Will They, or Won’t They? The Fabulous Gay Love Story That is the Early Chapters of Moby Dick

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"Jammer Moments", "Will They?/Won't They?", Gay Men, Gay Sex, Having erotic dreams/fantasies about sailors and whales is perfectly normal...Todd, Homoeroticism, Homosexuality, Humor, Ishmael, Jason Momoa, Literature, Male Sexuality, masculinity, Masculinity Studies, Moby Dick, Moby Dick is TOTALLY GAY, Novel, Quee-Queg, Queer, Queer Sexuality, Queer Theory, Sailors, Satire, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, The Hardcore Gay Erotica that is Moby Dick, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Well Hung Bad Boys Looking for D, Whalers, Writing

I mean if I woke up to find myself in the arms a large, able-bodied, tattooed god I could only hope that my make-a-wish came true and that I was resting next to Jason Momoa.  A man can dream after all.

It’s been a strange sort of year, one that has come with numerous changes and developments, but the most recent one was finishing yet another in a long line of 1000 page books, however my most recent challenge was unique because it was not a novel but in fact it was a history book.  Since I was a child my father has owned a dense tome wrapped in a black dust jacket marked with a swastika.  I knew a fair amount about Nazis because my father would often tell me stories of men like Patton and Ike Eisenhower who defeated these evil monsters that were almost on par with orcs from The Lord of the Rings.  I could never understand then why my dad had a book with their logo on the front.  This was largely because I didn’t take the time to read the cover.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer is an incredible book, and while I would hope one day to write about it’s significance to World War II history discourse, I began to observe, somewhere in the three hundred pages of Russian-German diplomacy, that I really, really, desperately wanted to read Moby Dick.  Again.

I mentioned this the other day to two of my co-workers and they gave “the look.”

It’s an odd sort of look.  I can’t say that it’s pity exactly, nor would I go so far as to suggest that it’s jealousy.  In fact it’s something in the middle I suspect.  A loathing of the self before one comes to the realization that I’m a narcissist and a weirdo who thinks he’s special and interesting and so they pity my strange variety of nerdom.  It’s a look I’m familiar with, and one friend even has a name for these moments that he charmingly refers to as “Jammer Moments.”  I’ve yet to contact Oxford English Dictionary because the term has yet to develop a significant etymology and I also don’t have the merchandizing rights yet.  “That’s so Jammer” will look great on t-shirts, and I intend to make a killing.

Despite my oddity, and my friends and co-worker’s mystification at my desire to read what is widely regarded as one of the most unreadable novels in all of human history, I’ve enjoyed picking up Moby Dick again.  The novel is beautifully written, philosophically profound, textually complex, and also a wonderful opportunity to dig into my queer sexuality and find what is surely one of the most delightfully gay romances in American literature.

Now I can anticipate my reader’s objections before I even get into the fun parts.  Fun parts for the record are of course queer jargon for ding dongs and buttholes, both of which terms are straight jargon for penises and anuses, both of which are themselves medical jargon for those things that shoot out babies and turds.  Why should I care about whether or not the characters in Moby Dick are gay?  I’m never going to read the book in the first place, so why should I bother worrying over the sexuality of two fictional people?  More to the point, if Moby Dick is a beautiful and philosophically profound novel, why worry about something as petty as sexuality?

My reader makes some wonderful arguments and I understand where they’re coming from, but to be frank I just feel like having some fun and writing a trashy queer romance and maybe, possibly perhaps, find something culturally relevant to observe at the end.  So get off my back people, life is hard and sometimes we all need to find a way to relax.

Now our story begins in the city of Nantucket where the gloomy Ishmael finds himself in a bar, the Spouter Inn to be exact.  I’ll touch on that imagery in a moment.  Our young stud of a protagonist is a country-boy named Ishmael who is caught by a wanderlust that is at times gloomy, which just gives him this precious “dark side” allowing the reader to picture the man as a kind of Goth dream-boat only without eye-liner and leave tattoos.  That’s for later.  Ishmael is caught by a near-constant desire to travel specifically to go whaling on the ocean for it provides his spirit an unknown, or indescribable satisfaction.  The fact that he surrounded by men is unspoken, but I hope my reader will agree, it’s clearly all about the dick, whale.

I meant whale.

Ishmael steps into the ejaculation, Spouter, I meant Spouter Inn, and he walks past a group of butch sailors to inquire about a room.  At this point the reader is given the first bits of foreplay to the beautiful party:

“But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooner’s blanket, have ye?  I s’pose you are a goin’ a whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooner might be, and that if he (the landlord) had no other place for me, and the harpooner was not decidedly objectionable, why rather wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with half of any decent man’s blanket.  (19).

I suppose I have to sigh and groan that our protagonist should announce himself upfront to be a bit of a slut.  It’s not enough that he let’s the barman tap his “head” in front of him without calling him on it, then you have the fact that admits to preferring multiple lovers and that monogamous relations leave him tired and bored, and before he’s even finished the sentence he has admitted that he’s not overly picky about the sort of man who shares his bed.  But perhaps what’s worst, or best of all, I’m not sure which at this point, Ishmael states outright that he’s willing to shack up with any guy if it means being warm and dry.  I mean I’m as much of a slut as the next guy, but show at least a little deference in selection of sexual partners Ishmael.  There are some Creeps out there, and you always find out far far too late in the game.  That orthodox priest was not happy when I said I had an early meeting.

Now my reader is sure to object against my interpretation by suggesting that none of that was actually implied.  Ishmael was just a young man looking for a place to stay during a nasty storm.  Well my reader has some very intriguing ideas concerning Ishmael’s sex-life, however I’m afraid I must continue to the juicy parts.

The reader is given a lengthy passage in which Ishmael deliberates about whether he should share a bed with the strange man that the bar-tender speaks of.  I wish I could say that this was enjoyable to read, but Melville really lacks a certain penasch in terms of getting one hot and bothered for random bed-sharing.  Chapter four progresses rather slowly until the reader is able to get a juicy couple of pages of Ishmael discovering his bed-mate will be a cannibal, and there is some rather yummy passages in which Ishmael studies Queequeg’s body, but it really isn’t until the start of chapter 5 that the reader gets any sort of hint that the action is starting up again:

Upon waking up the next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.  You had almost thought I had been his wife.  (36).

Before the reader interrupts my good time let me observe rather quickly that from this point on Ishmael will regularly use marital adjectives when describing his relationship with Queequeg.  It’s not enough that the pair of them wake up in a loving, warm embrace.  After all, it was a cold, rainy night and they were strangers seeking solace and warm in one another’s…company.  But just a few pages on from this Ishmael drops another hint at his developing infatuation:

But at length all the night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament.  For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.  (38).

Once again Ishmael employs the adjectives of marriage, and this association of course leads to a somewhat annoying realization that Ishmael is one of those queer men who buys into the idea that one of them is “the girl.”  This is a rather unfortunate realization, because up to this point I was enjoying Ishmael’s sluttiness and unbroken frolicking with another man.  Perhaps what’s so frustrating is this perpetuated rhetoric in today’s society, most obviously in straight communities.  Homosexuality is seen often as a kind of malleable heterosexuality in which two men or two women form a monogamous bond that mimics a straight couple’s.  One of the pair is the man, and therefore the active penetrator or licker.  I should really consult a lesbian and determine what the inside terminology is.  While the other partner is the passive receiver, meaning of course that that person is “the girl.”  Ishmael seems to be employing this imagery as he observes Queequeg not responding to his attempts to wake him up, and while it’s hardly a severe reiteration of a tired mode of thinking, it’s just disappointing that Ishmael can’t foster his own working model of queerness.

I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.  Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.  A pretty-pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk!  (38).

The only thing missing I suppose is some leather chest-guards, chaps, some cigars, and one of those swings you have to pay somebody to set up.  Who says Literature is boring?

Now my reader interrupts my fantasies because they are compelled by some misguided sense of revisionist intellectualism to remind me that there was no actual sex.  Queequeg simply fell asleep and Melville is trying to establish a purely heterosexual friendship between the two characters.  The use of the word “savage” as well is not meant to be dirty, but is in fact some unfortunate racism on Melville’s part to appeal to his original audience.  These are all fine points, but they’re ignoring the obvious assplay that was exchanged, and Ishmael being a weird slut who totally wanted it.

This is compounded by a later passage in which Ishmael is just watching Queequeg, and thinking about their association together.  And after a few moment’s reflection, which, let’s be honest here, men only ever employ that term to mean “thinking about all the sorts of kinky sex I’d love to have with another man,” Ishmael makes a further move:

I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile.  At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows.  I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.  (73).

If a man told me he’d like to sleep with me more than once I would probably be flattered as well…alas, I have yet to even receive an offer.

I suppose I must sigh here, and gently wave towards my face as Ishmael only gets more steamy in the sheets with his Cannibal lover (Man eats Man would be either a beautiful title for a homoerotic play by Tennessee Williams or else a wonderful title for a gay porno, I’m not sure which, why not both?).  After the previous exchange was offered Ishmael offers another sight just a few pages on where he let’s the obvious foreplay be observed:

But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.  Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.  Thus, then, in our hearts honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.  (75).

Again, before I can even get into the juicy parts about what is obviously sexual, my revisionist reader must needs interrupt to inform me that I’m performing a gross disservice to literary analysis.  What is being described is not an openly homosexual relationship.  Melville is merely using words like “honeymoon” to show a deepening friendship that is developing between Ishmael and Queequeg.  They would also like to remind me that strong homosocial bonds were common between men of this time because it was just not socially acceptable to share emotions between people of different genders.  Men and women kept their personal selves to themselves, and preferred to share such intimately with members of their own sex.  They would also like to tell me that I’m obviously trying to write contemporary homosexuality onto these characters which is unfair because the homosexuality of today’s society is an entirely different animal than homoeroticism that existed in the past.

Well, if I can offer a defense, I never used the word homosexual.  We have no idea if Queequeg is homosexual, or pansexual, or bisexual, or just queer.  Now Ishmael is most definitely gay though, because this entire book is just one long testament to his fascination and erotic fixation on “THE D.”

Now if my reader is done interrupting I need to get to the last two passages which obvious end with our queer heroes finally getting, if I can borrow an expression the kids are using these days, “Biz-zay.”  Immediately following the previous quote the next chapter begins with Ishmael and Queequeg, resting together and just basking in the afterglow:

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.  (76).

While this is nowhere near as pornographic as I would like it to be (Ishmael remains to the very end a nasty little tease) it’s so obvious that these two men have spent the night voraciously making love.  Queequeg’s invitations might also suggest that he was the one doing the penetrating, but even my skills of queer deduction only go so far.  I mean, the dude is the one leading the advances in this scene, literally “filling” the space of the bed and actively “pushing” into Ishmael’s personal space demonstrating his affection, but then again plenty of men like to be the one leading the advances before lifting their rump in the air like a cat in heat.  You never really know somebody until you get them in bed.

What’s obvious, apart from the fact that they both spent the night hiding the “sau-seege” is that these two men have developed a deep and caring intimacy.  Ishmael and Queequeg can freely touch and talk and fuck to their hearts content, and thus suggests that the opening passages of Moby Dick are offering a classic narrative of the “Will they?/Won’t They?”  Readers and viewers enjoy watching this dynamic because people are sexual creatures who tend to get some kind of voyeuristic thrill of watching another romance develop.  And because love is an evolutionary development designed to encourage procreation that results in long terms relationships to ensure two parents can raise a child together, sex is always going to be the end result of a love affair.

People want to see people fall in love to see if maybe they don’t see a little bit of themselves in these characters.  We want to observe another person’s love affair to see if it resembles the loves that we’ve pursued in our own lives.  And, I secretly suspect, this desire to watch another person’s love affair is a chance to explore a sexual dynamic that we did not.

I myself never got a chance to form a love affair with another man, and to be honest I’m not sure if I ever would.  I tend to gravitate more towards women when it comes to my emotional self.  I like their company, but I can’t deny that my queerness does push me towards a sexual dynamic with men.  I guess then I should give my reader one last chance to argue with my interpretation of these early passages of Moby Dick.

It’s ridiculous.  This whole essay has been one long, almost mastubatory re-writing of an American classic for the purpose of justifying or exploiting the writer’s personal sexual curiosities and hang-ups.  Ishmael and Queequeg do form a strong, homo-social bond together, and while there is some physicality in it, there’s no way that these two men could have possibly been considered lovers.  Its irresponsible and indulgent.

And I suppose my reader does have a point.  Queer as a word has changed from what it was.  That’s the nature of language.  It’s a fluid and constantly altering technology that allows human beings to turn thoughts into physical, tangible reality.  Queequeg and Ishmael express a companionship that is intensely homoerotic that manifests in physical and emotional closeness, and Melville writes it out as a kind of marriage between these two men, using the language of domestic partnership to allow the reader to see how much Queequeg becomes the most important person in Ishmael’s life.  The language of Melville shows that men in the past formed strong homosocial bonds between other men and found some kind of emotional solace in it.  So strong were these bonds that often times men found, in other men, more emotional and physical comfort in the arms and bodies and company of other men than they might have had with women.  And some men, in these relationships, might have found something akin to a romantic partner who gave them a stability and foundation of love that they could then build a life on that might, as time went on, save them from any and all kind of emotional problems.

I suppose my reader is right about Moby Dick in the end.  Men might have loved and fucked one another in the past, but the only thing that’s really changed is the language.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Moby Dick were taken from the 2000 paperback Modern Library Classics edition.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

As per usual, I really like helping my reader dig into the great works I write about, and so while I was writing this essay I found a few essays about Moby Dick in case the reader would like to dig a little deeper into the text.  Enjoy:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-moby-dick-means-to-me

https://www.shmoop.com/moby-dick/sexuality-sexual-identity-theme.html

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s04/web3/d1scarpa.html

http://www.trivisonno.com/moby-dick

https://thoughtcatalog.com/harris-sockel/2014/06/10-quotes-that-prove-moby-dick-is-actually-gay-porn/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/herman-melville-mark-twain-parini

https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2010/05/14/126828648/-moby-dick-musings-on-whale-heads

https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2011/10/18/141429619/why-read-moby-dick-a-passionate-defense-of-the-american-bible

The two-headed whale: Bisexuality and Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

On an entirely separate note…seriously, Jason Momoa isn’t the sexiest man of the year?  Seriously?  Do I really need to…okay.  Apparently I do.

You’re welcome.

Although of Course, You Could Become Somebody Else: A White Tower Review

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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, apples & peanut butter, Author Vs Voice Vs Persona, Book Review, Cetology, Charlie Rose, Consider the Lobster, Conversation, David Foster Wallace, David Lipksy, Derrida, Dostoyevsky, Guys, Imposter Complex, Infinite Jest, Interview, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Moby Dick, Personal Development, Philosophy, Postmodernism, prose, public intellectual, public perception of writers, Reading, reflection, Sentimental Novel, television, Ulysses, Writers, Writing

It started really with Charlie Rose.  In the mornings my wife would usually wake up before me, and in fact she still does, in order to get to school and so given the fact that I had no classes to teach and my job wouldn’t start until around 11 or 12, I would usually have the mornings to myself to putter, drink my tea, eat my apples and peanut butter, and watch videos or read before I left.  I usually couldn’t read and eat at the same time and so I pulled up YouTube on my phone.  However, I really don’t like wasted time, and so these early morning moments seemed like a chance to grow intellectually so I would watch Charlie Rose interviews because Charlie Rose usually hosts substantive interviews.  I watched Robin Williams, Gore Vidal, Bill Maher, Quentin Tarantino, Benjamin Netanyahu, and even Mr. Rogers.  I can’t honestly say if my brain got any bigger, but watching those videos while I ate my apples and peanut butter reminded me how underappreciated the Interview format is in our culture.

In the queue was a man by the name of David Foster Wallace, a writer I’d read before and largely ignored, and so like most of the choices in my life that lead to books, I picked the video largely because I had heard rumors and speculation and read something somewhere, and even after the interview I wasn’t terribly impressed.  In fact, to be frank, the man bothered me mostly because of the way he discussed academics in a kind of pejorative tone.

I can’t explain the Wallace explosion.  Like Orwell before him, and Christopher Hitchens before that, David Foster Wallace just seems to be dominating my consciousness and I honestly believe it has something to do with the fact that I’m beginning to abandon any and all hope that my life will have any real connection to academia.  I also wonder why, whenever I have these intellectual storms in which I become consumed with reading the entire works of single author or subject that I can never get myself to dig into the histories of Rome or Ancient Greece.  There’s a stack of books with names like Livy, Tactitus, Heroditus, Plutarch, Cicero, and Ovid that sit literally right behind my laptop while I write, yet consistently the books that wind up consuming my time and energy are those written by men, and not enough women, living in the 20^th and 21^st century.

Perhaps I’m just doomed to be another soulless, shameless Postmodernist.  More’s-the-pity.

Still, the name David Foster Wallace buzzed in the background of my head and so when I had coffee with a friend a few weeks later I snapped up a copy of Infinite Jest, ordered two copies by accident of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, bought Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, bought Consider the Lobster, and finally bought a copy of a book that, while it wasn’t written by Wallace, was still half written by the man and largely about him.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, apart from having an incredibly long title, is a book that shook me.  I was tempted to write some bullshit about the book shaking me “to the core,” and while the sentiment is accurate I distrust sentiment when trying to convey how much a book can affect you.  I was used to David Foster Wallace being a writer who always somehow managed to convey thoughts about society, art, literature, and writing that always left me profoundly altered and adrift in intellectual storms that would cloud my reality until I wrote about my thoughts about his thoughts and how fucking true they were, but David Lipsky’s book gave me something far more shocking and I use that word carefully.

David Lipsky’s transcribing of the various conversations he had with Wallace shows me not only a great writer, but a deep human being who seemed to suffer from most of the same shit I did.  Later in the book when Wallace and Lipsky are talking they discuss college.

[Lipsky:]…You said being a regular guy was a great strength of yours as a writer, I thought it was smart, but what did you mean by that?

[Wallace:] I think—I had serious problems in my early twenties.  I mean, I’d been a really good student.  I was a really good logician and semantician and philosopher.  And I really had this problem of thinking I was smarter than everyone else.  [Reason for faux]  And I think if you’re writing out of place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, or talking down to ‘im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are. 

And all that happened to me was, I just has a bunch of shit happen in my twenties where I realized I wudn’t near as smart.  Where I realized I wasn’t near as smart as I thought I was.  And I realized that a lot of other people, including people without much education, were a fuck of a lot smarter than I thought they were.  I got—what’s the world? Humbled, in a way, I think.  (214).

Besides these two paragraphs in my paperback copy of the book is an arrow and above it in cursive is written the phrase “My Life.”  It’s a pathetic confession but I admit that I often felt during my undergraduate career this combination of superiority and inferiority, and while part of it is simply growing up and suffering through the necessary reduction of the ego, I recognized early on that the kind of education I had received in grade school as well as home, far surpassed what most of my friends had experienced.  As such I enjoyed being the smartest kid in class, that is until a new student came down the pike who understood Derrida, and another who knew what the Sentimental Novel was, and someone else who had actually read Dostoyevsky, and so on and etc. and so I quickly developed what is known as “imposter” complex, the belief that you don’t belong somewhere because the people around you seem to be significantly smarter than you.

Eventually I settled into a comfort with my intellect because I realized that I will never know everything and so it was better to keep growing and be, as Wallace noted, humble.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is written as a long interview between David Lipsky, who is a novelist but also a regular reporter for Rolling Stone, and David Foster Wallace.  The book is specifically an interview for the promotion of Wallace’s book Infinite Jest which had just been published and would, in time, become part of the American cultural consciousness as a kind of American answer to Ulysses.  This combination isn’t made in jest…bad joke, it’s an earnest assessment having read Ulysses.  The book stands at 981 pages long, but throughout the text Wallace has numbered words and sentences that lead back to end notes some of which range from a single sentence, to multiple paragraphs, to, in one unfortunate instance, well over thirty pages.  And so the book stands at actually 1079 pages, 98 being endnotes alone.  It is considered an avant-garde masterpiece, and one of the great “challenge” books in the American literary canon if not the world.  Entire blogs are dedicated to deciphering the book, and scores of essays exist about the book and the myth that surrounds it.

For my own part I am working slowly through it, but while I did I decided that I would read Lipsky’s recorded interviews to see if I could find the man behind the whale.  That’s a personal metaphor for long difficult books by the way.  The lovely aspect about Although of Course You End up becoming Yourself is that the book does reveal these two men as realistic human beings as one early passage demonstrates:

[Lipsky:]You’re the most talked about writer in the country.

[Embarrassed to hear myself talk that way.]

[Wallace:]There’s an important distinction between—I’ve actually gotten a lot saner about this.  Some of this stuff is nice.  But I also realize this is a big, difficult book.  Whether the book is really any good, nobody’s gonna know for a couple of years.  So a lot of this stuff, it’s nice, I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times, which has not in fact happened.

I didn’t get laid on this tour.  The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked o get laid on the tour and I did not. (11).

It’s hard, as a man at least, to condemn this impulse because I’ve studied biology, and rock stars, and I recognize how fame influences conscious choices.  Lipsky immediately after this notes that rock stars certainly get this kind of notice and perks of fame, but they observe that writers tend to miss out on this kind of treatment.  There is a tendency on the part of men to enjoy their fame and this translates into having sex with multiple women because that’s a sign that you’re the dominant male or that you possess some kind of power, but looking at this passage what’s important is how human Wallace appears.  Most men, if they became famous, might expect the “groupie effect” and so the note of the missed chance reminds the reader that Wallace was every bit a man.

That isn’t diminishing his legitimate genius, I’m just noting the man would have enjoyed getting some while on tour, and this impulse isn’t necessarily crude, it’s just what seems appropriate from a man who tried to be down to earth as he could be.

Lipsky’s book is not just conversations about missed opportunities, or lack thereof, for sex that makes Wallace become real, it’s also for the fact that he, much like myself, grew up in a house that valued education and books.  Another passage shows this while he’s discussing his home life.

[Lipsky:] Environment in house?  Lots of reading?

[Wallace:] Yeah.  My parents—I have all these weird early memories.  I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other in bed, in this really cool way, holding hands and both lovin’ something really fiercely.

And I remember me being five and Amy being three, and Dad reading Moby-Dick to us (Laughs)—the unexpurgated Moby-Dick.  Before—I think halfway through Mom pulled him aside and explained to him that, um, little kids were not apt to find, you know, “Cetology” all that interesting.  (49).

I legitimately laughed out loud at this passage, because I have read Moby Dick before, and while the book isn’t always dry, the “Cetology” chapter is literally nothing but a taxonomy of the various species of whales known by whalers and biologists up to that time.  If that sounds fascinating but painfully boring that’s because it is, and don’t forget it’s Melville.  This brief scene by itself wouldn’t necessarily bring out Wallace’s humanity, but a few sentences down he says:

But I remember, I remember because there was some sort of deal about Amy, Amy got exempted from it, and was I gonna be exempted or not?  And I remember kind of trying to win Dad’s favor, by saying “No, Dad, I want to hear it.”  When in fact of course I didn’t at all.”  (49).

I suspect every child has that moment of recognition.  Our parents give us so much of themselves and their time and patience and energy and so as kids we recognize this and try to give something back even if it’s just our own time and attention.  My little sister and I would sometimes note that whenever dad talked about economics we would smile and nod, but much like Cetology in Moby-Dick we were left rather bored.  Likewise growing up my mother read numerous books about spirituality, and not being a terribly spiritual person myself listening was sometimes a bit of a chore.  Still I listened to my parents because they gave me so much emotional, financial, and spiritual support it seemed fair on my part to listen to stuff that they found fascinating and important in their life.  Regardless there was a moment of recognition with Wallace and this is where I’m able to address my contester.

So what about Wallace?  He was a hyper-intellectual avant-gardist who wrote incomprehensible novels and esoteric essays about television, tennis, and David Lynch movies.  What relevance does his personal life have to do with me?  In other words why should I care?

Well dear reader that’s where I have it.  During this essay I’ve repeatedly referred to David Foster Wallace as human, or noted that Lipsky’s book emphasizes this humanity.  This is because I believe in some fashion, the man has become an ideal rather than a human being.  And if I may take it a step further, writers in general tend to receive this treatment, their works becoming some kind of totem from which people form a kind of abstract intellectual worship.  The novels of Ernest Hemingway are not just stories of moody men drinking, fishing, hunting, drinking, etc., they are in fact looked to by some as wellsprings of masculine spirit.  Likewise, the poet Emily Dickinson is revered with a passion that is at times inspiring and at others horrifying, but along with her work comes the image of the recluse.  Dickinson is not afforded the opportunity to be a human being, she is the cartoon character of the shut-in, a woman who was so plagued by social anxiety that she had to lock herself away in her study writing poems that no one would ever read.  The conflict with this image, as well as that of Hemingway, is that it is devoid of real being.  Writers are people, flawed people, but people who possess passion and desire, and Lipksy’s book shows Wallace in this way.

Wallace is often painted as my imagined contester paints him, as a hyper-intellectual who was above human beings and solely existed in thought, but reading Lipksy’s book a different image of Wallace appears: a man who wants his passion and ideas to be understood or appreciated while he shares them with others while also trying to be a normal guy as more and more hype builds around him.

In one passage the pair of them are standing outside of an airport in Chicago and David begins discussing the problem of art in this time period:

[Wallace:] We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it’s done is given us the really precious gift of making the job harder.  You know what I mean?  And it seems to me like the harder it is to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, the better a chance you’ve got of making real art.  Because it’s only real art that does that.  (71).

On the very next page he continues this idea:

[Wallace:] The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader.  And my personal belief is that a lot of it has to do with vice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader.  That sort of, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening, and that’s our gift.  That’s a very personal deal, and here are seventeen ways to do it.  (72).

Without sounding arrogant, I recognized a similar thought when I first read this passage.  Part of that was simply because I spend most of my time reading, writing, thinking about reading, thinking about writing, and wondering what is possible in writing, or, more importantly, what can be accomplished in writing, and sometimes why I spend so much time thinking about writing and not actually writing.

I may sound arrogant, or desperate to sound clever, but I do believe a great many readers read lives of quiet desperation.  Novels are mass produced that follow formulas and give the same material, and before my reader believes that I am now about to rail against mass produced paperbacks I promise that I am not.  My aim is not to mock readers who willfully ingest such material, my aim is point a finger at the writers.  Why is there no desire to play with language and try for something more?

I want to think that perhaps my great collection of essays will actually amount to something accomplished in words.  Writing is my solace and my passion, but reading Wallace I was reminded again that it leaves me wanting for an opportunity to find something new. It’s not enough to tell a story about how I discovered a copy of The Stranger in my wife’s childhood bedroom and began reading it before describing its larger significance.  The writing has to mean to something or do something that impacts the reader just as much as the material.

I want, and there is the card game.  My writings are ever and always words thrown out to some unknown being in the world who stumbles upon this space, and when they read my words they discover that I have written sentences and thoughts not to myself but to others.  It’s a cheap trick, but one in which I’ve developed a voice around.

Lipsky’s book could easily become just a long list of beautiful quotes that a casual or superficial reader will ingest to spit back out in conversations to sound smart, but in many ways the style of the book is unlike anything published that I have read because Lipsky manages to present me with the real human being that was David Foster Wallace.  The interview format can lead certain writers to just kiss an individual’s ass and then get one or two good quotes from it, but the interactions between Lipsky and Wallace are not just the back and forth exploration of a career.  These two men discuss music, publishing, relationships, fast food, movies, smoking, realties of the magazine market, and within every conversation there are moments Lipksy notes that change the dynamic of the text.  Whether it’s being interrupted by an announcer three times at an airport, smacking Wallace’s dog when it gets too feisty, sharing a dirty joke, or just noting and reproducing Wallace’s Midwestern accent.  These moments coalesce so that the interview becomes two people trying to find and understand one another not only because one needs the other to promote his book and the other needs a publication credit to help his career, it’s about finding each other’s humanity.

Near the end of the book Wallace seems to provide a final summation as they discuss why people are ugly towards one another in this contemporary period:

[Wallace:] It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings.  The ability to do that with ourselves.  To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend.  Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself.  And I think its probably possible to achieve that.  I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.  [Spits a mouthful into cup] I know that sounds a little pious.  (292-3).

I’ll disagree with the man, suggesting only that pious may be incorrect, but at least virtuous, even if that word has fallen upon hard times.  Wallace has secured a legacy as one of the great minds and writers of his generation with only a few essays and a few novels, and while that greatness is certainly one of the reasons I find myself warming to the man it’s this last bit where I really recognized his intellectual ability.  The mark of a great mind is not necessarily making grand, sweeping generalizations, but small observations that lead to real insight.

More than any of that though, Lipsky’s book is at the heart of my recent Wallace explosion, for while it was some unknowable serendipity and influence that lead me to Infinite Jest, it was the social connection between a few of my friends that lead me to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and reading this book has helped me revaluate that tenuous connection.

Is it possible to feel another human being so truly and completely, feeling as if you might be so bold as to suggest that you know that person’s heart and soul but for a moment?  The end result of Lipsky’s book is the impression of a long conversation that, at the end which seems almost like saying goodbye, you knew another person’s heart.

Few books bother leave such a stamp on a person’s soul, though many try, and we’re all left wanting for such moments.

The Great Stress of Living and Killing Everything: Deadpool, Becket, and Nietzsche

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Book Review, Classic Literature, Cullen Bunn, Deadpool, Deadpool Killustrated, Don Quixote, Eternal Recurrence, existentialism, Fondation of Reality, Friedrich Nietzsche, graphic novel, Hannah and Her Sisters, Literature, Marvel, Meta, Moby Dick, Murphey, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Novel, Penis, Penis Jokes, Philosophical Coward, Philosophy, Reading, Reality, Robert C. Solomon, Samuel Beckett, Sherlock Holmes, The Gay Science, The Great Stress, The Portable Nietzsche, Waiting for Godot, Woody Allen

Moby Dick is a penis, that’s the joke.  Deadpool is sitting in a row boat waiting for the great whale to appear, and because he’s Deadpool he has to make a joke, a joke about the size difference to be specific.  I can assure the reader that this isn’t in fact a teaser trailer for the next Deadpool movie, but instead one of the most philosophically profound books I have ever read: Deadpool Killustrated.

Before I get to Deadpool however, I need to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening my little sister’s “Great Courses” tapes No Excuses: Existentialism, a series of lectures by Robert C. Solomon that looks at the writings of such writers and philosophers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, and of course Nietzsche.  The latter man’s work has chiefly been The Ubermensch, his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and most recently the idea that I’m the most familiar with, the theory of Eternal Recurrence.  This last concept, apart from the Ubermensch and his misunderstood phrase “god is dead,” is one of his most popular philosophical creations albeit not for the reasons he would have preferred.

I first encountered this concept when, like just about everybody else in America I trust, I had to take an Intro to Philosophy course to satisfy a core credit.  Unlike many of the people in the class who dropped after the first three weeks however, I took Philosophy because I genuinely wanted to.  It was an interesting time in my life.  I had just met the woman who would become my wife, I had a job on the university that I was botching regularly yet still enjoying immensely, and for the first time in about three years I found myself actually happy in life.  Dr. Krebs who taught the class wore Hawaiian shirts, cowboy boots, smoked camel cigarettes, and over the course of the semester made me question every facet of my reality down to whether or not happiness, or my lovely lady wife, was in fact even real.

I eventually settled comfortably, though carefully, into Empiricism, but that didn’t stop Dr. Krebs from regularly challenging me.  The man must have seen something in me because he not only regularly asked me questions during class, he also recommended I buy The Portable Nietzsche, his favorite philosopher, and to specifically read one passage.  I still have the page marked with his office faculty  card with the note messily scribbled on the back.  The passage is labeled 341, The Great Stress, out of the larger work The Gay Science.  I would find out later that the passage in question was often referred to as the Eternal Recurrence, and reading the passage this title is apt.

Nietzsche writes:

How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence– even this spider and this moon- lght between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience & tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.”

If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal Confirmation and seal? (101-2).

If the reader didn’t process all of that I have a second quote by Woody Allen from one of his more watchable films, Hannah and Her Sisters.  The main character’s ex-husband Mickey is having a philosophical crisis following a near-cancer scare and he starts reading philosophers to try to find meaning in life again and at one point he notes about Nietzsche:

Mickey: And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.  It’s Not Worth it.

Allen’s comedy aside there’s a reason Nietzsche’s title was “the Great Stress” rather than the Eternal Recurrence, and if the reader is paying attention to it Allen explained it perfectly.  The demon that appears to the unnamed narrator suggests that every aspect of life shall be lived again and not just the pretty moments.  Taking this realistically that implies that every mistake, every boring conversation, every papercut, every hour spent in line at the DMV, every hour of traffic, every time you didn’t walk over to ask that girl in high school to dance, every Thanksgiving when your Uncles and cousins started talking about Trump and everybody had to smile and pretend nothing was happening, will be lived over again, and not just once, but for eternity.  This realization is enough to make one consider the “stress” implied.

Nietzsche as a writer and philosopher is often listed with the Existentialists, and while this philosophy has fallen upon hard times in recent years, the core of the movement is actually rather positive.  Looking at this passage the reader has to determine in which camp would they fall: do they gnash their teeth and mourn their fate, or do they face the demon and pronounce that they shall live?

It’s an honest question and certainly one that’s worth asking.  If you found yourself saying “oh god that sounds miserable” then it’s likely Nietzsche is proving a point.  Living a life without passion really isn’t living at all, and if you look upon life as misery then you’ll never be able to live with a real purpose which would bring you a kind of satisfaction.  It’s the man or woman who is able to say yes to this question who is living with purpose and also one who is likelier to say honestly that they are happy.

I recognize that this may be a difficult concept and as such I decided Deadpool would be a good way of explaining Nietzsche’s idea…that, and I needed an excuse to review this graphic novel.

Deadpool Killustrated appealed to me originally out of what some may call pompousness, but what I prefer to call pompousness, because most of the references were to books I had read or read about as an English major.  The front cover of the book was Deadpool about to shove a cartoon bomb into Moby Dick’s blowhole, phrasing, and the subsequent covers were all gruesome reimagining’s of “the classics.”  The graphic novel was actually a sequel to a previous work Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe.  The book picks up in the aftermath of the mass slaughter.  Deadpool has killed every living thing in the universe because he realizes that he, like everyone else in the Marvel Universe, are living in a false reality created by other beings known only as “the writers.”  The voice in Deadpool’s head comes up with the idea that killing off the origin of stories, specifically the original “classics” may cause a split in reality and thus end his existence.  Using a handful of scientists he’s enslaved, Deadpool is able to enter the idea-verse and systematically kill off the characters of classic fiction such as Don Quixote, Little Women, Dracula, Moby Dick, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Jungle Book to name a few.  He’s eventually “beaten” by Sherlock Holmes, who manages to subvert his efforts and begin healing the damage.

The book is, realistically, an opportunity to “watch Deadpool kill stuff,” and as a Deadpool fan, and part-time Deadpool apologist, I’ll admit freely that I absolutely love the book for it.  Listening to Dr. Solomon discuss the idea of The Great Stress though I went back to the book and found an early passage:

It’s from this discussion that Deadpool’s path becomes clear.  In order to overcome the cycle of constantly killing everything and then starting over again, living a life out of his control, he has to find a way to stop the cycle from starting over again.

In short he doesn’t just have to kill the story-teller, he has to kill the very idea of stories.

This is a rather difficult concept for most people to process because death itself is already a damn riddle.  Religion and philosophy have already scoured our consciousness in order to establish some working idea of the difference between life and death, and in their defense they’ve done the best they could, but even then the concept of death is still something which will drive men all their lives to create in a desperate effort to conquer the unknowable inevitability.  Deadpool’s struggle then is likely one that will cause some confusion for his aim is not to die, but to simply not exist.

The only other narrative that follows this line of thinking is Murphey, a novel by the Irish playwright Samuel Becket.  If you don’t know anything about Beckett I should warn you going forward that it’s just going to get weirder from here.

Samuel Becket was a writer who, apart from being an acolyte of James Joyce, once popularly said that his grand masterpiece would be a blank sheet of paper.  Throughout his work Beckett pushed the form of art and writing trying to explore the philosophy of nihilism and the element of silence.  He’s most popularly known for his play Waiting for Godot which is about two men constantly waiting for their friend Godot who never shows up.  For Beckett the notion of existence was something that was fragile and, more often than not, a kind of disease that plagued the world.  The cure for this disease was either madness or death.

His novel Murphey, follows this aesthetic, for the entire novel is about a man named Murphey who wishes to attain one thing: nonexistence.  It’s important to recognize the distinction between this and death.  Murphey doesn’t want to die because even in death some part of him will live on, whether it be his spirit, his soul, and even the components of his physical body.  Nonexistence however is a state in which consciousness and physical existence will be forever purged from reality.

Beckett offers an insight into his protagonist’s mind midway through the novel:

It is most unfortunate, but the point of this story has been reached where a justification of the expression “Murphey’s Mind” has to be attempted.  Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was—that would be an extravagance and an impertinence—but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be.  Murphey’s mind is after all the gravamen of these informations.  A short section to itself at this stage will relieve us from the necessity of apologizing for it further.

Murphey’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without.  This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain.  Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.  (65).

Murphey is man who is clearly broken in some form or fashion.  He doesn’t recognize that he has a mind or a body, but he does understand that these objects exist.  Beckett continues this analysis as he writes:

Thus Murphey felt himself split in two, a body and a mind.  They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common.  […]

He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out.  (66-67)

At this point the reader may be wondering what relevance this near incomprehensible novel has to do with Nietzsche or Deadpool.  In fact it has everything to do with both of them.  Nietzsche’s premise in the Great Stress is that the cowardly individual is one who faces the reality of the Eternal Recurrence and, rather than rising up and accepting their lot in life, rejects it and tries to overcome it.  Because they don’t like themselves or their life they try to make excuses for their misery or, in the case of Murphey and Deadpool, they come up with ways of getting out.  To Murphey he tries to destroy himself to achieve non-existence.

Likewise, Deadpool faces the reality of the Eternal Recurrence and is ultimately undone by it.  The “voices in his head,” the source of most of his fourth wall breaking, serves as the functional demon pushing him to try and overcome existence which he sees as a disease.

Before I conclude, it’s important to be realistic.Deadpool Killustrated is in many ways just a dumb Deadpool story loaded with bad puns and references that will become outdated in a few years, but to ignore the philosophical implications Cullen Bunn manages to write in this book just because the main character is Deadpool is to miss something important.  Many people will stumble across this book, and many young kids who enjoy Deadpool and who have never read Don Quixote or Moby Dick will experience the classical works of literature in a way entirely unique.  This impression seals itself upon reality indefinitely and Deadpool himself explains this concept:

Life is an absurd mystery often filled with unnecessary pain and suffering and so a concept like The Great Stress is something relevant despite what your Dad who sells mufflers says about Philosophy.  Yes thinking about reality repeating over and over again is not going to help you pay your car note, neither is it going to add anything to your resume so you can get that temp job and move out of your parents place, and it’s definitely not going to stop your family talking about politics during Thanksgiving.  Despite the lack of utilitarian value, considering the notion of The Great Stress is important because it can make someone reevaluate the way they are living their life.  Our choices are informed by our worldview and whether or not we feel that life is genuinely worth living.  Facing the demon and saying “Yes” is not saying yes to some bullshit thought-experiment, it’s about affirming to yourself that you are actually living a life you want to live and not just one you’re living for someone or something else.

Deadpool is the coward and the loser of the Great Stress because he clearly doesn’t like himself or his life and so rather than lead a life that would bring him purpose he takes his frustrations out on those characters who have faced the Demon already and found something worth living for.  The narratives of our lives are built upon those that came before us and left behind living stories that recur indefinitely.  It’s from these stories that imagination is fed and developed into a living breathing being which provides direction, inspiration and purpose.

But I suppose watching Captain Nemo blow-up the Little Mermaid by being shot out of a torpedo tube can provide its own kind of philosophical statement.  I’m not sure what it is, but I’m sure it’s profound.

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve included a link to a brief biography of Nietzsche if the reader is at all interested:

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Nietzsche

I’ve also included a link to my latest “Jammer Talks: About…” YouTube video where I provide a small lecture over everything we’ve covered.  If you’d prefer to hear me talk rather than read, I hope you enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pNtfAjcYjA

 

**Writer’s Note**

All passages of Nietzsche were taken from The Portable Nieztsche, Penguin Paperback.  All passages from Murphey came from the Grover press Paperback.  Finally all Deadpool Killustrated passages came from the Marvel paperback edition.

 

Emerson’s American Scholar: The Man America Needs But Doesn’t Want

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Academia, America, American Literature, Barbara Streisand, Emily Dickinson, Emily Dikinson, Essay, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Ivory Tower of Academia, Leaves of Grass, Literature, Moby Dick, Philosophy, Physical labor, Public Education, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scholarship, The Amazing World of Gumball, The American Scholar, Transcendentalism, Walden, Walt Whitman, What's Up Doc?

There are few men that possess such a golden standard of intellectual spirit as Ralph Waldo Emerson. I consider it a great loss that it wasn’t until graduate school that I finally acquainted myself with the man’s work. Now don’t get me wrong, I had heard of Emerson. You can’t be a student of American literature without hearing of the man at some point. He’s kind of important. My first exposure to him was a small quote in What’s Up Doc? A comedy by Peter Bogdonovitch starring a young Barbara Streisand.

Howard: Sir, I must point out to you…

Frederick Larrabee: I must point out to you that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Judy: Emerson!

Frederick Larrabee: I beg your pardon?

Judy: Ralph Waldo Emerson, born 1803 died 1882.

Frederick Larrabee: You like Emerson?

Judy: I adore him.

Frederick Larrabee: I adore anyone who adores Emerson.

Judy: And I adore anyone who adores anyone who adores Emerson, your turn!

That was about it, until a friend of mine talked my ear off one night at my wife’s wind ensemble concert about Emerson’s craft and philosophical concepts that had sung a song in his heart that had never ceased. But that was it, and as the years continued Emerson continued to be, much like the T.V. show Breaking Bad, an amazing experience that I knew I would some day have to see to actually believe.

Fortune arrived in the fate of a summer course covering a Compare/Contrast course over Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Naturally I signed up immediately. It’s been a week in, and, while I find myself more appealed by Douglass, Emerson is everything I thought and hoped he would be, and I would be a fool to suggest that the man should not be read by every American citizen.  The man is just excellence supreme.

The first essay, or Speech really, of Emerson I have read was The American Scholar, and I thought it fitting to share a few thoughts of the importance of this essay. As I said a minute ago, every American citizen, who is truly interested in such an identity, should and must read this essay for the argument Emerson posits about what the role of the scholar should be in our society. This is an important idea because, in case you haven’t observed our society lately, scholars and eggheads aren’t particularly revered. The institutions of colleges have, in recent times, come under fire for being hotbeds of liberal indoctrination and this in turn has caused many parents to be concerned about what they’re children learn in college thus altering our previous perception of colleges which were, to quote Leela from Futurama, “Over-expensive day-care centers.” In our public schools teachers regularly have to struggle with over-bearing parents that micromanage every aspect of their children’s lives stymieing the teacher’s possibilities for what can and can’t be taught in the classroom. The push for standardized tests has strangled any semblance of education in our schools. And before people talk about the benefits of private education, I can speak from personal experience: you’re child will receive a wonderful education, but they’ll be a social and emotional fuck-up for years. I had to take a two year hiatus from life and society before I felt comfortable going back to school (well, that and Dad said I had to work or go to school so guess which I picked). The thesis here is that in our society, while we may preach about wanting more opportunity for our children, we don’t provide the financial and personal sacrifices that would really help them.

The scholar in our society, has been sacrificed to special interest mentality, and become victim to gross capitalistic endeavor.

But Emerson enters the scene and affords an alternative idea:

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. (63).

Now Emerson is not just creating the idea of the old Ivory Tower intellectual, for the man was a Transcendentalist. For those who don’t know what that is, it describes a period in American Literary history where human beings began to shift their creative attention to the power of the individual, and note the sublime aspects of nature. This was a period where writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville hit their peak, and Emerson stands in their ranks as top dog depending on your intellectual perspective. This period was important however for it marked a stage in our countries artistic sense of self where we ceased considering ourselves as part of the English cultural mass, and perceived ourselves as able to craft a national literature. Process that. Today that makes sense, but remember that Emerson is writing in the early 1800s. Only about two hundred years ago our nation decided we could play with the big boys and make art that was entirely our own.

Leaves of Grass, Walden, Moby Dick, and Self Reliance later, and you tell me if you think they succeeded?

But to return to my point, while Emerson is creating a new idea of what the scholar should be he is altering the old idea of the stuffy philosopher locked away in his tower oblivious to the world for he says a few lines before the above quote:

There is virtue yet in the hoe and spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. (63).

There is something definitively American to me in this passage, for while Emerson praises the scholar’s intellectual faculties, he ascribes real pathos for the ability to get out of the tower and work. This, unfortunately, seems largely absent from much of our reality. People that live in cities become comfortable with food arriving to their supermarkets, but as time moves on they become divorced from the notion of growing their own field, of being reminded that the fruits of our labor, in every sense of the word, comes from real physical activity. But it’s not just the people in cities, it’s our idea of academics. PhD’s are not known for their athletic ability, nor are scholars typically presented as working-class heroes. Look at me, I spend most of my time indoors reading and writing. I’m as guilty as anybody, and Emerson is rejecting the idea that there is something noble about being purely driven by mind. He sings the praises of action:

As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. […] I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. (60).

Emerson is objecting to many faults the contemporary existence of the scholar, and while lack of physical action is one of those principles that scholar seem dedicated of avoiding, Emerson is concerned far more with the social impact of the scholar. His main argument is that the scholar has lost objectivity, he has lost his relevance to the American people, and surely I can sympathize with that? As an English major the first question, always the first question, is: What are you going to do with an English degree?

It’s not so much that this question is spoken out of malice, as it is out of ignorance. I’ve had conversations with professors and students alike that feel concerned that any in the English academia are so acute, so inwardly focused upon their material, that their contribution to academia is irrelevant or useful to society. I’ve read essay after essay of scholars writing about obscure passages in novels, poems, and plays, and while their arguments are brilliant, the language they employ is so thick it’s a wonder anybody is able to understand their arguments. As I’ve said to many before, what’s the point of having and sharing an idea if no one can understand it?

That does not mean scholars should dumb things down, anything but. However, there is a conflict facing scholars of English which is how are we to offer society our knowledge and insight if no one can understand what we’re talking about?

Emerson creates in The American Scholar a new identity for academic to aspire to. He begins by noting the weakness of the current title:

In the distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state of mind, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking. […] In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives. (54).

This, and I can attest to this from experience, is often the case. Scholarship often times amounts to reading article after article of men citing others who are citing others who are citing others, and after thirty pages all you can muster in terms of an intellectual response is, who gives three shits?! And no scholar wishes to leave behind such a legacy or epithet. The purpose of scholarship, is to read and study what has come before, and find its relevance to contemporary society. In other words, read the works of Emerson and they attempt to convey to people why they should care.

Well why should I care? Why should I bother with Emerson when I could watch Game of Thrones, or the Walking Dead or the Amazing World of Gumball? What relevance does Emerson have to me?

Well, first of all, kudos to you for liking the Amazing World of Gumball. Seriously that is really cute show and the animation is fantastic. It’s real, it’s cgi, it’s 2-D. I wish I had had Gumball when I was a kid instead of Cow and Chicken, but, we have to make do with what we’re given.

Second, because we as a nation are constantly changing, developing, and finding our place in the world stage. “Isolationism is no longer a practical policy,” isn’t just a great line by Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca, it’s the reality of the American identity. Our nation is no longer the scrappy thirteen colonies working out the kinks of being a functional republic, and the next generations require great minds that are willing and able to step forward. It is the desire to see the American republic built and operated by intelligent men of firm character that makes Emerson relevant:

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. (65).

I can only speak to my own mind, but the reason I wanted to become a writer, and intend to become a teacher, is help create and help mold American citizens so that they can contribute to their democracy. I remember overhearing one of my American History professors discussing the tenure board with a colleague and there was one line that stood out to me, “I got into this job to cure ignorance,” and if that doesn’t sell you on Emerson or The American Scholar there ain’t nothing else in my bag of tricks that will.

I want America to be great. I want our students to be outstanding models of wisdom and firm character. In short, the rest of my life will be spent in helping students attain this idea of what it means to be an American Scholar. I want to help my republic and, if nothing else, teach students fun facts about American literature and history. Being a scholar, in my mind, is not about writing esoteric articles and wearing patches and claiming an Ivy League title, it’s about ensuring that I’m doing everything I can as an intellectual.

That’s why Emerson is in important in my mind. He is offers a vision of what America can be, and hopefully what its citizens want it to be.

 

**Writer’s Note**

The passages in this post were cited from the Emerson: Essays and Lectures Library of America edition.

 

Happy Birthday White Tower Musings!

Tags

Alison Bechdel, Ave Maria, Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth, big black dicks, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Christopher Hitchens, corgi, Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, encomium, Essay, Freedom, Fun Home, If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome, Johann Sebastian Bach, Les Miserables, Literature, Loony Tunes, Moby Dick, Nine Stories, progymnasmata, Sexual cannibalism, spider sex, The Marriage Plot, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Ulysses, William L. Shirer, Writing, Years of Upheaval, Yo-Yo Ma

The last year saw me write at least forty essays, each designed to highlight some aspect of literature, yet I can’t shake off the feeling that I really haven’t accomplished that much. No seriously, hear me out. What exactly does it mean to be a blogger?

Stop. Before I continue, let me give you this link so you can listen to this while you read, if you’re even still here and haven’t stumbled onto my blog because you were looking for fish sex or big black dicks. It’s a compilation of Bach on YouTube. I’ve always preferred Bach over the other classical composers. Even Mozart. Especially Mozart. I ain’t haitin, it’s just, Bach has complexity and presence that isn’t trying to prove its genius. Anyway here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JQm5aSjX6g

Now like I asked before, what exactly does it really mean to be a blogger? I call myself a writer, because along with the book reviews I write here, I also write short stories, poetry, and novels. Especially novels. Novels speak to me, yet I find lately I have a devil of a time reading one by itself. I’ve developed this system where I read ten pages in a book and then put it down. It’s a way of getting reading in and still being able to get things done. It works too; I’ve read Moby Dick, Ulysses, and Les Miserables through this system. Don Quixote is next as soon as summer school, fall semester, spring semester, and life is over with and I can find three goddamn minutes to myself. But what is a blogger? Can a blogger really call themselves a writer? I’ve seen blogs that are nothing but photographs, often a half naked women, but also of rusty cars in black and white, of little girls wearing white dresses, close ups of naked girls covering their nipples with one hands while green paint has been smeared across one cheek. These are blogs I have seen. Can you call these people writers?

I had this thought earlier and I believe it to be a good thought, I would like to start a blog about cheese. Spend the rest of my days trying various samples of cheese and write a review about them. Not just about how they taste, but the history of that brand of cheese, where it’s typically made, how it got its name. I think that’s a good idea, but I could I still call myself a writer? And what would the title of the Blog be?

A writer is what I am, it’s all that I can be because, at this point in my life, I’ve passed the point where I’m really fit to do anything else. It’s starting with my back. I’ve woken up three times this week with a pain in my back. That’s how I know I’m a writer because I can’t imagine doing anything else, and it’s too far to go back, but the problem arises: the only manuscripts I have ever published were on this blog, and   there again, can you really call what we write on blogs writing?

What I spoke before about Bach is true. I prefer him over the other composers. I don’t know anything about the man. I know he’s German but that’s about it, and it could be wrong. Classical music for many people is just noise, like Heavy metal. Both varieties of music are similar in its auditory components that people ignore them thinking there’s no variety when any musicologist or dude wearing a Slayer t-shirt will be happy to show otherwise. I think I like Bach for two reasons. The first is because of a scene in the movie Hannah and her Sisters where Michael Kane’s sister-in-law plays a record. Bach F minor concerto. It’s a beautiful song, and one of my favorite scenes in a movie. The other is because Yo-Yo ma performs Cello Suite No.1-Prelude and I’ve actually seen Yo-Yo Ma perform in person. The man is a machine; he was poured into a cellist. You can’t watch the man play without being moved. I’ve included a link here as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCicM6i59_I

Now why all this questioning and randomness. I’m a year old today. White Tower Musings began a year ago as part of a romantic ambition. What I wanted to do is convince people who hate literature and believe that it has no point or purpose to shut up and see that it has all the purpose and meaning in the world. Books can change people’s lives, when given to them at the right time, in the right way. Selling a book is hard, and feels often like prostitution . The downside is you don’t get paid like a prostitute does however, so it’s a thankless job with no fucking.

While I’m thinking of it here’s a cool random GIF (is it gif or jif, peanut butter?) of Godzilla.

While I’m thinking of it, I want to make sure you don’t feel like this was a waste of your time, so here’s a list of books I think you should read before you die because people love lists, if only so that they can disagree with them, because after all, what would the internet be if not a place for people to share their bullshit opinions with one another:

1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer—Haven’t actually read this one, but I recently borrowed it from my little sister who’s studying history so I’m pumped.
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky—Haven’t read this one either but I’m going to. Dostoyevsky is my man.
3. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen—This book annoyed and depressed me, but I haven’t read a book that has reminded me where we are as a culture right now.
4. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides—Is one the greatest living American Writers.
5. Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy—There’s a tree with dead babies tied up by their jaw bones.
6. Years of Upheaval by Henry Kissinger—It’s Kissinger’s memoirs as his tenure as secretary of state during the Nixon administration.
7. The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens—Fuck Kissinger! Use his fucking memoir as a doorstop!
8. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger—Because you need to see what a good writer the man was. And because Phoneys need to die.
9. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—Because there needs to be one book on this list by a woman that is not just for the sake of having a woman in the list. This book will floor you.
10. Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean—This is in my mind the greatest graphic novel behind Fun Home, filled with detail, and one of the most honest examinations of insanity you’ll ever read.

It’s been a year and over 4000 people have visited this blog, though to be fair, that number is probably closer to 3000 since I know most people only found me because they were looking for porn. And what does that say about career as a writer if people are only finding me because they’re looking for sex? But this fact isn’t as concerning to me as the title I’ve given myself, because certainly nobody in the public did. After a year of writing book reviews, movie reviews, and hopefully in the near future, art reviews, what have I actually accomplished?

I do not believe someone should call themselves a writer unless they can point to a finished product and say, “I wrote that.” I have that here, in this blog, but there again does this count as self publishing, in which case is this a vanity press?

Before I continue let me tell you a fun fact. My wife is a biologist and came to me one night telling me about a paper she had to give a presentation on. She chose it for the title. Sexual cannibalism. The article was an experiment done by scientists observing the mating behaviors of black widows and several insects. I’ll stick to the black widows though because that’s what I remember best. The researchers found that males that were aggressive in their mating dances and displays tended not to be eaten following coitus. Anyone who doesn’t know anything about spider sex is about to learn something cool. Black widows get their names because after they mate with the males they typically eat them. Sex, especially for female arthropods, is exhausting and they need nourishment for the incubation of eggs and the creation of eggs sacks. The man’s right there, so…fuck it, why not. Free eats. Well, as it turns out the males that acted like horny frat boys saying “HEEYYY BABAY!!!” were less likely to be eaten after sex.

Lesson of the day boys: Confidence is key.

Second lesson of the day: Fuck fraternities.

Third Lesson of the day: Never wear ladies underwear in public…unless you can pull it off.

My first article for this blog was actually a paper written for a class. The teacher arranged the course following something called the Progymnasmata. It was the classical (in the sense of ancient Greece) model of teaching young men how to be orators and writers. The Progymnasmata was a series of exercises and one of them was the Encomium. What the encomium does is ask the students to praise a person, object, institution, etc. focusing on the positive effects it has upon society. Christopher Hitchens being the writer I most wanted to kill and wear his skin for the rest of my life (too much?) I decided to write what the man had done for me. I got an A, and that was that. But a few months later I was battling with the idea of starting a blog. My thought was, I’m always talking to people that aren’t around, thinking of arguments against people I hear randomly talking about “this book is stupid” or “this book is weird” or the classic “What does this have to do with what I want to do for a living?” After a while not being published, and having to listen to the voices in my head for so long, I thought a blog might help.

The internet seems like a place where we’re allowed to explode and unmask our true selves. I worry though about the people who choose to live their entire lives in it when bikinis and corgis exist in the real world.

One essay leads to another. That’s another thing. Hold on. My favorite Loony Tune is Bugs Bunny. I envy his confidence.

I call my posts essays because I’ll give myself that. Most of the blogs I randomly scan through have 300-800 word posts describing the writers emotions, their feelings, explaining why they photographed seven hundred bunny rabbits humping in the DNC convention, but nobody ever calls what they write essays. I can’t think of anything else to call them. I put too much time and energy and sweat into them to call them anything else. It can’t be posts. Posts are something you do on facebook, if anybody still uses facebook.

Here’s another video if you’re tired of Bach. It’s Ave Maria by Shubert in the original Latin. I’m an atheist but this song always stops me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bosouX_d8Y

I think the problem with most writers is we all feel like we’ve got nothing to really contribute. We’re told nobody reads books anymore, and we’re all plagued either by the image of the penniless writer drinking himself to death, or else of the hipster wannabe at Starbucks composing poetry but really just looking at pictures of Bob Dylan on Google images while wondering why nobody takes him seriously. The writer is plagued by a poor self image in the Post-Hemingway, Post-Cobain, Post-Dylan, you know what I changed my mind it’s definitely Daffy Duck that’s my favorite. Bugs is cool, but Daffy has character.

I guess what’s bothering me, what my mind is wrapping around, is the typical human question: did anything I do matter? I admit, a year is not a great judge in the great scheme of things, and my ambition is too often checked by the limitations given by reality, but I do want this blog to matter. And to be fair, in the course of a year I have managed to write reviews for at least thirty to thirty-five books and films that I felt were worth people’s time. And even if people find me only looking for all male Mandingo parties, I at least taught them where the word Mandingo comes from before they decided to say fuck-it and go back to tumblr.

This essay was really written for me. I thought I would be quirky and funny and try to get in a few good points, but I’ve found at the end of this writing to be dissatisfied. I began this blog because I wanted to show people that books and creative writing can change people’s lives. A book can be the difference in a person’s life.

Am I a writer?

That’s the only question that really matters to me after a year of doing this. I write, and I publish my work, and people (seem) to read what I write. That’s where I hang my hat after a year of working and promotion of this site. A year in, and I have 50 followers and 4000 views. There’s a bottle of Jameson that sits on my bookshelf between The Vagina Monologues and The Male Nude. I think I’ll take it down, enjoy the deep burn of great whiskey. After all, that’s what writers do.

Thank you all for a year, thank you for bothering to show up. Thanks.

As a parting gift here’s a picture of me wearing a dress.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

Since you were patient enough to listen to all my boring classical music here’s a fun video of Goofy trying to ski. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2NovM22D04

**Writer’s Note**

Definitely, definitely Taz. Taz was my man. Do you know he was only in five actual shorts? It’s crazy but Taz was actually just a minor character in the canon of Loony Tunes. Fun facts here. That’s all folks.

JAWS From The Abyss: The Nightmares of Land Monkeys

Tags

Boobs, evolution, fear, Film, Great White Sharks, Herman Melville, Infinity, isolation, JAWS, Literature, Moby Dick, ocean, Philosophy, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Zombie, Roy Scheider, sharks, Sperm Whales, Steven Spielberg

If a film can scare the pants off of Rob Zombie, then you know for a fact that it’s either brilliant, terrifying, or a combination of both. The movie JAWS recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary and as part of a promotional event TCM hosted a nationwide showing of the movie in various select theaters across the country. Since my father saw the film when it first came out, we decided to go watch it in the theater as part of a fathers day party. But before I can continue I have to tell my “JAWS Story.”

My father is a loving, intelligent man, but for whatever reason he had trouble figuring out the change-the-channel button on the T.V. remote. One night, when I was about the age of five or so, the movie JAWS was on, and the film had just hit that part when the shark sinks the ship. I was spared the scene of Quint’s demise, where blood squirts from his mouth before the final crunch and he’s dragged under, but before Dad could change the channel I watched Brody run into the sinking boat and a great white shark burst into the water filled boat snapping its huge jaws. At that age images in film a magical realism defined by hyperbole.

I didn’t see a fake shark. I saw a real live monster trying to eat a human being.

And then Dad changed the channel. Well, this story would just be sad if it wasn’t for what followed just a few weeks later. We went to Pasadena where my grandparents lived, the Texas city by the way not the one in California, and my grandfather decided to take us out on the ocean for the day. This would have been fine, if his boat didn’t happen to look almost exactly like The Orca, Quint’s ship, and if the waves hadn’t been so rocky. Picture if you will, a frightened five year old boy, sitting inside a boat imagining only a giant real life shark will, at any minute, burst through the walls of the rocking boat to eat me up.

The plot line of JAWS, for those who haven’t seen it, is pretty basic. A shark begins to attack the beaches of a small island town in New England that depends on Summer tourists for its economic survival. A shark is caught, but still the attacks continue until the Sheriff, a man by the name of Brody, hires a local fisherman who specializes in catching sharks. Quint, along with a aquatic biologist by the name of Hooper go out to catch the shark, and eventually discover it’s a 25 foot, three ton, Great White. What follows is perhaps one of the most epic fights in movie history as the three men try to catch it, try to kill it, and finally, as their boat is sinking into the ocean, try to outlive it. Well as you can guess they kill the shark, but not until Captain Quint has been eaten, and Chief Brody literally blows the shark up with an oxygen tank and an old Garand rifle after barking one of the most quoted bad-ass lines in cinema history, “Smile you son of-!”

Now no matter how many times I see the movie JAWS there is one feeling that never changes: I’m always terrified watching the movie. Now some might immediately ask, REALLY? Like, dude, for real? That shark was like, sooooo fake, I mean you could tell. It didn’t even look like a real shark.

Now this poorly spoken critic is absolutely right. After a few years your childish fear of the actual shark begins to break when you take a closer look at it. In fact we’ve grown so comfortable with it we’re plastering it over women’s breasts now.  You don’t believe me?  Really?  The lady on the left says otherwise.

The shark is obviously fake, but that fear is not what bothers me.

The opening scene in the film is of two young teenagers going skinny dipping. The young man passes out drunk before he can enter the water, while the young girl swims out into open waters. Now anybody who knows anything about the background of the film knows that originally Steven Spielberg wanted to have a real life mechanical shark to attack people. BUT, to quote Mick Jaggar, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need. The three mechanical sharks were largely duds, the first in fact actually sank and had to be recovered by scuba divers, the second shark exploded, and the third and final version, a shark named Bruce, just didn’t work. Even well into the movie the technical engineers could at most get Bruce to open and close his mouth or blink.

With this in hand, the young Spielberg was forced into a creative corner of how to actually have a shark, without an shark. The decision was to suggest there was a shark, and with the help of John Williams’s iconic melody (two notes was all it took to make an entire generation afraid to even go to the toilet for fear of water) JAWS became a box office sensation. The girl is ripped apart and dragged beneath the water, and we didn’t even see a single tooth.

Now this suspense is often the most cited source of anxiety in movie goers. Because all you see is the shark’s perspective, and the haunting two-note nightmare melody constantly humming menacingly throughout the film, people are terrified by what is about to happen.

This, is not what terrifies me about JAWS anymore.

Well what then, sir, scares you about this movie?

The answer can be found in Moby Dick.

Now Moby Dick is distinct from the film JAWS for one primary reason, the vast diversity of its audience. JAWS literally broke box office records and held that title for at least two years before STAR WARS was released. Moby Dick, is one of three books PhD’s supposedly lie the most about actually reading (the other two are Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake). If such is the case, how could Moby Dick have anything in common with this film?

For starters Moby Dick was actually going to be in the movie. The introduction of Quint, a character likened to Ahab for his obsession with sharks, was originally going to be him laughing in a movie theater while watching the Gregory Peck film based on the book. Due to licensing issues however Spielberg couldn’t get this shot in the movie and instead Quint came into the story with the iconic scene of scratching his nails across a chalkboard during the city council meeting. While I watched the movie I noted that, at Quint’s Death when he’s literally in the jaws of the Great White, there’s a shot of him digging a machete into the beast, reminiscent of Ahab’s final struggle against the White Whale.

But the moment that most likens to Moby Dick is during the final challenge against the shark when Richard Dreyfuss’s character Hooper plans on setting up the shark cage and trying to poison it with toxins embedded into the hollow chamber of a spear. He’s lowered into the water, and once there the audience is able to really feel the ancestry of our species.

Anyone that has dipped their ears into a pool, or below the water level in the tub, knows the sensation of sound underwater. Waves struggle to move through liquid as quickly as they do through gas, that’s one of the reason’s why when noise happens under the water, it sounds diluted or dream like. Along wth this there is the inifinity of the ocean that hits us. If it is a lake or a river, there’s an understanding of boundries and the individual has the collateral that the shore is nearby I’ll be okay, I can always just move a few feet and be back on land. The ocean doesn’t afford human beings that liberty, in fact it takes it away from us. Being deep in distance of the ocean is like the abyss of space, and being isolated has the psychological effect of creating paranoia. Shapes appear and disappear in the water, and the most haunting moment of the cage scene is watching the shark swim away and slowly vanish out of sight. The land monkey knows the creature is still there, that’s its hungry, and we are far from help.

Watching this scene again reminded me of a chapter in Moby Dick entitled The Castaway. In the novel there is a young black boy by the name of Pip. He exhibits many of the characteristics of boys, he sings, he laughs, he takes the world around with not too much seriousness. Now during The Castaway passage little Pip joins one of the small rowing ships chasing after a whale. That’s the manner of whaling in the old days, men would leave the larger ship and chase after the beasts. Pip is playing around, hopping out of the boat, when the men spot a whale and take off after it, and the men leave him behind. The Pequod is miles behind him, the men are rowing ever away, and Pip is left in an eternal abyss.

The passage reads:

In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the center of the Sea poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. (526).

This would be enough, but Melville pushes it:

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my GOD! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely their hug their ship and only coast along her sides. (527).

The language might be a barrier to a contemporary reader, but even after two centuries, Melville’s description of isolation awakens a twitch in the back of our human consciousness. It’s because, as my clever title suggests (yes it’s clever, yes it it, yes, it, is…oh fuck you, you come up with something better, I’m sorry I love you so much, let’s not fight anymore), human beings are naked land monkeys still in the process of evolution. We live in our gravity and our uninterrupted sound, but the ocean is an alien territory to us, much like the vastness of space. One of the first exercises a   potential astronaut has to face is the isolation test, and this test is performed because the people at NASA are smart. It’s been documented time and time and time again, that if a mind cannot take that infinity and the suggestion it has upon our human consciousness, then they will never be astronaut material. If this isn’t clear enough, consider the Nieztche quote every freshman philosophy major has written on their arm or uses as the subtitle to their blog:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

It’s bad to take quotes out of context, especially Nietzsche, but in this case the quote has become a discourse outside of the intent of the original author (thank you again freshman philosophy major, you’re ruining an amazing field by being such a pompous asshole! Sorry). Some might not understand Pip’s paranoia, it’s just the ocean. That is true, but along with the general feeling of the immensity of the abyss are the monsters, which for Melville’s time, were whales. While the terrors of sharks weren’t unknown, the immensity of whales, and the jaws of Sperm whales in particular, inspired superstitions and imaginations to run rampant. Human beings are imaginative creatures, its part of the success of our evolution. We’re terrified about what’s waiting for us in the dark, and so we imagine what might exist. It could be a whale, it could be a shark, it could a skeleton hand reaching out from under your bed. And when it grabs your ankle, and slowly drags you away, it’s going to take you deep down into the dark, where the hungrier beasts await.

JAWS terrifies me, for that one scene in the cage. Hooper becomes Pip in that one perfect moment, but unlike Pip a monster actually strikes. We’re given just a few seconds to feel that old archaic dread that lingers in the DNA of our species and won’t go away until human beings have no more reason to fear.

If you don’t believe me, listen to this delightful story. A family of three were out scuba diving near a coral reef, and the son was carrying a waterproof camera. The father and mother wanted their picture taken and so the son readied the shot. He stopped. The father and mother waved but still the boy wouldn’t move. The father finally made contact and the boy snapped the picture. After a few moments they all joined back up on the ship. The father and mother, curious, asked their son, “why did you freeze there for a moment?” The boy asked, “Didn’t you see it?” When his parents said no, the boy pulled up the image and showed it to them.

The father instantly fainted and the mother was so shocked she vomited before also passing out.

The part of the story that usually follows is the actual photo itself.

Maybe you can understand their reaction?**

JAWS is a damn good film, and worth your time, for despite the fact it’s a popcorn movie (and yes, we did have popcorn when we saw it yesterday) it is able to tell a great story while still probing into that pocket of fear that still defines our genetic make-up as a species.

But just so this review is fair, remember, there are more recorded deaths each year from cows and deer, than there are by sharks. So what should you really be afraid of?

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve included a link to a small article here, in case anyone’s interested in learning about the similarities between Moby Dick and JAWS. Blew my mind.

http://mobydick.ie/2012/01/21/did-spielberg-rip-off-moby-dick/

 

**Writer’s Note**

Just so that the reader isn’t deceived, the shark photo of the divers has been revealed as a hoax.  This doesn’t eliminate the argument however for the fact that the story exists in the first place attests to the fact that the ocean still possesses the possibility to inspire horror stories and paranoia.

The Story No Eyes Seem To Be Watching

Tags

American literary Canon, Black women's narratives, Feminism, Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Literature, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, White Priviledge, Zora Neale Hurston

White Privilege exists in our nation, and anyone who denies it is fooling themselves. Sorry, but it’s best to start out strong and work your way down from there. I’ve often had to defend this opinion to others who deny it, affirming the position further by showing them that I am living white privilege. I attended a private Christian grade school from pre-k through the twelfth grade, that accommodated the children of noted doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even politicians (one was actually the son of a Texas senator, and surprise surprise he was a complete asshole who masturbated in classroom and didn’t get expelled, try to contain my amazement). The kids in my own grade group were fairly nice people, at least what I remember of them, but all around there was a sense of entitlement. Everyone drove nice cars, everyone was going to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer and make lots of money. But always what struck me was that within my grade of fifty to sixty there were two black boys. There were no black or Hispanic girls.

Now before you begin my interest is not to badmouth my high school (meet me in person and I’ll do that, believe me, I have dossiers) but instead to blend a highly contested public debate with a facet of academia. In my entire life I have only once had a teacher or professor who was a person of color. My readings in academia have only on occasion actually dealt with literature written by African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Asian Americans. And out of this long literary training I have only on a few occasions, perhaps seven times at the most, have I read a literary work written by a black woman.

This of course leads me Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston.

I was blessed with having an openly liberal English teacher in high school (in East Texas that’s an impressive feat), and for our Junior year reading , once we had completed most of the Harlem Renaissance, we were assigned this short but wonderful work. The story is of a young idealistic woman, the half black daughter of a former slave and her master that raped her, named Janie Crawford. Janie marries young because she is lost, looking for something to complete her. When this marriage fails to satisfy her she runs away with an older man who founds a store with her, runs for mayor, and over the years strips her of her sense of self. Eventually shaming him in public Janie meets and falls in love with a man several years her young named Tea Cake. Their love blossoms as they live together in the everglades of Florida and live their life in relative peace (the marriage ain’t perfect but we’ll get to that later) until a great hurricane strikes and sends a terrible flood. While they try to find their way back to civilization Tea Cake is bitten by a mad dog and develops rabies. Janie, in the end, faces off against a by now mad Tea Cake and shoots him in self defense when he tries to kill her. She’s tried for murder but is acquitted and Janie ends the novel returning to her home town, with an understanding of herself, and the world she inhabits.

Now the novel, after this VERY brief description (especially for me), may not sound terrifically empowering, and after all this is the issue. My wife, being the fiercely intelligent woman she is, follows the track of contemporary feminism and civil rights much more closely than I am and has often brought up an important point. The women who often protest that feminism is no longer important and that men and women are equal all have one thing in common: they’re white. Much the same way that the people who protest that racism no longer in exists tend to be white.

In our society it is hard enough to discuss the troubles young black men face, it is an even greater uphill struggle to even get someone to acknowledge that in this white male dominant society, black women tend to get the shaft. Now dear reader you might immediately protest, you might argue that African American women have plenty of opportunities in our world.

While some this may be true, it would be foolish to suggest that black women, at least in fiction, for that is my area of expertise, have as many opportunities as white men to have their stories even told. If we return to the novel for a moment, Zora Neale Hurston had difficulty even getting the novel published. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic movement dominated by black men that were interested in praising the idea of “the New Negro” as something of pride. While Hurston didn’t object to celebrating the negro experience (I’m using that word only because it became an important idea to the movement, I apologize vociferously), she was trained as an anthropologist and so she was unwilling to alter her novel so that the males in her book, who not only dominate their wives but also physically beat them when they “speak out of line.” Men like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright didn’t appreciate or care for this image, and so Hurston had to fight, just to have her book published, and even after it was, it received little readership.

One of the reasons for this may be because the character of Janie is, to quote my lovely-lady-wife, a headstrong independent wo-man. Midway through the novel her husband Joe Starks berates her vocally, though he’s often beaten her for making mistakes around the shop, and Janie finally snaps back:

Naw, ah ain’t no young gal no mo’ but den Ah ain’t no old woman neither. Ah reckon ah look mah age too. But ah’m uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s uh whole lot more’n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but tain’t nothing to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life. (75)

Hurston’s language is strong and unrelenting in her honest presentation of what life was for many black women of the time. The reader may at first have difficulty with the dialogue, but once the rhythms are learned the apostrophizes that seem to run higgledy piggeldy (god I really am a white) about the place become just part of the visual linguistic treat the novel offers.

Now it should be asked now the important question, so what? Why should I care about a novel about a young black woman who talks back to her husband and keeps looking for something more out of life?

You should care dear reader, because that is the human experience. Their Eyes Were Watching God gets to the core of what it means to have dreams and wonder if they are attainable. In the very beg   nning passage of the novel we’re given a taste of what Hurston is capable of just in terms of language:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. (1)

My dream, as of this writing, is to at least be able to teach sophomore level American Literature courses to college students, because I do not believe were truly educating our citizens about the cultural achievements of our nation. Most importantly I want to contest the idea that the only literary achievements have been performed by dead white straight men. I would place Their Eyes Were Watching God alongside The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick any day, because Hurston’s language sings. Reading her novel is like breathing a language that surpasses reality, and I enter a world of passions, physical sensations, and I’m able to believe in an ideal of life where, even if my dreams crash like waves on a shore, there is still a satisfaction in the knowledge that in my time I have, for a moment, held them like petals of a summer flower.

But because Hurston is a black female author, it becomes difficult, for whatever reason (*cough* Racism*cough*) to just get people to even bother to listen.

It may be because many simply don’t see the relevance to their own lives. I have noted that almost all of the previous essays written on this blog were done over works by white writers. For god’s sake even the title reeks of upscale white intellectualism, because I am, after all, a privileged white man, and therein may lay the deeper problem. Those of us that are comfortable in this life, who don’t suffer the same problems as the underprivileged don’t like being burdened with guilt. “My family didn’t own slaves, and I have car payments, I wouldn’t call that privilege.” While that may be, you don’t have to put up with the Klan, you don’t have to put up with stupid white people using the word nigger and not caring that you’re offended, you don’t have to worry about your sons being killed by police officers, you don’t have to worry about your husband leaving you for a “fairer skinned woman,” you don’t have to worry about the legal system demonstrating bias against you because you’re black, and, this can’t be emphasized enough, you at least got your story told. Those of us that have it well in this life (like I’m some kind of fucking millionaire) don’t want to understand or acknowledge that we have been blessed and that others have had a rougher life because that knowledge is inconvenient, it makes us feel guilty which is the wrong response. Once there is recognition of privilege the next response should not be guilt and self pity, it should inspiration to level the playing field so that others can have the same opportunities as you have had.

Janie’s story is everyone’s story, for ultimately she feels that there is some part of her that is longing for something, an unknown alien sensation or feeling and so she lives life trying to find it.

Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma’s house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made. (11).

If that strikes a familiar ear, it’s because that’s the way we all felt when we were sixteen. Therein is the final argument. As we read the stories of those who are supposedly separate from ourselves, we learn that human beings are homogenous in their life experiences and emotions. We yearn. We imagine. We look for some kind of comfort and purpose in this world.

The stories of black women are no different, in the broad sense, than those of a white man.

What are we missing by denying such women the right to have their stories told?

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perrenial, 1937. Print.