Second book - You Can Never Go Home Again - the town was upset.
Perkins (editor) cut down Wolfe's manuscript by at least 60k words.
Quote: "I want to write about everything and say that all can be said about each particular."
Wanted to write about America, not the government, or the revolutionary war, or the Monroe Doctrine.
The Lost Boy by Thomas Wolfe
Robert: brother Ben died when he was 18 (real life).
Mother: thinks of her favorite son.
Sister: recollects her favorite brother; looks through family album.
Narrator: Omission narrative.
Mnemonic devices.
Literary fiction: just fiction.
Omission narration.
Oral Narrative: mother tells story.
Photography: Ghostly presence.
Quote: "Can you remember how Robert used to look?… I was looking at that old photograph the other day - that picture showing all of us before the house in Orchard Street? You weren’t there…you hadn’t arrived. And now we went to St. Louis back in 1904."
A commonplace can change; we can never go back in time to our childhood, and there is nostalgia.
Henry James - The Jolly Corner (1988)
Semi-biographical.
Quote: "He had yielded to the humor of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it - the one in which he had first seen the light."
The ghost lost two fingers - it’s symbolic.
In the bible, adultery results in a cut on the hand.
It’s a scar that is a reminder; the mark of authenticity.
End of story: the guy seeing himself without his fingers; he passes out - ghostly presence.
Ghostly visits emphasize the ambivalence of what is normally called "reality" and "fact"; the remembered experience has far more solidity than objective drab shell life.
The retelling is the actual remembered experience.
Freud
We unconsciously try to get back to the state of being in the womb.
The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche)
Repetition of the same thing.
Becoming lost and retracing one’s steps.
Lost and found; we go through the steps.
Sigmund Freud
Fort and Da (Gone and there).
The game is simple: It shows us that we cannot control reality, but there is an appearance of being in control; pleasure and fun can come from it.
We write fictional stories because we can control the narrative.
Jacques Lacan - Mirror Stage
When a baby looks at a mirror they can recognize themselves.
Our alter ego.
They know it’s them but an altered image.
There can be envy of the alter ego (older sibling).
It’s not real but yet it can be impactful on our lives (example: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost).
Sylvia Plath (5/15)
Graduated from Boston.
Lady Lazarus Poem
Quote: "Out of the ash I rise (vampire) and I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three."
Quote: "What a trash to annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot—the big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies these are my hands my knees. I may be skin and bone."
Lazarus (bible).
Her power is to die (strip tease).
Peanut crowd (the crowd that Jesus needs).
Religious miracle.
Call "je m’appelle" (I call myself…).
"Miracle!" Caul (glass caul”).
Bell Jar.
Reverse geniality (Call me Ishmael).
To claim an identity.
What inner decision, what inner murder or prison break (trying to break a glass ceiling).
Her father died when she was young.
A woman living in the 50’s married to Ted Hughes, he cheated on her.
Quote: "Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call. It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: ‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out. There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge for the hearing of my heart—it really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy."
Quote: "I am your opus, I am your valuable, the pure gold baby that melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash— you poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.”
Her father and her husband were both Drs.
Restrained hysteria.
Poem Daddy
The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex.
Her father died while she thought he was God.
Quote: "Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother was possible part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other- she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it."
Father was not actually a Nazi, she was using cultural appropriation.
Quote: "These new poems of mine have one thing in common. They were all written at 4 in the morning That still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, written for the ear not the eye."
She tried to study and learn German.
Her poem “you do not do, you do not do” ( you du not du, you do not du).
Marriage you say you do for wedding vows she basically married someone like her father.
Lolita –young girl sleeps with her step father.
Quote: "I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, Ich, ich,ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene."
Quote from Daddy: “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two- The Vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years.”
Theme of the poem: baby talk, infantilized, nursery rhythm quality.
Sounds carry semantic meanings.
Allen Ginsberg
Dharma Bums features Santa Barbara in the intro.
Ginsberg grew up in New Jersey.
Ginsberg describes the mental hospitals that begin rising in the 60s and 70s.
His mother was a communist and would bring Ginsberg along to the meetings.
She also suffered from psychotic delusions, that the FBI could hear her thoughts.
Ginsberg was also institutionalized, dedicated the Howl poem to a fellow inmate named Carl Solomon.
Howl functions as a long list, a sort of continuous stream of thought, that documents how his friends had their potential ruined by social decay and government rot.
Bob Dylan included Ginsberg in the background in one of the official videos made for his song, with Ginsberg talking to someone not shown on screen behind Dylan.
This video also embodies the American rhythm (dashes, quickness, and and and).
William Carlos Williams supported Ginsberg, writing a nice introduction to one of his books to support him.
Ginsberg attended Columbia but was kicked out for vandalizing a dorm window, saying “Butler has no Balls”. Butler was the president of Columbia at the time, but Ginsberg was reinstated and was allowed to finish his degree.
1956 Ginsberg writes Howl, a very long poem which makes his name.
Before being published, Ginsberg held a public performance of Howl.
It was a group reading, at an art gallery.
Quote: "No one had been so outspoken in poetry before…none of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence…we wanted to make it new. We wanted voice and we wanted vision…a barrier had been broken."
The book was printed in England and when the copies were shipped in they were confiscated by customs, because of obscenity, particularly the curse words.
Ginsberg was not arrested (because he was in Tangier, out of the country) but the publisher and staff were.
There was a trial and they ruled in favor of the publisher (and Ginsberg). The judge says whether the poem is doing pornography for pornography sake or does it have a redeeming social function? The judge sees the poem as protest, thus having a redeeming social function? So, the obscenity has a point and Ginsberg is not punished.
Quote: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" emphasizes the visuality, the visionary sight of the poet.
Ginsberg acts out the trop of Poet as Prophet, as opposed to a confessional poet or an objectivist (object- making) poet.
This idea of the poet is drawn from Rimbaud, in part, as well as native American poetry (which incorporates drug use and shamanic elements). This is the model Ginsberg uses. Drug use is an essential part of his poetry.
Quote On Road: "At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night…I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white Man” dissillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley…I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted ecstatic Negroes of America."
This sentiment, of whiteness as limitation, is an old one. Henry Adams observes a similar phenomenon with immigrants.
Ginsberg constructs parallel structures in Howl, parataxis in method (and, and, and), like a list.
Howl is controversial. John Hollander (Yale professor) gives a nasty review.
Quote: "An utter lack of decorum in his dreadful little volume” the ravings of a lunatic friend to whom it is dedicated."
It is a classic east coast versus west coast critique.
Quote: "Carl Soloman! I’m with you" Emphasizing “with"-ness. The togetherness. The alignment. Living with another. Living with the other. With, witness, witness."
Quote: "Your first thought is the best thought"- Ginsberg.
Catch yourself thinking about something” and that’s where the poetry comes from. Prizing the spontaneous.
Ginsberg is very involved in protests, getting arrested in 1968 at the DNC for chanting “OM” at a crowd, trying to calm the crowd. The cops viewed it as incitement.
He gets a long file held by the FBI, that covered all his actions/protests.
Ginsberg was very interested in Buddhism (and eastern religion generally).
Why are they called Beatniks? Because of their alliance with protest orgs, they were frequently BEATen by cops. You hurl your body against the institution, against the machine of the government. It’s also beatific, meaning blissful, peaceful. it also recalls the heart beat, the body’s rhythm. it also prizes rhythm, the rhythm of modern life, and the beats of life
No Name Woman (5/21)
First chapter reads like a novel; Cantonese.
It’s about her being caught in the language she uses.
A memoire in her thoughts; it was controversial; category of nonfiction.
They had a baby out of wedlock - it was a tragic story.
The structure or the form of literature, false sense of intimacy.
The story is told as a secret; it’s important to gain the reader's trust.
Literature is about the frame of the story; big story is from someone who tells tall tales.
Man controls narrative.
The stories are told from the perspective of an old woman and an innocent child.
Quote: "A river bank that guides her life" her mother was very frugal, he mother lives by the principle of necessity. One is by necessity the other is extravagance that’s how we live by these two principles. They were superstitious, hunger and sex. Production in economy, restrict economy the opposite is general is --economy, Life is about production and waste, expandeger When we think about production its often about expendegere. All these words are conjectures, Counter factual statements, the possibilities the road not taken as an example. Mental Images, but we also have mental objects. Mental objects an example a mountain made of gold."
Quote: "My aunts haunt me, “drowning herself in drinking water” ethnographic Chinese culture. “ after 50 years of neglect, origami ” burning paper money, day of the dead Chinese will burn fake money, images of shoes and clothes on them. They change. We burn them because ghost live in a world of the intangible, we live in a tangible world and they burn out of respect. What is similar between origami and paper money, writing is making something out of nothing. Haunts has aunts in the word, The little girl understands her aunt doesn’t want her stories to be told. Reincarnation- our souls used to be in possession of perfect knowledge but then our souls get corrupted, Socrates was influenced by Buddhism When the soul dies you get reincarnated but the exception is if you are a criminal you are stuck in limbo same for someone that has been drowned. Maxine realizes as a narrative that her aunt maybe be mad at her, Medium, the person who speaks up is the medium the channel, they expose themselves to the other side, the bridge, they expose themselves to the other side, it can be dangerous, Maxine does this to tell her story. Her aunt’s only possibility is pulling down as a substitute that is what the writer is, the narrative is the writer. Confidence game is a con game. Writers are aware of the power and the danger of democratic imagination. Literature is putting yourself in someone elses shoes, this is what politicians do they think about what the democracy is wondering. Jack Keroauc
Jack Kerouac
French Canadian.
On the Road (1957).
The Dharma Bums (1958).
Big Sur (1962).
“Kickwriting”.
Started learning English at age six.
First novel was not well known; was written at his mother’s house in Long Island.
On the Road is about hitchhiking.
Emily Dickinson
Fascicles
Ezra Pound
“And then…” –parataxis
Charles Olson
Projective verse.
Projectile, percussive, prospective.
Composition by field.
Quote: "From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open–he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself".
Quote: "Form is never more than an extension of content".
Quote: "The HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the lINE".
Typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work.
The distinction between language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant.
Echolalia
Meaningless repetition of words and phrases.
The repetition of words and phrases by a child learning to speak.
Jack Kerouac’s poem The Dharma Bums read by Allen Ginsberg
Hotel California
Singer was high as hell "colitas”.
Song is about mental institutions.
“Hearing voices in the corridor”.
“Anytime of year, you can find it here”.
“Tiffany twisted” mind ruined by materialism”.
“Prisoners here on our own device”.
Allen Ginsberg
Mom was a communist.
His mom was crazy and suffered through psychological delusions.
Ginsberg was also institutionalized.
“Your first thought is the best thought” because it is spontaneous and natural. With witness, witness.
Aka catch yourself thinking; do not try to think too hard. Saw here- sense of vision; imagine
Sylvia Plath Section Review
Born in 1932, in Boston.
Plath’s father, Otto Plath was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University.
Father died in 1940 due to amputation of foot.
Attended Smith college, a prestigious women's college.
Submitted thesis of the Two Dostoveskeys in 1955.
During her third year of college, she is awarded am illustrious position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine.
Mental Health and Writing
Plath made her first suicide attempt on August 24th, 1953 by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother’s sleeping pills.
Survived first attempt, later saying she saw blackness.
Meeting Ted Hughes
Met at Cambridge, seeking Hughes out after reading his poetry.
Married 6 months after meeting with Plath’s mother as the only witness.
Moved back to the United States.
Plath taught at Smith College. Plath took a job as a receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital.
Early Career and Marriage
Moved back to England in december 1959.
Daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960.
February, 1961, plath suffers a misscarriage.
Plath’s Divorce
Couple begin renting out their flat out to a couple. Ted Hughes meets Assia Wevill and plath finds out they are having an affair triggering her Plath’s Depression.
October 1962, Plath experiences burst of creativity composes most of the poems which her reputation now rests.
Winter of 1962-63 was the coldest, children was often sick in an unheated flat in London having a miserable time. Her only novel, the Bell Jar was published in January 1963.
Plath’s Suicide
While for most of the time Plath was working, her depression worsened. Loses 20 lbs during that period.
The day of her death she had a live-in nurse coming in.
Plath was found dead with her head in the oven. She made sure that there was no contact of the carbon monoxide reaching her kids by making sure to put towels and tape between the rooms to seal them
Assia Wevill
Wevill was reportedly haunted by Plath’s memory; began using things which once belonged to sylvia.
Daddy: Intro
Written in 1962.
Mythologizes the father figure. Widely anthologized and one of Plath’s most iconic and enduring works.
Recall Plath’s own father’s early death.
It is also likely addressed at least times, to Hughes.
Plath wrote about anger, including macabre humor, and resistance in “Daddy”. Yet at the same time, she contrasted those dark subject matters with themes of jay, in hand with a deeper understanding of the numerous hindering functions of women.
Plath is very angry during this time.
Lady Lazarus
Is also an angry poem.
No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston
Horrible story based on real events. Memoirs have to be factual and verifiable.
Book was controversial due to her upbringing in America between two cultures – “Good Chinese Girl” vs “Open American”.
Controversial because there was no real way to confirm if her experiences were real. Memoir is able to describe what is going on in the head.
Story opens with ""You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born”. Villagers got angry that baby was born out of wedlock.
Family tried to suppress this story until Kingston was told this story as a cautionary tale.
Story is framed as a family secret. Story is framed as a secret to gain confidence. Propman is not part of the story but still part of the story aka parenthetical permace, marginal characters in a patriarchal society are the observers such as women.
Males are often able to control the narrative. Those with nothing at stake or no power are more reliable narrators / story tellers because they do not have much at stake.
Quote: "If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, 1 would have to begin, "Remember Father's drowned-in-the-well sister?" I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods."
Mother was frugal. Mother lives by the principal of necessity. “Adultery is extravagance”. Two principles of life are necessity and extravagance.
Villagers are angry because they are viewing the pregnancy as a selfish gesture when people are starving. Villagers live by the principal of necessity but they see the aunt as living in extravagance by having sex and getting pregnant.
Restrict economy is about focusing the economy on increasing human life style by providing basic necessities.
General economy is when the economy focuses on personal growth such as college degrees etc.
Life is about production or life is about expenditure, waste, and dying. Sex was originally only meant to have kids but now has lost its meaning. Maybe, must have, or are conjunctions.
Counterfactual statements are powerful because of the possibilities of what could have been. Counterfactual statements are also mental images of things that do not exist such as unicorn, dragon, Gold Mountain.
Mental objects play a strong part in our mental image. “Devoting pages of paper” chinese tradition of burning money for the dead. Money is burned so that the essence of the money can be grabbed by the ghosts to be used in the after life.
Paper money, orgimani, and burning money; making something out of nothing. Haunts has the word AUNTS “r. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost”. Chinese superstition. Socrates and Plato believed in reincarnation.
When a person dies, the soul starts the reincarnation process. Two conditions: a criminal or a person who has drowned are stuck in limbo. Only way to escape limbo as a drowned person is to replace themself with a substitute.
Her aunt may be upset for spilling her beans. Medium is the person that speaks up for the spirits; medium is a dangerous job because you expose yourself to spirits. Maxine is using herself as the substitute as a medium to tell her aunt’s story. The writer is the substitute of the drowned ghost.
Her aunt did come back alive; but with no name. Narrator is the medium. Medium is a translator. What is literature? Putting herself in another’s shoes Political reps are investigating and imagining placing themselves in the shoes of citizens
Thomas Wolfe
The most famous writer you’ve never heard of. Fall from grace; fell out of literary favor.
Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina though he eventually alienates himself from the community there. Attended UNC Chapel Hill and edited The Tar Heel newspaper there; master's degree at Harvard, studied playwriting.
Made the subject of his writing quotidien American Life. His subject is “not the government, or the revolutionary war, or the Monroe Doctrine” but rather “ten million seconds and moments of your life”.
Loved german culture until he noticed the rise of antisemitism. Much of his writing is autobiographical, which caused some scandal among his family and wider community who resented how they were depicted. Famous for his long manuscripts (required lots of editing).
Maxwell Perkins (his editor) had a contentious relationship with Wolfe; part of his mythos is his death at a young age. Lots of his work is published posthumously. Maxwell Perkins was at Scribner
Aline Bernstein
Born in 1880. Worked in theatre for a number of years, from the time of 1916 and 1961 she worked on 51 different productions in a variety of roles.
Met Thomas Wolfe in 1925 aboard the RMS Olympic. He was 25, she was 44. She was married to a stock broker but this did not prevent them from engaging in a five year affair. This was also a financial relationship, with Bernstein offering patronage and support of Wolfe’s writing. It was a tempestuous relationship too, passionate and unstable.
Wolfe immortalized Bernstien as the character of Esther Jack in his novels Of Time and the River, The Web
The Lost Boy
Published in 1937. Divided into four sections. Tells the story of an Asheville NC family grieving the death of their 12 year old son. Characterized by lengthy passages, lyricism and the finely wrought characters. Notice the repetition in the text (“Again” and “It has always been”
Affect Theory
Nostalgic, eerie, melancholy.
The sister maybe being younger does not remember Robert through memories but rather relies on image
Confessional Poets
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Beryyman. Dark and private subject matters: death, trauma, depression, relationships
1950’s
Baby Boomers; post WWII; urban sprawl; golden age of detective fiction; golden age of film
Skunk Hour Poem by Robert Lowell
Opening Quote: "One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull; I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here— only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare."
Robert Lowell Quote: "The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland, Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction
Stinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night…My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night. Mind is not right when there is a confusion of time Title of the poem: humans have a division; acknowledging that the human being is going through suffering Existentialism: expassing the notion of nothing. “God is dead”, absurdity. So absurd, nothing is making sense
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
Quote: "I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare."
Quote: "—It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go."
Elizabeth Bishop
Spent her time fishing.
The fish in her poem did not fight because he was caught and released over and over again. The fish knows the deal of catch and release.
This ruins the fun of fishing for victory.
Flat poem; repeated similes.
Knowledge requires a knower and a known. Knowledge is both a tool and a weapon. The Fish poem is about the ethics of knowing. Fisherman is bothered that the fish is not fighting for its life.
N. Scott Momaday
Native American Quotes; Kiowa Indian; PhD from Stanford; Got his first job as assistant professor at UCSB Published as a chapbook
The Journey of Tai-me (fine edition limited to 100 hand-printed copies)
Sacred Sun Dance doll Tai me is the sacred sundance doll
Tai-me is told in a Tripartite format (three part format): Mythology, History, Family, Non linear time
“And” (american rhythm). Each “and” is co-existing, not hierarchy. Palimpsest- parchment made from animal skin; computer memory is a palimpsest palimpsest is anything that holds memory; forgotten things can be recovered if you know how to Only colonists appeared time to be linear.
Stories that come with their own telling; dialogism; communal; culture as a way of life; total translation. Songs have their own souls. Can be uprooted and translated but originality cannot be replicated.
Quote: "I became more keenly aware of myself as someone who had walked through the time and in whose blood there is something inestimably old and undying. It was as if I had remembering something that happened two hundred years ago"
Simon Ortiz
Advocated against uranium mining in New Mexico; fought in the Vietnam War; How did Sam Ortiz Write about the Sand Creek Massacre?
Quote: "“There are ghost towns all over the West; some are profitable tourist attractions of the “frontier,” others are merely sad and unknown” “Colonel Chivington was a moral man, believed he was made in the image of God, and he carried out the orders of his nation’s law; Kit Carson didn’t mind stealing and killing either
Quote: "“At the salvation Army A clerk caught me Wandering Among old spoons and knives Sweaters and shoes I couldn’t have stolen anything; my life was stolen already”
Frontier Thesis was a powerful trope; westward movement starting in the 19th century think “Manifest Destiny”; concept that God gave colonists the right to expand westward center of the world is went from the mediterranean, to the atlantic, and eventually the pacific
Quote: "“The Frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonists. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe… Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American” Frederick Jackson Turner (1893)
“Teleological suspension of the ethical” (Soren Kierkegaard). Abraham Conception or commitment to a goodness that transcends one’s current understanding of the good Radical Hope
What does morality mean when a good person commits atrocities by just doing their job Radical hope is when you can only hope in the dark. How can you believe in concepts of bravery?
Radical Hope comes from the biblical story of Abraham Abraham must kill isaac to suspend the notion of the ethical Call and response in African American churches
Leslie Marmon Silko
Born in Pablo, went to the university of new Mexico. She represents a generation of people after the Vietnam War.
Formation narrative, there is an acoustic quality. The repetition is how we remember lullaby’s the rhythm is natural for our bodies, it goes into our subconscious poetry is isn’t about words but more about the sound Spider-web-narration Spider woman.
Lullaby ( a nurturing song) Spider woman is suspended between heaven and earth, so real and symbolic. The web is seen as a weapon for her to capture men Some cultures see the web is seen as a trap for death Indian cultures see spider woman as a creator and a protector In Chinese mythology the creator of human beings was a woman The archetype for writers and story tellers is the spider in these situation
Quote:* "“the sun had gone down, but the snow in the wind gave off its own light. It came in a thick tufts like a new wool-washed before the weaver spins it” key letter in that quote is W, M upside down can also be seen as a W Letters