individual power vs fate + coincidence

One of the main things about the book that struck me was the desire for individuality and individual strength in a world where the individual does and does not matter. Oswald’s background is marked by this dichotomy—a perpetual dropout and semi-malcontent who always seems to get into fights, Oswald is marked by a desire for greatness and difference from those around him. There seems to be a fascination with movie stars (the scene with John Wayne)–and his notably stilted conversation with the radar operator Bushnell after Oswald shot himself suggests the pervasive influence of outside factors. I just kept thinking of common movie tropes (like the power of the individual, black and white morality, big masculine heroes always getting the girl) and how they influence everyone, not just Oswald. He is struggling with desperateness to be something, to, in spite of Oswald’s almost unending mediocrity, mean something.

In contrast to this, Libra also sets up the idea of an overwhelming societal force/web of connections that dominates the flow of events—a young Oswald and Ferrie talking about a .22 caliber rifle, the passing discussions of Jack Ruby haunting New Orleans before he shows up in Dallas, and so on. Following a conversation between Parmenter and (um, the guy with the crazy ass name. George de blahblahblah), Parmenter goes on one of his mystic rants about how we're all linked in coincidence and suspicion. Later, when Banister discusses why he doesn’t like Kennedy, part of his dislike seems to stem from how much of an idealized individual that Kennedy is. It is Bannister that refers to forces in the air that drive society, and indeed that seems to be true for large sections of the novel—with the increasing dovetailing between the fictionalized assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that Everett and his group are looking for and the actual Lee Harvey Oswald—that suggests the primacy of coincidences, to the point where coincidences dominate and may replace reality. However, the last lines of the book suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald did have his impact—that his name, for better or worse, will live on in history, and in a world where the individual seems to have simultaneously less and more power in the web of coincidences. It's daunting, how many interpretations can stem from the plot of this novel. But I guess that's just like the real assassination.

kennedy assassination + media

There's no arguing that the Kennedy assassination changed the political landscape of the United States. What I had never really considered before was how the aftermath changed the media landscape of the world.

Zapruder sold the publication rights to his film images to Life magazine, which ran the jarring, graphic still frames in its next issue a week later. The sequence was not shown as a film clip on network television until 1975. Where were the TV cameras? They were in studios. I guess most television cameras of the time were still bulky and barely mobile, the size of refrigerators. The president of the United States was not yet under constant video watch (imagine Obama ever being left alone for 2 minutes). The era of compact TV cameras and anywhere-hookups, even for professionals, was still in the future. (Hundreds of witnesses carrying video-ready smartphones? Even further into the future.)

But what was on television that November weekend was the return of Kennedy’s coffin to Washington, D.C., the funeral, the burial, and the various processions linking these events. That and, of course, the live onscreen killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters.

It was a harbinger of the media world to come. Transoceanic satellite links were new and expensive, but this was a story of such unexpectedness, such importance and such personal drama that TV pulled out all the stops.

The weekend’s events were watched in grief, shock and horror by millions around the world. The Kennedy assassination and funeral were a founding instance of the global village, a media experience shared in real time across borders and continents.

on conspiracy theories

Well, I finally caught up and finished the book. I had a really hard time reading it, not just because it's a hard book to read but I just disapprove of the subject matter. Disapprove isn't the word I want but, I just feel like I'm wasting my time reading conspiracy theories, and Libra is well written enough to make me way more interested in those theories than I ever wanted to be. The book offers a good deal of new material on how conspiracy theories can be viewed. Specifically, there are several sections that stand out as emphasizing ideas already discussed or bringing new material to light. One of the first is a discussion of the decentralization of information and knowledge away from the leaders in power. In a world where knowledge is danger, ignorance an asset (not the exact quote, can't find it in the book) conspiracy can thrive. When leaders strive to shield themselves through ignorance, the operational workings of the government are beyond their control. For the public, the idea that this is possible is alarming, because it means that no one is in control. This is particularly damaging in a democratic republic, where the voting process gives the illusion of some measure of control.

Conversely, there is the idea of too much control. If leaders yielding their knowledge allows for secret operations to exist from those lower down the power chain, then the idea that leaders can be keeping information from us is also present. When Ferrie tells Lee that Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other, this is precisely the idea that he is striving for. It is a unique situation where the men in power are to be feared if they know too much information but also if they know too little. The prevalence of conspiracy theories can be blamed upon the existence of these two ideas working in constant tandem.

The constant threat of conspiracy requires people to find some way to defend themselves. Win's daughter (Susie?), is fearful that her parents may not be who they say they are. Therefore, she hides a pair of Little Figures, and even though that didn't really seem too significant I think in large part, this represents the loss of control that people necessarily must go through. They cannot trust their leaders, yet they must be prepared to defend themselves against either possibility: that the leader is keeping secrets from them, or secrets are being kept from the leader. The defense against the conspiracy is the Little Figures, but as the girl does not describe exactly what the Little Figures actually do, they are nearly useless. The truth of the matter is that she had absolutely no control over the possibility of the conspiracy, but the existence of the Little Figures gives her some illusion of protection. As long as they remain hidden, she can remain separate from the conspiracy, and not be dragged into the center of it. Thus do Americans attempt to believe that they cannot be duped or tricked by the conspiracy, but the power of the Little Figures is purely illusory.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite authors and I was so stoked when we read "Lyndon" in class, especially since I had never read it before. I was surprised- to me, "Lyndon" doesn't feel like Wallace at all, mainly because so much of the story is spent depicting the actual Lyndon B. Johnson. There isn't any distinction between actual news quotes and made-up "transcriptions" regarding the curious relationship between Boyd and LBJ; as a result, I sort of feel like this story is likelier to have a greater impact on people who know more history as opposed to someone like me, who is coming into this story with a character-based handicap. Complicating things, or perhaps complicated by my own lack of familiarity, is the downright cryptic final section....

What makes this feel less like a Wallace story (and I'm not claiming to be knowledgeable about this fancy literary business) is the specificity of context. It's not that Wallace isn't a detailed writer, not at all. There are parts of his non-fiction where DFW's keen eye for efficient, yet insanely detailed description is nothing short of impressive. And there are parts of his fiction where the detail is so completely and exhaustively fleshed out that it becomes frustrating, which maybe is the function of it. For me, though, the vast detail develops such complete dimension to characters and situations that might be considered "absurdist" that they become very believable. This is maybe most apparent in the (in)famous Infinite Jest, but it's definitely also true of "Lyndon," when we consider the whole bodily function thing, and just the general aura of Lyndon. The opening line of the story, I mean come on.

All that being said about his detailed writing, I think Wallace usually leaves some things about his characters to be open, which is I guess harder when you're writing about a real person. Little about this story is open: it's mired somewhere between fact and fiction, and our only true in-road is the fictional Boyd,  and he's the man we learn the least about (married, then not, and why?). As for Lyndon himself, he is often described through the lens of a caricature, and his big speeches are, I assume, meant to mirror or mock the man's actual policies.

This is completely unrelated but I found my favorite DFW story online, "Incarnations of Burned Children," which I think gives an idea of what I was talking about with character development. This story is only like two pages long but even so, if he wanted to be clearer about his characters he could have easily been. That's the kind of writing I'm used to reading from him, and it's not that "Lyndon" was disappointing in any way, but.. I don't know! I don't know.

Incarnations of Burned Children

by David Foster Wallace

(taken from Esquire)

The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child's screams and the Mommy's voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner's blue jet and the floor's pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still in the steaming pool, and the Daddy's first act was to take the child under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run over the boy's feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured or flung more cold water over his head and shoulders and chest, wanting first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man's mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he'd ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they'd become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. The tenant side's door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, the chest and stomach's red was fading to pink under the cold water and his feet's soft soles weren't blistered that the Daddy could see, but the toddler still made little fists and screamed except now merely on reflex from fear the Daddy would know he thought possible later, small face distended and thready veins standing out at the temples and the Daddy kept saying he was here he was here, adrenaline ebbing and an anger at the Mommy for allowing this thing to happen just starting to gather in wisps at his mind's extreme rear still hours from expression. When the Mommy returned he wasn't sure whether to wrap the child in a towel or not but he wet the towel down and did, swaddled him tight and lifted his baby out of the sink and set him on the kitchen table's edge to soothe him while the Mommy tried to check the feet's soles with one hand waving around in the area of her mouth and uttering objectless words while the Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table's checkered edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler's cries but still the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still under the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy's side talking sing-song at the child's face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until the first wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel's hem and the parents' eyes met and widened--the diaper, which when they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby's diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water'd fallen and pooled and been burning their baby all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn't, hadn't thought and when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God's first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the size of a grown man's thumb that had clutched the Daddy's thumb in the crib while he'd watched the Daddy's mouth move in song, his head cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy lonesome for in a strange vague way. If you've never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the lady was almost there with him looking down at what they've done, though hours later what the Daddy won't most forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic's ER with the tenant's door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn't stop and they couldn't make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

Birth Control and Freedom

I meant to write this post ages ago but never got around to it. Time to pull a "Lot's wife" and look to the past (so clever). On April 5th, Shruti, Will, and Maia presented Angelyn Mitchell's article "Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred." Much of the article focused on how sexuality correlates to female empowerment and independence. When Dana is in the antebellum south, rape is a constant threat and sex is wielded as a weapon. When she is in modern day California, sex is an act of pleasure and love, something Dana shares with her husband out of her own free will. For us and for Dana, sex = freedom.

Our class discussion focused mainly on this distinct difference across century lines. We explored possible scenarios where Alice or Rufus were transported to the 1970's, and we speculated on their outlooks on our society, specifically modern sexuality. I have qualms with dealing in such hypothetical terms, but the discussion did get me thinking about the constantly evolving perception we have of sex. What exactly about the antebellum south changed to allow our current perspective to develop?

It's important to remember that Kindred was published in 1979, two decades into the western sexual revolution and only seven years after oral contraception was actually accessible to the entire American public (I'm referring to the 1972 case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, which is nicely summarized here). It can be reasonably assumed that Dana was using some sort of contraception by this time, whereas the same can't be said for women of the 19th century, especially slave women. I don't mean to imply that birth control is a modern invention; to the contrary, contraception has been around for centuries. However, in the 19th century the most common form of birth control was the male condom. George Bernard Shaw even said that the rubber condom was the greatest invention of the 19th century (that's not relevant, it just made me laugh). Until female contraception became as available as male contraception, sex was a power men could wield over women.

I know I said I hate hypothetical situations but I can't help myself right now. What if the slave women on the Weylin plantation had access to birth control? There would still be rape, there would still be suffering, but the vicious breeding cycle implemented by slave owners would end. The women would not be seen as child rearing machines, and perhaps more as real people. That might be too hopeful- maybe they would still be seen as property, but at least on an equal level with slave men. Not that slave men were regarded highly. I feel like I just put both of my feet in my mouth so I'm just going to stop. My point was supposed to be that access to female contraception is the reason sex is viewed so differently in the two settings of Kindred. I kind of got too engrossed in research to actually formulate any coherent thoughts but the history of birth control is simply too fascinating.. They used spermicide in ancient Egypt? Must stop typing.

Past vs Present & Overlap in History

I think we all sort of accept the idea that the 19th century setting in Kindred is much worse than the 20th century setting. We (through Dana) witness an obscene amount of cruelty, physical and emotional brutality and oppression. However, I have qualms with comparing justices across time; today in class I couldn't help but resist the idea that the antebellum south was all that different than modern times, especially when compared to the 1970's when social equality was regarded with even less importance than it is today. I don't mean at all to undermine the horrible practices of slave owners, but the fact is that similar behavior goes on to this day, not only around the world but even in our country, where we have supposedly evolved from our disturbing past.

Migrant workers, for example, are often worked past the point of exhaustion, paid nearly nothing, and given no legal rights- they work to survive, and though we don't hear about it in the news, are often beaten by their bosses (I was tempted to call them "owners"). A quick Google search will yield numerous accounts of literal modern slavery, right here in the U.S. Stories of workers being recruited from homeless shelters, promised pay, then given nothing (or close to it, definitely not enough to survive on) and locked into trailers with 10 or 15 other people at night. It's infuriating and frankly not much worse than what we read about in Kindred, at least on the Weylin plantation. This brutality, paired with the constant racism still directed towards Mexicans (and by default of our own ignorance, anyone with dark skin and a Spanish accent) hardly paints a pretty picture of race relations in the US, even when juxtaposed with the unsettling history of slavery that we are all uncomfortably aware of.
 
I honestly have a really hard time thinking that things have improved so much since the 19th century- maybe all that has changed is that we hear less about, or have just gotten really good at ignoring, the cruelty we exhibit. I think that was actually one of Octavia Butler's goals in writing Kindred- by the end of the novel, Dana and Kevin have both been given reminders of their time spent in the past (physical and emotional reminders in Dana's lost arm and Kevin's incapability to re-adapt to modern times) and as such will never be able to see their world as one of equality. They will constantly be reminded of racial and general social injustice that they experienced first hand, and that will change how the act in modern times. Butler is trying to make us realize as readers that we should not and, really, cannot turn our backs on suffering, but rather must try to understand and accept it. Ignorance may be bliss, but it's also the greatest sin I can think of. Food for thought.

Ragtime Vs. Doctorow

Recently in class we briefly touched on the issue of perspective in historical fiction writing. Should historians be purely objective, while writers of historical fiction can be openly subjective? The writing of any history is inevitably a process of selection and in a way all written history is present tense, about the historian’s own time as well as the past one they’re writing about, and it can’t be otherwise because the historian is a part of his or her own culture, just as the people being written about were in theirs, and this inescapable fact shapes the history being written. Phew. Ok but it's impossible to write any narrative with complete objectivity. No matter how hard an author tries to disguise their connections to the modern age, it can’t be done. Not totally. So now I’m wondering what traces of the 1960s and 70s, the time of Ragtime’s composition, can be found if we read between the lines.

 
    I don’t know much about history but I know that the era Doctorow describes in Ragtime is often thought of as a progressive time in American history. Such change was possible because, so we are told, there was broad agreement among most Americans about political means and ends and this consensus engendered evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. We don’t typically think of revolt and anarchy when we think of the early 20th century, yet instead of consensus, Doctorow chooses to emphasize conflict (between blacks and whites, capital and labor, men and women, haves and have-nots) and it is these conflicts which are so often repeated throughout the course of our country's history.

     In place of basic optimism about American “progress,” Doctorow substitutes an ironic skepticism about whether any such progress is possible, at least not without a fundamental reordering of social, economic, and political power. This mordant view is underscored by the fates of the novel’s most principled characters: Coalhouse  is assassinated and his followers scattered; Goldman is deported; and Tateh abjures his political principles and recreates himself as their antithesis. We debated a little in class about whether these characters’ fates were actually doomed, and Amalia (I think it was her, at least) convinced me otherwise- maybe they’ll go on to greener pastures, etc. But I don’t see it as optimistic, either. I think Doctorow is just showing how progression doesn’t really exist but neither does regression, that there are only opportunities leading down various paths.. I’m getting way way way off base from what I wanted to talk about. 60s! Bullet points!

• Coalhouse Walker- Black Panthers, Black Muslims, Malcom X
• Emma Goldman- feminism, political radicalism
• Younger Brother- New Left
• social and political violence
• the development of a grassroots, utopian, and non-Marxist radicalism
• new cultural visibility. Jews primarily in the earlier period, as represented by Tateh, and African Americans in the later one, as represented by Coalhouse.

    Maybe I’m reading too much into the characters. But I think these characteristics of the 60s help to explain the features of the ragtime era that Doctorow chose to emphasize, and they illustrate how the ideas of the historian’s own time can influence the history he or she writes. It makes perfect sense that historians strive to be more than antiquarians, that is, they want their understanding of the past to have some contemporary relevance as well, to illuminate the problems and potential of their own modern culture.