Last Post

End of the year and here we go, the last impressive post of the semester. The Crying of Lot 49!!! This is probably my favorite book of the year because it was both humorous and it went against the literary establishment, my two favorite things. Most of the time I feel like some of the interpretations given in English are pretty much B.S. and Pynchon speaks out in his book about searching for something where there is nothing to be found. Now I'm not saying that there never is more meaning and even most of the time there is, but reading too much into something is pointless and bad. Oedipa was a bored housewife who's paranoia fed by the fear of the could war looked for meaning in the meaningless throughout her life. While looking at a radio or the factories in the city she thought they were trying to tell her something more. Her paranoia was even more effected by the sighting of a secret society symbol throughout her adventures that lead her further and further down the road of craziness. One of the points I believe Pynchon was trying to make was that paranoia can leave you alone in this world and always leave you looking for something else. For Oedipa she lost everyone and never found what she was looking for.

The Brooch

The Brooch by Faulkner is a story of the relationship between a mother, son and his wife. The relationship dynamic between the three is what stuck out to me most in this story. First of all, the mother/son relationship is very strong and they are very close. When he went to college she went with him, the story says, making it so they never have to be apart. In class it was suggested that it might be an "unnatural" relationship, possibly even sexual. I don't really get that from the story. She definitely has a control over his life as is made evident by the fact that he never really went out with anyone, and he hung his head when walking by the pretty girls. She doesn't ever expressly forbid him though and he eventually does fall in love with Amy and he marries her. He can't leave the house because she is his mother and he feels he owes it to her and she is too sick to take care of herself. The mother doesn't like it because of Amy's reputation though. Amy and the mother's relationship is a strained one that only exists because of her son's wishes. She is kind enough to give Amy a Brooch that is worth alot and is a family heirloom. The mother holds no love for her however and as soon as Amy cheats she is ready to give up on her and force her out. Boyd and Amy were in love when they got married and had a descent relationship other than him being angry at her for dancing and drinking with other men. After their baby died they grew apart and he couldn't help her in her grieving so he allowed her to go dancing alone, something he knew one day would lead to her cheating. He felt useless and so he always just hoped it wouldn't happen, but when she did cheat he could no longer go with her and reject his mother or let his mother rule his life anymore. It was just too much to bear and he had to end his own life.

The Queen

There was a Queen by William Faulkner is a story about a woman who marries into this proud family, all the men die, so that it is only her, her aunt in law, her son, and the help left. She had received letters that would embarrass the family earlier in life and they were found by a Jewish man who she then slept with in order to retrieve them. The old woman then dies and the story ends. Basically this story seems to have to themes, that of pride and race. First of all, Narcissa is too prideful to tell the uncle to go after the man who wrote the letters and too prideful to burn them, so later she has to have sex with another man to get them back. This hurts the pride of the Aunt to the point that she becomes so upset she dies. Pride is also related to race in that the maid Elnora feels that she is better than Narcissa because she has more high class blood in her and the fact that she is part black doesn't diminish that fact. Obviously to the white people however it does diminish it. This story also shows a anti-semitic sentiment when the old woman tells the Jewish investigator to leave just because he is a Jew.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos William's biography says it all when it calls him a "no nonsense voice of the social man". His poetry also contains vivid imagery and subtleties that could be missed if one didn't read carefully. His poem The Young Housewife at its surface is about a man who drives by a house and sees a woman and later he sees her with various delivery men and he just drives by. One has to wonder how the man knows that the wife would be in a negligee at that time of day when she is inside. It actually seems like he has had a sexual relationship with this woman and as he drives by one day he thinks of her fondly and sexually. He then compares her to a fallen leaf and then says he drives over dried leaves crushing them. So perhaps the car is him sexually and he is a man that has had sex many times with wives and enjoys thinking about it. The Portrait of a Lady I did not really get at all. Finally there was The Descent. Carl Rapp wrote "Williams reaches a point at which the external world no longer seems to provide an adequate correlative for his desires and expectations. Williams finds a similar way of looking at defeat and loss that enables him to see those negative experiences as positive ones with implications not yet "realized."" I think these are great comments about Williams' s poem. In this poem he seems to be speaking about death but how it isn't really the end. He seems to believe that even after we die our memories still live on and that memory is the greatest thing we have from life. For instance "no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness" is saying that nothing is as good as our memory makes it. He is also saying that in death we realize the love is not moral and it will remain after life forever "endless and indestructible". Throughout this poem he is trying to say this that "no defeat is made up entirely of defeat" and even in death good can come.