mathematical waves

Perhaps that's my problem with this one: I'm not so good with math. I enjoy listening to music, getting lost in a melody, but I don't feel the rhythm of this book. I sit down to read and wake up later with the book on my lap or my chest, only a few pages deeper. I've read sparknotes and gotten similar results.

Oh ok I get it. I'm reading with Rhoda's eyes: I'm only ok, only rooted, when I'm calm and alone. In the world, around people, I tend to float within their spheres and lose myself; which makes learning difficult. And since this is such a difficult author to read, I'm not sure how to absorb it. Rhoda is disconnected from herself, a very real and dangerous disorder today, but I'm not sure how it was diagnosed or treated in Woolf's day (maybe she needs more dairy in her diet? Or maybe I do, in a room alone and nothing but milk until this makes sense). Occasionally while reading I pick up a phrase that really speaks to me and I think this book will be different, this time I'll get it, but those phrases are few and far between and the rest of it is outside my capabilities to understand, to internalize and learn it. It doesn't help that everything we've covered this semester has been a superficial reading of complex materials as we fly through as many works as we can fit in to the class. I need more time on each piece to acquire it, to incorporate the traditions into my individual talent.

The Waves--in class

• They are children at the beginning
• the interludes are italicized
• and describe a scene on the beach
• there is a metaphorical connection between the interlude and the episode (of their soliloquies)
• --time of day and how old they are or what's going on in their lives
• --first interlude, morning; first episode, childhood
• --afternoon, leaving for school

What breaks this book from conventions of novels?

• there are 6 narrators
• all 6 are main characters, growing and changing
• no minor characters
• both more characters (more major) and fewer overall (most novels have more characters, major and minor)
• Characters reveal themselves from the outside and the inside simultaneously
• no real 'setting'--where is it taking place?
  
• written to a rhythm, written as an arc not just a linear plot
• rhythm of life
• no winners or losers
  
• no good v bad
• what do they look like?
• narrators switch with rhythm, too, not just back and forth
• play-poem: listen! there are different voices in the novel
• reading this is like listening to a piece of music (like the Ring Cycle, the German version of the poetic eddas)
  
• 
  

bildungsroman--coming of age, formation or educational novel



Bernard is the storyteller, the phrase-maker, the normal one
observant of people-notices Susan is upset, rushes to help; mediator: brings people together; imaginative: makes up the games; language becomes his method of keeping track of reality; Elvedon-imaginary place where they play (or Virginia's room of her own), the place where the characters look into the world of the author;

Susan is earthy, passionate, love/hate extremes
Associated with Vanessa, Virginia's sister and an artist
episode 1--observant of nature and natural things, loves nature and natural things; traumatized by the kiss between Jinny and Louis; jealous, love/hate strong emotions, fierceness of maternity; focus on home; looks at eyes, differentiates others by how their eyes look and how they look through their eyes;

Louis is never good enough, associated with Eliot (hence the yellow, like the yellow fog) and Prufrock! cares deeply about tradition and history, doesn't feel like he's part of any of it, loves Egypt and elephants
all alone, loneliness; different from others because his father is Australian (lower-class); great-beast stamps are his motif, great chained beast; lives a repressed life and the 'great chained beast' is his inner 'lion'; women are attracted to him, in spite of his loneliness, and it doesn't alleviate his loneliness;

Neville is emotional and 'tight', always questioning himself, associated with knives, in love with Percival?,
thinks about things that are not concrete; too delicate; doesn't talk about himself as much as the others; positive recluse, doesn't feel lonely; sickly and weaker than the others; the thing about the apple tree, death among the apple trees forever (primal fall); frozen traumatized; occupied with thoughts of things outside his control, worried about the 'big stuff': life, the universe, everything; ideas of order; though he ends up being gay, he's more of a traditionalist than the others

Rhoda is reclusive, stuck inside her own head, separate from everyone, unhappy, has no relationship to her body and has no face, dissociated/disconnected, female Septimus, intense/prophetic dreams, never figures out how to function in the world; outcast, attracted to the color white; moon-like and vacant; emptiness; sees herself as nobody, has a fragile identity; doesn't have a face; outside the loop; metaphysical-outside time and space, disconnected; totally lost and unable to relate to reality; the others experience physical alienation but Rhoda's is total, complete; always lagging behind; the only one of the group who doesn't have a father (which makes her different), and not a part of the patriarchy; constantly flying/falling/floating, not rooted at all (like Susan is rooted and oriented and attached);

Jinny is the pretty girl, the party element
all body, totally into her physical self; body and physical sensation are the center of her identity as words/bernard, beast/louis, home/susan;
comfortable in her own skin, less alienated than the others; free-spirit; self-confident; Carpe Diem; the cost of being a social butterfly: in the dark, when she's alone, she has no idea who she is; emptiness at the core of her and erodes her as she ages;

summaries

Prufrock and Chaucer

The author of this article compares Prufrock's attire with the clothing described in Chaucer, particularly the Monk's physical description in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. The similarities may seem coincidental because the Edwardian style clothing was hardly uncommon but there is a certain rhyme-scheme in both that parallels. This article also offers research from the OED on the history of the word 'pin' and how it relates to Prufrock's self-worth.





Fool from Hamlet and Prufrock

The only available fool in Hamlet is already deceased, and Prufrock lives till human voices wake him and he drowns, but he exists in a sort of living death, paralyzed by his fears of rejection and he is never fully alive. The entire passage that begins "No! Am not Prince Hamlet..." contains ambiguous references to many characters in the play. Yorick mocked the meaninglessness of his world as Prufrock moans and frets over the futility of his own life, measured out with coffee spoons. Yorick appears as only as a skull; Prufrock sees his own head upon a platter.



Hamlet and Prufrock

Beginning epigraph if Prufrock, Guido's words, sets the stage for the macabre scenes of one man's sorrowful lament that he cannot reach out to his fellow humans, similar to the brief encounter between Hamlet and the ghost of his father. The epigraph allows the reader a glimpse into the Other Side, similar to the ghost of the old King Hamlet in the beginning of the play. Hamlet and Prufrock are both perplexed by an overwhelming question with similar results though the questions differ; both feel as though their world is stale and lost meaning, exist within the yellow fog. Prufrock and Hamlet also share a difficulty relating to women and spent much of their time preparing their faces to meet others, and share an intrinsic hesitancy, a wobbling back and forth on the proverbial fence before making a move.
They differ in that Hamlet does take action eventually; Prufrock dies a 1000 times before his death because he never makes his move.
Prufrock may also be compared to Ophelia as both characters drown.

four quartets

The central theme is the union of the flux of time with the stillness of eternity (grover, 253)

Burnt Norton
Rose Garden--air--vision
How do you find the timelessness inside of time?
the first (garden)world is Eden, innocence
freezing time



Section 2
garlic/sapphires organic
stars, dancing, not as much movement, suspension, zen state, life within death as opposed to death in life as in Hollow Men, moment of incarnation, epiphany as personal awareness of the moment of suspension, release from desire, ends in the rose garden

Section 3
distraction, disaffection, descent
not soul-purifying darkness however but a negative suspension, negation of imagery, the nothing


Read east coker for next week
East Coker--earth--first attempt to reclaim/answer the vision

section2 seasons and stars
stars, dancers/dancing
different times in the cycle

section 3
dark, vacant
church/christ in east coker, place where Eliot's remains are interred,





Dry Salvages--water--going down into the darkness for the transformation


Little Gidding--fire--short; the Transformation that leads to communication with divine reality

How to find stuff for research paper

1. online
2. check for full text (online)
3. e-journal--see if we have it on as an e-journal article
4. walk over to library and get journal and xerox article or send it digitally to email for free
5. ILL

to the lighthouse

Time Passes chapter
10 years pass as the house deteriorates and there is a radical shift of perspective
People die and the living move on
in Dalloway, there is only one day of things happening, dilated time, so much going on and everyone interacting and playing with time because the text goes back into the character's histories,
but Lighthouse is expansive and takes longer
Dalloway--flashing, quick scenes, contracted time
Lighthouse--recreating moments of being simultaneously inserting the events surrounding the special times

(back to) time passes--lights dim on characters of those who die, Lily's light is on? And Mr. Charmichael's lamp, and the darkness descends during the ten years of the war
Mrs. Ramsay's death occurs, words create pictures, read it like poetry
part 1 is set in summer, moving on to autumn, forwarding into winter and the darkness of a world at war
the Light has gone out of the World because Mrs. Ramsay dies, leaving Mr. Ramsay lost
Lily takes over but she doesn't have the same 'mythic' qualities as Mrs. Ramsay, the fullness of giving her all for those she loved; Lily is the 'road not taken' and sorta like Elizabeth Dalloway in that she has new opportunities more than she's a 'new woman'
Mr Ramsay imposes himself on everyone like the doctors who impose themselves on Septimus and Lily cannot paint because of him, rather his impositions
Mrs Ramsay made herself happy by doing for others, by fulfilling other's wishes and needs; Lily does not find happiness by doing for others and Mr Ramsay doesn't get it, doesn't understand why things are the way they are
All he needed was her to say something anything nice--she compliments his boots as a last resort and bam! their relationship is healed

Ash Wednesday

a feminine form of writing, seems like a woman wrote this.
But Eliot has escaped the 'prison of the self' and joined the Holy Mother Church and perhaps found peace with something greater than himself, surrendered his individual talent to the tradition.

desiring this man's gift (not art! b/c he has the art but not the gift of inspiration) and that man's scope
and no longer strive to strive towards such things--perhaps he found his gift with his conversion? since the aged eagle stretched it's wings (in keeping with the bird reference from the Shakespearean sonnet) however this bird is not a lark singing praise but an old eagle mourning
selfish desires; no longer burdened by the opinions of others; no longer cares what others think he's given up on people (since he's an eagle) and the (now vanished) power of the usual reign is what held Prufrock back.

Unlike Prufrock, where he stays in the dreamworld (...till human voices wake us and we drown) and the Waste Land, staying in the dry lands and hearing the thunder but never reaching the rain, and Hollow Men who never cross the river to death's other kingdom, Ash Wednesday's liminality(?) allows the author to cross the boundaries, cross the threshold from frustration towards relief: he's moving up, spiraling up towards heaven instead of circling around the same level of hell.
Has to stop torturing himself in order to allow God a place in his heart

2nd stanza--cleansing and crossing the threshold to climb the stair in 3rd stanza

possible paper topics

hmm...
madness and writing
Prufrock and Clarissa or Elizabeth or Septimus

Mrs Dalloway

I'm still laughing at the thoughts Clarissa has about her parties, how they are 'life' to her in an intangible, almost inexplicable way. It's a timeless emotion: I love having parties myself, as do most of my female friends, so we can just catch up with each other all at once and stay on top of things. How do you help your friends out if you don't know what's going on in their lives? Each social circle, no matter how high up the 'social scale' one finds oneself within, has it's elite and it's bores.
Miss Killman harbors resentment for her state in life, her low rung on the social ladder, and her resentment keeps her from advancing beyond her state. She's become a monster, the monster she projects on to Clarissa really comes from within herself. Woolf chose her words well when she described Miss Killman as the monster within her "lost her malignity...and became...merely Miss Killman, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help"(p 190). Clarissa seems superficial, and she has no idea where or what the equator is (p 185), so she's pitifully uneducated, and the opposite of Miss Killman because she is everything Miss Killman is not. While Miss Killman prides herself on her suffering to bring her knowledge (p 196) and her education to sustain herself financially, Clarissa gains knowledge through observation of what goes on around her and is sustained by her husband's income. Clarissa has no need to know where or what the equator is but is aware of her surroundings; Miss Killman has no need to know what's going on with the world now but teaching history puts food in her mouth and money in her pockets to survive. Each is educated in the way she needs, to get her through her day and make it to another; neither would survive in the other's world.
Clarissa reminds me of my best friend because she can throw the best parties, always has the right food and the right amount (I do the cooking, she just tells me how many people and a vague idea of each of their lives so I can plan the menu; she can't cook and I can't keep up with that many people), and I'm sad because she and Miss Killman could be good together if they were able to use each other's strengths to surpass each other's weaknesses (or at least get along for Elizabeth's sake).

Oct. 6 Class

Friday, Oct 24

Topic Due! for final paper

Mrs. Dalloway

Uses stream of conciousness to delve deeply into each character, including the history that brought them into the scene during the time the book takes place.

Themes:

How does Mrs. Dalloway fit in to Ms. Woolf's life and works?

One single day in the life of...the whole world?

Uses personal allusions about each person, back in time, around in space but a very small space; very defined and constrained by time and space but vast in characters.

Time is a major theme, hooking parts together

original name of the manuscript was 'the hours' (but it was stolen by another writer!?) and 'Mrs. Dalloway', as a title, helps the reader focus on the characters instead of the time frame.

tensions between public and private living (p.59)"...thinking it was outrageous to be disturbed at 11 o'clock on a day she was giving a party..."

flowers

seperateness and autonomy vs. feeling a part of things

Peter's walk eclipses Clarissa's on the east (he's been in the east, associated with colonization-ness, military, military statues on his walk, east is the lower class part of London)

Richard's touches Clarissa's path but on the west, the upscale part of London

Septimus picks up Clarissa's path and continues along it

According to Virginia herself, the characters of Septimus and Clarissa are as continuous as the paths they walk, two halves of the same whole, opposites containing a bit of each other

Wrote the experience with her own madness into the character of Septimus

***Stone=14 pounds so 11stone6 is his weight, a unit of measure no longer used (154+6?)

themes from What the Thunder said

The then-current decay of European society because people had lost compassion and charity and these things are required for the proverbial grail-knight to arise, for the year-king to return and ensure a good harvest year. The water is gone from the waste land because people have lost self-control and their fiery lust burns away the moisture, creating and enlarging the waste land of Europe. Rocks, and no water. Even if the grail were found, there was nothing to put in it to rejuvenate the land.

I must admit, though, that I didn't see much in the words Eliot wrote and extrapolated this from several sites.

Waste Land in class (the most important poem of the 20th century)

Complete structure (all five parts as a whole)
It's greatness lies in it's ability to connect with us all, as in Prufrock and Eliot's other early poetry.

Traveling through a series of images (sorta like Dante?) Go home and listen to Eliot read it and check out the power point.
----The tarot prediction in the first section is explicated throughout the rest of the poem; the next four parts explain/live out the prediction in the Burial of the Dead.

Luke Skywalker is the Hanged Man! In Episode 2 when he loses his hand and falls off the antenna upside down. Upside-down means it will be resurrected and reversed.




This is the most helpful hypertext I could find:
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/table/explore5.html

Burial of the dead
What's wrong with the world, how the earth is now a waste land
Begins the same as Chaucer--in April, so he's well-read/well-versed in literature


Game of Chess
Failures of married love/life the game isn't being played right; the strategies are wrong; how to make life worth living again through love and marriage

Fire Sermon
Failure of lust (unstructured love); awkward love/sex relationships; sexuality and desire (stirred by spring rain?); practicing 'free love' in a philosophical way, of course;


Death by water
low point; sparagmos;


Thunder said
Eliot's last attempt to make sense of the world before converting to Christianity; water cures the waste land since it's dry and rocky;

Blog the themes I identified in parts of Burial, sections 2, 3 and 5 (I'm a 5!)

"Full Fathom Five..."

(From "The Tempest")

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

Waste Land

This was a difficult piece. I read all the interpretations I could find and I agree that it is difficult to wake up after sleeping for a long time. "Warm, covering in forgetful snow" is an excellent description of the sleepy, waking dream of depression. I've spent medicated years covered in forgetful snow, subsisting on dried tubers, and Summer definitely surprised me when I decided to stop taking all those meds. I argued with my doctors and eventually did it on my own as memory and desire stirred the dull roots of the life I was no longer living so much as stumbling through. I think I need more than a week to adequately discover what lies between the lines of this song for me; a year ago or so, I would have sailed through this and known it all but I've come a long way with lots of therapy and trying to bury the snow under fresh new hyacinth flowers.

The Chess Game had a different meaning for me. I spent this summer in group therapy for a very old event that changed my life; it took me 15 years to come forward and ask for help. I admit I didn't "get it" but when I read the interpretations and learned that the Chess game is a cover-up and a description of a rape, I read it again with old eyes and came away with the nightingale who filled all the desert with inviolable voice: that's how the group sessions felt, actually, being able to give voice to such a terrible act and the struggle to find meaning in the senselessness of it, and that sometimes a death is merely symbolic and just to give life to something new. Yes, I understand the sacrifice of the old king for a bountiful harvest; I've always been enamored of ancient legends and myths, and tarot is nothing new but I studied I suppose a different pantheon with different symbols.

The waste land

At work, I was dutifully reading my Waste Land texts, all the explanations (because I needed them). I have always LOVED Prufrock but I guess I never bothered to pick up anything else by Eliot and was rather unprepared for the complexity of Waste Land. So one of my co-workers looked over my shoulder, the cook, and said "What's that? Waste Land? That's why I dropped out of high school! How're you doing with it?"
Well at least it's not just me that doesn't get it! I'm quite frustrated.

room

Ch 2--women in literature
1. general topic of chapter (s)
2. most important section, carries thematic weight, close reading
3. other thematic issues carried over from rest of book
4. compare/contrast with tse
5. problematic passages (don't understand or self contradicting)

went to the British Museum to research; BM is "where it's at" at the time for any research. everybody who's anybody went there to do their research.

Male/female dichotomies--contradicting ideas about women; we were the literary ideal yet in truth, flung about the room and owned by any male in the family be it father or husband

Money--allows for education and the opportunities to write
p38-freedom! I need not hate any man, he can take nothing from me; I need not flatter, he has nothing to give me.

subjective/objective--usually subjective, Virginia flips into objective and impersonal at times, like she flips truth/lies while fact-finding

Ch 3--
fictional story of Shakespeare's sister, Judith and history of women writers (made up the earlies story since there is no history of women that far back to Elizabethan women) and covers several known women-writers.
Why weren't there more woman writers? They couldn't own property because they were property; had no access to education or reading; Brontes (female authors, sisters) all published under pseudonyms (____ Bell)

p56 You shouldn't be able to tell what the writer is thinking, the writer's personality should not pervade through his/her work. The work should stand alone; grudges, spites and antipathies do not show through in Shakespeare's works and that makes him a good author.
the Great Artist is impersonal, objective

Ch 4--
the learning? lonely? world of the female writer; giving us (the readers) a coherent history of women writers, offering an alternate cannon!
p63 a contrast to Eliot who was not a fan of the romantics puts writers on a pedestal above ordinary people on the street
p64 a woman, the first who makes her living on writing, and the middle-class women who begin to write
Histories are written by men, who catalog wars, because Men think wars are important but Virginia Woolf writes about the beginning of women writing a lot as the significance worth noting over wars (Did women have a renaissance and what was it?)
Jane Austin--did not have a room of her own, was constantly disturbed by comings and goings in the public parlor of the home, yet nothing of her life shows through to harm her work, not distracted by pettiness, anger and fear.

8-Hamlet and others

I really only enjoyed the movie Hamlet because of Mel Gibson. I'd never found it interesting in high school, and now I know why: because Hamlet himself is made more important than the story, which I suppose is why the Mel Gibson version did so well. I must admit it's been quite a while since I've taken the Shakespeare class and don't remember whether or not the play was 'satisfactory' to me when we dealt with it in class. I believe Hamlet could have handled his situation better with a little more communication but don't understand quite how a playwright could have made a better story with less confusion. Since I did enjoy the movie, it wasn't a complete artistic failure, just needed a better setting to succeed than was available when this essay was written. Hamlet is generally portrayed as a buffoon, expressing the" buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art" but how would one react to the death of one's father by his (or her) mother's treachery? I cannot relate to that emotion since I've never experienced such a betrayal; it is an amazing leap to delve into the psyche of the disturbed, especially one so intelligent as Hamlet.

As for the metaphysical poets, I enjoy the reading for the pleasant development of words as the subject progresses. I find the poems to be great works because they are lovely and justified, and do not as a rule try to pick apart pretty things just to discern their underlying meaning. Metaphors are not my strong point, I think, and admire the poets who excel in their use ( I watched too much tv as a child perhaps). "The poets of the 17th century, the successors of the dramatists of the 16th, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience" I believe suggests what TIT states, that a great work of art is not created simply because the subject is great. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and the poem just preceding the quote, beginning with "One walked between his wife and child;/with measured footfall firm and mild..." simply yet elegantly illuminates the simple beauty of a family, happy together. God made mountains and forests and oceans and humans, all of which are beautiful in themselves, but when human nature lends towards the chaotic, there is great beauty in the harmony we seldom create together and the words that describe this harmony, in my opinion, are greater because the subject is so much more obscure than the simplicity of describing the beauty of the lake or river, because it is less easily obtained.

adding clasmates blog urls

I went into edit my profile and it's under Links. Just add the url and it will appear at the bottom of the blog, after all my posts. There's a new gadget called 'Followers' to list people who follow my blog and I added it but I'm not sure yet how to add everyone's address. I only have two classmates blog addresses anyway so it doesn't do me much good, but I'll work on it when I get more. Perhaps we could all add ourselves to the followers to easily check each other's works?

7-Tradition and the Individual Talent

feelings=images, impressions; emotions=strings of feelings, events or experiences
the work, the poem itself as opposed to the poet
which is more beautiful: a poem about grand beauty, or the beauty in the everyday? (the progression of words and word-images, development of the subject)

As an aspiring writer myself, I of course model my works after what I've read before. When I read a fantastic story, I try to recreate it (my favorite inspiration is generally Borges; I like the way he makes the ordinary extraordinary). I like reading a fantastic story and finding out at the end it was simply something mundane that the author looked at through a different lens. Is what I write new and fantastic? No; it's traditional, modeled after a style I fancy at the moment, but it's new for me if it's a subject or style I've never come across before (some are good, some are pitiful attempts at greatness that fall far short) but even the stories that don't pass muster are part of the process, part of the cannon (in this case, my own personal canon) and each attempt changes forever the future forays into this style or that. Eliot is quite critical of writers, rather critics, who only look for what's new but how do you discern what is 'new' if you don't know what else is there?
I find that works that discuss the everyday and make it beautiful are my favorites. I read a poem once about a shiny metal goddess whose worshipers placed offerings in her belly and she gave them bread and cookies. The metal goddess was a Hobart mixer (like a Kitchen Aid mixer on your counter but the gigantic, industrial floor model). I'd never thought of working as a baker like that, and I've made my share of sheet cakes and loaves by the dozen in commercial kitchens, berating the choices that brought me into the heat of the kitchen, but jobs like that have a beauty of their own, too, if you know where to look. Not everybody goes to the Alps, so reading a poem about them may create images in my mind but only if very skillfully written. Most of us, even those who don't cook, at least know the machines that line the shelves at Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond and can picture the metal goddess in a new light next time you go shopping after reading that poem and find beauty in the every-day ordinary as it becomes extra-ordinary. How does a feeling become an emotion? Do you have to 'experience' the feeling often before it transforms itself or does it simply rise in intensity and recreate itself into the more solid designation of emotion? And who determines which it is? The poet, the poem or the reader? "Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past". So every time I've ever poured ingredients into a mixing bowl, I was placing my offerings into the goddess who exchanged my gift into a gift for me. How wonderful it is to bake and be part of the fantastic ritual of feeding my loved ones! I had no idea how the exchange was part of a plan; I just thought I wanted a cookie. So now my feelings about working as a baker have been changed by words, exchanged the feelings I had years before I experienced the poem, and feelings become emotions attached to the action of creating yummy things from plain old boring ingredients.

6-kew and mark

I liked the continuity between these two stories, that a snail was witness to all surrounding it while being obscurely present either noticed on a wall or unseen beneath the towering flowers in the gardens.
Mark was the first of Woolf's works that I've ever attempted to read and I found it very difficult to follow as she meandered through time with various fantastic explanations for this curious mark on the wall she was not interested enough in to stand up and find out just what it was. I get lost in reveries, especially with the flickering tongues of fire (whose image is forever ruined by Harry Potter's communication system and faces popping out of fire places, talking). It was interesting that when a human voice woke her from her reverie, she did not drown like Eliot/Prufrock but was freed by the knowledge that the mysterious mark on the wall was a snail: mystery over! Her works, while confusing, seem to have cheerful, happy overtones that uplift the determined reader who wades through all the trails of her reveries.
Kew gardens, when I read it, was of course difficult to follow but at least I'd had other stories by Woolf under my belt by then and expected the digressions. But the snippets of conversations that the reader is privy to in this story are just what a snail living in such a garden would hear. How confusing people must seem when one only knows bits and pieces! From the perspective of the snail, the entire world of humans must indeed seem large and knowledge only gained in pieces. The story flowed like a walk in the garden, too, and wasn't as confusing as Mark, in which the narrator never actually got up from the chair or did anything at all. In Kew, there is action observed and discussed as it occurs. And the little snail remains while the world goes on about, unaware of it's existence.

I started A Room of One's Own today and got totally lost in her reverie before dinner was served so I was completely confused when she stopped mid-sentence and jumped to the next paragraph with dinner being served; it was quite vexing and I had to go back a page or two to figure out where I went wrong only to discover that she really did jump around like that. Kew and Mark on the Wall evoked similar emotions, although Kew was easier to picture because it was quite scenic. And what is a Beadle?
I'm not sure how to follow her reveries. I meander through my writings, too, sometimes and during conversation have been told it's difficult to follow me; now I know how frustrating it is! I did enjoy the Haunted House, though, and it gave me ideas for my second life project since the story is set in Asheham. I guess Woolf's writings just take some time to get used to. Perhaps Haunted House was easier to follow since it was shorter than the others and she didn’t jump around like a cat that’s trying to stay out of the bath tub.
I had seen the quote "One can not sleep well, live well, love well if one has not dined well" in Friend's Food with a Flair restaurant in Anderson, my favorite restaurant until the owners retired, and I'd always wondered who said that (it says Virginia Woolf, but the name didn't mean anything to me) so imagine my pleasant surprise when I found those very words in the first chapter of A Room of One's Own!

modernism

Throughout antiquity, thinking has been the province of a select, radical few. Others were merely to believe their teachers and respond accordingly, not to come up with new ideas on their own. Gradually, individual thinking became encouraged and eventually the norm. As our societies expanded, so did our knowledge of the world itself and new theories disproved old theories which required a complete re-construction of the ways we learned. Instead of re-vamping old theories, more and more students were experimenting with them and learning that many old theories just don't hold up to scientific inquiries. The learned of this time period had to re-invent themselves and their classification to include new ways of thinking, not just learning. And thwarted at every turn by the Church in their Justifications to leave the masses ignorant, they had quite a fight before education even resembled what we know today.

Education, historically, has been for males, especially after industrialization allowed men to go out into the world to work and learn. Women were once again shunted to the rear in order to care for the basic daily chores to sustain living while their men were out reconfiguring the landscape of the educational universe and reinventing more complicated, mechanized ways of doing traditional chores. Even still, women found a way to reinvent the landscape themselves: they began reading their husbands' and fathers' books and theses and began to think for themselves much the same as men were expanding their knowledge base. (The song that's playing in my head while I write this is Eurythmic's "Sister's are Doin' it For Themselves").

Modernist works include women more so than many other time periods in history, as well as a delve into the individual psyche. A new, personal accountability arose in this time that every little nuance of self was not in some way beholden to some specific deity (i.e. the furies, if one was angry or maddeningly off-kilter with everyone else, the anger or radical behavior could be blamed on the furies of myths) so much as to one's own character; this shift upset the natural order of things, but the old ways were on their way out anyway. If one could not blame the furies or other external influence, then where did these feelings come from? Freud posed the theory of the unconscious to explain where indeed we get our emotions that we cannot always control. And if these things come from within, then we are accountable for our own actions. Always.
So Prufrock, in olden times, could perhaps have blamed the fates for not weaving his life together with a woman he desired but in the modernist times in which he lived, he had only himself to blame.

Prufrock

· The epigraph is from Dante's Inferno (Canto 27): the section where Dante speaks with a man burning in the eighth circle of hell for the sin of fraud through evil counsel. The man agrees to tell Dante the story of his life, but only because he knows that no one in hell will ever return to earth to publicize his story:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame would shake no more. But since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.

What context does this epigraph set up for the poem? Why did Eliot choose it to introduce "a love song"? What does it tell us about the speaker in the poem and his situation?

The poem is the private thoughts of a shy gentleman. These thoughts were recorded under the assumption that they would remain private, that no one would know. The speaker is shy and insecure, totally unaware that everyone feels that way at some time or other. I believe Eliot made it a love song because it reflects the underlying emotions and internal struggles that one faces before beginning the courtship; this is what goes on before the speaker (any speaker, if he or she is human and thus subject to human shortcomings) begins wooing his lady-friend. This poem tells the reader that Mr. Prufrock is very shy and unassuming, humble and takes pride in his (however humble) appearance: in short, perhaps rather shallow, since he worries more about how he appears or he fears the object of his desire is shallow and will reject him based on his appearance.

· All of the repetitions about time and how there will be so much time are back-references to a seventeenth-century poem written by Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress":

This is a seduction poem; the man is trying to convince the woman to make love with him. He says, we gotta do it now because there just isn't enough time to mess around and be coy. And besides we are all going to die and what good will your chastity be then?

Considering this earlier poem, why do you think Prufrock keeps repeating that there will be enough time? Does the reference to the Marvell poem give us any clue as to what the "question" may be about?

Prufrock repeats that there will be time because he is patient. He is willing to chance that he will never reach his goal if it means that he will not have to "force the moment to it's crisis". He is more like the coy mistress than Marvell in this sense.

There is another reference to the Marvell poem later on in "Prufrocck." Can you find it? How does it work?

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife,

Through the iron gates of life.

To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question

Marvell rolls it all into a ball to concentrate his pleasure into a specific area. Prufrock squeezes his universe into a ball to stall for time before he has to roll it towards some overwhelming question. He is merely biding time before he must face the inevitable, whereas Marvell simply cannot wait to throw the ball into his coy mistress' park so she can throw it back to him. Marvell enjoys the courtship game, positively revels in it, at least as much as succeeding in the game; Prufrock dreads the entire process with an awesome, fearsome dread.

· When he starts talking about the "bald spot" in the middle of his head, what do you think he is worrying about?

And indeed there will be time...time to turn back and descend the stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair and they will say How his hair is getting thin!

He waits and waits and waits, perhaps too long. The moment is gone and he might never get another chance to 'force the moment to it's crisis' but he let it slip by just in case there's a better moment on the horizon that would make the beginning of their courtship even more special. But like the coy mistress, perhaps the worms will get the best of him as he waits until his hair grows thin and he has even less to offer the woman he desires.

When he starts talking about having known all the evenings already, what kind of a life do you think he has led?

He's enjoyed a rather social life, but always as the "friend" of the ladies, never as the boyfriend. He's perpetually the third wheel or the confidant or even just the guy the girls call when things go wrong with their boyfriends and they need a shoulder to cry on, never guessing it's pure torment to him to have what he really wants above all else so close and be unable to articulate his desire, unable to rise to the occasion (as the poet was unable to rise to the occasion?) So he has known them all already, known them all...because they come to him when they need to talk about their lives for his perhaps cautious advice. He knows what makes each woman tick, but even so armored in this knowledge, he's unable to advance to the next level of the game.

In the stanza beginning "And would it have been worth it, after all," the speaker suddenly changes tenses; now he speaks in the pst tense. What does this change of tenses suggest about what he is thinking?

Perhaps he knows that some of the squabbles that the girls get into with their love lives are simply because they are spoiled and/or just high maintenance women, so perhaps he's dodged the proverbial bullet by not being able to force the moment to it's crisis. Would it have been worth it after all? Who knows. Perhaps the women are unhappy because the only man who really knows them is Prufrock, and he's unable to please them, or at least not confident enough to try. He changes tenses because his musings have led him down the road a bit farther than his feet have taken him. He knows he doesn't have the nerve to roll his "universe-ball" to the Overwhelming Question so he allows his imagination to invent reasons why it wouldn't be worth it, after all, to make his failure less his own shortcomings and more an Informed Withdrawal.

Ok, so I've been in SL before and I'm a bunny with wings! I got the wings at a freebie store the last time I was here. I chose the bunny because she was the only non-human avatar available at the time. I like the fluffy tail, but I think I'd've chosen a different color if I had the choice. Perhaps I'll be able to figure out how to do that this time around! This requires a lot of remembering knowledge I thought I'd never need again...

back to school

My name is Carrie and I missed the first day of class because I had to work. I picked up this class just at the last minute and couldn't get my shift covered in time. I work at Papa Duke's Bar and Grill in Anderson.
I thought I had about two years left but found out on Tuesday that it's possible to graduate in May if I work really hard so I'm gonna go for it! Now I just need an internship...
I've taken Dr. Holmevik's classes on both video gaming and digital communications, so I'm sorta familiar with Second Life. I didn't enjoy SL at all. But last time, about a year ago, I got lost and an angel avatar saved me and took me back to wherever it was I was supposed to be. I'm currently just outside Cooper Library on the virtual campus where the fountains still spurt water. And there was something that looked like fire floating around the fountain last night, too.
I have a lot of pets: three dogs, three cats and three rodents (a miniature Russian hamster and two guinea pigs). T. S. Eliot is one of my favorites (I can recite from memory most of J. ALfred Prufrock's love song), but I must admit I've never picked up an appreciation for Virginia Woolf.
I mostly read fantasy and sci-fi when I'm reading for fun but last year I read Cold Zero by Christopher Whitcomb, a sniper for the FBI's hostage rescue team. It was rather outside my genre but well worth the foray: I loved it! I'm a WPS, with the intention of writing grants when I graduate. Why grants? Because as a single parent, I've gotten a lot of assistance to be a student and improve my financial standing. I wouldn't be in college at all without Anderson Interfaith Ministries who so generously help cover the daunting cost of child care for parents returning to school. I know there are many moms and even dads who don't know that there is help out there to achieve their goals and I want everyone to have the opportunities to succeed even if they did things backwards (like I did) because it's well worth the struggle to be able to say "I did it!"
I guess I got a lot out of my technical writing class first because I was a Food Science major at that time. I was lost, struggling with my chemistry classes and scared to death of physics looming on the horizon, and I took my first English class since arriving at Clemson (I'm a transfer from TC) . I love Star Wars so I was fortunate to have Prof. Swords for the class and we wrote Star Wars Lego instruction manuals for our group project. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to heck with FS, who cared if I couldn't eat my homework anymore and there was too much science and not enough food anyway, so I switched to WPS and haven't looked back. Except that I made the Clemson Ice Cream and sometimes I miss that!
I am fairly computer literate. I took the video gaming class because I don't play games. Never have found the time to enjoy them, but my son LOVES video games. I had to play World of Warcraft and suddenly I understood what was enjoyable about video games. I got to play with friends I haven't seen in person in years. I know that Second Life is more about socializing and WoW is more about playing, but I found the social aspect in WoW more to my liking than SL (perhaps because I just enjoy fantasy realms anyway). So the video gaming class helped me connect with my son: now I know what he's talking about when he reaches a new goal or surpasses a new level. And reading his quest log helped him excel in reading. He's in second grade now and he types fairly accurately, too.