week 9

October 24 and October 26

INVISIBLE MAN

constructed like a piece of music, like a quartet
The blues: Betsy Smith "Sugar in my bowl", "A good man is hard to find"

Louis Armstrong "What did I do to be so black and blue"

DEAD MAN

• William Blake and Daisy Miller

WB= he has no clue, destruction of character

DM= sexual (primal) instincts, innocence in society

• Thel talking about how everyone has a gun in America
• capitalistic bounty hunters
• road movie
• abduction myth
• portrayal of the Indians

Who abducts him?

• Nobody? and then he becomes sympathetic like Patty Hearst
• William Blake? Abducted by the poet

WILL: individual

BILL: wants to fit in and be like everybody else

Like WS "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu", "Of Modern Poetry"

main themes:

1. death: circling back around to the beginning
2. what it means to be an American: no one actual point, they are complicated
3. seeing an old place in a new way, or seeing everything new

"We are all waiting there for our abductor whether this person is good or bad"

THE BEAR

• rhythm is going one 'primal'
• unpunctuated, revolving, fluid, confusing, like the old testament
• the death of the bear
• a great storyteller
• the bear was there first, before men

INVISIBLE MAN

• the operation: a lobotomy? Electro-shock therapy? castration?
• whatever it was it caused him temporary memory loss
• pg 265 eviction: the things that are listed are ordinary things, that anyone could have, they tell a story
• Marcus Garvey
• militant: no negotiations with whites, a black nationalist
• the rings and fighting before the speech
• vinettes or set pieces that grasp our attentions and leads us on
• picaresque (picaro), like Don Quixote, a rogue or rascal figure
• has a series of set narratives that teach the protagonist lessons
• Horatio Alger, famous for writing rags to riches stories
• this is the anti- Horatio novel- he has good intentions, but he keeps running into injustice
• "initiations into different identies" becomes cynical and mean at the end
• Rhinehart= the trickster, the doppelganger, runner, gambler, lover, preacher, etc
• 'dream novel' more like a dream than reality
• verbal sparing: playing the dozens pg 238

My verbal sparing match:

Your mamma's so fat, she sat on a rainbow and skittles popped out!

Your mamma's so fat, she's got her own zip code

• IM is based on jazz improvisations
• integrative: it pulls things together and creates unity between these things
• imagination inspires democracy pg 564
• mind= imagination "poems of our climate"
• music goes back to the origins which puts music at the bottom of our pyramid!

~

history

~pyschology~

~~~~dreams~~~~

fable, folklore, and fairytale

~~~~~~~~~mythology~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~music~~~~~~~~~~~~

• Gilgamesh: the first book ever published (Tod Clifton)
• The Odyssey by Homer= the Cyclops (Brother Jack)
• Aeneid by Virgil: finds something original, yet has an origin
• Sibyl
• Sybil is a white woman with a fantasy about being raped by a black man, he doesn't actually rape her, he makes her think he did, then writes a note about how she was raped by Santa
• he is on a mythological quest
• the last chapter is like Revelation in the bible

MUSIC

• like 'The Merchant of Venice' ~ Shylock is evil because he doesn't like music= evil hates music

Set Pieces:

1. Battle Royal
2. True Blood: a tale of incest
3. Golden Day: the vets (brothel/asylum/bar)
4. Homer Barbie: orator, blind as a bat
5. President of the College: Bledsoe (expelled from Eden, Paradise)
6. Vet on the bus: give him advice about games
7. Emerson: the son of a liberal, he is a dogooder who was reading Freud's 'Totem and Taboo'
8. Paints: 10 black drops + white paint = 'perfect white' but really looks dirty
9. Lucius Brockway: machine with in the machine
10. electro-shock therapy: makes him loose his identity, then he realizes that knowing who Brier Rabbit is is more important than knowing his name
11. Mary: from the bible ~ at the end he has to get home to Mary, she is nurturing and motherly
12. Peter Wheatstraw: the yam seller who reminds him of home
13. Eviction: helps the brotherhood discover him, also the inventory of items is like "Man on the Dump"
14. Brotherhood: (communism) they believe in discipline, unification, science, history
15. Clifton: eulogy pg 445-9 (from the book of Judges 5:27) makes the sambo dolls dance for them, he has "fallen out of history"
16. Rhinehart: a doppleganger~ never meet him, just hear about him
17. Sybil
18. apocalypse: the end of the world

yo' mama jokes: this link gives you tons of hilarious 'yo' mama' jokes!

"spit, grit, and mother wit" comes from the word agon- agony