One Second Everyday

Thursday's discussion about how videos change the way we view historical events reminded me of the app that I have called One Second Everyday (ISE) (http://1secondeveryday.com). It is an app that cuts one second out of any video that you take throughout one day, and mashes the one-second clips together into a sideshow-like video. You can pick only one clip per day, so you have to be really selective.

This is like the Zapruder film because with videos, you can only get one side of the whole picture. If I choose a clip of Memorial stadium during the Illinois Marathon, it is easy for a viewer to assume that all I did that day was sit in the stadium among the crowd of runners. But there is always more to my day than just the one second that is stored in the 1SE app. You can talk to people that I've met that day to see what else I've done that day. You can go to restaurants and libraries to find my paper trail. But it is much easier to just accept the one second clip as a full representation of my day.

With the Zapruder film, there is a limited view that the viewers of the video get to see.
Physically, you can only see the right side of the car with JFK in it, and not much else in the surroundings. You can't see Lee, or Zapruder himself, or the bullet that hits Kennedy. I guess this has the opposite effect of One Second Everyday, because the lack of image evidence lead to conspiracy theories and complicated the event, while the 1SE app tends to simplify a day's events into one moment. The Zapruder film is still similar to 1SE because recording something and having a purely factual piece of evidence prompts people to come up with fictions to make sense of it.

People that pump up Lee

In Libra, Bobby Dupard and David Ferrie are similar in that they both point out coincidences to Lee in order to get Lee to assassinate famous people. Lee, who is trying to get in the history books and is probably seeing himself as the main character of a novel, thrives off of this feeling of coincidence, that the events around him revolve around him.
On page 275, Dupard points out that Walker is coming to live in Dallas. "'You think it's some coincidence this Walker come to live in Dallas? Get off, man. He is here because the fury and the hate is here. This is the city he made up in his mind.'" While Dupard is saying it's not a coincidence, this line will certainly make Lee think that it is a coincidence.

We can see this mentality take hold in Lee's mind after Lee and his family moved to Neely Street. Here, he has already purchased a 6.5-millimeter Italian rifle under the name of Hidell and is preparing to assassinate General Walker: "What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions"(p. 277). Lee can sense the connections that he's making and he sees his private world expanding into the real world, which is testament to the fact that Lee constantly observes himself from the outside from a historical perspective.

David Ferrie points out these coincidences to Lee even more blatantly: "You spend most of your day on the sixth floor, don't you? His car is coming along Houston right straight at you. Then dipping away down Elm. Moving slowly and grandly past. The one place in the world where Lee Oswald works. The one time of day when he sits alone in a window and eats his lunch. There's no such thing as coincidence. We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen."

In this passage, Ferrie says there is no such thing as coincidence, which is really saying that Lee is a part of some greater planned narrative that he will follow, that there's nothing left to chance.  He is also saying that such opportunities arise solely because of Lee's own actions. This puts Lee into the same frame of mind that he'll be making history pretty soon, which is something that Lee has dreamed about for a very long time.

Sympathy for Jack Ruby

In class someone mentioned that Jack Ruby was portrayed in depth as being rough in his actions but insecure and emotional inside. I think DeLillo is setting up Ruby as the perfect person to kill Oswald. Even before Jack Ruby kills Oswald, DeLillo is already preparing excuses for readers to make for Jack Ruby. Two of Jack's traits that set him up to kill Oswald are his naive aggressiveness and his emotional pride, both of which made him a sympathetic character for me.

Jack Ruby is violent in a defensive way, which can be seen on page 264, where Jack is attacking a man who had "grab-assed one of the waitresses." Jack's anger pushes him to extreme lengths and soon Jack isn't defending the waitress who'd been groped but rather trying to harm the perpetrator. We can see that Jack's anger can push him to do irrational things and go the extra mile.

Jack is also full of emotion. He is very considerate of others, and this can be seen on page 267, where he buys sandwiches for the policemen: "These cops of ours deserve the best because they put their lives on the line every time they walk out the door." Although it is mentioned that Jack does this to stay on the good side of the police force, his respect for the policemen seems genuine. "He felt blood seeping into his shoe. But just seeing these men in uniform, clean shaven, he wanted to say it is the proudest feeling of my life being a friend of the police in the most pro-American city anywhere in the world" (p. 268).

Additonally, Jack is sympathetic character because we learn of a lot of his physical flaws.
Jack keeps taking Preludin pills, which is an appetite suppressant. On page 257: "Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook." We sympathize with Jack Ruby here because he is trying to overcome one of his flaws and is looking to the future.
Jack is also balding: "He didn't like being without his hat because the balding head is here for all to see. He took scalp treatments that he felt were doing some good although the doubted it" (p. 267).

I feel like now in the chapter "In Dallas",  when Jack Ruby shoots Lee, we are less likely to see Jack Ruby as a bad guy.

Hard to navigate

One of the many things that I disliked about Kindred was the (physical) structure of the book. While flipping through the pages to find passages to reference for my response paper, I had a really hard time finding my desired passage.

One obvious reason that this book is hard to navigate is that there aren't any changes in text size or font or any pictures like Mumbo Jumbo had.

Another is that I couldn't really form a chronology of the events of the book in my head. Maybe it's just me, but with the weird slave-and-master dynamics and time traveling made the entire story a blur in my head. When did Dana try to escape? When did Alice try? What age was Rufus after Dana time traveled for the third time? (what even happened when she time traveled for the third time?)

Perhaps each page looks the same to me because Dana adds her own interpretation of anything that happens, which clogs up the page and makes "landmarks" less visible (by landmarks, I mean long dialogues, large paragraphs, short paragraphs, anything that stands out visually that leaves an impression in your mind, so that you can find it easily for response papers).  I felt like someone looking across the treetops and not finding a break in the forest.
 

The entire book basically takes place on the Weylin plantation, and therefore the text doesn't vary much throughout. There aren't any new characters' names that pop up as "landmarks", or capitalized town names or words in all caps. Names of characters are mostly first names, no last names. The names are the same, and each time Dana time travels, the same people are at the plantation. The chapters begin at varying spots on the page, and don't always start at the tops of pages.

I guess I had a hard time searching through the novel, but maybe it was just me. I was hoping to find an online version of Kindred so that I could use the Ctrl+F feature.

Slaves to a system

In class discussion of Kindred, someone said that everyone in the book was a slave to the system of slavery on the Weylin plantation. To us, outsiders, the concept of slavery seems alien, and as Dezy had said, like part of a dystopia. However, to the people living in antebellum Maryland, it was just a part of everyday life. Tom Weylin unemotionally whips the slaves because that was what was expected of him as a slave master. Unlike Rufus, who receives anti-slave propaganda from Dana, Tom Weylin doesn't know of anything other than the system he lives in.

But aren't we slaves to a system even now?

It got me thinking about how people in the future would view us. I'm almost positive that they'd see us as slaves of the capitalist, consumerist system in America. We know nothing other than spending and buying the more attractive items. We are educated about the third world, and even when we visit these places we never really understand them. We are taught to treat everyone equally and with respect, that everyone has a right to do whatever they want to do, as long as it's within the law.
If these people from the future looked back at us, they would look at our factory farms and polluted seas and say, "They're just slaves of the consumerist system". The people of the future might be vegans who live emission free.


This got me thinking about how aliens would view us, humans on earth. They may say:
"They're just slaves of oxygen."
"They're just slaves of the vocal communication system."
"They're just slaves of their own physical bodies."

My point is that there are so many points of view of a system of living. Tom Weylin was raised in the 19th century and so he went along with slavery. If American society has changed so much that just 150 years after slavery, we are now nondiscriminant to other races (Okay, actually far from it, but in theory we are (I think)). Who knows what we'll be going along with in the future. But because of our attention to the study of history, I am sure that we will never repeat slavery. 

Showing vs Telling

One thing that I dislike about Dana's role in Kindred is that she gives the readers too much information. Not like she gives too many details for each scene, but more like she thinks in the book what we, as readers, should be picking up on. She tells more than she shows, which I guess is one aspect of a first-person narrator, but I dislike it because it allows me to wait for her interpretation of events in Kindred and sit back and tune out while the events are actually happening (I don't mean actually sit back but it allows me to pay a little less attention to the plot).

One of the things that Dana makes unnecessarily obvious for the readers is the similarities at we are supposed to notice between characters in Kindred. One example is on page 231, where Dana is arguing with Rufus.

     "You watch your mouth," he said.
     "Watch yours."

Then later, when Dana is talking to Alice on page 235:
     "You want my help, Alice, you watch your mouth!"
     "Watch yours," she mocked.
     I stared at her in astonishment, remembering, knowing exactly what she had overheard.

Dana makes this connection very clear to us, while in most books and movies that I've encountered, these similarities are supposed to come naturally to the reader. If a phrase in conversation has some significance, Dana makes sure we know it.
Another example is when Dana compares Rufus with his father on pages 214-215:
     "You walk away from me, Dana, you'll be back in the fields in an hour!"
     ...
     He sounded more like his father than himself. In that moment, he even looked like his father.

Now, if Dana showed us instead of told us how Rufus resembled his father, I would be much more interested in the story.  I recall Dana drawing subtle comparisons between Kevin and Tom Weylin earlier in the novel, but as the story unfolds I feel like Dana is making connections too obvious, and not giving us readers a chance to figure out anything ourselves.

Loophole in Slaughterhouse-Five

I think I may have found a possible loophole in Slaughterhouse-Five. But first, I should clarify some assumptions that I have, to see if my understanding of the book is correct.
_________________________________________________________________________________

1). We can use the book metaphor with Billy Pilgrim's unstuckness: We view his life like we flip through a book, seeing different parts of his life whenever we want, because he is living his entire life simultaneously. Vonnegut is just giving us snippets of the book that is Billy's life to make Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy is living his entire life simultaneously.

2). There is no "present-day Billy", because he is unstuck and has no intermediate, baseground from which he can leap forward and backward in time. He belongs to every part of his life equally.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Then, how can Billy be aware of the bombing of Dresden, thirty days before the actual bombing, while walking in the parade in Dresden? (this is page 192 of my version, but it is the fat version. The actual number should be closer to 180 I think. It starts "Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned--in about thirty more days...)

Using the book metaphor, how can a character know what is going to happen to him in the future? Characters in books just live through the plot like a normal person in linear-time life would. With Billy's unstuckness, he just lives each part simultaneously. He jumps from page to page in the book that is his life, but lives them normally.

Transitioning to the second assumption that I made. If it is true, then there is no Billy that knows of the bombing beforehand. With the book metaphor, there is no character reading the book outside of the plot; there is only a character in the plot. He is living that parade in the streets of Dresden just like it was the first time. In fact,just saying that Billy learned of the bombing suggests linear time (and for Billy, there is no such thing as linear time), that there was a point in time that he didn't know of this bombing, then a later point in time that he learned of the bombing, when in Billy's unstuck life, there is no before and after.

Main point: Billy doesn't know what is going to happen to him, he's living the moment like it's structured, just like it's the first time.

This paragraph confused me (actually there's also the part where Billy' knows that the aliens are coming for him). If my assumptions are incorrect or I'm missing something, please let me know!