to mature subjects but looking at his work also reminds me of my childhood. I used to play these “I Spy” games on the family computer in which the player simply tried to find and click on all of the items that were listed for the player to find. I’m not sure why 6-year-old me was so entertained by this, but I used to play for hours—just how I feel like one could view Prince’s artwork for hours and still make new discoveries.
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”
The Interdependence of Form and Content
In her work “Elements of Style,” writer Suzan-Lori Parks discusses the intricate relationship between form and content both in writing and in life. Parks states that “content determines form and form determines content; that form and content are interdependent.” (Parks, 7) This chiasmus creatively asserts that form and content are dependent on each other. This complex concept is difficult to comprehend at first, however, Parks relates this concept to entities outside of writing. Interestingly, Parks uses her physical body as an example of a form and how the content of her life is dependent on her physical form. She writes, “It’s like this: I am an African-American woman – this is the form I take, my content predicates this form, and this form is inseparable from my content. No way I could be me otherwise.” (Parks, 8) By explaining the relationship between form and content in this way, Parks allows her audience to connect this idea to their own lives. Continue reading “The Interdependence of Form and Content”