De-What?

Ah, spring break. A time to kick back, relax, enjoy yourself...or in my case, worry about what the heck deconstruction really means in time for this test on Wednesday. Oh, joy.

I thought I had it figured out on Friday, but then I read Professor Thomas's blog and I'm back to being confused again.

Here's what I had worked out before:

Demystifying is concerned with answering the "What?" of the piece- What is it, What does it do.

Deconstruction is more concerned with the "Why?" and the "How?"- Why does the author do this instead of that, Why does it work in the way it does, How does it work the way it does.

Now I'm convinced that demystifying is concerned with the What, Why, and How, and deconstruction is concerned with something I don't necessarily have a word for.



On my break I took the opportunity to go into Chicago for two days with my freinds and visit the Art Institute, one of my favorite museums, and I decided (this was Monday before I had read the Professor's post) that maybe I could analyze a painting. And I like Professor Thomas's example, so I think I'll have a go at that."Europe Supported by Africa and America", by William Blake. At first glance, a very ordinary engraving in the Allegorical sort of mode.

Emphasis here on Allegorical.

So for the formalist analysis, we observe the individual elements and their perceived meanings. Three women (the preferred choice for portraying continents in art, for reasons I'll explore later) of different ethnic backgrounds, metaphorically three continents, standing on a grassy field with flowers at their feet. The one in the middle, whose eyes are looking downward, is supported by the other two, who are looking out of the engraving. The woman in the middle is holding what looks to be a laurel garland, and is wearing a rope of pearls. The other two women are wearing golden armbands. America's knee is bent inward to point towards Europe, and Africa is turned towards Europe also, focusing the observer's eye on the middle figure even more. Europe's hair is also long and curled to cover her genitals, and so, coupled with her downcast eyes and the pearls, is an metonymic image of purity while the two chargers, so to speak, of Africa and America are brazenly inviting the observer to look at them. In this way, Europe is symbolically more civilized (read: less sexual) than the other two.

Chargers, for the record, are a heraldic device used when displaying a shield, the two figures outside of the shield who hold it up. The United Kingdom's chargers, for example, are a lion and a unicorn, for England and Scotland, respectively. (Interestingly, if you look carefully, you'll notice the Unicorn is chained.)





Now to demystify, examining the ideology behind the piece; why the author does what he does. This engraving was done in 1796, a period when Europe was just beginning the quest for colonial power. Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, the four major players in European Politics at the time, all had colonies in both America and Africa, whose revenues were a great source of income for the Europeans, the "Support" that both these continents offer Europe. Their great wealth of natural resources is given by the golden armbands they wear. Since Europe is victorious over the other two, she holds the laurels in front of all of them, emphasizing her supposed power, but since Europe would be nothing without the colonial revenues, she leans on both of them like a sick woman. Europe is also standing a little higher than the other two, another indication of dominance.

And finally, the deconstruction, examining the questions this piece raises for us and the binary oppositions. One thing that entered my mind as I was writing this: Why Women? We're talking about the continent of Europe here, the most powerful political force in global politics! Theoretically speaking, that should be a man, the man who has dominated the other two! But then I remembered that we're talking about continents here, not people. the continents are women because it's the land we're talking about, and the European ideal is that land is property and made to be subjugated, in contrast with the Native American and even the African idea that land is community property and made to be shared. Maybe that's demystification; I don't know.

Another thing that occurred to me is that I mentioned up above that since Europe's eyes are cast down and her long hair is covering her private parts she appears less sexually charged than the other two. But long hair has been (and still is, in some parts of the world) a very sensuous and sexual thing; we still 'let our hair' down on occasion and the phrase still means the same thing it did back when women were sporting updos like the Gibson Girl here; going wild and behaving in disregard of the rules. In that sense, Europe is the most sexual of them all- she has the longest hair and it is down- but at the same time is looking down, not inviting or brazen about her sexuality at all but rather repressing it, hiding it with that 'double standard' hair.

insomnia and freudian psychoanalysis

I woke up on Saturday morning at one in the morning, which is when my roommate decided she was going to start going to bed. By then I had been asleep two hours, and was very disoriented as to why I couldn’t sleep. I moved my covers, turned over a few times, and then, finally, got out of bed and took my retainers out to think about this.

Then I went outside in the hallway and wrote a poem, which summarizes what happened next.

are you sick, she asks, in the throwing up way, she asks me, as if the asking will help me somehow realize i need to run for the bathroom
no, i say, i'm sick in the insomnia way
in the its one oclock in the morning and i can't sleep and it's driving me nuts way
sick in the i think i got too much sleep last night way.

oh, she says,
because if you do need to, you know, throw up, you should go to the bathroom.
i go.
i am thinking while i do it, thinking of what kind of sick i am.
right now, at one clock in the morning,
i am sick in the way that its too warm and i want to be cold
sick in the way that my hands won't type now because they are shaking and stumbling over the keys
sick in the way that troubles me, that makes me want my mother to complain to
but i know that it is also one oclock where she is
and calling will not help me or her.
sick in the way i cannot explain
but i know that something is wrong
and i cannot fix it
alone.

when i am back she is asleep, all lights off.
thanks, i say to the darkness.
now i feel like throwing up.

When I cannot sleep, I begin by thinking about stories I am writing, or things that have to be done the next day, and then I move on to boring things, like my blog for this class. And I begin thing about how this feeling of throwing up is probably a symptom of something, and how Lacan says that symptoms (wrong kind, I know, bear with me) are metaphors of another problem. So I begin asking myself, what could this insomnia/feeling I want to throw up be a metaphor for?

It could be from the taco pizza I had last night for dinner, which looked a little iffy and was probably sitting out for a while before I got to it, but then I remember today (yesterday, I guess, it's one in the morning now on Saturday) was Friday, and I was not supposed to eat meat, which, of course, the taco pizza had on it, so perhaps my insomnia is from guilt.

after that I remember that after I realized at dinner I was not supposed to eat meat I began thinking about how lent this year has seemed really short, and that that is probably because I haven't been observing a lot of the Lenten traditions my family has like keeping catholic kosher on Fridays (no meat, fasting) and going to stations. I remember I talked with my brother that afternoon, who mentioned that he was getting ready to go to stations, and also remember that I felt a little lonely after that and wanted to go home.

Then I remember I wanted to talk to my mother, but Jeffery wouldn't get her for me, just like I want to talk to my mother now (as it says in the poem) like I do every time I feel sick. I would go upstairs and wake her up and say "Mom, I feel sick" and she would get out of bed and get me crackers and water and stay up with me until I felt better, but now that I'm at college, I can't just call and expect her to get up because I have an upset stomach, now can I?

I realize that all of these things that I'm thinking about revolving around this pizza are all about home, and then it strikes me; perhaps what I really have is HOME sickness, literally I am sick for home, and it is now manifesting itself physically.

Another possibility presents itself after that, that perhaps the tea I had before going to bed was caffeinated and now I am feeling the effects of that, or perhaps I am detoxing that stupid pizza because it was green tea, and then I am back where I started trying to get this pizza I was not supposed to eat out of my system. before I went to bed I was working on a paper for my chemical substance abuse class about the TV show House and how, during third season, he checks himself into rehab to detox and hopefully get better after he's pressed with criminal charges about his Vicodin abuse, so this may also have contributed to the detox theory, but I also remember that while I was watching house it occurred to me that perhaps my family, since Friday is when USA broadcasts House reruns, is also watching House, and again I am back to being sick for home at one in the morning, sitting in the bathroom wondering if I can just throw up and get this over with and go back to sleeping.

It is nearly two in the morning, and I have reached a new level of pathetic- I have just psychoanalyzed a physical symptom, and in some bizarre, complicated way, it made sense. that still leaves me with the problem of not being able to sleep on a Saturday morning, but that, of course, is a trifle compared to the last one.

I begin to wonder as I sit here in the bathroom that perhaps the reason I cannot throw up this guilt that the reason that it is sitting here on my chest like it is intent on spending the week there is because I do not want it to leave, I want to suffer and sit in our bathroom at two in the morning and write all this down on a clipboard, because somehow this will serve as a lesson in guilt and then I realize that is perhaps one rabbit hole I do not want to go down.

Yet another thought presents itself, that my not wanting to go to sleep shows that I am afraid of what my dreams might be saying to me, that I am homesick and at eighteen years old I do still want my mother and I am not as independent as I seem. and this makes the most sense to me of all of them, (partially because I changed my facebook status to "wants to put off tomorrow as long as possible") which to me is really the scary part, because I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and it doesn't look like I’m going to bed anytime soon if this is indeed the case.

The point of this post is that I think I understand Freud now. I hope that this serves as a better example than the ones in the book. And yes, don't worry, I got some sleep in the end.

A Million Words for Love

I was fascinated by Bertan's article on the study of the evolution of language and the signifier/signified debate. I especially liked his paragraph about how perhaps, if we had no word for pony, all horses would look the same to us because we had no designation for the smaller horses.

And that got me thinking about something I had read the other day about how in Arabic, and several other languages, there is more than one word for what we in English call "love." there's a word for general love, a word for love between lovers, a word for love that's distracting, a word for love that causes us pain because it's so powerful. We don't have anything close to that last word. we just have...love.

There's been a debate going on (maybe this is just at my house) about how we throw words around too freely now and how the phrase "LOVE" has lost its meaning. does a word become less powerful when we affix too many meanings to it? Can the signified overwhelm the signifier?

written after reading http://archive.eteraz.org/story/2006/12/4/8052/97546
and another article i can't seem to find now...

NOT A CLASS POST- How to do Email alerts for new blog posts

okay, so this is going to sound really nerdy, but I know it's been really hard for me to keep track of all the blogs in my group and i decided i wanted to set up email alerts for all of them so that when something new gets posted, i get a message saying "read me!"

Well, technically speaking, it's not an email, it's a post into my Google Reader feed, which shows up on my igoogle homepage. you can have it show up on your MyYahoo page if you like, too.

to get the RSS feed (that's what it's called) on your IGoogle page, simply scroll down to the bottom of the Blogger page (I'll get to wordpress in a minute) and click the link titled " Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"

A page will pop up in a new tab or window asking how you'd like to subscribe to the feed, via google (igoogle page) yahoo (myyahoo page) or a few other options I'm not familiar with. you choose one and click subscribe now.

depending on which you pick, your yahoo or Google Reader page will come up ( I have both, so I tried both). On Yahoo, you'll get a message asking if you'd like to add this feed to your My Yahoo page. click yes and it'll add it in the center column at the bottom. With Google, it'll ask you if you'd like to add it to google reader, which manages the feeds and puts them in a nice little box on your i google page.

I haven't tried word press with the yahoo yet, but for google, once you're inside that Google reader page, there's an option on the lefthand sidebar called "Add Subscription." If you click that, a menu will appear asking for a search term or a feed url (the website address of the wordpress blog works fine) Paste the URL in and click ok- if it's the right URL, the blog should be added to your subscription list and the widget on your igoogle page will show when you have new posts to read. NOTE: you might have to add the widget to your Igoogle page for it to do any good.

But nifty, yes?

Just thought I should share this valuable information.

Sounds of Silence- Ideology in Simon and Garfunkel

If none of you have actually heard this song before, here's YouTube graciously stepping in to play the music for you while you read this post- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdGkZ6Fngw

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

I started randomly singing this song when I was walking back to my room last night and kind of had this epiphany- the sounds of silence are like ideology. They're the unspoken rules and creeds that govern our daily lives, things that we can't necessarily explain because they've always been like that.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
A neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

But then, when I got to this part of the song, the people talking without speaking and hearing without listening, I started thinking about Naomi Klein's corporate advertising culture and how americans seem to be really confused now about what their culture really is; is it what the advertisements tell them to buy or is it what they are buying or are the two the same or is really the fact that they are being advertised to. That's an ideology, that advertising culture, and a really good one, too; we can't say where it starts or where it ends. But that's what a culture is, isn't it?

The people writing songs that voices never shared, it's almost like the big record companies controlling the music we listen to; the music is stuff that the artist doesn't write, and sometimes I don't think it's stuff the artist even likes! Real human voices don't share some of the music before we listen to now, it's just the recordings that spread whatever message the company wants them to spread. Music is culture, is an expression of ideology, so the fact that this music is being engineered means that our culture, too, is engineered.

This also made me think about Foucault and that lingering "What about all those writers who never get published?" (I know, this song covered a lot of bases for me last night, but that's because Paul Simon's music is made out of awesome)

Fools said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence

It's that corporate culture (I think it's a culture, anyway) that keeps the silence in place, that doesn't let the voices like the narrator's speak. And, the narrator is arguing, that censorship is only going to get stronger if you let it.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls,
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

A Neon God? You don't need to get any more advertising-oriented than that! But even the sign knows that there are more outlets for the unpublished, the subway walls and tenement halls that are covered in graffiti, and of course, the sounds of silence themselves, the unspoken rules that govern our interactions. Obviously Foucault and Paul Simon were thinking about this in terms of the pre-internet world, but nowadays you can self-publish on the Internet, you can have your own book bound at a Kinko's, you can stream your music through MySpace and have everyone who visits your site listen to your music. And even if only ten people read that book, it still influences the sounds of silence, the Ideology behind when and why you wrote your book.

Author's note: This post was kind of a decompressing of information to see if I understood it. I don't know if I made a point or not. I'm sure that's not the way Simon wants us to read the song, but I'm not publishing this in a nationally circulated news column, so I think I'll be okay.

A Poem for you

I wrote this poem after hearing the poet Larry Schug speak to my English 133 class the other day. We were talking about one way to interpret his poem and he said "That's not what I meant it to mean, but that's cool!" The guy who brought it up said "Oh," in this really disappointed voice because what he'd gotten out of the poem had been really cool, something about capitalizing letters, and Larry said, by way of an explanation, "That's not wrong. Once I publish a poem, once you read it, it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's your poem- you can do whatever you want with it." Anyway, I thought what he had to say had a lot to do with Barthes and the death of the author and I wanted to do something with that.

So I wrote this. Have fun with it.

This poem does not belong to me any more.
a poem by mg written january 23rd

This poem does not belong to me any more.
This poem stopped belonging to me
when it stepped out of my pen
eyes flashing
fists up
teeth barred
ready to take on the world.
This poem stopped fighting my cause
when it met you-
it gave up,
went home,
switched sides!
You powerful person, you,
you reader!
You made it do that!
This poem does not belong to me any more-
This poem belongs to you.

Fishing for Answers

corny title, no? I kind of like it.

I think what Fish is trying to say is that we only get out of a poem what we put into it. When we begin reading we already have a preset number of responses to the text based on things we've already read before and our life experiences up to that point, our own sort of 'literary tradition', to use Eliot's verbiage.

In my other English class right now (133) we're reading Adrienne Rich's "Atlas of the Difficult World" and for those of you who haven't read it, don't drop everything to go pick up this anthology; rave reviews aside, these poems are really, really boring. It's academic poetry for academics, really, riddled with obscure references to books and poems most of us haven't read and pottery types no one but the most ardent of collectors would be familiar with. It's perfect for reading and analyzing in a class room setting, but to read it for fun, outside of class, like poetry should be read, it's terrible. I can't get anything out of her poems because I don't have all the information I need to put in to understand what she's talking about. without those references, (which, once explained, are kind of crucial to understanding where she wants the poem to go,) the poem to me is nothing more than a mental scrambled egg- the brain was cracked open, the thoughts poured out, and then someone went in with a spatula and shuffled everything around until the only thing that told me it was eggs was the color and the previous experience with scrambled eggs that Fish also talked about in his essay. ( "...You know a poem when you see one because its language display the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems..." Fish 326)

It seems to me that Rich wrote "Atlas" with a specific audience in mind, an audience she references in her poem "Dedications" in which she describes all the people who are reading her poem:

I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour.

and on it goes. I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that college students don't seem to be the interpretive community she's preaching to. Are poems written to certain interpretive communities? Does that mean other interpretive communities can't read them? I mean, if we look at haiku, the Japanese, who have a respect for nature as an intrinsic part of their culture, are probably going to get a little more out of

Blowing stones along the road on Mount Asama, the autumn wind.

than anyone with a western background is.

Thoughts on this, folks?

foucault, eliot, and the Author- EDITED

So. After having the overwhelming feeling that I wanted to punch Eliot in the face for saying his piece on how the author should be completely emotionally separated from his work and how poetry is an escape from emotion (which, for the record, I think is complete crap) I have come to this summary. Foucault and company are saying that the author is not the source of an interpretation of his/her text, but rather the source of fodder for ongoing discussions (discourses was the word Foucault used). The author, then, should be completely ignored, because he is then essentially irrelevant in this new role because all he did was write the stuff, and it is now up to the readers to make something out of it.

I think I may have missed something, because that doesn't make any sense to me. I agree with Eliot when he suggests that the works with staying power are the ones that appeal to the emotions the whole world can feel, and not just the personal emotions of the author, but I can't say I find it believable that in order to create something with lasting effect you have to be emotionally distant from the work. If you're writing about Love, how can you write about it if you're not thinking about it, if you haven't felt it? How are you supposed to write about something and have it seem believable and accessible to the rest of humanity if you don't use your own experiences?

All I'm saying is that I'm not really buying it.

EDIT 1.22.08
After having changed my comment settings due to attention brought upon them by my estimable theory professor, I'm going to edit this post so that he can comment on it. (At least, I think my blog's the one he tried to comment on and couldn't, as I'm fairly certain I was the only one who as of 11:20 this morning had anything besides a "This is your first post; Edit Me!" notification on their blog.



I wrote the first part of this post after trying to wade through T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault all in one sitting. This was, in hindsight, a bad idea, and in future blog posts I will refrain from commenting until I have read the articles twice and discussed my thoughts and feelings with one of my esteemed classmates who will, for the moment, remain anonymous.

I will also attempt to word said posts in a slightly more academic manner. The first post was....erm...rather juvenile.

I still believe that Eliot's idea of emotional distance is bunk, although this idea did present me with a rather amusing image, noted in my margin: "The poet's mind is completely separate from the poet's body and that body's experiences, thereby functioning like the room full of monkeys with typewriters expected to turn out Shakespeare's complete works..."

Amusing, yes?

I do, however, agree with what he says about viewing the work in the context of the entire literary spectrum behind it. "I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." (P. 433, very bottom) You can read Beowulf and the Epic of Astrid and see that they're written in approximately the same style, but the Epic of Astrid (which, by the way, I wrote as a semester project my sophomore year of high school, which is why you've never heard of it) needs to be read with the knowledge that the writer, namely me, wrote after she had read and experienced a lot of feminist...it might be called literature, but propaganda or ideology seems a better term. We need a context for everything we read. This, again, is where I think I start disagreeing with Eliot. You don't need to really know anything about me to read the poem, but you need to know where I fit in the literary experience.

The First Posting

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands...

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

When the evening sun is low...

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

Each burning deed and thought.

That's the Village Blacksmith, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it's where I got the idea for the title of my blog. As a woman, I can't be the title character, but as a writer, a reader, and at the moment, a student, I think I qualify to call myself a wordsmith, someone who takes "each burning deed and thought" and, perhaps more importantly, words, and crafts them into something beautiful, functional or just plain interesting.

This blog will be a repository for my journal posts for Literary Theory and Criticism and later on as an archive for my various literary endeavors and their updates. Happy writing!