#close-reading

[crylockchaos]

One of those moments when I wish I could talk to Dallon himself about this

[mclegibilist]

Understanding What a Dunk Looks Like

A note on notation single quotes ('') are for quoting the presented text, single quotes ("") are for everything else that would normally go in quotes.

The first stanza of "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" goes like this

Jennifer dates a man in a 60s cover band

He's the Ess-dog, or Sean if you wish

She's 18, he's 31;

She's a rich girl, he's the son;

Of a Coca-Cola middle man

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This is what we call a "dunk". Some might say this is obvious. My desire, in analyzing communiciation, is to give reasons for the obvious that we feel transfer robustly between examples, reasons that are predictive in uncertain situations.

Here's my question, how do I know this is a dunk? Rather than a full analysis, which could be a PhD thesis, let me list a few points of evidence:

#1 '60s cover band' — the 60s were a great time for music, but 'cover band's are considered derivative and therefore not good signals to any of the desirable qualities being in a band might display. The fact that they cover music in the 60s indicates they are nothing but an homage to greatness. It also contextualizes how "stuck in the past" a 31 year old is, as we find on the third line.

#2 'Ess-dog' — Is bygone slang and, again, this man being 31 makes this feel "try-hard". People, knowing that being youthful is a cultural virtue, dislike those who plainly attempt and fail to keep their youthful air more than those who don't even try. They are the posers, the people who need to be specifically singled out to show where the real signal for a category is.

#3 'Sean if you wish' — 'if you wish' isn't something you usually use to end a statement, unless you intend to show your resentment for those who choose that path. Beginning a statement that way can be slightly different: "If you wish to sing, then sing!" This gives the impression of "imposing self-image on others", i.e. explicit manipulation of other people's behavior in a way that doesn't "fit" what the other person thinks you can ask of them, everyone hates that. Maybe "Ess-dog" would have flown these days, since people can choose their names and pronouns in many circles, but having to use "the" feels like grandeur.

#4 'She's 18 he's 31' — it probably goes without saying given current age-gap discourse that large age gaps (usually measured in their proximity or excess over a decade) are looked down upon in the current Western world. In this case, this is profiled as "youth seeking" on the part of the Ess-dog.

#5 'She's a rich girl' — we don't even need the second half of this sentence to say: saying someone is dating someone rich almost always implies money-seeking, even if it's just to "match class". And in the Modern™ world where class is fake, except for rich people fucking over everybody else, this is considered, what's known as "really lame and gross".

#6 'he's the son/Of a Coca-Cola middle man' — there's a lot here. being defined by your dad is bad these days: you're "supposed" to be someone individual, you're supposed to "make yourself" despite your privilege, if you've got it. But the privilege here is sad and pitiful, i.e. Ess-dog's dad is only a 'middle man' which means he's not on top, so he's not powerful enough to be impressive, and he's not on the bottom so he's not a sympathetic character. He's someone who ruins other people's lives while having his life ruined. And what about his mom? Why can't she do something cool. Anyway, Pater Ess-Dog works at 'Coca-Cola' which everyone hates, for a plethora of reasons. It causes obesity. It's too big, so obviously it's corrupt in the anti-capitalist mindset. And most importantly, it represents the idea of "soulless brand interested in making as much profit as possible." I definitely believe that one, though I guess I think that's actually true of every identity, just with different ideas of "profit".

Of course there's much more, and this is only the first stanza, but we'll leave this here as an initial push into the kind of analysis I'd like to see, the kind of cultural archiving I think we need.

[youcanthaveadoll-blog]

Native English- to Korean- translation

“5. She call  she believe  she calling to  she has calling because there no response   she believe   she calling and the other end must hear. The other end must see   the other end feel.

she accept pages   sent care of   never to be seen   never to be read   never to be known   if name  if name be known  if name only seen heard spoken read   cannot be   never   she hide all   essential words  words link subject verb   she writes hidden the essential words must be pretended   invented she try on different images   essential   invisible” (14)

Sandwiched in one of Cha’s “translate this into French” passages, between eloquent conjurings of holy repentance, the former political apportionment of France, and a relatively mundane trip to Paris, we find this passage. First off, she assumes such multilingual aptitude on behalf of her readers in this demand: the reader is asked to translate the aforementioned paragraphs, none of which are particularly “easy” for beginning language-learners. For native speakers of both French and English, though, the task is trivial.

However, the above passage sticks out so sorely against the rest of the translation assignment. Traversing its sentences, the reader is jarred back and forth, as one action (”She call”) barrels into another (”she believe”) barrels into another (”she calling”), and so on. The reader has no recourse but to scan forward and retrace their steps back to the beginning of each action, most of which would function better - for the reader’s sanity - as standalone sentences. Cha challenges punctuation throughout the novel: while the other passages contain a litany of punctuation, this one contains a single period. As readers, we aren’t given a chance to breathe - our longing for linearity compounds with each triple-space above.

Cha tries to convey, here, a non-native English speaker’s grapple with this translation challenge. Native anglophones and francophones translate all of these passages easily (though they may not make complete sense). Cha exposes the experience of a non-native speaker right in the middle of bilinguals’ completing this assignment. She asks us to consider the difficulty of translating into language x from language y from language z, where z is one’s native tongue. More broadly, this passage represents just one example of Cha’s attempts to convey the plight of non-natives in a environment. While there are moments of vigorous vocabulary, for the most part we observe improper subject-verb agreements (she even mentions “subject verb” in the passage in question, knowing very well what she’s trying to convey), stuttering, and of course a blinding lack of punctuation; these malfeasances can be extrapolated to the real world, when immigrants’ integration into new cultures often stalls.

[lifelovelit-blog]

The Struggles of Conformity

“For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends…they made one feel…one must never, never say what one thought. …They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody else.” Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, page 210 The oppression Orlando feels when comparing herself to these male writers is undeniably tied to gender stereotypes and expectations. The Victorian Era was particularly harsh with the lines separating the genders. Orlando was struggling with the idea that she must “never, never say what [she] thought” and “always, always write like somebody else.” When developing these thoughts, Orlando compares herself to the great writers Addison, Lamb, and Sir Nicholas, all of whom are male. Especially around the time of Orlando’s change from man to woman, Orlando observes explicit lifestyle differences between the two genders. Since her transformation, Orlando has adapted many traditionally female mannerisms and habits, resulting in a feminine voice in her writing. In light of this, it would be impossible for Orlando to conform and write exactly like the men she is comparing herself to. In this particular quote, the Victorian Era is apparent in the veiled reference to the “Angel in the House,” another of Woolf’s written works. Orlando (much like Woolf did in her own lifetime) struggles with the Angel: Orlando, as a woman, cannot say what she thinks; she also cannot write like herself, lest she be too opinionated, clever, or unique. To me, this passage carries an overwhelming sense of oppression that accentuates the rigid gender roles of the Victorian Era and the overbearing presence of men in the business of writing.

[arabella-strange]

And by this process [of close-reading] you will gradually come to attach less weight to your own “Thus I thought” at other times. You will begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious importance;—that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:—in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any “thoughts” at all; that you have no materials for them, in any serious matters; —no right to “think,” but only to try to learn more of the facts.

John Ruskin, "Of Kings' Treasuries" from Sesame and Lilies (1865)

[c-reads-clarissa]

And this low and familiar expression was often in his mouth and uttered always with the self-complaisance which an imagined happy thought can be supposed to give the speaker: to wit, 'That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table' (though once I made his comparison stagger with him by asking him, if the sons to make it hold were to have their necks wrung off?) 'whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men.' (77)

I love the interplay of linguistic agency in this sentence. Clarissa is quoting her brother James, who by this time in the novel has effectively spearheaded a campaign for Clarissa to marry a man she detests simply because this man says he will settle all of his fortune on Clarissa and allow Clarissa to keep a hold of her own inheritance (typically all of a wife's money reverted to her husband upon marriage, hence the metaphor of the chicken). James may seem to have all the power in this situation -- and indeed, in the world beyond the letters, there really isn't anyone who'd dare go against him -- but Clarissa's position as the letter-writer allows her not only to interrupt James's metaphorical rambling, but to destabilize its very premise and underscore the faultiness of his argument. What she can't do out loud, she can at least do in writing.

I can't make any definitive claims since I'm only 160 pages in, but from what I've read so far (which consists mostly of Clarissa's letters, with only two or three of Lovelace's), I don't think it would be incorrect to say that, against the overwhelming verbal agency of men, women nonetheless have recourse to textual agency: what they can't speak, they nonetheless can write. The only way for Clarissa to "talk back" is not to talk, but to keep up her correspondence.

[c-reads-clarissa]

Good girls and bad boys

In the preface to Clarissa, Richardson writes,

in the great variety of subjects which this collection contains, it is one of the principal views of the publication: to caution parents against the undue exertion of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage: and children against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity, upon that dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband. (36)

A few thoughts:

--The straightforward equation of parental authority with "natural authority" becomes increasingly problematic as Clarissa's parents proceed to act in ways that seem rather unnatural in order to have her marry their choice; I'm getting the feeling that this is an area of real concern for Richardson, but also real moral ambiguity. Clarissa ought to obey her parents because they are her parents, but even by eighteenth-century standards Richardson seems to think they aren't really acting like her parents.

--It's interesting to watch the shift of the audience of advice in these lines--from "parents" to "children" in general to the second reference to "children," which really only means female children, because they are being cautioned against marrying certain men. When "children" gets redefined/specified in its second use, I can't help but look back to the first use and reevaluate it as well. Do male children have to listen to parental authority when it comes to their marriages? Yes, technically -- but that isn't what this novel is about. Also, "children" first comes up with respect to the issue of parental authority, so it makes sense as an epithet, but surely women should be older than "children" if they are going to be finding themselves husbands; the use of the infantilizing term says something about the culture's expectations of marriageable women and the quality of the relationships they were expected to have with their future husbands. (Note to self: cf. p. 57, where Clarissa relates that her brother often refers to her as "the girl.")

--I don't know exactly how Richardson is planning to prove that reformed rakes don't make good husbands -- since if my knowledge of the future plot of this novel is true, the rake will neither reform nor become anyone's husband! -- but I think it's interesting that the notion of good girls who love bad boys has been a trope for over two hundred years. I want to admire Richardson for calling women out on it, the same way I want to admire modern writers who call women out on it, because THEY ARE CALLED BAD BOYS FOR A REASON, and every woman deserves to be with someone who treats her (and who treats women in general) with respect. But it really depends on how Richardson handles this.

[rafaeltorch]

Quoth The Raven

Getting to the bottom of recurrence, as it has been as much a part of my life as cancer itself, I’ve sought out its meaning; and meaning for me has become sanctuary, even the act of seeking out meaning. Different dictionaries all conclude that to recur is an intransitive verb There are a few words like to die or to go or to sleep, to lie, or to sit, that, for example, are never going to be transitive. To recur is one of these verbs. It doesn’t suffer from ambitransitive-ness. It is what it is. Forevermore. 

The “forevermore.” Reminds me...

“And [ ‘Recurrence’ ] never flitting, still is sitting, still is  sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the  floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted - nevermore!” [my bold]

I can write, “My cancer has recurred,” and it’s enough. Then there’s always this: “The cancer recurred in my lungs, 4 spots now, all measured in mmm (2 in each lung), and one bigger mass in my psoas muscle, maybe 2 or 3 cm.” The latter part of this, the prepositional phrase, is a luxury. It’s opulent, grand even. 

In my mind, these days, who needs the rest of the sentence? Some would argue, “The phrase is a more specific, detailed fleshing out of the problem. The first gets at it, Raf,” they’d tell me. “Yes; but the second part, yes, the second part really gives us, the guts.”

“The guts?” I’d ask. “I’ve given the ‘guts’ with ‘my cancer has recurred.’ There’s no more ‘guts’ that that.” I’d ask them. It’s cancer. It’s recurred. Who cares, lungs and abdomen? Who cares lymph nodes and livers and brains? Who cares colons or renal glands or prostates? Who cares kidneys and bladders and intestines and pancreases. Who cares stages 3’s and 4s and three months to live or four? It’s always, rather plainly, ‘my cancer has recurred.’” It’s what I’ve told people. They don’t want that. They want the prepositional phrases. They want the adjectives and the adverbs. Never the thing-in-itself.

* * *

To recur, ( -curred, -curring ), most commonly means “occurring again, periodically, or repeatedly (see above examples). 

Like: (recurring) Can you see and understand the recurring theme? Like: Why does Poe use the raven as a recurring symbol throughout his poem, “The Raven”?

Like: of a thought, image, or memory come back to one’s mind: In Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” the Protagonist's own fears and desires keep recurring to him, even as he tries to forget and move forward, empty without Lenore, because his fears and desires speak directly to the opposite of his own sense of self; and it was this recurring“opposite sense of self” that he had held allegiance to for all these years even if this “sense of self” was potentially the most harmful thing in his life. Had he mistakenrecurrence for consistency and value and sensibility?

Moreover, the New Oxford American Dictionary notes that the word recurrence is a noun and a derivative of ‘recur.’ 

Like: My recurrence is back, and you’re gonna be in trouble (Hey La. Hey La...). Or, better, I’m experiencing a recurrence. Which is a strange sentence anyway because it suggests it’s a person, place, or thing that hangs around me for an inconsistent and indeterminate amount of time. My recurrences strike me as being like a loiterer. Similar to Poe’s raven, standing on the bust of Pallas, the goddess of wisdom -- at the highest point in the room, lording over. Similar to Poe’s raven, the recurrence is a haunting (in Sweden, the raven is the ghost of murdered peoples. In Germany, recurr -- um, I mean, ravens are the souls of the damned; and in Danish folklore, ravens could lead people astray. And yet, in various mythologies, ravens are god-like figures -- both Tricksters and the Creator God. In Poe’s poem, and in my life, he is both, the damned and the Creator).

The origins of recurrence are Middle-English (in the sense [return to]): from Latin “recurrere,” from re- ‘again, back’ + currere which means ‘run.’

All that out of the way, the deeper meaning of the word ‘recurrence,’ something I’ve been forced to read and see and hear and understand, something far beyond the mere medical definition and its ramifications is stimulating in its own right. It’s not just a symbol of resistance to treatment, to chemotherapies and surgeries, trials and protocols and prayer and eating well and exercising at least an hour a day. Recurrence has become an idea that is central to my life and maybe always has been central to my life, and I’ve just been too blind to read it and see. The notion of recurrence is central to all of our lives with or without disease: whether it’s the past we’re reckoning with, the return of a jilted lover, the dreaminess of a middle-aged man in the midst of a cliched or not so cliched crisis, or, plainly enough, the days we wake to everyday: the medium triple-shot latte I order everyday at Starbucks and their attempt to correct my language by saying, “You mean a ‘grande, triple-shot latte?’”, the routes we choose to drive or walk to get to work, the work we do, the hours we give to sleep (“I’ve got to have at least 8 hours of sleep every night or else I’m nothing the next day!”), the alarm clock everyday faithfully at 6:13 a.m. It’s this “everydayness” as Walker Percy describes in his wonderful novel The Moviegoer, our being sunk in “everydayness.” This being “sunk” is disease enough because it blinds us to the potential of recurrence. (And everyone has it -- most of us are sunk). 

We are all seeking Lenore, the absent woman of Poe’s “The Raven.” We’re all going crazy for her and the absence. Sunk in the narrator’s library looking at the raven on the bust of Pallas proclaiming, “Nevermore.” 

The most interesting dictionary definition is third one in the OED. It tells us that ‘recurrence’ is, as with oceans, “a flowing back.” Lastly, ‘recurrence’ is a reversion to “an ancestral type” -- to return to something older amidst the chaos of the modern world -- reverting to another, older kind of thinking to alleviate the alienation of now even if that new-old thinking could alienate one further.

In this sense, my recurrence of cancer, two spots in each lung and one in the anterior abdomen, has forced me out of Percy-ian everydayness and into something more primal and necessary. To “back run” (the literal putting together of ‘re-’ and ‘currere’) is to run into myself, back into the buried. The recurrence of cancer, sure, is the splitting of cells and the failure of my body’s environment to deal with it, but outside that easy and diseased definition, the recurrence is also a moment that allows me to revert, flow back, and potentially find meaning -- if done well and purposefully. No wonder Poe’s raven sits atop the bust of Pallas, the goddess of Wisdom. What recurrence is, when used in the aforementioned ways, is an allowance to read again and see again the world we’ve been fundamentally reading poorly and not closely enough. Of course the raven sits atop the bust, for the man who has lost Lenore “for evermore” believes wisdom is the highest thing to be attained, what will help ameliorate terror. It’s why the bust holds prominence in the room (and is usually taught in American Literature classes as the symbol of rationality and reasonableness, what is, we teach wrongly I’d argue, lost to the man), but the bird, taking hold of the bust lets the narrator potentially see the world as it is. The bird offers a new worldview, a new ability to close-read. Yet even we, as readers, are as confused and terrified at the bird’s gaze. It’s what makes Poe so eerie. But, living with recurrence, Poe’s poem can’t help me think that what the bird is doing is teaching. His lesson, “Nevermore,” is a good one. A lesson that should be memorized, but to us and, more importantly, to the widower the lesson is lost -- especially as he is a man who is living in the midst of recurrence. 

He is given an opportunity to move beyond what is known as “wisdom.” For isn’t “wisdom” in the story a statue of Pallas, mere replica of the goddess of Pallas (much like Caesar's Palace is a replica of ancient Rome)? Isn’t the bust of wisdom a symbol of something worldly and therefore transitory, and what’s so spooky about the bird is that he speaks about a notion -- “nevermore” -- that transcends the worldly and right now -- Poe brilliantly brings our eyes not to the bust of Pallas, but, more importantly to that which is physically higher, therefore most authentic. He toys with us. We want to see the bust, because the bird and his pronouncement is just to scary to believe in and see and know. “Nevermore” (the repeated answer the bird gives to various questions posed by the narrator) speaks not to a horror but to a truth that extends beyond the grave and our fear of it. 

Sometimes the answer we’re given isn’t the answer we wanted or ever wanted. It’s true we weren’t asked to be born, but we must be responsible for the kinds of questions we ask even if it means the answers we find disrupt our lives in terrifying ways. Actually, with almost four years of treatment under my belt, I’m still terrified, but I find myself trying to ask the kinds of necessary questions that may make my life more full. 

“Nevermore,” quoth the raven. 

The narrator has mind enough to call him “prophet” because he just might see for a moment; but soon enough it is a “fiend,” “thing of evil,” or “devil,” as the answers he’s given to questions he’s asked are “incorrect.” “Nevermore” is Poe’s attention to the language, that in the everyday there is meaning even in the transitory and worldly. And it recurs over and over again, but do we stop to think about recurrences, to stop and say, “Hold it a minute, I’ve seen (or heard) this before. What does it mean?” 

As powerful as my cancer growing again, itself sort of yelling out, “Nevermore.” Believe me, there have been days where I, like the narrator of Poe’s poem: 

“shrieked upstarting - [...]

Leave my loneliness unbroken! [...]

Take thy beak from out my heart, [...]'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'”

But the problem was never the cancer or the recurrence, the real disease was the inability and ineffectualness of my desire to read well the world before me and to build a new thesis statement that would somehow account for the life I find myself in. I often tell my students (and this is a major part of the second half of an essay of mine on my other blog Pacific Coast Time called “Everywhere. Going Everywhere.”) that they should be prepared to, mid-essay, re-write their thesis statements because they might find that their evidence has taken them in new and exciting directions. They are too often ready to crash and burn with the ones they’ve built. We are too, it seems, ready to crash and burn with the faulty theses we’ve built because to destroy them would be to start again, to return to the beginning, and who would want to do that? What would it mean, we might ask ourselves, to return to the beginning? What if I have to deal with the unforeseen, turn over that rock or this rock? 

Progress is moving forward! we shriek. Progress is always moving forward, we tell one another. It’s in the language of our day. The president implores us to try and “own the future” or, better yet, “win the future.”

Building sound thesis statements that might mirror our lives and be testaments to the kind of lives we want to live should be our aim. We should attempt to be open to, recognize, and closely inspect the recurrences of daily life for they must mean something. They're recurring! To forever be attuned to recurrence is allowing us to be in the process of “going everywhere.” Everywhere at once. I’ve come to think progress is not always moving forward. Progress is going everywhere even at the price of maybe being forced to deal with the problems of any and all beginnings -- the blank page for the writer. Cursor blinking. Waiting. For you. Forevermore.

* * *

My cancer has recurred. I’ve so much ahead of me. Who could blame me for being so anxious and drearily dark sometimes, but on other days, being so dazzled by the potentiality of days, these recurrent days. Living with cancer, I’ve learned that recurrence is greater than wisdom, as we know it and understand it today. Being attuned to recurrence(s) is seeing. It is being-there. It is the Beautiful. It is forevermore because it is in the heart and is of hope, which is a place right between the roar and silence of things. I’ve come to pride myself in recurrence even if it does come on the heels of hearing the doctor telling me, “I’m sorry, son, the chemotherapy didn’t work. You’ve got cancer again. We’ve got to go back to the drawing board.”