A Few Words From Jack

A Movement?

Left: Jack Kerouac Right: Kenneth Rexroth

These two writers openly disliked each other. This fact is well documented, at least by Rexroth himself. Nonetheless, they both occupied, or are generally conceived of as having both occupied, a movement popularly known as "The Beat Movement." How can two writers with diametrically opposed aesthetics and conflicting social, moral, and political viewpoints occupy the same movement?

This might be a pivotal question in contemporary analysis of those we label "Beats." In order to best pose the question an amount of spacial and temporal layering might be necessary. To layer these two writers, along with others who occupy this same enclave, which is often and erroneously imagined as homogeneous, some new media tools might prove useful.

For my purposes a glog might be the best "venue" to present these layers, though it would prove to be only a gathering point. In this gathering point I would compile links and images that might suggest the particular social histories and literary influences each writer of the movement is drawing from. This would be done as a sort of amalgamation in order to show where each writer converges and diverges and how they interact in ways that suggest a movement, and in ways that don't.

Glogging In Quicksand

Now that we have read Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand, let's take a look at some multimedia sources in order to delve a little deeper into some of the social and cultural enclaves Larsen renders in her novel. For the purposes of this assignment let's focus on Helga Crane's time in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen presents both new opportunities as well as new limits for Helga Crane. Take a look at the glog we have created: Exoticism in Quicksand. What opportunities do you see for the black feminine character implicit in these images and videos? For example, what was Josephine Baker able to achieve and what were the limits to these achievements? In what ways does Baker's femininity and race play into her performances? What might Helga think of these performances? Would she approve? Could we consider her costumed exhibitionism, though superimposed by her aunt and uncle, a similar type of performance?

Before Josephine Baker there is a history of artistic preoccupation with the exotic of the primitive. Take a look at some of the artwork on the glog, and don't forget to check all the links. How does Helga's portrait, painted by Axel Olsen, fit into this history? What are the limits of black femininity as presented visually in these paintings?

Along with this visual history presented in paintings and sketches there is an ongoing literary history of exoticising and primitivising the racial other. Look at the books and plays exhibited on my glog here. Where does Quicksand fall in this (incomplete) history? What does it add? What does it question? What might be missing from the history presented on the glog that you might consider a necessary link to including Quicksand in this history? For example, would we need to include the trope of the sojourn in Europe that is often present in American slave narratives?

Finally, what can you infer from this glog and how does it inform your reading of Quicksand?

Take some time to think about these questions and to consider the glog in relation to the novel. On your blog, answer any or all of the questions that might help further your understanding of the novel. Also, include a brief "reading" of the glog and its relationship to the novel.

The Exotic Other in English Literature

Presented here are a few images suggesting the "primitive" and "exotic" presence of the Other in English Literature.

Whitman Assignment

Objective: to condense, clarify, and structure an assignment centered on the interpretation and attempted understanding of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Step One: We will begin under the auspice that the swallowing of the poem in its entirety may cause disastrous effects, including, but not limited to, acute feelings of despair (possibly leading to insomnia, depression, hopelessness), anxiety, sensations of being suddenly overwhelmed, sweating extremities, nausea, and possible death by asphyxiation. That being the case we will break our engagement with the poem into munchable steps.

Step Two: We will begin, after having begun as stated above, by looking at the assertion made in the last line of the first stanza--"every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"--as a sort of thesis statement that might guide us through the poem. If this is a thesis of sorts (and one needn't necessarily agree that it is), how does the poet support, reconcile, or engage with this thesis throughout the poem?

Step Three: In order to answer, or begin to attempt to answer the question posited at the end of step two, we will look closely at the following section of the poem:

"The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips, / The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, / The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, / (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) / The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

In this section we see an interesting juxtaposition of characters. Indeed, in the same breath, we are introduced to an opium eater, a prostitute, and the President, and reintroduced, as is the case throughout the poem, to poet in his relationship to these particular characters. Can any of these characters tell us anything about the context of the poem?

Step Four: Let's start with the opium eater. Do a little research on opium and opium culture in the 19th century. For some preliminary research feel free to refer to my earlier blog post "The Opium Eater Reclines..." and gather from there what you can. Don't forget to check the links and explore those as well. While exploring 19th century opium culture don't forget about the other characters surrounding the opium eater. What do these characters have in common, if anything? How does the opium eater and the opium culture that implicitly surrounds him inform your understanding of the poem? Does this glance at the opium eater support or undermine Whitman's "thesis" or, if thesis is too abrasive, his preoccupation or theme of reconciling the individual self with the societal whole that makes up his surroundings? Is Whitman able to clearly establish the binary oppositions of self/whole, individual/community, while simultaneously dissolving these boundaries? Is he able to show the every atom belonging to him belongs as good to what is not him? Use the opium eater, including some cultural or historical context that surrounds opium culture and consumption in the 19th century, as a way into the immense population that inhabits the poem.

Step Five: Write a blog entry that engages with the questions given in step four. Please note that my interest in the opium eater is more or less arbitrary, or subjective if you like, and functioned for me as a starting point to inquiry. If there is a character or object present that you feel better articulates the preoccupations of the poem feel free to share that in your blog as well, though a brief explanation of your engagement with the opium eater and why you found him unimportant to your exploration of the poem might be an interesting addition to your study.

Keep it Classy Walt Whitman

My cultural object has turned up to be more of an objectification of a repetitious character in history: the destitute, the forlorn, the addict, the prostitute. The question then is how does Whitman sympathize, or, in other words, communicate with these objectified subjects to make the both individual and part of a whole?

Read Leaves Of Grass. Write about the poem in a sort of free response. What compels you, if anything? What turns you off? What characters caught your eye? What objects caught your eye? What do you feel you need to know to further engage in the poem?

In the first stanza of the poem, Whitman asserts that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." In class, after the reading and the free-write of the poem, we will think about this powerful assertion and if he accomplishes it through the rhetoric that makes up his poem.

I will then give a brief lecture on how I came to attempt to answer a preoccupation I had with the poem. I am concerned, that is, with the reconciliation of the self and the whole. How can they be unique and at the same moment connected a an "atotomic" level? I found my inquiry directed toward the interplay between cultural objects and the subjects that populate that culture. That is, I am interested in the humanizing of the opium eater and the prostitute and the President. But those "characters" are also operating as cultural objects that might lead to other inquiry.

The paper assignment might be something that asks the students to pick out a character who has been objectified or an object that has been characterized. What was the cultural significance of these objects or these characters at the time Leaves of Grass was published? How does the interplay between object and subject lead us to an understanding of Whitman's larger preoccupations? Does it?

After students had written papers we would take as many classes as necessary to talk about the images, characters, and objects they had explored and what they found therein and if they felt they had gained a greater understanding of the poem. If engagement is sincere and ongoing the turning in of the paper will be optional.

The Opium Eater Reclines...

"The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,)"

And so it is that Whitman at once acknowledges, takes part in, is one with, and sympathizes with what might be considered the lower rungs of society. I think the word sympathy is important:

"I am he attesting sympathy;
Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?
I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality;
Am not the poet of goodness only. . . . I do not decline to be the poet of wick-edness also."

for as Websters dictionary tells us, sympathy, amongst other things, is the "correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational motion to one another through some medium." Whitman's exploration, I think, is an attempt at unearthing these mediums in order to communicate with all that surrounds him, and thereby with himself.

What does he unearth in his embrace of communication by sympathy?

Whitman gives the opium eater only a glance, but in that glance he takes in the entire intricate and interconnected network of his community and country. Take the New York opium dens, for instance, that are implied in this glance. What was happening there? Who was present? As it turns out the opium den was a sort of melting pot, where people of all races would "indiscriminately mix." The drug itself, much like the prostitute, compelled people from all strata of society from the destitute wanderer to the aristocrat or politician. Perhaps that partially explains Whitman's juxtaposition of the prostitute and the president: (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,) / The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries."

But opium itself also suggests some other interesting cultural complexities. The drug was largely distributed by an new influx of Chinese immigrant workers. Though Chinese immigrants were not employed until 1865 to work on the Transcontinental Railroad, the influx of Chinese immigrants began early in the 19th century. The opium trade was inextricably bound to this immigration and so bound to culture of its bearers.

Opium also had its ties with writers of the time, though primarily English, and so the nod to the opium eater brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his poem Kubla Khan, or Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

More applicable to Leaves of Grass though is the rich and diverse, if at times dangerous and seedy, culture that opium in the 19th century came to represent. In later years wars would be fought over the drug and countless acts of destitution would result from its abuse. Nonetheless, in New York, in 1855, opium culture came to embody a sort of uncouth but undeniable leisure that a poet of wickedness and goodness might find sympathy for.