Prose or Problems

There is a new trend in the literature world. What's literature, you ask? Well, it used to be a form of entertainment and education where people used paper and pen and wrote their thoughts. Amazing, I know! So this trend, it's poetry. It seems, even with writing style, things go in and out of fashion. Poetry was created as a form of expression. There are many different types, but poetry, in it's simplicity, was created to write emotions. Good poetry has the ability to pack a lot of emotion into one line. For example, T.S. Eliot wrote, "ash on an old man's sleeve is all the ash that burnt roses leave" (Four Quartets). A reader could ponder a sentence like that for a lifetime.
As you can see, the use of poetry is important when it comes to the more serious subjects of life. Prose in YA have become popular for those writers who have a difficult story to tell. There is the novel "Sold," written about a young girl sold into postitution. There is "Crank," a mother writing about her daughter's addiction to meth. Neither of these tales could have been written in a story format and been successful. Poetry can be a useful tool for an author. That being said, I've started noticing a commonality between YA literature and poetry. It seems that poetry has started walking hand-in-hand with problems.
The use of poetry is a fashion that's wrapspeeding it's way back into literature, but the poetry, problem relationship is a new outfit. And, I am not shy in saying, I think this relationship is an unhealthy one.

Looking for Alaska's Purpose

So it seems that I've been reading a lot of young adult literature lately. All I have to say to that is, I'm taking a young adult lit class...so...you know, that's why. The latest novel I read, and can I say right off the bat, damn it was good, was Looking for Alaska. Apparently this novel is very controversial, and, although I'm not too familiar with this whole parental debate, I'm pretty sure it's one of the most tame novels I've ever read. I realized after doing some research that Black Boy has been a required text in high school. That novels main scene is a guy suffocating a woman, cutting her up, and putting her in a furnace. I'm pretty sure a 16 year old can handle the "lesson on blowies" scene. I think the older we get the more we forget what it's like to be young. Anyways, I promise I didn't write this blog to talk about teenage confusion of the female anatomy.

There was an interesting concept to the novel when one of the main charters ( guess who, Alaska) asked "how do we get out of this labyrinth"? It's a pretty intense question and I'm assuming you will find a million different answers. I will give you a hint, however, she answered wrong.

I started thinking about what my answer would be to this question because I'm so wise and all. I suppose that right now in my life my answer would be change, change and hard work. I've found that nothing comes easy. Not a job, not money, and certainly not friends. All these things take work and time. I believe if youre not happy, you should change. Most of the time this means yourself. A person, place, or thing (otherwise a noun) will never give you happiness for an extended amount of time. It's always going to be you that dictates your life and your face staring back at you in the mirror. You better find a way to love that face, I mean emotionally and physically.

The Book Theif by Markus Zusak

There was a qestion asked in class that really triggered some thoughts for me. It was, "What role does the use of words play in the novel?" It gave the example of Mein Kamph. The question made me think of the power of words and the power of a book. It's ironic that in the novel, The Book Theif, some of the German citizens loved the act of burning literature that was, so called, "faux pa." In the novel, they give the example of burning a book called The Shoulder Shrug. It was a story of a Jewish man who was treated too well. I found it odd that people were so worried about being influenced by Jewish literature, but they never stopped to think of what a book like Mein Kamph was teaching them. The book burners were right in being frightened by the power of text/words, I just think they chose the wrong words to frighten them. In the Book Theif, there are a lot of instences where the reader sees parellels. There is a story at the end of the novel that Max tells. It is about people constantly standing over him. He first talks of it as something he is afraid of and then progresses to say that it comforts him. The dependant variable in Max's story is the person doing the standing. When he was little it was a bully he used to fight with. At the end, it's Liesel. This story struck me as odd because, if you recall, Death is the narrator. Max writes about his fear of people standing over him and yet, the one standing over him truely, is Death. The story, therefore, makes a parallel between Liesel and Death. Interesting....I think so.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gayman

I could not put this book down. This was one of the most interesting and fun reads I have had in a long time. I thought the story was very original and I think this was one of the reasons I like the novel so much. It was refreshing to read a storyline that hasn't been beat to death by pen and paper. There was a line in the book where Silas says, "There are other unremembered gates." I immediately thought of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, one of the last lines, "at the unknown, remembered gate." It may or may not have anything to do with that, but I like to think that Neil Gayman knew his Eliot. If this is the case, then that line could be very important. Eliot, when he spoke of the remembered gate, spoke of it only being remembered at the end of all things (thus death). It would make sense that Silas would be aware of entrances and exits after death and Nobody is still oblivious. This line can be connected to the end of the novel, when Nobody is leaving the graveyard. He sees his life ahead of him being the ultimate journey. He wants to explore and eventually learn the deep secrets of the world, or maybe just the graveyard. So, I understand I'm pushing the boundaries alittle bit with the metaphors, but, hey, isn't that the joy of reading?

For Tai

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."



-Mark Twain

I started class (again) on Monday. I'm taking Young Adult Literature and for class, our teacher assigned everyone The Giver. It's a novel about a town that has evolved itself into a "utopia." The actually giver is a person in the town that holds all the memories that have ever existed. Sound familiar...? Anyone remember a certain man by the name of Socrates? He also believed that all memories live within us. However, I digress because this isn't what I want to write about...just yet. There was something else the teacher assigned. It was to look up Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory. I remember learning about Transactional Theory when I went to MSU. Basically it states that the value of a novel is in the reader, not in the text. If a book is never read then it doesn't contain value. Ergo, if a book is loved, even if it is the worst book in the world (cough, cough, Twilight)(yes Tai, I said Twilight) then it obviously has some kind of influence on its readers. Same scenario, different result; a book is written and it contains all of the world's answers, but nobody understands it (Finnegans Wake), this book, according to Rossenblatt, is worthless.

This is where I started thinking. And, just so everyone knows, this is what I'm thinking most of the time:

Anyways, I started thinking, "those bastards." Authors have been getting away with writing shit and selling it paperback because they know what the audience wants. The novel Moby Dick was hated, it was said to have had "bad English" when it was first written. Now it is one of the most important novels in the American cannon. I'm referencing Herman Melville because he is an example of an author who didn't write for the masses. Today, readers buy anything with fangs and boobs on the cover. Here's my example of a current novel's blurb:

"It wasn't exactly an ideal first day of college, Andrea had gotten lost on her walk to her first class. She tried a short cut, but found herself in a dark dank forest. Everywhere she looked there were golden cold eyes staring back at her. She thought it was her imagination, but when she started to run someone grabbed hard on her shoulder, swung her around, and bit into her neck. When she awoke she found herself in some sort of fantasy land where everyone was really really good looking. She came to find out that, even though they were evil, they were struggling to be good. Andrea, even with her better judgement, wanted to help the vampires on their quest for goodness. She chose the most attractive vampire and started a sexy, heated love affair. Even though he wanted to kill her, and he himself had been dead for hundreds of years, they found a way to live happily ever after. Then, she got her period......and she died."

I wouldn't be surprised if I just plagiarised a novel in the teen section of Barnes and Noble. If you're reading this and you don't agree with me that there is a lot of crap on the book shelves these days, I just wanted to say, don't hate the messenger, hate the author who convinced you their shitty book held anything valuable.

The Ocean

The Ocean



The ocean has its silent caves,



Deep quiet and alone,



Though there be fury on the waves,



Beneath them there is none,



The awful spirits of the deep



Hold their communion there,



And there are those for whom we weep,



The young, the bright, the fair.



Calmly the wearied seamen rest,



Beneath their own blue sea,



The ocean solitudes are blest,



For there is purity,



The Earth has guilt, the Earth has care,





Unquiet are its graves,



But peaceful sleep is ever there,



Beneath the dark blue waves.



By: Nathaniel Hawthorne







I came across this poem and it caught my interest. The ocean has always been seen as a mystery. There is a statistic that says less than 10% of the ocean has been explored and more than 90% of the ocean's inhabitants live in the unexplored areas. Sometimes I wonder why we strive to find other life forms on Mars when we have an entirely unknown world in our backyard.


Anywho, I enjoyed how Hawthorne described the ocean because it made me think of how and why the ocean is portrayed in literature. In most cases (the one's I remember) the ocean is seen as a vast question mark. It alludes to the grandeur of life. If we think of the novel, Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, we have a perfect example of a man's life consumed by the ocean. The story starts out with a man who lives in the Caribbean and after his depression sets in, he becomes a traveling sailor. He travels to different islands and coastal towns, but he continually talks of how he is called by the sea. Hawthorne's poem and Hemingway's novel are the same story in two different forms of writing. Hemingway's character lived on the sea. It comforted him in a way human compatibility could not. Hawthorne describes the ocean as peaceful, a sort of serene that cannot be found on earth. Land, because it's inhabited, holds all the chaos that humans create. The ocean, because it's mostly untouched, stays innocent. Heminway's character felt the purity and peacefulness that Hawthorne describes.


His characters depression drove him to look for comfort in the most alien object possible. What Hemingway realizes is that the ocean has no care for the depressed. I believe that, although the ocean's cold personality doesn't seem like a shocker, I think it should. Besides Islands in the Sea there is so much literature written where characters are depressed standing next to the sea. It's so predominant, but I've never asked myself why. I believe that the feeling of unimportance we get while looking out onto the ocean is linked with the mystical quality of the ocean. It's that unknown, unintelligent, small feeling that humans have. We go through life only thinking of our needs, and being beside something so big, we can't help to feel very insignificant in the scheme of things.

The reason that people like Hawthorne find the ocean to be a symbol of everything good is that, besides the feeling of insignificance, it lets us know that there is so much more. The ocean is a metaphor for unobtainable knowledge, the idea of believing because we are forced to.

The angel, Appollyon

XXVII.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.
-Robert Browning

I saw this stanza from Robert Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came and immediately thought of the bird in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. This didn't strike me as too odd. In literature birds are seen as guides, usually to other worlds. Here the character Roland is taken from a dismal land he calls brut to the end of the quest, the dark tower. He sees no end to his journey until he looks at the bird and then, all of the sudden, the tower is right in front of him. The bird acts as Roland's guide to the tower, a tower he has searched for his whole life. I would like to think that the bird was necessary because the tower lives in a world of its own, a world in which human beings can't get to. It is also noted that the bird is black. We can assume, as the reader, that he is describing a raven (perhaps). This assumption takes us to another metaphor. Ravens usually represent death.

Browning mentions in the fourth line the angel Apollyon. Apollyon in the Bible is named to be a destroyer. Browning compares all things leading to the tower as destroyers or destroyed themselves. These descriptors all lead up to what the tower actually represents, death. Because the tower itself is dead and destroyed, why would anything flock to it that isn't also holding the same fate? It's interesting to ask this question, it shows you that Roland himself is destroyed. He, like the bird, is "Apollyon's bosom-friend." This thought leads us to understand why Roland has now found the tower, right in front of him, after all these years. It could be that his destruction allowed him to enter the world of the tower.

The name Apollyon, can also be translated in Hebrew as Abaddon, which means the angel of the bottomless pit. If you replace the line in the poem to the Hebrew definition, it reads slightly different. Seeing the tower as a bottomless pit shows it as Hell. Roland travels his whole life just to end up in Hell.

While going over my notes, I also saw that Abaddon sounds a bit like the word abandon...Roland, abandoned? Just a thought.

The Tower

Well, here I am, out of school and finding the urge to blog. I had doubts that this day would come, but, alas, I feel like writing again. I figured I would continue to write in a similar fashion. Any future blogs will mainly be about my current readings, symbolism in those readings, and poems that strike my interest. (What can I say, I do love poetry.) So, the question is, what have I been reading? Since out of school, I have had the luxury of reading whatever I want. It's quite nice. I recently have been involved in a long series of novels by Steven King called The Dark Tower. Yes, for all you high-brow people out there, I am thoroughly enjoying a Steven King novel. This series includes 7 books total and is based off of a few epic tales. King reveals that, for this book, he has been influenced by the poem Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came and Tolken's Lord of the Rings.



I've decided, enough with the summary. Let's move on to the things that interest me. First and fore-most, the tower.



A tower is a very historical and complicated symbol in literature. You have the Christian outlook, where a tower is a fortress. It was a belief that a tower could be built to heaven. There is a belief that. if built high enough, it would put you closer to God.



There is a tower Tarot card. Its meaning is destruction and disruption, an ill omen, or a sudden change.





A tower is also used as a metaphor for an epiphany. It can be seen as a revelation or an eternal answer for its characters.





I have no doubt that King was well aware of the major symbols a tower holds, him and a long list of authors before him. I mentioned earlier his 2 major influences, they both hold the tower as a core symbol in their stories.


Facts:


-King uses the tower as an unattainable landmark, thus the Tower of Babylon.


-The tower has the ultimate power of destruction, it is the center piece that holds all worlds together and it's in danger of crumbling. Here is the Tarot Card.


-And, there is one instance where 3 of the characters receive a small glimpse of the tower and during this time they have a enormous revelation that they must continue their quest or all worlds will fall. This is one of the many instances the tower acts as an epiphany.





Well, I think this is enough for one day.