Literary Doodle: Slaughterhouse 5

Tags

billy pilgrim, fate, kurt vonnegut, literature, predestination, slaughterhouse 5

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:

GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE
DIFFERENCE.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.^[1]

To the few people who randomly stumble upon this blog once in a while: sorry for the lack of updates. Work’s been busy and I haven’t had a lot of time to read. So it goes.

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^[1]Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 (1969; London, 2000), 50.

Literary Doodle: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Tags

drugs, fear and loathing, hunter, las vegas, literature, opening, thompson, weird

Speaking of memorable openings:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”^[1]

This is bat country. Hah.

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^[1] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971; London, 2005), 3.

Historical Doodle: Auschwitz and After

Tags

auschwitz, charlotte delbo, history, literature, second world war, world war

Is this literature or history? I don’t know.

A man unable to follow any longer. The dog lunges at his backside. The man does not stop. He continues walking, followed by the dog walking on its hind legs, its muzzle at the man’s rear end. The man is walking. He has not uttered a sound. Blood stains his trousers’ stripes. It seeps from inside, a stain spreading as though upon a blotter. The man goes on walking with the dog’s fangs in his flesh.

Try to look. Just try and see.^[1]

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^[1] Charlotte Delbo, Rosette C. Lamont (trans.), Auschwitz and After (1965; London, 1995), 85.

Literary Doodle: Austerlitz

Tags

architecture, Austerlitz, fear, foreign, insecurity, literature, Sebald

On that day, after we had left our viewing point on the promenade to stroll through the inner city, Austerlitz spoke at length about the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history. In his studies of Railway architecture, he said when we were sitting in a bistro in the Glove Market later that afternoon, tired from our wandering through the city, he could never quite shake off thoughts of the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places, although such ideas were not part of architectural history proper. Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most betray the degree of our insecurity.^[1]

Oh, Austerlitz. I never quite figured out what those photographs mean.

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^[1] W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London, 2001), 16-7.

Literary Doodle: Tree of Life

Tags

brad pitt, creation, film, god, grace, jessica chastain, literature, nature, religion, sean penn, terence malick, tree of life

Something a little different this time. This is about the wonderful film “The Tree of Life.” The “quote” this time is the opening scene, which for me was one of the most poignant parts. The film is a religious work, already indicated in the opening quote from the book of Job:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? …When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?^[1]

For me, it’s a film about love, childhood and family. It’s also a more spiritual journey, about tests of faith, reconciliation and forgiveness. Woven through that is Malick’s account of Genesis, leading from the moment of Creation into the main character’s childhood.

As the opening quote shows, this is not a movie about answers, but a film about questions – it asks the viewer not only to think, like complex narratives sometimes do, but to contemplate. I’m curious what other people think of it – comment below, yes?

Lastly, this film is not only visually stunning, but the visual component is full of meaning. Text and dialogue is sparse, and meaning is communicated through imagery. So while I can tell you a lot about it, the best thing to do is watch this film.

The following excerpt is the opening scene; it lays out the major themes of the movie – family, childhood, and also the idea of a “way of nature” and a “way of grace,” which in my mind are represented by the father (Pitt) and the mother (Chastain). Other ideas?

[Edit: Here was a small clip of the opening scene of the film; but Fox did not agree with that and said video was removed from the internet. I'm pretty sure the movie is available all over the internet, so I guess you could Google it. Sorry.]

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^[1] Job 38:4,7.

Literary Doodle: Ragnarok, the End of the Gods

Tags

a.s. byatt, jormundgand, jormundgandr, literature, myth, ragnarok

All this time she grew. She was as long as a marching army on land. She was as wide as underwater caverns, stretching away and away into the dark. She spent more and more time in the darkest depths, where no sunlight came, where food was sparse and strangely lit with glowing reds and cobalt blues. She came across mountain ranges in the water, and belching chimneys and columns of hot gas. She sipped at the blank white shrimp down there, and picked the fringed worms from their crevices. Nothing saw her coming, for she was too vast for their senses to measure or expect. She was the size of a chain of firepeaks: her face was as large as a forest of kelp, and draped with things that clung to her fronds, skin, bones, shells, lost hooks and threads of snapped lines. She was heavy, very heavy. She crawled across beds of coral, rosy, green and gold, crushing the creatures, leaving in her wake a surface blanched, chalky, ghostly.^[1]

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^[1] A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (Edinburgh, 2011), 71-2.

Literary Doodle: The Merchant of Venice

Tags

literature, merchant, mercy, monarch, play, poetry, shakespeare, venice, william

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.^[1]

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^[1]William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, (1596/1598?), 5.4.184-197.

Literary Doodle: House of Leaves

Tags

horror, house of leaves, mark danielewski, monster, uncanny

My hands had gone all clammy. My face was burning up. Who knows how much adrenaline had just been dumped into my system. Before I turned, it felt exactly as if in fact I had turned and at that instant caught sight of some tremendous beast crouched off in the shadows, muscles a twitch from firing its great mass forward, ragged claws slowly extending, digging into the linoleum, even as its eyes are dilating, that widening fire, the glowing furnace of witness, a camera lucida, with me in silhouette, like some silly Hand shadow twitching about upside down, is that right?, or am I getting confused?, either way registering at last the sign it must have been waiting for: my own recognition of exactly what has been awaiting me all along–except that when I finally do turn, jerking around like the scared-shitless shit-for-brains I am, I discover only a deserted corridor, or was it merely a recently deserted corridor?, this thing, whatever it had been, obviously beyond the grasp of my imagination or for that matter my emotions, having departed into alcoves of darkness, seeping into corners & floors, cracks & outlets, gone even to the walls. Lights now normal. The smell history. Though my fingers still tremble and I’ve yet to stop choking on large irregular gulps of air, as I keep spinning around like a stupid top spinning around on top of nothing, looking everywhere, even though there’s absolutely nothing, nothing anywhere.^[1]

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^[1] Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York, 2000), 27.

Historical Doodle: I am alive and you are dead

Tags

biography, history, literature, philip k dick, science fiction

And so, with a five-thousand-year-old oracle guaranteeing its “inner truth,” he plunged methodically into the labyrinthine ways of his idios kosmos. His personal “idiocy” would henceforth be organized around the conviction that reality could not be apprehended directly, because it gets filtered through each individual’s subjectivity. What seems real is a deception. What rational beings agree on as constituting reality is merely an illusion, a simulacrum created either by the few in an effort to mislead the many or else by some external power intent on misleading everyone. Reality is not reality.^[1]

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^[1]Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Inside The Mind Of Philip K Dick, Timothy Bent trans. (1993; London, 2004), 76.

Theoretical Doodle: The Birth of Tragedy

Tags

appollo, birth of tragedy, creativity, culture, dionysos, friedrich, myth, nietzsche, philosophy

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Appollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.^[1]

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^[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (1872; New York, 1956), 136.