Howie fixates on a lot of little details. That's what makes Howie Howie. From the modernist design of staplers to the inefficiencies of air dryers in bathrooms, no object or task is too small for lengthy discourse. Yet there is something seemingly large and important that is almost completely ignored by our observant protagonist of The Mezzanine: the names of people. It would seem appropriate to discuss names in The Mezzanine, after all, a few letters are often all that represent us on the written page, people judge us for what our name is and how we spell it. Names have deep roots in culture, reflecting a family history as well as contemporary culture. It's no coincidence that generations will often have a lot of...Johns or Alices or Stephens...names are shown to go in trends, the more people hear about a name becoming popular the more they use it or a variant. So why is it that Howie doesn't discuss names, and goes so far as to almost completely ignore them?
Let's take the case of his own name. Howie, the diminutive form of Howard, is a pretty average name, at least in my own head it doesn't evoke any strong images, if anything the only thing that stands out is how unremarkable it is, neither common nor rare, not specifically from any given culture or time period. Perhaps Howie doesn't mention his name because it is just that--his name, since it's his story he doesn't need to remind himself of his main character. I normally don't think of myself in the third person, and if this were a stream of consciousness style book I would have no quibble with only seeing his name once (in the bathroom of all places). Looking at a different example of a book with a similarly styled first person narration from a somewhat removed version of the narrator who is authoring the story, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield manages to slip his name into the narrative often. Granted, Holden is more specifically writing to the reader, though Howie clearly talks to us through his footnotes (something Salinger chose never to deploy). Think about how many times in conversation (either in real time or revisiting in your memory) someone says your name. Maybe not as much as "you" but my bet is that it comes up every now and then, enough that if you were to write to the detail that Howie did, it would probably be included many times. This would lend to the idea that Howie is intentionally editing out his name in his depiction of his lunch hour.
The other person's name that stands out to me would be L. In class people brought up that we never really get a description of L., what she looks like, who she is, what she does, we see only fleeting glimpses of her in relation to one of Howie's observatory stories. Forgive me for going to a different novel for comparison, but I immediately saw the connection to E.C. of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that, she is the romantic interest of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus. E.C. who the reader later finds out is named Emma, has minimal contact with Stephen, with little more actually taking place between the two of them than glances during different scenes. Emma is one of the key pieces that Stephen fails at during his maturation that ultimately drives him from his native shores of Ireland to seek a new country to achieve his potential. We don't quite see the same thing from Howie and L., they seem to be in a long term relationship. Though she is a seemingly large part of his life, perhaps Howie's reluctance to name L. derives from her importance in his mind that ultimately does not fully fit with her place in reality.
So now I will finally attempt an answer to my question initially posed above. I suggest that it is in response to Aurelius that Howie chooses to ignore names. "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spices and ashes." If we do not live meaningful lives as Aurelius argues, then what in death are we remembered by if not our actions and mannerisms? Our names. For millenia humans have carved the names of the dead onto rocks so that if nothing else, that singular description will survive. Is there any way Howie could have refuted Aurelius more, then by focusing on all the trivialness of mortal life, while ignoring the one thing of relative permanence?
Monday, August 26, 2013
Here Lies
Here lies the end of my coming of age, and the beginning of my journey in the 20th century.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
The Coming of a Writer
I figure since all the seniors seem to be reflecting on their time in individual classes and at Uni as a whole that I can spend one blog post reflecting. Of course I'm not leaving this school, but it is the end of the year after all. For all the books that I've read this year in AA Lit and now Coming of Age, the amount of allusions, allegories, social commentary, and a whole host of other literary elements found in the books we've read has been amazing. Last semester I remember wondering if Ralph Ellison intended everything that we (and professional literary critics) were able to see in his words. Surely, I thought to myself, it would be impossible for Ellison to finish a novel of Invisible Man's complexity and intentionally add in all that he did.
This curiosity of mine was reinvigorated when I began writing the semester project. There was so much I wanted to say, I wanted to continue the story lines of Holden and Jane, have Julia meet new people, make social commentary, all while trying to make a just plain interesting story at the surface level. In the end, my semester project turned into a long, roughly thirty page short story that really did hit almost everything I wanted to cover. At times though, I sacrificed brevity to make sure everything was fleshed out. Sure, it made the paper more accessible to an average reader who hadn't read the books it was based on, nor was versed in reading between the lines, but did that make it better or worse? Is it the author's responsibility to make it possible for nearly any reader to understand their work, or as the author is it okay to make the reader work for it a little bit?
In the end, I realize that maybe it isn't always best to spell everything out so much. That may be where the genius of someone like Ralph Ellison lies, he puts in just enough that an astute reader (or group of readers) can get an inkling as to his point, and from there notice it recurring and being supported later in the novel. James Joyce didn't write Portrait with all the notes that we had the benefit of in the back of the book. That was a publishing decision, and one which I imagine he wouldn't have chosen. Those notes certainly made the already complicated novel more understandable for modern readers, and in turn more popular (because an average reader doesn't like books it doesn't understand). That is what a publisher's job is then: to sell the most books possible.
That was Salinger's greatest success, maintaining control over the physical book, not just the story. He's famous for not including a picture of himself in his bio, not allowing the cover of the book to be fancy, and to control all the information from cover to cover. Take that in comparison to another book from a few years earlier in The Great Gatsby. That book is known for it's cover, with the faceless eyes and lips, and the stylized version of the New York skyline. Fitzgerald was even quoted as saying once that the cover art came first (without the artist having read the manuscript) and he, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then incorporated images into the book that could be related to the cover.
Of course my "Re-Illusion off Oxford" will never be a world famous work. There won't be movie deals or famous cover art, but I can still, in some small sense, relate to the struggles of authors to maintain ownership over their own work. In my case I fought with myself, over giving my work a more accessible level of detail, or keeping it more below the surface in an elusive attempt to create art. The reader friendly version won out, though even the struggle between the two roads diverging was important for me, both as a writer, and as a reader relating to the authors I've begun reading more and more.
This curiosity of mine was reinvigorated when I began writing the semester project. There was so much I wanted to say, I wanted to continue the story lines of Holden and Jane, have Julia meet new people, make social commentary, all while trying to make a just plain interesting story at the surface level. In the end, my semester project turned into a long, roughly thirty page short story that really did hit almost everything I wanted to cover. At times though, I sacrificed brevity to make sure everything was fleshed out. Sure, it made the paper more accessible to an average reader who hadn't read the books it was based on, nor was versed in reading between the lines, but did that make it better or worse? Is it the author's responsibility to make it possible for nearly any reader to understand their work, or as the author is it okay to make the reader work for it a little bit?
In the end, I realize that maybe it isn't always best to spell everything out so much. That may be where the genius of someone like Ralph Ellison lies, he puts in just enough that an astute reader (or group of readers) can get an inkling as to his point, and from there notice it recurring and being supported later in the novel. James Joyce didn't write Portrait with all the notes that we had the benefit of in the back of the book. That was a publishing decision, and one which I imagine he wouldn't have chosen. Those notes certainly made the already complicated novel more understandable for modern readers, and in turn more popular (because an average reader doesn't like books it doesn't understand). That is what a publisher's job is then: to sell the most books possible.
That was Salinger's greatest success, maintaining control over the physical book, not just the story. He's famous for not including a picture of himself in his bio, not allowing the cover of the book to be fancy, and to control all the information from cover to cover. Take that in comparison to another book from a few years earlier in The Great Gatsby. That book is known for it's cover, with the faceless eyes and lips, and the stylized version of the New York skyline. Fitzgerald was even quoted as saying once that the cover art came first (without the artist having read the manuscript) and he, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then incorporated images into the book that could be related to the cover.
Of course my "Re-Illusion off Oxford" will never be a world famous work. There won't be movie deals or famous cover art, but I can still, in some small sense, relate to the struggles of authors to maintain ownership over their own work. In my case I fought with myself, over giving my work a more accessible level of detail, or keeping it more below the surface in an elusive attempt to create art. The reader friendly version won out, though even the struggle between the two roads diverging was important for me, both as a writer, and as a reader relating to the authors I've begun reading more and more.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Do we need it to be fresher?
When I read over Mr. Mitchell's blog post the other day about the teacher who found that Black Swan Green was more relatable to her students than Catcher in the Rye, I was somewhat surprised, though not entirely. I wrote earlier about how coming into Catcher I didn't like that everyone told me it was the book that would change my life. When I would tell assorted family members at different Hanukah parties during winter break that I was taking a class on coming of age novels, with few exceptions everyone would ask, "Are you going to read Catcher in the Rye? You just have too." I was then often treated to their personal take on the book, its role in their life and their guess as to how it may change my life. Like Mr. Mitchell said in his post, discovering a book (or telling yourself you've discovered it) can make a book really appealing. I would never get a book that's sitting at the front table of Barnes and Noble, with posters and flyers advertising it, I like to go and find books that I've never heard of. Catcher was certainly not that kind of experience.
I did enjoy the book in large part because I related to Holden though. Maybe because I thought his struggle to remain a childlike teenager in a society that told him that as a rich white man he should relish in his ascension to the pinnacle of 1950s American society mirrored my similar struggle with going to a school and having friends college plans are a given so the focus is on career outlook and things of that nature. Though he was from a different time, and many of the images a contemporary of Holden's would understand I didn't, translating from that time to this time wasn't that much of a stretch. The things expected of you, the phoniness of some of the people around you, those things haven't really changed. It's not to say that the students in Roake's article live in some alternate universe where the aforementioned behavior doesn't exist, or that somehow they aren't astute enough to be able to translate Holden into something more relatable to them, maybe the complex voice of Stephen Dedalus made Holden's more real-world oriented banter seem much closer to current life.
That isn't to say that I couldn't relate to Jason Taylor because I related to Holden, his many struggles were very familiar, either things that I went through or saw others have to overcome. It was nice to start reading Black Swan Green and have no one who saw me read it know what it was about. It was nice to feel that feeling (though probably untrue) that I was connecting something from the text that hadn't been though of before. It was a similar feeling to when I read White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty last semester. It's also relatively new, by a largely unnoticed author in the prose world (though Beatty is a known poet).
Jessica Roake's point in her Slate article, that English departments should replace Catcher with Black Swan Green, on the surface I suppose makes sense, if you can only do one coming of age novel you might as well go with the more modern one. But it doesn't seem right to just swap out one book for another to fill the spot deemed "young boy coming of age and struggling with his society." I really didn't like on the back of Black Swan Green's cover when it had a quote reading that it was Britain's Catcher in the Rye. I believe that there are elements that Mitchell probably picked up from Salinger, and traits of Jason that may trace back to Holden, but with a new book to say that it is only a translated version of an old classic seems sacrilegious for a literary critic and an author. No one would ever say that Don Quixote is a Spanish version of Canterbury Tales (perhaps because the plots are distinctly different), but both these novels serve the same purpose as the beginning of each nation's literary tradition. Both Catcher and Black Swan Green say that being independent is okay, that you don't have to follow every whim of the society around you, so why would anyone who likes these two books, let alone wrote them or about them define them in terms of each other. In the end I think each book stands on its own as an important member of the larger coming of age genre, and while I disagree with Roake's position that Black Swan Green is the new Catcher in the Rye, I don't envy her for having to make the decision between a classic in the genre and what may well be a future classic.
I did enjoy the book in large part because I related to Holden though. Maybe because I thought his struggle to remain a childlike teenager in a society that told him that as a rich white man he should relish in his ascension to the pinnacle of 1950s American society mirrored my similar struggle with going to a school and having friends college plans are a given so the focus is on career outlook and things of that nature. Though he was from a different time, and many of the images a contemporary of Holden's would understand I didn't, translating from that time to this time wasn't that much of a stretch. The things expected of you, the phoniness of some of the people around you, those things haven't really changed. It's not to say that the students in Roake's article live in some alternate universe where the aforementioned behavior doesn't exist, or that somehow they aren't astute enough to be able to translate Holden into something more relatable to them, maybe the complex voice of Stephen Dedalus made Holden's more real-world oriented banter seem much closer to current life.
That isn't to say that I couldn't relate to Jason Taylor because I related to Holden, his many struggles were very familiar, either things that I went through or saw others have to overcome. It was nice to start reading Black Swan Green and have no one who saw me read it know what it was about. It was nice to feel that feeling (though probably untrue) that I was connecting something from the text that hadn't been though of before. It was a similar feeling to when I read White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty last semester. It's also relatively new, by a largely unnoticed author in the prose world (though Beatty is a known poet).
Jessica Roake's point in her Slate article, that English departments should replace Catcher with Black Swan Green, on the surface I suppose makes sense, if you can only do one coming of age novel you might as well go with the more modern one. But it doesn't seem right to just swap out one book for another to fill the spot deemed "young boy coming of age and struggling with his society." I really didn't like on the back of Black Swan Green's cover when it had a quote reading that it was Britain's Catcher in the Rye. I believe that there are elements that Mitchell probably picked up from Salinger, and traits of Jason that may trace back to Holden, but with a new book to say that it is only a translated version of an old classic seems sacrilegious for a literary critic and an author. No one would ever say that Don Quixote is a Spanish version of Canterbury Tales (perhaps because the plots are distinctly different), but both these novels serve the same purpose as the beginning of each nation's literary tradition. Both Catcher and Black Swan Green say that being independent is okay, that you don't have to follow every whim of the society around you, so why would anyone who likes these two books, let alone wrote them or about them define them in terms of each other. In the end I think each book stands on its own as an important member of the larger coming of age genre, and while I disagree with Roake's position that Black Swan Green is the new Catcher in the Rye, I don't envy her for having to make the decision between a classic in the genre and what may well be a future classic.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
My Sag Harbor
When I began reading Benji's account of life at Sag Harbor, and then heard Mr. Mitchell's personal experience growing up on the Jersey Shore, I found a lot of similarities and interesting contrasts with the beach I like to call my own. My beach is Marco Island, Florida. It used to be this really small fishing village about an hour south of Fort Myers but now it has become a grossly overcrowded tourist spot. Ever since my dad was born my grandparents have been going down there during December. A guy who my grandpa met through his advertising work in the 60s had a place down in Marco and would invite them down to stay with them. Verlin, the guy who my grandpa knew moved into real estate, and soon the properties that Verlin would rent throughout the year became the houses my grandparents would stay in during their time there. Years later I came into the picture, but sadly the all day fishing trips with good old Dennis and the morning bait fish expeditions off Verlin's dock were over. Verlin had died, and my grandparents were too old to be out on the water all day.
As I began to get older, my uncle and I became a lot closer because he still wanted to fish all day and no one else besides him and I did, so we have had many adventures over the years. There was the time we were fishing off the narrow sea wall at the farthest tip of the island and I jumped down onto the rocks to try and grab the black drum (that's a species of fish) that had gotten off my line in the rocks but couldn't get back into the water. We only realized as we were walking back--sans fish--that I was bleeding all over the place from a gash in my thigh. There was the time the stingray was going through the water right next to us as we were walking to Hideaway Beach near low tide. When it was time to fillet the fish, I would dutifully stand next to him and throw all the pieces of the carcass to the swarm of pelicans around our dock, and then a few years ago he taught me how to fillet, and allowed me to butcher my first few dozen fillets until I could finally get a full one without any bones.
That point where I dove in after the fish has now been blocked off by the condo association above it. Hideaway Beach has become even more difficult to get to as the mega-mansions built along its edge have continued to encroach, breaking mariner law and trying to privatize land below the high tide line (which we dutifully ignore and walk through anyway). The boat that we've fished from my entire life, the Little Brat is starting to show its age, and the dock is slowly come apart. The invading tourists have taken their toll too, normal public beaches are practically not fishable now, and the good fishing spots are being over fished to the point of nonexistence. Manatees and dolphins, previously normal sights out on the water, have become scarcer in response to the increased boat traffic and decreased food.
Even though I'm not a townie, I only go down for a week or ten days every year, I still feel like a true member of Marco Island kind of like Benji. I know the best restaurant in town (Snook Inn) that literally has charter captains come to the dock the restaurant owns and throw in fresh fish. The chefs even go so far as to cook anything an unknown customer brings in. Sue's Garden is the go to place to get carry out on Christmas Eve and Christmas day when everything else is closed. Walker's Coon Key Marina has the best live shrimp in the area though Calussa has the cheaper bait and gas. If you have the time Cape Romano is always a guaranteed success in the fishing department, Coon Key is a bit of a gamble but the trout and whiting available make it worth the risk.
For me the "going out" issues that Benji presents is the questions my uncle and I always ask each other at Thanksgiving-What's the weather look like for December, and more importantly what's the water temperature like? Have any hurricanes blown through and hit Marco? Are there any red tide warning or beach re-nourishment projects? When we get there the first day is always spent sorting out the rods, checking which parts we need to replace, and what fishing spots are gone and which news ones have popped up.
My experience year to year in Marco defines me. I know when I've gotten stronger because pulling in the anchor is easier, or when I've gotten taller after noticing that I can see more over the console at the helm than I could the year before. Coming of age for me in that part of my life was when my uncle got me my own fillet knife, the same type my grandpa bought him forty years ago. In Marco I'm more in tune with nature, and I'm more confidant in my physical skills, whether it be navigating through the maze of identical mangroves, or sensing a storm when the water gets cloudier and the current starts running. Marco is where I feel most alive, and my countdown towards when we will go there usually starts in July, also about the time I start checking hurricane forecasts and praying that they will miss Marco and instead push the fish from out in the gulf more towards the west coast of Florida. Marco runs within my family, and no flock of tourists or greedy homeowner can ever take away my Sag Harbor, because Marco will always be my home.
As I began to get older, my uncle and I became a lot closer because he still wanted to fish all day and no one else besides him and I did, so we have had many adventures over the years. There was the time we were fishing off the narrow sea wall at the farthest tip of the island and I jumped down onto the rocks to try and grab the black drum (that's a species of fish) that had gotten off my line in the rocks but couldn't get back into the water. We only realized as we were walking back--sans fish--that I was bleeding all over the place from a gash in my thigh. There was the time the stingray was going through the water right next to us as we were walking to Hideaway Beach near low tide. When it was time to fillet the fish, I would dutifully stand next to him and throw all the pieces of the carcass to the swarm of pelicans around our dock, and then a few years ago he taught me how to fillet, and allowed me to butcher my first few dozen fillets until I could finally get a full one without any bones.
That point where I dove in after the fish has now been blocked off by the condo association above it. Hideaway Beach has become even more difficult to get to as the mega-mansions built along its edge have continued to encroach, breaking mariner law and trying to privatize land below the high tide line (which we dutifully ignore and walk through anyway). The boat that we've fished from my entire life, the Little Brat is starting to show its age, and the dock is slowly come apart. The invading tourists have taken their toll too, normal public beaches are practically not fishable now, and the good fishing spots are being over fished to the point of nonexistence. Manatees and dolphins, previously normal sights out on the water, have become scarcer in response to the increased boat traffic and decreased food.
Even though I'm not a townie, I only go down for a week or ten days every year, I still feel like a true member of Marco Island kind of like Benji. I know the best restaurant in town (Snook Inn) that literally has charter captains come to the dock the restaurant owns and throw in fresh fish. The chefs even go so far as to cook anything an unknown customer brings in. Sue's Garden is the go to place to get carry out on Christmas Eve and Christmas day when everything else is closed. Walker's Coon Key Marina has the best live shrimp in the area though Calussa has the cheaper bait and gas. If you have the time Cape Romano is always a guaranteed success in the fishing department, Coon Key is a bit of a gamble but the trout and whiting available make it worth the risk.
For me the "going out" issues that Benji presents is the questions my uncle and I always ask each other at Thanksgiving-What's the weather look like for December, and more importantly what's the water temperature like? Have any hurricanes blown through and hit Marco? Are there any red tide warning or beach re-nourishment projects? When we get there the first day is always spent sorting out the rods, checking which parts we need to replace, and what fishing spots are gone and which news ones have popped up.
My experience year to year in Marco defines me. I know when I've gotten stronger because pulling in the anchor is easier, or when I've gotten taller after noticing that I can see more over the console at the helm than I could the year before. Coming of age for me in that part of my life was when my uncle got me my own fillet knife, the same type my grandpa bought him forty years ago. In Marco I'm more in tune with nature, and I'm more confidant in my physical skills, whether it be navigating through the maze of identical mangroves, or sensing a storm when the water gets cloudier and the current starts running. Marco is where I feel most alive, and my countdown towards when we will go there usually starts in July, also about the time I start checking hurricane forecasts and praying that they will miss Marco and instead push the fish from out in the gulf more towards the west coast of Florida. Marco runs within my family, and no flock of tourists or greedy homeowner can ever take away my Sag Harbor, because Marco will always be my home.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Big Bad Michael
Today near the end of class Mr. Mitchell asked us if we like Michael Taylor. My first instinct was to say no, almost that he is a character created for us not to like. Reading the "Souvenirs" chapter my opinion of him was compounded by his behavior. Up to that chapter he had always seemed to me to be an arrogant, self centered man. I didn't like his smugness when Moby gets taken by a crane, or his passive aggressive way of verbally fighting with everyone (mostly Helena and Brian) at dinner. I thought it was a character flaw that he couldn't at least hide his displeasure at Jason's stammer a little better, because after all it's not like Jason chooses to have it. I took his actions in "Souvenirs" to be a continuation of his poor character. He passed Jason along to his trainee Danny, didn't call Jason about being tied up with a seminar, and then made Jason apologize to Craig for getting elbowed in the face. I did think the scene with the kite was nice, but it seemed more like an outlier of his personality, that everyone has one of those days where they're exceptionally nice and attentive yet they go back to the same old curmudgeon the next day.
As I thought about Michael more after class though, I began to not really be angry or annoyed with Michael so much as feel sorry for him. He's a middle level person in every sense of his life, he's a middle manager at work, middle class socially, and of middle intelligence. I don't get the sense from Jason's description that he's very attractive (though I don't know how much any of us see would describe our parents as being attractive), he's clearly not funny, and his one talent is apparently identifying fossils. But I'm sure when he was a teenager he had dreams of being somebody, or changing world. Instead he's a manager at Greenland. He was probably picked on by the previous incarnations of Ross Wilcox and hoped to escape his tormentor once he was a professional. In a sense he did, I don't think Craig Salt would be described as a hard man like Ross is a hard kid, but Michael still has to quietly follow everything Craig says and does. Jason says that his dad wouldn't meet his eyes when he tells Jason to agree with Craig's incorrect identification of the fossil. He's clearly ashamed by the whole situation, though he probably finds more value in advancing up the food chain at Greenland than Jason's momentary respect.
Taken in this light, a lot of Michael's behavior can be explained. His weird rule about not going into his office which Jason breaks in the first chapter is clearly more about control than hiding anything in his office. At work he is only a mouthpiece for Craig, so to have people listen to his personal commands at home is a big deal. Pretty much all of the other stuff he does seems related to this thirst for some small level of control over his life. I think his issue in life is one many of us fear, or at least I do. I don't want to live my life as a middle man who passes on my boss' ideas to my subordinates without ever getting to use my ideas. Michael lives the life none of us want to live, so it's easier for us to overlook him with a simple judgement of his personality without bothering to look at why he is who is, because deep down we fear becoming him.
As I thought about Michael more after class though, I began to not really be angry or annoyed with Michael so much as feel sorry for him. He's a middle level person in every sense of his life, he's a middle manager at work, middle class socially, and of middle intelligence. I don't get the sense from Jason's description that he's very attractive (though I don't know how much any of us see would describe our parents as being attractive), he's clearly not funny, and his one talent is apparently identifying fossils. But I'm sure when he was a teenager he had dreams of being somebody, or changing world. Instead he's a manager at Greenland. He was probably picked on by the previous incarnations of Ross Wilcox and hoped to escape his tormentor once he was a professional. In a sense he did, I don't think Craig Salt would be described as a hard man like Ross is a hard kid, but Michael still has to quietly follow everything Craig says and does. Jason says that his dad wouldn't meet his eyes when he tells Jason to agree with Craig's incorrect identification of the fossil. He's clearly ashamed by the whole situation, though he probably finds more value in advancing up the food chain at Greenland than Jason's momentary respect.
Taken in this light, a lot of Michael's behavior can be explained. His weird rule about not going into his office which Jason breaks in the first chapter is clearly more about control than hiding anything in his office. At work he is only a mouthpiece for Craig, so to have people listen to his personal commands at home is a big deal. Pretty much all of the other stuff he does seems related to this thirst for some small level of control over his life. I think his issue in life is one many of us fear, or at least I do. I don't want to live my life as a middle man who passes on my boss' ideas to my subordinates without ever getting to use my ideas. Michael lives the life none of us want to live, so it's easier for us to overlook him with a simple judgement of his personality without bothering to look at why he is who is, because deep down we fear becoming him.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Destruction in the Rocks
In the "Rocks" chapter, Jason watches from the sidelines two wars over a pile of rocks, The Falklands War (between Great Britain and Argentina) and the rockery (between Helena and Michael). By the end of the chapter Jason reflects on how the result of neither war stirs up any joy for him. When I first read this over I believed that the death of Tom Yew and the open fighting between his parents essentially killed his childhood, marking the point where he changed from a naive boy to a more world weary young man. To some degree I think this is a proper characterization of how these events changed Jason: he goes from the boy keeping a scrapbook of the war and ranking his parents' fight by a number of stars, to writing the word "bloody" six times in one sentence.
On another level this chapter shows the death of Jason's future, or at least the one he seems to have been planning on. Ever since the first few pages of Chapter 1, Tom Yew had been the man Jason idealized, his proverbial lighthouse if you will. He says on page nine that Tom was a minor legend in Black Swan Green, and when he shares his opinion on anything everyone instantly changes theirs to match his. Jason's first understanding of love and sex is from Tom, albeit accidentally, when Jason's up in the tree watching Tom and Debbie have sex. Jason always imagines fighting for Britain, shooting down MIGs and refusing medals from Margaret Thatcher, and Tom serves in the Navy and is treated like a hero for it around town. Jason wants to be Tom Yew in a few years, the cool care free guy who can say anything he wants, both because people won't mock him and he doesn't have to worry about a stammer. When Tom dies the path Jason was wanting to follow abruptly vanishes, he almost becomes a moving ship without a rudder to keep the theme around sailing going. This lack of control against the social current is probably a lot of what pushes Jason towards the spooks. He wants something he can work towards, and he wants to find another Tom Yew, hoping he'll find it as a spook. The closest guy to Tom in the group would probably be Pluto Noak, but unlike with Tom, Jason seems to realize that Pluto charts a course just a little too far of f normal life routes.
On another level this chapter shows the death of Jason's future, or at least the one he seems to have been planning on. Ever since the first few pages of Chapter 1, Tom Yew had been the man Jason idealized, his proverbial lighthouse if you will. He says on page nine that Tom was a minor legend in Black Swan Green, and when he shares his opinion on anything everyone instantly changes theirs to match his. Jason's first understanding of love and sex is from Tom, albeit accidentally, when Jason's up in the tree watching Tom and Debbie have sex. Jason always imagines fighting for Britain, shooting down MIGs and refusing medals from Margaret Thatcher, and Tom serves in the Navy and is treated like a hero for it around town. Jason wants to be Tom Yew in a few years, the cool care free guy who can say anything he wants, both because people won't mock him and he doesn't have to worry about a stammer. When Tom dies the path Jason was wanting to follow abruptly vanishes, he almost becomes a moving ship without a rudder to keep the theme around sailing going. This lack of control against the social current is probably a lot of what pushes Jason towards the spooks. He wants something he can work towards, and he wants to find another Tom Yew, hoping he'll find it as a spook. The closest guy to Tom in the group would probably be Pluto Noak, but unlike with Tom, Jason seems to realize that Pluto charts a course just a little too far of f normal life routes.
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