Furniture and Memory - Gordon's FW Plot Summary

(*click this image to enlarge, it works this time!) Bedroom Image from page 34 in Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary by John Gordon, "Excessively neat as this may seem, its rationale is firmly based on the author's understanding of psychology, and it has a precedent in the ancient art of memory:" (Gordon 35)

"Such a system, which Joyce would have encountered through his readings in Giordano Bruno, might have first taught him to consider the extent to which a person's environing circumstances may be both palimpsest of past associations and prompting of future mental acts, the extent to which 'memories [are] framed from walls', as conjured by a reminiscensitive' observer. In making if the furniture of his own little room an everywhere, our dreamer simply follows suit. Like everything Joyce wrote, Finnegans Wake begins in a richly particular here and now."

- John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, page 36

Dream

Here are two dreams I had in one night.

#1 - I was sitting on the red couch in the interview room where the selected person on the show What Not To Wear sits to watch the secret footage of their bad outfits. Stacy and Clinton were excited about having me on the show and I was so thrilled to be getting $5,000 dollars to shop in New York and get a new wardrobe. Stacy was in the middle of saying something to me and in my ear a loud whisper said, "SAM" and I woke up and looked around, alert, nervous, and startled. Sutter and my two dogs slept soundly.

#2 - I was dreaming that Sutter woke me up to put more water in the humidifier next to the bed, then I woke up from the dream and wondered if I had already changed the water, then I really woke up from the dream within a dream and checked the water in the humidifier, which was fine. Which dream was a dream and which was reality, I'm still not entirely sure.

Class Notes 1/29

I walked in on discussion about ladders, and DNA. Highbrow and lowbrow are connected on a ladder, they are linked, and there are spaces in between.....like middlebrow etc.

portmanteau - combining words

woid = word+void, also the very sound of woid is word with an accent.

soundance = sentence

Four Quartets, Little Gidding, Eliot

"And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph."

Dr. Sexson mentioned that for Joyce an error is a portal of discovery, references the mistake on a blog, demonic instead of demotic.......

Dr. Sexson set up FW for us in the structure of a house also the 3 Draconian Ages

Floor = FW people = Draconian Age = Language

top floor = kids = gods = hieroglyphic

middle floor = parents = heroes = aristocratic

ground floor = servants = men = demotic

Gods decline to heroes, declines to men, and bottoms out back to the age of gods.

Dr. Sexson said that the demotic language is a decline in our sense of the divine, we bottom out with Samuel Beckett.

Four Quartets, East Coker, Eliot

"In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass."

Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, Eliot

"Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now."

Issy has a blue bedroom with stars painted on the ceiling. See Kelsey's blog and FW page 148.

The Earwicker (everybody) family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy.

From lecture, Joyce's Main Sources for Finnegan's Wake:

-Bible

-Ovid's Metamorphoses - each story has to do with change

-the Italian.......Dante

-the Englishman.......Shakespeare

FW - Dr. Sexson pointed out:

pg. 1 'penisolate' - penis, peninsula, pen

pg. 125 'Shem the Penman'

pg. 185 'alshemist' - alchemy, shem

Shem is into Alchemy. I will let you know more with my owning of page 183 which has turned into 183-5.

FW, also pointed out in class:

pg. 16 'eyegonblack' (Joyce's eye patch), like augenblick, German word for moment, short period of time.......in a blink of an eye!

also on page 16, 'bisons is bisons' (bygones be bygones) and notice on page 263 'bygones be bei Gunne's'

Blog assignments:

-find yourself in Finnegans Wake, not your life, but your name

-blog your dreams

-Feb. 2nd wake up at 6 am (or was it 8 am?) and then write everything that happens all day. Feb 2nd is Groundhog's Day, Joyce's Birthday, Purification of the Virgin, the Mayan New Year, a special anniversary, among many other things. Ulysses is all about one day, June 16th, 18 hours.

I suppose this might be a way of paying attention to all the things we do everyday, the divine detail, even brushing our teeth (if you do that) or feeding the dog or shaving. Making the ordinary extraordinary. For it is in the mundane, everyday, ordinary, secular aspects of our lives that we have the divine experiences, the epiphanies, the extraordinary, where else can we have it?

Intersting and Helpful Links

Good site:
http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/joyce_works_fw.html

FW Annotined:
http://finwake.com/

Eternal Return:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Eternal_return#9

Class Notes 1/27: Finnegans Wake with Ben

Books on Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop is a good one.

Finnegans Wake page 613 the page we spent 40 minutes with, this is as far as we got, barely half a page! Click on the image to enlarge it to read the notes (I think that will work). The idea I understood, or meaning was the Eternal Recurrence talked about in Monday's lecture. All this has already happened! Every morning when we wake up and start our day there is a regeneration of the universe. Ben linked this back to Vico's cyclical ideas, especially recourso, cycle back and start over which of course Joyce drew from this idea.

This is a picture of my Finnegans Wake book after class today, keep in mind I had not marked in it bfeore class:

Then with 10 minutes left in class Jennie Lynn performed/recited the last few pages of Finnegans Wake for the class. Talk about intimidating! It was beautiful and moving.
Special thanks to Ben and Jennie Lynn for a captivating, enrapturing, and inspiring introduction to Finnegans Wake. Hopefully now for each of us in the class owning a page of Finnegans Wake is a task we approach with recklessness and abandon, rather than fear and loathing.

P.S. Jennie Lynn inspired me to start memorizing my section and this is what I've got kind of memorized from page 183, "You brag of your brass castle or tyled house in ballyfermont? Niggs, niggs, and niggs again. For this was a stinksome inkenstink, quite puzzonal to the wrottle. Smatterafact, Angles aftanon browsing there thought not Edam reeked more rare. My wud!" It is 40 words, but it would be cool to get the whole page.

Making a Holiday and Holyday & Ben's Lecture, Notes 1/25

Class Notes 1/25/2010

HW

-choose one page of Finnegans Wake to own/work with

-memorize about 30 words from the page, go to Brianne's blog to get some tips on memorizing

Talked briefly about Bloomsday in class. Bloomsday is June 16, 1904 and it is the single day in which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Underlying the plot of Ulysses is Joyce's way of commemorating the first day spent with his wife, Nora Barnacle (incidentally, the most ordinary, boring, uneducated of all women you could ever not hope to meet which thusly attracted Jamesy to Nora). Ulysses, in its grander perspective, is the glorification, the immortalization, the singing, of an ordinary day. Leopold Bloom does things such as go to the butcher's, a funeral, the bar, and the brothel; but all of these normal, ordinary things are made great in that they are played to the tune of Homer's Odyssey and Bloom, the sad and often pathetic protagonist, is made heroic in the fashion of Odysseus.

James Joyce's birthday is Feburary 2nd. In addition, February 2nd is also the Aztec New Year (and the last one, so enjoy it), the Purification of the Virgin, a very special wedding anniversary, and Groundhog's Day. We will remember Bill Murray's classic role supported by the beautiful Andie MacDowell in Groundhog's Day the movie. Bill plays tv reporter Phil Conners and he absolutely hates having to go to Punxsutawney (not to be confused with Yoknapatawpha) on assignment to cover the event. But when he realizes that he's going to have to relive this most boring day every day, he finds ways to make it special amidst a culture that has so apparently reduced holiday to ordinary. Punxsutawney becomes his "memory theater" (which we can use to memorize F.W.) and he begins to orchestrate the day so that Groundhog's Day becomes adventurous and romantic in the same way the Ulysses made June 16th an Irish holiday where everybody gets rip roaring drunk and follows the path of Poldy Bloom starting at #7 Eccles Street.

There are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake--the first thunderclap is Henry Chimpden Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody, Humpty Dumpty) taking a nasty spill from a ladder. Each thunderclap (Joyce was terribly frightened by thunder) signifies life and death, having come full circle and ending up right where you started. It expresses, like the Aztecan calendar, cyclical time. This idea is called the Myth of the Eternal Return and it is struck upon by nearly every author worth reading. Dostoevsky uses it in the Brothers Karamazov, chapter 5 of The Wind in the Willows is titled Dulce Domum (to arrive where we started) and Nietzsche notes that "we must will endless repetition". Phil Conners figures out that by dropping a toaster in the bathtub or driving off of a cliff into the quarry he too can cause a thunderclap and will the endless repetition that is so imperative to making the ordinary extraordinary. Here is a link to a philosophy blog based out of Berkely that I found that might also be of interest: http://whooshup.blogspot.com/2009/02/groundhog-day.html

Ben's Finnegans Wake Lecture:

his FW book from 2004 is very worn, duct tape holding it together and colorful with lots of writing.

The Eternal Recurrence, Ben's favorite definition for this is from Nietzsche,

'The closest approximation of becoming to being'

the recurring theme in FW: a letter buried within chaos, nonsense, book, that explains what happened at Phoenix park, the macrocosm

forms aligned with being, fragments aligned with becoming, rendering of the two infinitesimal

Our idea of life (in the west) and reading a book is linear X----------------X

However, FW is not linear, it is cyclical, the start and the end are indeterminate, the book ends and begins again, Finnegan.

Looking at Egyptian Mythology, Book of the Dead, Sun journeys through the sky, and then at night it journeys through the underworld before it rises again.

the idea is that our lives mirror this cycle

this idea also key to understanding Finnegans Wake

constantly in a state of becoming, approximation of being.....

a journey through the underworld between 'riverrun' and 'a long the' akin to eternity, the space bar on our keyboard.

think about the book as a river, Going from source to the ocean, evaporates, travels in the clouds across the sky (underworld), rains and returns to the river.

We cannot approach Finnegans Wake the ways we approach other texts, as if it is a cumbersome thing, FW is not a code we are meant to break.

the letter buried in the book is just a fragment

so one might ask, "How are we supposed to read Finnegans Wake?"

Need to understand the shape and existence of FW as a book is incidental, it is a deceptive appearance of a book that we are supposed to read. The idea is to let the book impose its force and form and nature on you!

It makes more sense to 'read' FW in a group to dissolve the ego, also helps to have people in your group who speak different languages. Reading in a collective sense.

Decoding vs. Finding the meaning

Ben met once a week for an hour and a half with about 15 (smart) people when he was at Boston College and they would work through about half a page per meeting. Equals about 10 pages per semester.

Let the page recondition the way you think language works.

page 474 Lucan - lucid - Lucifer

like Tim Finnegan, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer, they all have fallen, fallen bodies.

page 104 prayer, combination of prayers, plurability of prayers
allmaziful - maze, intricate, labyrinth
mamafesta - manifesto, replacing the patriarch

let the language exert its own will with a hilarity of puns

page 104-5 titles or names, shards of ourselves, figures in the novel are shape shifting, figures in history

think of when you dream, one person of face metamorphoses into another, melting into each other, same happens with words, what isn't to say that this metamorphosing isn't the true character of things?

George Luis Borges: we have all been each other

Finnegans Wake is an Intellectuals parlor game. Approach this book with recklessness & a sense of abandon......perhaps with some wine.......or whiskey......or maybe some Guinness.

Passage that we approach on Wednesday: page 613

look and see what you can't see.

RE-MEMBERING FINNEGAN by Dr. Michael Sexson

Please visit Re-Membering Finnegan by Dr. Michael Sexson
very important, high priority, worthy, notable, significant, read and see for yourself.
"Remembering Finnegan, we learn that the central question is always the same every where and in every age. Are you having fun again? Are you in the funhouse, cave, or carnival, where words become flesh again? Where everything beheld is seen as if for the first time again? Where everything done is yet the same play again?"

Also, since Samuel Beckett is around the corner, here is a link to an extraordinary collection of net resources:
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/

Class Notes 1/22 & my page selection & MORE

Notes from Class on the 22nd of January

Google Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico
Wiki - "Vico’s major work was poorly received during his own life but has since inspired a cadre of famous thinkers and artists, including Benedetto Croce, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell[citation needed], Samuel Beckett, Isaiah Berlin, Giovanni Gentile, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Julius Evola, Edward Said, Marshall McLuhan, Thomas Berry, and Robert Anton Wilson. Later his work was received more favourably as in the case of Lord Monboddo to whom he was compared in a modern treatise.[7]"

Rachel has read The Following Story, and I'm only a few pages away from Part II (guess what I will be doing the rest of my Friday night). We are to read this super short book once over the weekend, and then for a second time at the end of the semester then blog about the difference between the 2 readings. I love it so far and I think everyone will love it. People who were in the major author class will appreciate how Nooteboom is very well acquainted with Nabokov and Transparent Things.......mysterious mental maneuver.......

Finnegans Wake page 13 "It is well known. Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W. K. O. O. Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand fenferall. Fumfum fumfum."

See Jennie Lynn's blog regarding sign and gesture beneath language.
See James the rat's blog, rapture.
See Zach's blog with the water genie writing example read in class.

Blogs and assignments to do:
-read The Following Story this weekend......it is a short quick read. Just takes a couple hours or so.
-blog examples of words you thought were in the lyrics to a song but really weren't
-blog an inventory of your bedroom when you wake up.....see Christina's blog on this.
- ****By Monday choose the page that you will own of Finnegans Wake and blog your choice**** -also blog the 29-32 words you will memorize on that page.
-also blog an example of a proliferation, multiplication, explosion, long list of, an inventory like the way the water genie talks from Finnegans Wake.

My Finnegans Wake page choice (at random) to own is page 183 and a part of 184. I have yet to choose exactly what I want to memorize, tough choice on those pages.......

As I read my page of Finnegans Wake eating a rosemary chicken quashed
sweet qutatoes meal at the table by myself with a glass of red wine (malbec)
Sutter walked in the room, says, if you ever ask why I love you just remember
this moment and that book you have in your hand.
Ha. (don't worry he loves me even when I read lowbrow Twilight). Here is an asterisk: We have been using the term "read" to explain what it is that we are doing with Finnegans Wake. After all, it is what you do with any other novel. But
to "read" F.W. is beyond misleading. First of all, it is a book that near
impossible to read, as Joyce intended it to be, and I doubt that anyone [living]
could read F.W. from cover to cover as you do with other books. If we all had a
Jesuit education then maybe we could read it. Secondly, and probably most
miportantly, is that Finnegans Wake is not meant to be read, in the
traditional sense. Ulysses, Joyce's first epic work, can be read cover
to cover like a book. Ulysses is the book of the day, as therefore can
be read in the conscious way in which we read a book--Sounding the words out in
our head, reading alound to ourselves, following a plot (in this case to the
minute over the 18 hour day). Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is the
book of the night, a dream book, and thus we cannot be expected to read it
consciously, nor should we try. Rather, as in a dream, we must read this book
subconsciously and that is something I am trying to learn how to do.

And on page 79 of Finnegans Wake I might have found something in the water genie's style,
"...a homelike cottage of elvanstone with droppings of biddies, stinkend pusshies, moggies' duggies, rotten witchawubbles, festering rubbages and beggars' bullets, if not worse, sending salmofarious germs in gleefully through the smithereen panes-..."
By writing like the water genie we are instructed to write the opposite of what nearly every English teacher or otherwise has taught us. Rhythm with proliferation creates a stylistic flow.

We listened to The Ballad of Tim Finnegan which is available in my previous blog. This is where Joyce got his material.....he went to the lowbrow Irish drinking song and wrote a very highbrow complicated book. Ballad of Tim Finnegan - "a gallon of whiskey at his feet and a barrel of porter at his head"
Finnegans Wake page 6 "He's stiff but he's steady is Priam Olim! 'Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E'erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their deepbrow fundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdown alanglast bed. With a backalips of finisky fore his feet. And a barrowload of guenesis hoer his head. Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!"

There are more links on page 6 to the Ballad of Tim Finnegan.
The Ballad is of death and resurrection, Tim Finnegan rises after whiskey is accidentally poured on his head, a phoenix rises from the ashes and begins anew, and Finnegans Wake starts with a sentence fragment and the beginning to that sentence is the last sentence, so to end is to begin again.

We were given groups today. Each group assigned a theme of the class. See Dr. Sexson if you need a group.

Class Notes 1/20 & My 20 Minute Lifetime

Class Notes from Jan. 20th

Changing into a larger classroom is P2C2E, so we are staying in the small classroom where we are squished together like sardines.

Blogs to do, but not necessarily due:
-blog in the style of the water genie about our own life, the more words the better, see pg. 59
-blog about what you see when you wake up
-blog about your 20 minute lifetime experience

The only 20 minute lifetime experience I can think of having is in the morning.
When the alarm rings I think about getting up, but the warm body next to me and
a peaceful Oly curled at my feet encourages me to hit the snooze and sink into
my pillow. I usually have the longest, most vivid dreams for the 5 minutes of
snooze time. When my alarm goes off again I frantically look at the time because
it feels as though I have been sleeping for days and days, but it has only been 5
minutes.

-blog on how 'Haroun' links with the themes of the class
-blog a discovery in Finnegans Wake on the one page you choose and memorize about 29-32 words
-and keep reading blogs!


In class Dr. Sexson covered briefly the themes of class:
1. Myth of Eternal Return - everything appears in cycles, ability to return to the mythical age, universe is recurring, we've done it before, we've just forgotten it. How many times have we taken this class?

got to wake up and smell whatever it is that you smell

Ballad of Tim Finnegan's Wake, give this one a chance, they mention Joyce in the intro:


"Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake"
Odyssey is to Ulysses as Tim Finnegans Wake is to Finnegans Wake.

VICO - 18th century Italian philosopher of Eternal Return
Gods
hero
men
chaos - dude language, dude, like, bitch

2. 20 minute lifetime
star trek
and doesn't Alice wake up from Wonderland having only napped for a little while or no?
3. Life as fiction and language
we are made of other peoples words
4. World as Myth & Dream
Vishnu dreaming universes out of the cosmic ocean
5. Dolce Domum
home sweet home
find that the treasure is already home where you started, but you have to leave to come back and find it. Dorthy had to leave and go to Oz before finding that everything she needs is in her own backyard.
in order to get to where you are, go by ignorance - via negativa -

Talked about Rushdie - highbrow talent, very impressed with Beckett and definitely read Nabokov.....Zembla

Haroun pg 107
Finnegans Wake top of pg 112 - woods...words
Haroun pg 125 Shadow Warrior dance - silence has its own beauty, creatures of darkness as lovely as children of light, reference to Beckett
Beckett keeps talking about not talking

We are all invited to Dr. Sexson's Funferal.....and drink the water of life.....whiskey.

Joyce and Beckett

This here is a link for those interested in how Beckett was both influenced by Joyce and did something different:
http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num07/Num7Hayman.htm

Class Notes 1/15

Notes from Friday the 15th of January

Ever waited for someone? Ever waited for someone who didn't show up?

via negativa - pessimistic, dark

possibly coming to know something through negation, talk about something based upon what it is not

Beckett, 'every word is a stain on silence,' now we know a bit more about who we are dealing with.

Beckett, highbrow, off putting, repellent, literature of futility, (don't play into his hands, don't be repelled, keep reading!)
Frye - the World of Literature is divided into a filling up and an emptying out.

Plenosis is a filling up, comedy and romance, springtime/hero, forces of darkness are over come and the world fills up, night becomes day, boy gets girl.

Kenosis - Beckett wants to take everything out.

Plurosis(I couldn't read my handwriting) or rather Plenosis - Joyce wants to put everything in. , Finnegans Wake is a great novel of Plenosis, filling up.

In Haroun and the Sea of Stories on page 72 there is a description of Finnegans Wake.

"So Iff the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and
even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the
Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that
it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each
one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry
of breathtaking complexity.............the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in
fact the biggest library in the universe." (Rushdie 71-72)

Here we have in both books an attempt to include every story that has even been told.

Note the reference to Thousand and One Nights.

We also talked about Katha-sarit-sagara, or Kathasaritsagara, कथासरितसागर, "ocean of the streams of stories" Wikipedia describes this as "a famous 11th century collection of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales as retold by a Saivite Brahmin named Somadeva.
Nothing is known about the author other than that his father's name was Ramadevabatta. The work was compiled for the entertainment of the queen Suryamati, wife of king Anantadeva of Kashmir (r. 1063-81). It consists of 18 books of 124 chapters and more than 21,000 verses in addition to prose sections. The principal tale is the narrative of the adventures of Naravahanadatta, son of the legendary king Udayana. A large number of tales are built around this central story, making it the largest collection of Indian tales."

Things to do, not necessarily due:

• Take one page (at random) of Finnegans Wake & own that page
• read intro by J. Bishop to Finnegans Wake.
• extra credit to anyone who laughs (out loud) while reading Beckett. Blog about it
• read 'Haroun' over the weekend
• also read Finnegans Wake over the weekend....haha
  

give a high brew to the high brows

Thoughts on 'Haroun'

I went online to find out some more about Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and I found a neat article from the New York Times online titled "The Fatwa That Begat an Opera" By JOHANNA KELLER. Here are some snippets:

Mr. Wuorinen (opera composer) said, "There is an admirable absence of self-pity
and bitterness in 'Haroun.' The book goes under the guise of a lighthearted tale
written for children, but there is a social and political message against people
who want to shut everyone up and strangle the imagination."

The article quotes Salman Rushdie talking about why he wrote the novel,

"When something bad happens - like a divorce, for example - children think it's
their own fault," Mr. Rushdie said recently in New York, where he has lived
since 2000. "I wrote 'Haroun' as a kind of message in a bottle for my first son,
Zafar, who was 11 at the time. I hoped he would enjoy the story as a child and
then appreciate it differently as an adult. During that awful time, I thought if
I could turn the situation on its head and have the son save the father, it
would be something I could give Zafar, a story that would help get us through.
My second son, Milan, is 7 and is beginning to ask when I am writing a story for
him."

Note the acrostic in the poem before the first chapter:

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:

All our dream-worlds may come true.

Fairy lands are fearsome too.

As I wander far from view

Read, and bring me home to you.

"The question repeated throughout the novel is, What's the use of stories that
aren't even true? By inquiring into the nature and value of narrative, Mr.
Rushdie wrote a fable that more poignantly than any of his other books, gets at
the heart of what happened to him and, in a time of increasing religious
fundamentalism, what is happening to us all."

I am interested about the ongoing discussion about Haroun and the Sea of Stories in conjection with the five themes of class and the other texts.

On the surface Haroun and the Sea of Stories seems like a story meant for children, but beneath the surface, or interwoven with the surface there are other allusions, allegories, puns, etc. that adults get. Not only does it capture the imagination of children and adults alike, but speaks to our lives. This book does not lack depth, so then how can we call it a lowbrow book? Perhaps because of its popularity among readers and ease of reading could it be distinguished as lowbrow children's literature, however the book communicates themes and ideas that contain more reality than fantasy, however the reality is addressed through fantasy. 'Haroun' is a text that frames the five themes of this class as indicated on the syllabus. A novel that can be a part of conversation for all the themes of class seems like a highbrow book, but it is available to adults and children alike so it seems lowbrow. If I had never heard of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, supposedly popular literature, before this class, does that mean highbrow and lowbrow depends on who you are? or am I living under a rock?

Class Notes 1/13

Notes: First Day of Class

Highbrow, less people reading it, Lowbrow, more people reading it.

We are even looking at movies because we read movies more than we read books. But there are Highbrow movies that nobody watches.

There are 5 major themes of the class:

1. The Myth of the Eternal Return

2. The 20 minute Lifetime

3. Life as Fiction and Language

4. The World as Myth and Dream

5. Dolce Domum (To Arrive Where We Started)

Inventories & Lists

Attention given to seemingly endless lists.

We have to address our sense of attention.
I used to zone out on the first day for the class roll, but the list is poetry itself as I've learned from my Nabokov class last semester. Something so mundane with seemingly useless and uninteresting objects or names listed is interesting and poetic. Next time you find an old shopping list wadded up in your coat pocket or in the bottom of your purse, read it again with some more attention. I'm reading Wind in the Willows for the Capstone class, but I happened upon a list listing the contents of a wicker luncheon-basket in the beginning on pages 6 and 7 that I would like to share,

"coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgesspottedmeatgingerbearlemonadesodawater-"

The Book of Lists was mentioned by Dr. Sexson, and I think I have The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay by Umberto Eco.

Bookmarks Magazine gives a description: "Best-selling author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is \"the vertigo of lists.\" Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, in his lyrical intellectual style he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous collections, is a philosophical and artistic sequel to Eco’s recent acclaimed books, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, books in which he delved into the psychology, philosophy, history, and art of human forms. Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a \"giddiness of lists\" but shows how in the right hands it can be a \"poetics of catalogues.\" From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times."

High vs. Low and Rushdie

I thought this could be one way of imagining the Sea of Stories.........

Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

Highbrow literature, as I see it is more complicated, with greater depth, and not a common recreational read. Lowbrow literature on the other hand would have a higher readership, with a more popular following, lacking the depth that is needed for the so-called pedantic readers who consider themselves only fit for the highbrow reading. However lowbrow, doesn't neessarily mean lesser. As Christina says in her first blog entry, "Who is to say that any truth or beauty contained in a "lesser" work is any less valid or any less moving than truth contained in masterpieces." We see this in the lowbrow, (as in children's literature) Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. Contains allegory for problems in society, beautiful imagery, and reaccuring themes of story, storytelling, and language.

"Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old - it is the new combinations that make them new" (86).

Water Genie - " 'You know how people are, new things, always new. The old tales, nobody cares' " (86). I like this quote because the old permeates the new. Old creates the new. The new is created from the old. Which leads me to think about how the highbrow and lowbrow come from the same place. The old.

Haroun - "I've just arrived, and already none of it seems very strange at all" (87).