The Difference between Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein

To me, Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein both have a lot in common. I don't care about their characters. Their plots are for the most part mundane-- even when exciting things happen, they're coated with a veneer of mundanity. And I read both of them in a way completely devoid of empathy for any characters involved.

But I will seek out a Flannery O'Connor story, and I will not seek out a Gertrude Stein story. In fact, I will go to great lengths to NOT have to read Gertrude Stein. And this is why:

Flannery O'Connor filters her stories through a narrative structure. Gertrude Stein does not.

Take, for example, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. I feel like Three Lives was concocted in a laboratory by someone who's never been human. Just for a sample:

‘“I certainly never did see no man like you, Jeff. You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. I certainly don’t see a reason, why I should always be explaining to you what I mean by what I am just saying. And you ain’t got no feeling ever for me, to ask me what I meant, by what I was saying when I was so tired, that night. I never know anything right I was saying.” “But you don’t ever tell me now, Melanctha, so I really hear you say it, you don’t mean it the same way, the way you said it to me.” “Oh Jeff, you so stupid always to me and always just bothering with your always asking to me. And I don’t never any way remember ever anything I been saying to you, and I am always my head, so it hurts me it half kills me, and my heart jumps so, sometimes I think I die so when it hurts me, and I am so blue always, I think sometimes I take something just to kill me, and I got so much to bother thinking always and doing, and I got so much to worry, and all that, and then you come and ask me by what I mean by what I was just saying to you. I certainly don’t know, Jeff, when you ask me. Seems to me, Jeff, sometimes you might have some kind of a right feeling to be careful to me.”

This is less than third of the paragraph, by the way.

I just can't read it without getting a massive headache. And the stories are put together in the same way-- with absolutely no regard for convention. Details describing characters seem chosen at random. Descriptions are clinical, exact, and uninteresting. The pace of the story seems at once painfully slow and entirely arbitrary-- it isn't filtered by interest to the reader or by anything else. Time itself seems arbitrary-- Gertrude Stein leaps back and forth without blinking an eye. And of course she abuses punctuation horribly.

But Flannery O'Connor is something easy to swallow, something... storylike. In the film industry, where convention is generally considered a lot more important, the rule is introduce your villain in the first twenty pages. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", we are introduced to our villain on the first page without knowing he is, in fact, our villain. Also, the story occurs in three locations: the family's home, the roadside restaurant, and the eventual car accident (the road is a device to get us from one plotpoint to the other). In all of these locations our villain is (re)introduced to us in various forms, whether it be through hearsay or in person. When the villain finally shows up, there's a sort of inevitability to it, a comfortable inevitability. "Oh, of course," you think. "This must be our villain."

Also, the story begins where it begins and ends where it ends. There's an element of closure.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I don't know if I've been brainwashed into being uncomfortable with the avant-garde. But I know what I like, and for the most part I can't help that. I don't like Gertrude Stein. I like Flannery O'Connor. I think in narratives and she writes in narratives. It's almost like a more direct form of communication.

New, Sexy Desktop

My friend Avery came over today and using this program called Rainmeter she coolified my desktop. What you see here is a screenshot of my actual desktop. No lie. It's got a cute little dock with icons for all the programs I normally use and a built in clock and a hidden taskbar which only shows up when I mouse over it. She did the same for my laptop. I was going to post the results here, but my laptop is pitching a fit, probably because of its new layout. I need to do one of those file consolidating things, whatever they are.

I'm not sure my laptop can handle this Rainmeter business. It's getting pretty old. Hopefully it'll last me a couple more years but break before I am financially independent and have to pay for my own.

I kind of want my next computer to be a Mac.

Up in the Air

So I saw Up in the Air. Without giving anything away, the acting was spectacular, the characters were interesting, and the ending was wondrously unexpected. What struck me most about this movie was that everyone in it was sensible, except for the silly twenty-year-old who was, in fact, a silly twenty-year-old. When the forty-year-old woman saw the forty-year-old man with a twenty-year-old girl crying on his shoulder, I thought there would be drama, but they all sat down and talked about the twenty-year-old girl’s relationship problems without jumping to conclusions, which was nice. And I’m always in favor of less sappy endings.

It was a courageous piece with a sort of an indie feel to it, the sort of movie that screams I AM A SERIOUS MOVIE, and I recommend that anyone with an interest in movies see it because while Avatar is the most visually stunning movie I’ve seen this year, Up in the Air is the most meaningful, in that it effectively explored a theme. Admittedly, I’ve only seen three movies this year. But I think Up in the Air will remain the most meaningful movie of the year for a few months, at least.

The Problem with Sherlock

This is Joseph Stalin, the man who rose to power after the Russian Revolution. He presided over the Soviet Union until the time of his death.

This gentleman is Bruce Wayne, colloquially referred to as “Batman”. Batman is the protector of the city of Gotham, and has foiled many nefarious plots over a long and prestigious career.

This is the French Revolution. The French Revolution’s results were not lasting, but they were certainly dramatic and caught the attention of the world, and later served as a precedent for the American Revolution which, as we all know, spawned the world’s greatest economy: the United States of America.

And this is Jack Sparrow. He’s risen from the dead, stabbed the heart of Davey Jones, and come into the possession of a jar of dirt.

Three men and one revolution. All are noteworthy men or events of action. All have accomplished superhuman feats, whether it be governing Siberia or defeating Catwoman.

And what do these men/events have in common?

Action themes. All of these men have action themes, ranging from La Marseillaise to da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na BATMAN!!! I myself have an action theme which is loosely based off of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water in double time. It should be obvious that anyone who wants to accomplish anything has to have an action theme.

This is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes has a devil-may-care hairdo and a quixotic expression. Sherlock Holmes has a movie full of copious amounts of squee, including, but not limited to, Sherlock Holmes, the beautiful and iconic city of London in the 1800s, the banter between Sherlock Holmes and his well nigh inseparable companion Watson, shrapnel, pretty fire, the British parliament, the hangman’s noose, satanic ritual, resurrection from the dead, and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes does not, however, have an action theme. The audience is forced to leave the theatre to the sound of Celtic stepdancing music. This only confuses them, since the last time I checked London was not in Ireland. There was nothing wrong with that movie that a good action theme couldn’t have fixed.

I take that back. Someone needs to completely revamp this movie’s soundtrack. Violin music should not play when things are exploding, and for God’s sake, cover up the sound of Sherlock Holmes and Beautiful Female Criminal Trope girl with some sort of romantic theme. It’s bad enough that I have to watch people in movies kissing; I don’t want to hear it, too. Put the corny violin music there. Put the stepdancing music there, for all I care. Just cover it up, will you?

Dorm Life

I like many things about dorm life. One of the things I like most about it, actually, is hearing people walking past my room in the night when I can’t sleep well. I like the feeling of security it gives me, hearing voices I recognize. It makes it harder to imagine things like serial killers and monsters in the closet, etc., etc.

I also like having other people take care of things for me. Like cooking. I can’t cook, and I admire people who can. I’m afraid of putting things in the oven and I baked my first thing ever (a Bundt cake) about a week ago, with much assistance from my mother. I like having a dining hall where I can go and eat things someone has prepared for me.

I like never having to be alone. I don’t need to talk to people during the day, but I do need to go somewhere and see them mulling about. The Danna Center houses a food court, dining hall, shops, assorted meeting rooms, and CCs coffee lounge, a room which I am extraordinarily partial to because I can go get my tea and scones at three o’ clock and read the Economist to the sound of people talking and studying and generally mulling about (I also like doing this because it makes me feel very British).

I like having my own space. I don’t like cleaning it, but I like having a space which I control completely, which has my things and which no one can enter without my permission.

But I just can’t take it anymore. I’m losing my singing voice. The walls aren’t as thin as they are in many dorm halls I’ve been in/heard about, but they’re still rather thin and I’m afraid I’ll mess up or sound awful and someone will hear me, or I’ll sing very well but bother someone who’s studying. Oddly enough, it isn’t my range I’m losing— it’s my ability to sing notes quickly. I can’t trill anymore or keep up to a fast song, and it’s bothering me tremendously.

Women Ruin Everything!

I found myself loudly proclaiming these words tonight, after midnight, which I’m sure everyone in my house appreciated (not that most of them weren’t awake anyway). Upon examination, I thought this a decidedly odd thing for me to say. After all, I’m female. Nearly all of my close friends are female, and I admire them greatly. Obviously I don’t dislike women or I wouldn’t choose to spend such a large percentage of my time with them. So, aside from my general propensity for yelling contrarian opinions in a loud voice and hoping someone responds so I can argue with them, I failed to see what would compel me to proclaim said phrase.

At least I did until I realized that it was not women in general I was disgusted with, but female characters. A particular female character, one whom I’m pretty sure I brushed over in a previous entry. Elizabeth Swann.

Why does Elizabeth Swann disgust me? Well, to begin with, she seems incapable of holding a conversation with a male character that doesn’t involve their faces being less than six inches apart. She’s also fond of speaking in a breathy voice and pretending to faint to get attention.

But she’s a liberated woman! So it would seem. In a time when most women of her class had the same unexciting fate, that of marrying a substantially older man, raising children and throwing lavish dinner parties, Elizabeth Swann is strutting around in pants, fighting with a sword and kissing whoever she wants. Untamed, unfettered, she escapes from under the combined noses of the East India Trading Company and runs away, pretending to be a boy to gain passage to Tortuga. Etc., etc. It all sounds wonderful at first blush— a woman ahead of her time! But I’d argue that the likes of Elizabeth Swann are from a time long before the 1700s. I would refer you to the Book of Genesis.

In Will Turner we have our Adam— our unrealistically well-intentioned and lovesick hero, dashing and clever and willing to go to the ends of the earth to please the one he loves. And Elizabeth is the spitting image of his beloved, Eve. She is, above all things, deceitful. If Will solves conflicts by running at them with a sword, Elizabeth uses her head. She deceives men into dying for her, faints to get attention, pretends to be attracted to man after man, promising them sex or marriage as long as it will get her what she wants at that moment. She is, of course, astonishingly beautiful, and lest we forget the comments of male characters constantly remind us. She has no problem with using this beauty for her own gain— Norrington is promised marriage, Sparrow is sent to his death with a kiss. And she apparently feels no loyalty to Will, as scenes in the second movie demonstrate.

But one cannot make sweeping judgments about a movie series with a sample size of one. What about the second main character, Calypso? Calypso, a woman as wild and untamable as the sea, who told Davey Jones she would see him in ten years and when they could finally be together— Gasp! She wasn’t there! Isn’t that just like a woman?

But what about Sparrow? Isn’t he deceitful?

Actually I would argue, though possibly unsuccessfully, that Jack Sparrow is the most trustworthy character in the entire movie. While characters in the movie certainly don’t always trust him, the audience trusts Jack Sparrow on a deeper level than they’d trust an Elizabeth or a Will. As an audience, they trust him to put on a good show— it’s a different and better movie with Jack Sparrow around. But within the universe of the movie he has their trust at a much more fundamental level. Jack Sparrow is one of those extraordinary characters who are the antithesis of Greek tragedy. Their downfall is unforeseeable. They seem to transcend the universe they’re in, operating under a different set of rules. In short, they make the audience feel safe. Dumbledore is one of these characters. The Marquis de Carabas from Neil Gaiman’s book Neverwhere is another. Authors love to kill off these characters because it shocks the audience on such a profound level. Sometimes they bring them back, sometimes they don’t, but always it takes a while for it to sink in that they’re really dead, and the shockwaves radiate miles around.

And on a completely different level, he’s honest in his interactions with other characters in the series. A self-proclaimed dishonest man, he lies and cheats with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. In contrast to this innocent outlook, Elizabeth Swann loudly trumpets the existence of her moral center, and after she’s done something wrong she sits around with a weepy look on her face.

And on another level, trusting Jack Sparrow usually pays off because things always come out right in the end. Trusting Elizabeth, on the other hand, will lead you to your watery grave, courtesy of the Kraken.

Writing

I have no memory for names or numbers, faces or procedures. I can only remember words. I suppose that’s why I have to be a writer: if I tried to do anything else I’d forget how it was supposed to be done.

Tragedy

I am easily bored, and one of the things which bores me most is tragedy. Tragedy is exactly the wrong word to use in this case, but I can’t think of a better one off the top of my head. Tragedy has a majestic connotation— it makes me think of empires falling, lovers committing suicide in fits of passion. And all of that is fine. I can watch lovers commit suicide in fits of passion all day long— well, perhaps not all day; that might get a bit wearing after a while, but I think it would for most people.

I suppose a better term would be Extremely Depressing Stories. And not all brands of Extremely Depressing Stories— it’s the mundane stories that bother me. Petty violence. Stories about slaves and serfs fall under this category, and it’s not that I don’t think it isn’t important that America’s children grow up knowing that slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude were very bad things that should never happen again, but the kinds of books I was forced to read in grade school, in middle school, and again in high school seemed to have no point. In grade school the plot was always the same: someone would be in a tolerable situation— I wouldn’t want to trade places with them, but, you know, that’s life. And then their mother would die, or one day a Mysterious Stranger would appear and— poof!— just like that they would be married off to a cruel man who beat them and raped them routinely and a cruel mother-in-law who would make them clean the kitchen endlessly. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’ve gone through the American school system you’ve had at least one year of American lit where you were force-fed story after depressing story. Maybe I’m getting carried away, but that was my experience.

So it isn’t even the ending I’m objecting to, really. My apologies to any Toni Morrison fans, but I had to read Beloved in high school and the scene I remember most vividly was when all of the slaves were forced to perform oral sex on some men— I don’t even remember who the men were, or why they, the slaves, and several large crates were lined up in some sort of formation, and I’m not going to reread the book and find out. I just remember it was a completely unnecessary and entirely vulgar, and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to put the book down. I can’t remember if Morrison found some way to tie that scene into the plotline, but I don’t believe she did. I remember that book like a bad dream, and it wasn’t the horror I objected to— it was the pointlessness, the futility, the why-am-I-reading-this. It’s not like I don’t know that racism exists today, and that it existed in greater quantities in the past. It’s not like I don’t turn on the news at night and hear that same story which occurred yesterday in some other country. It doesn’t even have to be fiction— it’s happening all around me, every day, and it’s not that I don’t know, it’s that I know too well. If there’s one thing I know, if there’s one thing I hear about every day, it’s petty violence. Give me something I don’t live and breathe.

Give me something weird, something to make me see things in a new light. Call down the apocalypse Cormac McCarthy style, or throw me into the alien slums of District 9. Show me something to die for— an epic battle for the sake of a great nation, a Juliette and her Romeo. Give me a protagonist with a dream and an enemy with a backstory; make me care that one of them has to die. Take the traditional British route in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien, T.H. White and, yes, the modern J.K. Rowling— people die, and the ending may be tragic, but elves still sing, dogs still bark, magic and truth and love and beauty still exist (initials before your last name optional). Give the tragedy a background to stand out against so I can appreciate it in all its bittersweet beauty.

My friend Avery says that one of the most depressing movies she’s ever seen was a French movie called Au Revoir, Mes Enfants. For the first hour of the movie you’re immersed in the world of a French boarding school, following the story of a boy and his friend. You come to know them, you come to deeply sympathize with every trial they undergo. And there’s a feeling of safety— you’re not on a battlefield, you’re in a French boarding school full of schoolboy silliness. When the Nazis invade France, the ending really breaks your heart, and that is a tragedy.

The Game of Life

My sister and my cousin are playing Hasbro’s The Game of Life, and I’m noticing that the stocks in the game always appreciate value. You pay your initial sum of money to buy the stock, and then every time someone spins, say, a six, you collect your $10,000. This is such a ‘90s way of looking at the stock market. While technically I suppose a stock could earn you no money, in which case you’d be “selling it at a loss”, it still isn’t like seeing the value of all of your assets, house included, plummet overnight. There should be an “economy fails” space which cuts every player’s assets in half. That’s how life really works.

Just a thought: Could there be some way to incorporate the failure of the banking system into these games? What about a “bank fails” space, after which the banker throws up his hands in defeat and the entire board game economy grinds to a halt? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Pretension

Let me start off by saying that I have absolutely nothing against art films. I enjoy a good European indie about the nature of miscommunication as much as the next pretentious college student, but I feel that my pretentious brethren, whom I love dearly, approach ignorance in their blatant disregard of popular culture.

Since I set foot on campus I’ve been hearing comments which make me feel like a philistine, but a philistine with the moral high ground. Since when is “It’s too popular for me” a reason not to like something? Reference the laziness of the screenwriter in leaving about a zillion plotholes, if you like, or say that the song’s lyrics are subpar, but don’t dismiss someone’s work with an “It’s popular”, and for God’s sake don’t follow this comment with “Now, Dr. Zhivago, there’s a real book.” We are not talking about Dr. Zhivago. We are talking about— because I was watching it less than an hour ago— Pirates of the Caribbean.

Pirates of the Caribbean is an action movie. Since it is an action movie, one shouldn’t approach it expecting whatever deep message one might get from a Swedish art film about humanity’s place in the cosmos. But Pirates gives what is promised in the trailer and more— beautiful cinematography and nonstop action, all of which is taking place to the beat of an incredible soundtrack. My father has always held that classical masterpieces are no longer presented in a concert hall, but in a movie soundtrack, and I’m inclined to agree. Personally, if I had just written a classical masterpiece and I could either hear it performed in Carnegie Hall or in Pirates IV, I’d choose Pirates. Why? Because of greater exposure and a larger profit— mainly greater exposure. Popularity of modern classical music aside, there’s only so many people you can fit into Carnegie Hall on any given day. The more exposure a work of art has, the more life it has. Life is the ability to affect other living things, and I’d rather affect thousands of people on opening night than a couple hundred members of the New York artistic elite.

But we haven’t even gotten to the acting yet. The acting cannot be described with normal superlatives. Aside from the brilliance of Johnny Depp, there’s the pirate supporting cast— specifically Barbosa, who gives a stellar performance, with facial expressions and line delivery that would make him the best character in the movie were Johnny Depp not there to steal the spotlight. I thought all of the pirates performed their roles admirably, juggling levity and genuine danger to create a mixture which can only be described, in culinary terms, as spicy goodness. Kiera and Orlando, the Pirate world’s token pretty people, I actually find quite boring. Both of them were perfectly fine, but fine isn’t good enough when you’re costarring with Johnny Depp. If it were possible to cut Elizabeth and Will Turner out of the picture entirely and focus more on Sparrow and Barbosa, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

This has turned into more of a rambling movie review than an actual cohesive thought. Regardless, lay off my mainstream action movies, okay?