Andy-isms

I wrote down things that Andy said in class that tickled my fancy and thought I'd put them here for further enjoyment. I can't always give context, but I think they're funny nonetheless!

9/11
(Discussing Tambien la Lluvia, but mostly James Bond)
 "It's hard to concentrate on 'is it water or oil' when it's Daniel Craig driving around cool-ass cars shooting shit."

9/13
(Discussing Bradford and Tommy Granger)
Andy: "It's like they said, 'This writing is really dry and awful, so we'll throw them a...'"
Someone else in the class: "Bone?"
The rest of us: *burst out laughing*

9/16
"Ben Percy's voice has its own beard."

9/23
"Waverly, not the home of WartSuck."

9/25
"The one day you wear your cool sweatshirt to work, the President of the college sits next to you at the Paideia lecture."

11/8
"Take these two sonnets and call me in the morning."

11/11
"Imagine Scoes Hoes til you're dead!"

11/13
(On how long "The Great Lawsuit" takes to get to the point)
"[Margaret Fuller] needed Paideia in her life."

11/18
"I write best when there's a lot of heavy machine noise."

11/25
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitant."
"The American economy isn't family-friendly. It doesn't get into Macklemore concert."

12/2
(Trying to pronounce Dupin)
"Dupe. Dupe-man. Doop-lion. Doop-dog."

12/4
(On Whitman)
"Tongues on breastbones and beards and things. Well, one beard."

12/11 (probably)
Andy: "Well, I figured we'd have the final exam at my house because there's a larger collection of My Little Ponies for use in dramatic readings."
Me: "LargER?"
Andy: "Well I don't know what you guys have in your backpacks!"

Dickinson

I think there is much more to Dickinson’s poetry than meets the eye, so I suppose that would be “simply deceptive.” I once wrote a paper comparing her to Robert Frost, and how even though on the surface, his poems seem light and hers dark, reading into subtext actually shows that the reverse is often true. I’ve thrown a bit of that paper into here now to prove that Dickinson’s poetry isn’t always as dark as it seems, meaning that there is something deceptive about it:

Her poetry seems dark and brooding on the surface, especially when one looks at the suggested titles. Her poem “260 (288)” initially does not seem optimistic. It begins, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” At first, one would think that the poet is demeaning herself, perhaps dejected with life and feeling unimportant. However, the full poem proves that she is happy with this fact:

How dreary – to be –Somebody!

How public- like a Frog-

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

When one is nobody, one can be anybody. A person can change identities as one changes clothes, and this idea can be appealing. An identity can trap an individual, and the lack of identity leaves one free.

            Another of Dickinson’s lighter poems is “314 (254).” In this poem, she discusses hope:

            “Hope” is the thing with feathers –

            That perches in the soul-

            And sings the tune without the words –

            And never stops – at all-

She goes on to say that hope is heard in all situations, and says that “Yet – never – in Extremity, / It asked a crumb – of me.” This is to say that hope does not always take effort. Hope lives even if a person does not devote him or herself specifically to developing it. It will always be there, guiding a person through the most difficult times. These two poems show that Dickinson has a more optimistic side to her poetry.

Whitman

Walt Whitman

1.

Ok, nerd alert, but all of this atom talk make me think of the series 1 finale of Doctor Who, when Rose turns into the Bad Wolf and tells the Dalek Emperor, “I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them.” Maybe it’s just because every time I see “atom” in this sense I hear it in Bad Wolf Rose’s voice. There’s actually something sort of Whitman-esque in the whole Bad Wolf speech, because it talks a lot about the whole of creation and power over that, but I digress.

This is really an introduction to what “Song of Myself” will be about. It reminds me of the first introductory sonnet of Astrophil and Stella. The most poetic thing to me in this is the repetition. It gives the poem a lilting rhythm, sort of a swinging back and forth.

5.

This is a pastoral strophe, and it’s also very holistic and natural, with the lovers loafing in the grass, and the only man-made image is the fence (and even that seems pretty natural). The repetition present in the first strophe is also really prevalent here; the whole last stanza has each line starting with “and”, which gives it sort of a rambling, stream-of-consciousness feeling. We also get the idea of sex and bodies leading to ideas, as his tryst and “loafe in the grass” leads him to contemplate nature and God.

8.

Even though it is free verse, there is a rhythm to Whitman’s poetry that’s especially noticeable in this strophe. Even if it’s not necessarily iambic pentameter, there’s a lilting rhythm to “The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill” (150). The repetition adds to the sense of the mundane brought by the everyday images, because many of these are not big things; they’re the drone of the everyday that no one really notices.

Frederick Douglass

(When asked to compare the overseers, this theme is what immediately came to mind, even if it involves masters and not only overseers. Page numbers all refer to the standalone book, not the Norton Anthology. Sorry!)

Douglass is surrounded by wrongdoing in the name of Christ as he grows up, and this leads him to understand the great difference between the Christianity of Christ and the “Christianity” of slaveholders, a difference that is still prevalent in today’s society. Douglass does not despise Christianity as a whole; he only hates Christianity when it is used as an excuse to do evil.    

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” Douglass declares on page 115 of his first autobiography. Though the examples of Bad “Christianity” far outnumber those of Good, there are a few instances of the latter, one of which is the preacher Mr. George Cookman. Shortly after Captain Auld’s conversion, he begins to invite several local pastors over for dinner. The slaves all “loved” Mr. Cookman, because he always called them in for prayers, while the other preachers only sometimes called in the slaves. They also thought him instrumental in getting a very rich slaveholder to emancipate his slaves, and “by some means got the impression that he was laboring to effect the emancipation of all the slaves” (63). Though he could not openly show his sympathy for the slaves, they felt it and knew he was a good man. Another “true Christian” in Douglass’ life was his mistress Sofia Auld. When he first arrived, she had never owned a slave and therefore did not know the “proper” way it was done. She treated him with kindness, gave him enough to eat, “seemed to be disturbed by [the crouching servility, usually so acceptable a quality in a slave]. She did not deem it imprudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face” (43), and she did not beat him. Unfortunately, she ultimately became corrupt with the power of slaveholding and “that cheerful eye…soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon” (44). The final example that could be construed as true Christianity is that Mr. Covey allowed his slaves to rest on Sundays, and often called them to worship at his home. While his character was corrupt, he showed some compassion by not forcing the slaves to work on Sundays.

            “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (115). Clearly, Douglass condemns not his own Christianity but that of his owners. Douglass also states “that slaveholders have ordained…that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable” (17). Douglass also relates cases in which slaveholders murder their slaves without a second thought. All of these “religious” men seem to have forgotten the very basis of Christianity in the Ten Commandments, specifically “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Such people are not Christians, no matter how much scripture they quote or how many church services they attend. The “Christianity” of these people is the “Christianity” that Douglass despises.

Better Late than Never: The Relations of Sex and Power in The Kingdom of This World

In The Kingdom of This World (cue the Hallelujah Chorus running through my head indefinitely), Alejo Carpentier uses sex in multiple ways to show the power dynamics of the Cap Français. Some are more surprising than others.

The main way in which he uses sex is as a show of power. M. Lenormand de Mézy keeps Marinette, a mulatto washer, as a pseudo-wife until he marries again. After losing his second wife, “He suffered from a perpetual erotomania that kept him panting after adolescent slave girls, the smell of whose skin drove him out of his mind” (Carpentier 54). On the night of the slave uprising, he went out “with the idea of forcing one of the girls who slipped in[to the tobacco shed] at this late hour to steal some leaves for their father to chew” (66). The man seems to almost be addicted to sex, but he uses it as a way of asserting his dominance as master.

Once the power dynamic shifts and the slaves revolt, however, they use sex to show their own power. On the night of the rebellion, Ti Noël slips away from the crowd and into the house, because “For a long time now he had dreamed of raping Mlle Floridor” (68) After the slave revolt is smothered, Carpentier reveals that “The Negroes had violated nearly all the well-born girls of the Plaine” (71). The slaves turned the tables on the plantation owners and used sex to show their new (albeit short-lived) dominion.

Sex is also used to show Macandal’s power. His “deep, opaque voice made him irresistible to the Negro women. And his narrative arts, when, with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men spellbound” (13), and upon his triumphant return, he is described as having “testicles like rocks” (37).

However, even as Mézy uses sex to show his power, the slaves have sex even more than he does. One instance is around Christmas, when Mézy is more lax with discipline and the slaves might “slip by night into the quarters of the newly purchased Angola woman whom the master was going to mate, with Christian ceremony, after the holidays” (40). Sex is casually mentioned often, and could potentially be viewed as the slaves trying to have power of their own. There is one example of this that puts Mézy and Ti Noël into stark contrast; while Mézy has a philosophical discussion with his wife on the slaves’ reactions to Macandal’s execution, “Ti Noël got one of the kitchen wenches with twins, taking her three times in a manger of the stables” (47). This could be Ti Noël searching for an outlet for his feelings regarding the execution after having to hide them from the plantation owners.

While sex seems to be used as a symbol of power in The Kingdom of this World, it also can be used as a symbol of sought power or rebellion.

Stargazing at Lindeman Pond

(I would like to start by promising that this is not inappropriate! Also, it's not about the pond itself but about that area on campus...)

“Hey, I finally finished that paper!”

I send the text, my thoughts focused only on getting into my pajamas and going to sleep. I think I deserve it after reading all that poetry. I hear the Allons-y! of my ringtone, expecting nothing more than a good-night.

“Yay J Hey, do you want to go stargazing? It’s the perfect night for it.”

I hesitate. My bed beckons, but so does he.

He’s been wanting to take me stargazing for ages. He says you can see an arm of the Milky Way if you go to the right place. I didn't even know that was possible.

Just this week he asked if we could go, before he remembered that it was a full moon and would therefore not make for good stargazing.

So I reply, “Sure.”

He comes to pick me up.

“There are three places we can go,” he says, “and quality of the stargazing and the time it takes to get there are directly proportional.”

“I don’t want to go down by Storre.”

His face falls.

“You won’t like the best option, then.”

“What’s that?”

“Lindeman pond.”

I protest at first. It’s too far away, it’s too late, it’s too cold. But he convinces me it will be worth it.

So, grumbling, I grab a blanket and a coat and we start the long trek across campus.

By the time we get to the Regent’s lot, it’s cold. We begin walking into the field, past the pond. The light slowly fades behind us as we walk further into the misty dark. I start to get scared; this looks like a scene out of a horror movie. We make our way blindly across the field, through the ropes course, almost hitting the cables holding it up more times than we can count. Neither of us think to use our phones; that would make entirely too much sense.

I’m tired and I’m cold and the dew has soaked the hem of my pants and I’m wondering if it’s worth it when we lay out the blanket, lie down on the ground, and stare up at the sky.

And it definitely is.

I see more stars than I ever remember seeing, even when I lived in New Mexico and spent so much time in the mountains. I can see an arm of the Milky Way, just like he said. I see shooting stars. It makes me feel so small and insignificant.

I want to take a picture, but my phone only captures the darkness, not the millions of specks of light the stars provide. I suppose it’s fitting; technology really doesn’t belong here. We try to find constellations but fail miserably. That’s fitting, too; we’re not supposed to impose order on this.

I want to say something, but I don’t know what. It’s hard to put words to the entire cosmos, the whole universe stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction. All I can say is, “Thank you,” and hold him closer.

And as I look, I forget the cold, hard ground. I forget how tired I am. I even start to forget the one beside me who brought me here. Laying by the pond, staring at the stars, all I notice is nature.

And it’s so incredibly beautiful. 

Motivational Emerson (with reflection in comments)