Sula

I've read Toni Morrison's Beloved before, but Sula has a different quality to it. It has less terror and haunting and abuse or perhaps just has all of these qualities in a more subtle way. I found her introduction to her novel very insightful and assisted my interest in what was to come. I do think that the context of the inception of the work is as important as its contents. And the inception of this work is very conscious of its potential ignorant audience, the whites, who will not be approaching this work with the appropriate guards up if they have any at all. The "buffer zone" of the foreword manages to create this guard for them, to establish very clearly the misunderstanding of her communities activities, joy and general livelihood. The story itself is again conveniently encapsulated for those sensitive to or ignorant of the content shes is about to present by the presentation of this town as a historical fact and not something which any longer 'taints' the present. It could be suggested that this is a fact of her youth as an author at this point in her career, and consequently her anxiety about getting favorable reviews. The description of war by Shadluck is very similar to presentation of war in A Red Badge of Courage. The fact that we learn of his racial identity at the same time he rediscovers it in the toilet bowl, a place of filth and unwanted contents, is an interesting linguistic turn.

Gloria, Hallelujah!

Gloria Anzaldua is another fabulous insightful moving pained and productive writer that we've read this semester. I'll certainly be holding onto this one. Although the preface was very dense in sociological, socio-political and other academic concepts, I found it was very important information which helped me to approach the material she was presenting me with which was very far from my own bubble. As a third generation American, living comfortably off the successful mobility of those before me, with a past dominated by experiences in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts - I at first can't relate. But how about the fact that I've lived a life of crossing borders, of tireless and seemingly endless travel to over twenty countries? Isn't my desire to be somewhat settled, or at least to have roots, while not being nailed down, similar to her distress over not having a home or not being able to return to it or claim it? And although shes a lesbian and I'm a bisexual, we share the process of rejection and acceptance which comes as a result of that identity. What we don't share with in that regard, however, is perhaps a sense of community. Very early on I found others like me, I was affirmed and reaffirmed, whereas she had to affirm herself in the face of direct confrontation and perhaps or probably only recently in her academic world found "the community".
I feel very thankful that I studied Spanish for three years and even though failed horribly at it as a class because of being intimidated out of my ability to speak it I still enjoy listening to it, reading it out loud and speaking the little I do know in casual conversation. Tenses I know not at all, and my vocabulary is limited, so my translation is always rather poor, but there is something about the pronunciation of the language that lends itself to feeling being expressed. That is why I read her work aloud and reacted particularly strongly to words such as "authentic" which were expressed in regards to it.

Frank O'Hara

After reading the introduction to the Collected Poesm of Frank O'Hara, I was ready to thoroughly enjoy his work because of his "anti-literary and anti-artistic" as well as "unrevised" style which "ignored the rules" -- similar to the way I plunged into poetry in eighth grade. Although I know that we're perhaps supposed to be approaching our school work in a more objective frame of mind, I would be doing myself a disservice to approach another poets work without the question, "What can I learn from here?". However, I discovered it was very...distanced somehow, and I read it but wasn't 'moved'. I can't quite find what it was about his work that wasn't touching to me. Perhaps its because I've become too accustomed to my generations angsty angry frustrated underdeveloped poetry and my aesthetic taste for poetry hasn't been established. However, the poem 'Poem', dedicated to Gertrude Stein, had a flow that I found attractive. That flow, the way that it lends itself to you reading it silently the same way that you would read it aloud. Perhaps because its the most bodily poem we read of his. Perhaps because he used the word 'you'.

Giovanni's Room

I think this book is by far one of the best ones I have read since...perhaps ever. I may have been as excited about another book, say, Doris Lessing's Marriage of Zones Three, Four and Five or Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, but I haven't had the same experience that I've had with Giovanni's Room. Not only was the prose sharp and quick and observant, but it was also invasive.
Invasive.
Yeah, invasive. It got under my skin, and at some points that felt really nice, but there were certainly times when I had to put it down and walk as far away as I could. I am nothing like that character, and yet I still identified with him. During the second part, the sickness spread to my mind. I found myself reading eagerly, or perhaps hesitantly waiting to see just how hard things are going to fall, and at the same time thinking about things totally outside this book, questioning my life in the same way, at the same time. That means my brain was processing two different scenarios parallel to one another. It was a bewildering experience.
Perhaps it also helped that for no particular reason whatsoever, I happened to have skimmed my Strunk & White's Elements of Style: illustrated this morning and had a sense of E.B.White's fanaticism for unwasted words. I remember thinking that it's a lot easier to not waste words when you are free to write as much or as little as you want, but college students don't have that leisure. Baldwin adheres to this rule, intentionally or not, and does so brilliantly.

Revisiting Gertrude Stein

Upon reviewing the expanse of work that our class has covered in the last seven weeks for the midterm, I decided to give Gertrude Stein another chance. This time I kept in mind what one classmate mentioned about reading her aloud and did so. I found myself closing my eyes and paying close attention to the movements of my teeth and tongue and lips, as if my eyes had sunk down into my uvula and I were watching a very surreal movie. After studying Hindi for a few months abroad, I have a new found awareness for the capacities of my mouth with language and I have to thank Gertrude Stein for giving me back the feeling that language is a beautiful thing and not something ever to be taken for granted. The movements of your mouth during her poems seem far more important than the subject. During my reading I often found that sometimes she cares so much about repeating a oral movement that she scrambles the meaning of a sentence to do so:

"Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading mention nothing."

"Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for."

So, thanks Ms. Stein, for your seemingly nonsensical poetry!