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!

When the helmets come off

In Slaughterhouse-Five, at the beginning of Chapter 3, Vonnegut completely un-glamorizes the German soldiers and their police dog. He strips off their intimidating appearances by giving the soldiers and dog a background. The effect reminded me of the scenes in war movies, where the American soldier tumbles into hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier.

The American soldier is clearly the protagonist of the movie. We get his background, see him with his squad mates, see his hopes and fears. In a battle he fires from a distance at the German soldiers who are clearly the antagonists of the movie. They look intimidating without faces in the background, running behind panzers, and their helmets are the only visible part of their head.

But when the American soldier runs into a German soldier and they start rolling around on the ground and their helmets come off, you see that the German soldier looks just like the American soldier; they both have fear in their eyes, and are both struggling for their own lives just to live to see the next day.

 

 I think Saving Private Ryan does a good job of un-glamorizing war (What Mary O'Hare fears that Vonnegut will do) by making each killing scene more personal, and making the German soldiers more human. The beginning of Chapter 3 does the same thing; shows us that the German soldiers are young and old, are farmers, and have a female dog, which is quite relatable to the American soldiers and to the readers. By drawing similarities between the enemy soldiers and the American soldiers, both Saving Private Ryan and Slaughterhouse-Five un-glamorize war.

The photos are almost the same!

The author of my panel presentation article, Sharon A. Jessee, wrote in her article "Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo" that Reed often uses the pictures in the novel for contradiction and irony, which draws attention to a point he's trying to make (I didn't pay much attention to the pictures in Mumbo Jumbo after I learned that they mostly don't make sense):

In the epilogue on page 210, Papa LaBas is talking about Freud and says:

"I once leafed through a photo book about the West. I was struck by how the Whites figured in the center of the photos and drawings while Blacks were centrifugally distant. The center was usually violent: gunfighting lynching murdering torturing. The Blacks were, usually, if it were an interior, standing in the doorway. Digging the center." (p. 210).

With Jessee's article in mind, I noticed that the photos sort of contradicted these observations by LaBas. The page is set up with two photos stacked on top of eachother, like this:

The quote from the same page says that whites are mostly in the center of the photos while blacks are pushed into the centrifugally into the distance. In terms of the 3D space of the pictures, the blacks are distant, in the background, away from the action happening in the foreground. However, in a 2D sense of the picture, the two black men in the two photos are both in the very center, and in almost the exact same position in both photos; leaning to the left, head slightly tilted.

This also goes with the general theme of the book, where the high and low speech styles are switched between black and white characters; in the photos, the racial stereotypes that are portrayed are the exact opposite stereotypes. Blacks are stereotyped as rough while whites are stereotyped as high-class, but these photos reverse that notion. And what Jessee's article says is that this draws attention to those stereotypes.

Ragtime : Michael Kohlhaas :: Life of Pi : Max and the Cats

Class discussion towards the end of Ragtime about Doctorow copying from Michael Kohlhaas reminded me of a conversation that I had with a Brazilian exchange student a few weeks ago. The student told me that Life of Pi was copied from a work by a Brazilian writer. I went home, googled this, and found that Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, had borrowed the plot from Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats.

Max and the Cats follows a man named Max who is fleeing Nazi Germany after he is reported to the secret police for having an affair with a married woman. He is on a boat with few passengers and many zoo animals, headed for Brazil. The boat is sabotaged and sunk. Max manages to escape into the sea on a life boat, and finds that he is sharing the boat with a jaguar. At one point, he entertains the thought that the jaguar could be trained. At the end of his many days afloat, it is revealed that there was never a jaguar on the boat with Max.

Life of Pi is about an Indian boy named Pi who climbs aboard a lifeboat, but is on the boat for completely different circumstances. He finds a tiger on his boat, and sails with it for many days until he reaches land. At one point he tries to show the tiger that he is the alpha male. Like Scliar's book, readers find out that there was never a tiger on the boat with Pi.

The similarities are obvious. But just like Doctorow surrounded the plot of Michael Kohlhaas with many other stories, Martel adds so many more parts to the plot of Max and the Cats that it is transformed.

 In Life of Pi, Pi is joined by a female orangutan, a hyena, and an injured zebra. The hyena kills both the orangutan and the zebra, then is killed by the tiger. At the very end of the book, when this incident is investigated, it is revealed that each animal on the boat was actually a human being (each a metaphor for a human?), and that the tiger was Pi himself. This is so much more complex than Max and the Cats. Additionally, Pi and the tiger stumble upon an island made of carnivorous, acidic algae that is inhabited by meerkats. What this is a metaphor for, I don't know, but it surely is something that Max and the Cats doesn't have.

Just like Life of Pi is "copying" from Max and the Cats, Ragtime borrows the plot from Michael Kohlhaas, while adding on so much more. In addition to several other characters, fictional and historical, Ragtime is different from Michael Kohlhaas in that it weaves all of these characters together instead of just substituting them for characters from Michael Kohlhaas.

I think borrowing plots works, but it may be more acceptable to first ask the original author first before following a certain book so closely in plot.

Non-character-centered ending to Ragtime

After turning past the page with IV in the center, and laying eyes on Chapter 40, I was assaulted with a seemingly endless sequence of large paragraphs that daunted me. Pages of information on every character in the book, especially J.P. Morgan, bored me. I was hoping for a more climactic ending, but was disappointed. Then I remembered that Doctorow was trying to portray the early 1900s as a time period, not as a period in a few character's life. An exciting ending wouldn't make sense; it would most likely be completely fictional, and would not prove any point about the early 1900s.

As mentioned in class, the ending was like the ending of some movies and documentaries, with a "this is what happened to him afterward" section for each character. It gave me the feeling that these characters, the ones that didn't get killed off, were living and surviving outside the scope of the book's plot. J.P Morgan was still living, fulfilling his dreams in Egypt. Mother and Tateh got married, and created a family with a bright future. These character's stories are clearly not over. They still have milestones waiting for them on the horizon.

Unlike many movies and novels, these characters aren't emerging from the wreckage of a final battle or continuing on with their lives with life-changing knowledge. They just make do with what they've got.

The last paragraph of Ragtime continues the stories of characters while ending the time period that Doctorow depicted with the rest of the novel:
"The anarchist Emma Goldman had been deported. The beautiful and passionate Evelyn Nesbit had lost her looks and fallen into obscurity. And Harry K. Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade." 
Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit have sad "endings" (although "endings" isn't the right word because their stories have only ended in the book, not in the Ragtime reality). As the reader approaches the last lines of the novel, these "endings" leave a lot of questions unanswered. But they also open the mind to a range of possibilities for Ragtime's characters that makes the novel seem more historical and less fictional.

Writing styles in postmodernist fiction

One way that postmodernist fiction departs from modernist fiction other than the subject matter is the way it is presented on the page. In Ragtime, Doctorow gives the reader a picture of the setting of the novel by telling it through an unknown narrator, which is filled with subtle bias and a story-telling feel to it. At the end of Chapter 6, during the "it became fashionable to honor the poor" last paragraph, Doctorow includes a few aspects of postmodernist fiction that makes it clearly not modernist, and not a normal setting of a backdrop of a novel.

Doctorow uses repetition that is sort of conversational in this last paragraph.

"In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers...or their legs crushed; they had to be counseled to stay alert."
and
"In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them." (page 34 for my version).
These two sentences have similar structures and are adjacent, with a semicolon in between a clause describing the dangers of child labor and a clause explaining what was being done about it.

Another example of repetition:
"One hundred Negroes.... One hundred miners....One hundred children."(p. 34)
And also:
"There were oil trusts and banking trusts and railroad trusts and beef trusts and steel trusts." (p. 34)

These instances of repetition, I feel, sets this novel apart from modernist fiction because it is a completely new way of telling "history." Also, I don't remember seeing so much repetition in non-postmodernist fiction. In my opinion, it makes the tone seem more conversational.

My favorite postmodernist author, Haruki Murakami, takes this non-standard way of formatting to another level. It an eerily postmodernist way, Murakami, in his surrealist novel Kafka on the Shore, writes some portions of the thoughts of his main character, Kafka, from a boy named Crow's perspective, in boldface (I think the boy named Crow represents Kafka from a parallel world). I've never seem another novelist write in this format. This stood out to me and gave me the impression that Murakami was trying to depart from the normal standard of the format of novels, just like Doctorow in Ragtime is pioneering a new way of telling history, or at least giving readers the backdrop of a novel.