Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange parts 1-7

Karen Tei Yamashita

Several part of the first section make reference to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

I am not well versed in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as I should be, but I’m assuming that the character name “Gabriel” in this may be an homage to him — sort of a magical realism shout-out.

You know this was written in 1994 because everyone has pagers and Walkmans.

If you’re from Los Angeles, a lot of the references to heat and freeway-driven cultural wasteland seem sort of tired, since they’ve been going on a long time. I really think the brilliant low-budget farce Americathon said all that need be said way back in 1979.

The Tropic of Cancer as metaphor might signify the boundary between Eurocentric American culture and the culture of the so-called “global south”.

Manzanar is a pretty bizarre choice for a character name — I can’t imagine anyone would name their child Auschwitz or Guantanamo but it seems like those names would fall into the same category. Is this character intended to be a prison (or imprisoned)?

Rodolfo Gonzales, “I Am Joaquin”

Rodolfo Gonzales, “I Am Joaquin”

In “I Am Joaquin” Gonzales declares that he, as a representative of the Chicano experience, has been “trapped” and manipulated by American society, which forces him to make a choice between his culture and “a full stomach”. He goes on to identify himself with the meso-American and Mexican civilizations of the past, chronicling the Mexican struggle for independence against the succession of colonial powers who have oppressed his people.

He says “my culture has been raped” and goes on to cite a number of cultural contributions that were ignored or suppressed, including “mariachi music” which (like American jazz) is not indigenous at all but more fusion of indigenous songs with European orchestration (contributed from the brief German colonial period in Mexico).

The importance he places on history and indigenous culture becomes clear toward the end of the piece when he puts forth a call to action: “The music of the people stirs the/Revolution/Like a sleeping giant it slowly/Rears its head/To the sound of/Tramping feed/Clamoring voices/Mariachi strains”.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (to p. 114)

Toni Morrison

My first impression upon reading this was that this is a superstitious family; they are in denial about their past. There’s a chicken/egg question about the superstitious behavior and the suppression of memory; is it the case that in the absence of facts superstition takes over, or vice versa?

The residents of the house assign human qualities (spitefulness, “outrageous behavior”) to it, almost conflating the house and the ghost.

She faults Baby Suggs for intentionally pushing the memory of her eight children aside, but by believing that the ghost of a baby haunts the house (and has driven away her boys), it seems like she’s engaged in a form of denial as well.

We begin to discover that in the author’s diagesis (bam!), the ghosts and the feeling of “hauntedness” are intended to be real (the first evidence of this is when Paul D comes into the house for the first time and feels something strange about it). Later when the 20-year-old Beloved is discovered and brought back to the house, Denver begins to suspect that she is a spirit and not a real person. Beloved speaks in sibilant fragments; her body is described as soft, like a baby’s, and her clothing is black, perhaps funerary, and she has no knowledge of the outside world or a past life before she was discovered by the tree stump.

She does, however, feel like she has a purpose; she tells Denver she’s there for Sethe, and in being there seems to bring forth memories of Sethe’s previous life as a slave (such as the hanging of her mother, which Sethe had previously suppressed).

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo

“Call It Fear”

The language in this is pretty oblique but it seems to deal with the author’s sense of fear of the unknown. She refers to it symbolically, referring to the fear as “this edge” and using images of darkness and death to characterize it. She (again symbolically) juxtaposes this with the symbolic image of “a string of shadow horses” that act upon her in a transformative way, “pulling [her] out of [her] belly”.

“White Bear”

The piece begins with the image of a woman about to board a plane; she pauses before boarding, which initiates a pensive tone. “She has felt like a woman/balancing on a wooden nickle [sic] heart”. The wooden nickel is a false token that stands in place of a real nickel, made of wood instead of a more permanent metal, so maybe we can infer that there is some falseness or ephemeralness in her feelings. She goes on to describe an image of a white bear which has “the whole world balanced in/between carved of ebony and ice”. This contrasts the reference to balance in the poem’s first stanza; it may be that this is a fantasy imagined by someone who is at a transitional and seemingly angst-ridden point in her life and is fantasizing about the power of the white bear as a way of looking hopefully toward the future.

“Summer Night”

This piece depicts someone is at home on a hot summer evening waiting for someone else to arrive. From the emotional symbolism we can assume that this person is a mate or lover; the speaker describes “an ache” and burning. The line breaks reinforce the notion that something’s missing in the picture.

“The Flood”

In this piece Harjo is appropriating a Native American myth (the “watermonster”). But rather than destroying her as the myth portends, she points to its transformative possibilities, seeing in the watermonster’s lake “the girl I could have been at sixteen,” and later “the wife of the watermonster”.

The prose form conveys the sense that this is a tale (or an updating of the traditional myth) rather than a poem.

The lake seems to be symbolicaly equated with the myth in the poem’s final stanzas (“The watersnake was a story no one told anymore. They’d entered a drought that no one recognized as drought”). This points to the importance of perpetuating and honoring one’s culture (equating it to life-giving water).

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
“Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake” is a most excellent simile. To me the notion of “moldering” cake brought to mind the wacky tradition of putting the last slice of wedding cake in the refrigerator so the married couple can eat it on their first wedding anniversary, a practice that I’m sure has caused the deaths from botulism of more than a few married couples.

“She shaves her legs until they gleam/Like petrified mammoth-tusk” is another spectacular simile; I don’t typically think of fossils as gleaming so clearly there’s some irony, delicious irony, at work here.

Just for yucks I tried to read “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience” but found myself unable to get past the part where she asserts that a father has no “innate orientation” toward caring for their young. Clearly this woman has never seen my one-handed diaper-changing technique; there is no way to argue that that is anything but an innate behavior.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

“We Real Cool”

This brief poem depicts some high-school dropouts at a pool hall. The line breaks (following the word “We”) project a pensive quality, indicating that the people depicted in the poem are questioning or seeking their identity. The last line (“Die soon”) leaves no question as to the writer’s attitude toward the people she’s describing.

“The Bean Eaters” (text)

This piece is a tableau of an elderly couple eating beans for dinner. The pair seem to live in poverty (eating beans, rented room); they don’t seem to have much but their memories. The tone of the piece is fairly neutral (although she does describe the couple as “Mostly Good,” using capital letters as emphasis).

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (text)

The opening stanza of this piece describes its own story as “like a/Ballad” but soon reverses that, spelling out a series of cliched characters (the “Dark Villain”, the “maid mild”, the “Fine Prince”) who turn out to be ironic versions of their traditional roles. The “villain” is dark because of the color of his skin, not because he’s evil (in fact, he turns out to be a teenage boy).

By the end of the piece, the “milk-white maid” begins to question her culpability in the crimes committed by the prince. She is sickened by him and realizes that she no longer loves him, but can’t being herself to leave him: “She wanted to bear it./But his mouth would not go away and neither would the/Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman’s eyes”.

Speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream

This is an iconic speech, one that I’d heard in full a bunch of times (I sometimes use this text as filler when I’m designing software — much more fun than using something bland and neutral like lorum ipsum). The thing that always strikes me most about this speech is the fact that he gives it in an emotional style but the argument is very logical and reasoned — Black people are only after the rights guaranteed to them in the constitution, nothing more. They’re only after their due as Americans; they want to cash the “promissary note” written to them by our forefathers.

Malcolm X: Address to the OAAU Founding Rally

I’d heard this speech recently as well (we just got around to watching the movie Malcolm X in the last year or so). It’s a little tricky to compare this speech to the King speech since the exigence and audience is a quite different, but there are definitely points of style and substance that make for interesting comparisons. Malcolm’s speech is obviously far more confrontational; he refers to “us” and “them” several times. I thought the audience’s reaction was interesting when he touched on the notion of militancy during the talk — the first time he referred to “raising an army” it almost sounded like a few people in the audience were laughing (the notion is pretty audacious). But upon subsequent mentions of armed struggle and self-defense, the audience pauses, then cheers. I can only hope that when my moment to incite a crowd into armed struggle, I will be as eloquent and as persuasive.

It’s interesting to think of the two men as different poles of a dichotomy; to me it makes more sense to think of them as having the same goals but using different strategies. If “war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means” (Clausewitz) then you can look at Malcolm as the soldier (or general) and MLK as the diplomat. Nations require both generals and diplomats to achieve their goals, something that the current president would have done well to remember.

Pynchon, Lot 49, Ch. 6

Oedipa calls on Emory Bortz and his wife, Grace, greets her. The Bortz children are hellions, throwing beer bottles at each other; Grace asks Oedipa if she has any children, because she carries herself with “a certain harassed style”. This aura of harassment comes as a result of what she’s been through int he story to this point. We don’t really find out why the Maases don’t have children; could it be the case that her manic pursuit of the Tristero conspiracy is a sort of sublimated motherhood? (This is confirmed when Pynchon later says “your gynecologist has not test for what she’s pregnant with.” (144)

Oedipa goes on to discover a long history of the Tristero which Pynchon inexplicably recounts. This, like the discussion of the perpetual motion machine in chapter 5, is difficult to penetrate and doesn’t seem to have a direct connection to what’s going on in the plot. This may be another attempt by Pynchon to put the reader in Oedipa’s shoes by bombarding him with informration, although that might reading might be either too charitable or too convenient.

One interesting tidbit from this history is that the Tristero postal monopoly was sponsored by the governments of Europe and because of various rivalries inside and outside the organization, had their governmental patronage withdrawn. The organization falls upon hard times, “now reduced to handling anarchist correspondence” (142). This notion of pushing the organization to the margins is sort of like saying “when guns are outlawed, only criminals will carry guns.”

Pynchon, Lot 49, Ch. 5

(83) Oedipa mission to get to the bottom of the mystery leads her to the Cal campus where she feels out of place: “attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take.” Yep, that pretty much covers it. Her crossing into “another world” represented by the university has an almost sensual appeal for her; you get the sense that she’s being completely seduced by this.

The theme of the perpetual-motion theme seems sort of bogus to me and I had trouble figuring out how this theme is supposed to relate to the overall story. The (pseudo-)science is complete hooey (it is prediacated on the notion that people can psychically communicate with oxygen), so it seems we’re expected have to interpret it metaphorically?

Oedipa finds her way to San Francisco and is cornered in a bar by a man who is a member of Inamorati Anonymous, who tells the story of how that organization was founded — a Yoyodyne executive on the verge of suicide after having lost his job and his wife aborts the act at the last minute after seeing the muted post horn, thinking it must be a sign. This suggests that the symbol, like Oedipa’s quest for knowledge, is a fetish object for the desperate. He immediately uses the symbol to arrive at a wholly unrelated conclusion (that is downfall was love).

(p. 96) “In an all-night Mexican greasy spoon off 24th…” This could be evidence that the whole book is a hallucination because as everyone knows you can’t get table service anywhere in the Mission after 10pm.

After traversing San Francisco and seeing an incongruous mix of images and strange people, Pynchon revisits the notion of this story as a sort of anti-detective novel, noting that at some point in the story “the private eye sooner or later has to get beat up on”. But in this case Oedipa is not being beat up by the bad guys; she being beat up by information.

The tenor and tone of some of the San Francisco scenes sound a lot like “Howl”: “She gave him goodbye, walked downstairs and then on, in the direction she’d told her. For an hour she prowled among the sunless, concrete underpinnings of the freeway, finding drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers, walking psychotic, no secret mailbox.” (105) — this is just before she discovers the WASTE mailbox.

Pynchon, Lot 49, Ch. 4

The chapter opens with Oedipa descending into the Tristero conspiracy, “until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.” This is probably the strongest confirmation yet that much if not most of the aspects of the conspiracy are a function of Oedipa’s psychology — she may be imagining the whole thing, or she may be making more out of a series of disconnected facts or coincidences.

During her self-guided tour of Yoyodyne, Oedipa encounters Stanley Koteks, who encourages her as a stockholder to get the company to rescind its policies against permitting its engineers to patent their inventions. She reacts by saying “I didn’t think people invented any more.” This is an interesting facet to one of the novel’s theme of knowability/unknowability — in the modern era, the notion of invention seems entirely ceded to corporate teams and for a variety of reasons individual inventors such as Leonardo di Vinci and Edison are no longer in evidence. Of course the notion that no one invents anything is absurd, but the notion of the everywoman being disconnected from the source of new knowledge (and the control of that knowledge) is a central element of the story.