Broadening Perspectives

I, too, was most intrigued by the interview with Burroughs. He seems like he would have been a really cool guy to sit down and talk to because he had some really innovative ideas. I liked his concept of his scrapbook and how he would take newspaper clippings or write things down, and then when he saw something in real life that reminded him of a scene, he would take a picture and then put it down next to it in the scrapbook -- that is the real cut-up, I think, because it is taking the real, actual life, something totally separated from his world from his mind, and bringing them together.
On page 4, he says, "Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands." This line particularly resonated with me because that is the sense of what I think we have been trying to do all along--take totally, or at least seemingly, unrelated things and find a way to string them together to create something new that people can appreciate, (or we can on our own). He says that the range of vision expands, and I think that it's important how he points that out, because the fact that we are doing these things and bringing different pieces together really does broaden our potential or outlooks as writers...perspectives, maybe? I'm really not sure exactly how to phrase what I'm thinking. My point is that by doing what we're doing with collage, or what he was doing with his "cut-up" method, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to see things in a new way.

Close Encounters of the Third Mind?

I really liked the interview section with Burroughs. I felt like he was high the entire time. Some of the concepts he talked about, the expanding beyond oneself and encompassing the universe and stuff, I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounded cool. One aspect that I thought really worked, was Burroughs' exploration (very short) of dreams. It's interesting to think how the mind creates dreams. Some people think that dreams are simply the brain trying to make sense of misfiring neurons. Wouldn't it be interesting then to try a replicate the loose logic of a dream? I also liked the idea of breaking past words in order to use images, to communicate with said images, as a more pure form of "speech."

Burroughs is Awesome!

"Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of out the words' making any sound whatever in the mind's ear. Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you're well on the way."

I was really interested in Burroughs' The Third Mind and the concept of the cut-up method, because, as I've mentioned before, ever since we started experimenting with collage, I can't stop thinking of new ways to mash-up and remix and think in collage. I really liked the beginning of the interview where Burroughs was asked about what the cut-up offers readers that typical conventional narratives don't. I really liked that Burroughs said, "Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands." I like to think that every collage I've done so far (at least with images, that is) has indeed expanded the overall view of the collage itself because of the connections between them to make a new narrative that obviously wouldn't have been there if I (or another author) hadn't juxtaposed those images.

"That's my principle message to writers: For Godsake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you."

--I also thought this message was really cool for cut-ups and stuff. If we just observe, we might get some pretty amazing ideas for works!

Internal & External

Although many of the concepts in The Third Mind are ideas we have previously discussed in the context of collage, there were several points that caught my attention.

On page 2 of the interview, Burroughs says, "What I want to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings." I found this statement to be very interesting, because over time, as writing developed and began to rival orality as the primary form of communication in our culture (which I'm actually only aware of because we've been discussing it in my Western Literary Traditions class), it became more and more about the internal world rather than the external one. So the fact that there is now a trend pushing in the opposite direction is intriguing, as well as helpful in understanding exactly what we are (possibly) trying to "do" with collage-writing.

Burroughs further complicates this idea on page 5, however: "That's cut-up--a juxtaposition of what's happening outside and what you're thinking of." Here, it seems that cut-up is more than just a representation of the outer world, but a clash between the inner and outer worlds. Which is even more exciting, really. And makes sense in regards to collage--we are choosing to put together pieces of the outer world based on our own inner thoughts or impulses.

I didn't realize that I had that much to say (write, rather; isn't it amazing how easily we exchange the two words?) on the subject, but now that I've gone and written it, I suppose I'll wrap it up by saying (writing!) that I liked the way Burroughs ended the interview--maybe just because it gives assurance that, cut-up or no, the author is alive and well.  

Defying expectations

Une semaine de bonte certainly DOES do everything but meet the expectations of an unsuspecting reader (or should I say spectator, since that feels a lot more acurate in this case) it even inverts the expectations that the spectator adapts to after having worked through a couple of chapters. There are themes and repetitions, even ones that show up inside the images as images - as a kind of subversive meta dialogue on the non-existing narrative - but once the reader has established a rapport with those themes and hints, they taper off into something that is completely slippery and ungraspable.
I agree with the fact that this work is obviously not designed to 'tell a story' as it were, to support a narrative, on the contrary it fights tooth and nail against any kind of continuous interpretation while the grouping and the framework, slim as it is, provides just enough structure to take away the possiblity of addressing and interpreting each of the illustrations as a standalone.
I was particularly fascinated with the workings of anatomical designs, not so much because they were more exceptionally rendered than the other artwork (or actually the most acurate and realistic depictions) but more because their placement and integration conveys the feeling of Max Ernst being utter fascinated with the concept. Apart from that, the water-themed images are certainly the most memorable of the set and provide the most coherent contexualisation of all the chapters.

Hrmmm...

So... Max Ernst's brain must be a pretty exciting place, right? Even though I think all of the separate sections of the work are just as equally important, something about the "Monday" section really stood out to me as being particularly compelling. The water element as the driving theme behind the visual was really cool, and I couldn't help but notice the stark contrast in theme from the "Sunday" section. (Maybe because women are the dominant forces behind the separate pieces in "Monday," whereas in "Sunday" they are obviously much more repressed by the men.) For some reason I really love page 42 where it seems like the woman has obviously died by the river after the bridge has crumbled behind her. I still can't seem to put together what it might mean, but it's all about the reaction anyway, right? The water element of this section is beautiful, and another piece that caught my eye the most was page 51. The juxtaposition of the drowning men in the foreground with the woman looking relaxed (and perhaps expectantly so, given the contemplative look of the one man standing on the water) is both moving and slightly disturbing at the same time, but of course I can't say that's a bad thing! As weird and unsettling as this work is sometimes, I love the surrealism.

Haphazard Thoughts

Since Une Semaine de Bonte  seems to be more about reaction that comprehension, here are a few sporadic thoughts as they came to me:

I found the various framed pictures in the "Tuesday" section to be rather fascinating. The bizarre images the frames often contained brought them out of the background, where wall decorations are usually situated, and shoved them suddenly and strikingly close to the viewer. My favorite may have been on page 79. Or perhaps 77, a portrait (or mirror?) which I imagined to be revealing the woman's true intentions--intentions that (to me) weren't particularly benign. The chaos of the framed images on 111 was effective as well.

As Rachel mentioned, there were tons of recurring images that showed up throughout the entire work. A few that struck me (other than the more obvious ones denoted by the particular "example" of the chapter--can we call them chapters?): snakes, insects, leaf-stamps, and the innards of plants.

The fact that so often it was the faces that were replaced intrigued me. For a long time, I've found the idea of masks and their symbolic nature to be fascinating. By replacing the human face with an animal one, their very identity, their humanness was stripped away--or perhaps, their base animal natures revealed.

I thought the giant eyeball at the bottom of page 134 was very disturbing. Until it occurred to me that it was in the section in which the example was "Oedipus"; then I thought it was kind of hilarious. Also, I liked page 181 better upside down.

Repetition always finds its way back

Une Semaine De Bonte… yeah, interesting, to say the least. I really liked the aspect of repetition in all of the pictures. I thought it brought back the concept of the uncanny, which I think actually fits really well with all of this surrealism stuff, anyway. For me, Dimanche was my favorite because of the incorporation of the lion heads throughout and the fierceness that I think it brought into all of the pictures. (That, and the fact that I absolutely hate birds and they freak me out and they were in a lot of the rest of the book.) Throughout the whole of the book all of the pictures, though similar in nature, ultimately were very different when you really looked at them. I think if you were just flipping through it would be a little bit harder to distinguish between them because of the repeated elements, but I think that works for someone who is actually sitting down and taking the time to really look at it and pay attention.

The mix CDs are so amusing. Some are whacked as hell, though, to put it lightly. Number four on disk two was crazy and creepy and the layers kept messing with my mind, but that made it really cool, (but really creepy and I really kind of just wanted it to end). Some were really bizarre, but I was glad to have the mixture of the funky ones and the absolutely off-the-wall strange ones because it shows that we can really go absolutely anywhere with things and we’re pretty much unlimited.

I’m with Jess, about how this whole collage concept has kind of taken over. When I’m looking at or reading something, sometimes I’m thinking “What can I take from this?,” or “How can I use this?” I don’t mind it, though. Honestly, I think we could be doing that all the time anyway, looking for “inspiration” in other places, if that’s what you want to call it for a clear conscience. 

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words?

Well, Une Semaine de Bonte is certainly an interesting piece. I'd love to find out how the collages were actually formed physically and what underlying concepts sparked their conception. (That tends to be my immediate reaction to collages in this class: How was it formed? It's become an obsession; I really want to know.) Aside from this, the format is interesting as well. I like how each section is associated with a day of the week, and an element, yet is left unexplained. How does a baron with a lion's head embody "mud"? That's up to the reader to figure out. My favorite "theme", if you will, was "Water." I enjoyed how Ernst manipulated the ocean or rushing tides into each picture, especially the ones where women are sleeping. In this way, water seems to take on a dream-like and feminine quality. (So many men are drowned in this section! What the hell!) Is this because women are fickle, fluctuated, and "dependant" on the moon? Because we're swift like a coursing river? Have the force of a great typhoon? I also found it...maybe a little disconcerting...that at times the pictures began a narrative (I'm thinking of "Fire") but never upheld it fully. Or rather, I should say, there seemed to be a narrative, but I couldn't make any sense of it. It drove me nuts, but in a good way, I guess. (That's to say I didn't mind it terribly.) I think this collage best exhibits the "many interpretations" aspect that we discussed at the beginning of the semester.

Excuse me, where is this narrative going?

Both the short texts based on newspaper felt very much like a confirmation of my earlier thoughts about collage and directionality. The authors use - both in a different, but still intensely graphic way - the rearrangements of the words to de- and recontextualize, to fragment previous meanings and at the same time focus the text into a much more straight forward point; a theme if you will. This also leads back to my impression of Nadja having a subconscious narrative as well as a surface one, however in the case of the newspaper pieces that narrative was picked out of the sources by virtue of the composers' (which I will apply here instead of author, for it feels much more like they create new tunes out of a fixed set of materials, adhering to certain - albeit mostly and loosely grammatical - rules) eyes to be brought before the reader to see what they wouldn't have, had they only read the original pages.

Ambiguity

So much collage!
Anyway, I agree with Alyssa; I began to appreciate the book more through the end. I thought it was interesting how he brought up the idea of common sense (pg. 143) and how Nadja had lost, or had maybe never even possessed, common sense at all. It made me think of how it would apply to collage, and whether there need be any sense in it at all.

In “N,” since it is all taken from the front page of the New York Times, I wondered how Jackson put it together and made her decisions on how she was going to make sense of it all, (there it is again). I was thinking about what her intention was and how she considered how she was going to achieve that using just the material she designated for herself. I really liked the way she set it up, but my favorite part was the first paragraph of “Conversation Gospel,” when she discussed what constituted a conversation. Since "N" wasn't given a clear identity, he remained a bit ambiguous and left to be interpreted, as I found. I just found it to be an interesting concept, and now looking back, I realize that she made it all work using minimal materials.

Now, “Daily News” was another interesting form of collage, yet so much different. There was clearly much less text, but I liked that about it because there was less to absorb and it was easier to take in all at once and I could go back and look it over again and again. Since it isn’t set up in exact lines, it is a little ambiguous and so sometimes you can decide how you want to read which line for yourself, (or at least, that’s how I found it to be). 

Who goes there? Is it Only Me? Is it Myself?

I enjoyed the second half of Nadja a great deal more than I did the first. The pictures of Nadja's artwork were much more intriguing than previous visuals, as they were open to more interpretation, and in their abstraction held  more of an mysterious, unknown quality, rather than simply "here is a picture of this person/place." I also liked the list of his favorite quotes from Nadja on pages 115 and 116. Reading all the quotes strung together out of context, it struck me as very much like a collage. In many cases, there's no direct meaning to gain from the quotes, yet the juxtaposition of the seemingly superfluous ("Pink is better than black, but the two harmonize.") with the seemingly profound ("Before the mystery. Man of stone, understand me.") instigates a vast spectrum of emotions all at once.

I thought our other readings were interesting as well. Once I accepted that "N" was basically nonsensical, I was able to appreciate the play with language, especially in the first paragraph under "Animal Gospel," with its constant repetitions, and "Gospel Incompletely," which just sounded beautiful to me. "Daily News" was a bit too disjointed for my taste, but I liked how the layout of many of the poems enabled you to read them in a variety of ways. There were also some very powerful phrases created with those few choice words that I really loved, such as "the years were a casket."

It's a mad, mad, mad world!

So, I like the concept of madness and insanity from the manifesto, and it got me thinking about how the concept of collage is a kind of madness too. Think of a normal piece of fiction as "sane" in that it is tied together, normalized and is the author's entire idea (input and revision from editors notwithstanding). Then look at the collage fictions, especially the more visual works that have done as exercises for the past few weeks.

I know when I see the insane depicted in film or comics, the writing on their walls is disjointed and unnerving, and it's the same kind of look we attempt to create as we try to place our readers in an uncomfortable and uncanny sense of the world. Of course, i'm talking about popular culture here in terms of madness, and I am not trying to say that we as writers are mad. (Though we may be, as the world of the literary has shit pay)

But isn't the collage going against the sense of "logic"? The collage doesn't have to be surreal in terms of Breton, but it almost seems illogical in terms of normal fiction; taking pieces from other works to tell our story, and not the original author, or really some times not even to tell a story at all.

Still, it sure is fun to be crazy.

A single flow of thought

The title of this post is basically the conclusion I got from both Nadja and the Manifesto, though oddly enough from a very different perspective for each piece. The novel felt more like a notebook acting as a journal for things to be jotted down at a moments' notice, though at the same time it felt carefully crafted to blur the line of one 'scene' flowing into the other. I still can't decide whether I welcome the disruption of the reading process that the pictures posed or not, because they take you 'out of the flow' while on the other hand sometimes providing welcome pauses. Certainly the visual illustration is interesting.
The most striking thing that came to light for me while reading the novel was the character of the 'woman' that was weaved into the narrative like an underlying layer that surfaced in all these different incarnations, but was very obviously a composit of the same person. I can't really pinpoint what it was in the writing, but it felt to me that any mention of this woman - who I assume is supposed to be Nadja - stood out stylistically, much like a narrated relief. It is certainly an intriguing concept to explore further while reading on.
I very much recognized the style in the Manifesto as well and the attempt at the same continuous flow of thought poured out into the page (that Brenton actually conceptualized in the Manifesto itself) but I think that a strictly non-fictional and reflective text might not be the as well a vehicle for this kind of approach because I found it a lot more inaccessible than Nadja, which you could let wash over you without really losing anything of narrative even though not every single word held the same importance and some paragraphs were rather fleeting, but for a kind of text like the Manifesto is supposed to be - from my perspective - the effect is more confounding than enlightening.

Choice and the Real: I read the manifesto upside down.

The first thing which I feel must be addressed, is this dear letter. This question of whether or not it is enough for something to be chosen as a different object... To that I can only reply that "chosen" art seems to have far less of a ring to it, save that of the hammer which I wish it would turn back on itself with such fervor.

That being said, it is strange... this relationship of the Surreal, and the chosen. On the one hand, the Surrealist must choose to show us something outside of reality, or at least, outside of the box in which we assume reality is so nicely placed. As this manifesto seems to say of the kind of writing it finds less than stellar... "I refuse to go into the room". Such, if the writer is to be believed, is a necessity of the mind which finds banal repititons of the everyday detail of language to be sickening, and even immoral in art.
Here we seem to find a(nother?) critic of the novel... one who finds it far too gritty, detail oriented, and raw... even in its own invention.

On the other hand, it would seem that choice is immediately subjugated in the next few sentences. His concern fro Freud, and his dream interpretations, seems to imply that a world in which we have no (conscious) choice in, but is distinct from this imagined "real", is far more important to us than the original real... precisely because it juxtaposes, and possibly frames.

I have a question, also, on the basis of the following quotation:
"It seems that every act is it's own justification, at least for the person capable of committing it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is sure to diminish."

My question, if I might deign to ask one, is this.... how much of Surrealism is the Mother... Brother... Child, of this hypermediation we now bear witness to? How much the enemy? For on the one hand, it seems that the surrealist tendency to rely on the Choice of the matter is what is so very much a cause of this media malady... but at the same time he seems to predict the symptom... the seeming deadness of something once it has been copypasta-d. Does my question even matter? Especially in this class, where it seems that so much of what we do is to ignore the presumption of this deadness, and in so doing... find new life.

Incurable Mania

For the most part, I wasn't particularly moved by the "Manifesto of Surrealism." It seemed like Breton was simply trying to universalize his own opinion by making a bunch of generalizations, generalizations that I don't think always hold true for everyone, such as "Children set off each day without  worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine," "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him," and "At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales," (4, 13, 15). These statements all sounded nice when I read them, but then when I paused to think about what they actually implied, I found myself unconvinced.

That being said, I really did enjoy his advocacy for mystery on pages 9 and 10, beginning with "Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments." This was something I could relate to, in our formulaic, 5-steps-to-the-perfect-life society. We have a seemingly innate resistance to the idea that something could be unknowable, incomprehensible. Which is why leaving the reader with unanswered questions is such a powerful technique.

However, I don't believe that "rationality/logic" and "surrealism" should be viewed as polar opposites. In fact, I don't think you can even completely separate them. And why try? Why go from one extreme to the other? Everyone's minds process their thoughts and experiences differently. That's what makes life so interesting.

Don't I Love Her? When I Am Near Her...

I'm not too sure what to think of Nadja  just yet... only that I like it, and especially appreciate Breton's use of pictures throughout to help illustrate the telling of the story, particularly where Nadja's character is concerned. ("because in Russian it's the beginning of the word hope, and because it's only the beginning...") I'm obviously drawn to the surrealistic elements of the work and whether or not (at this point, at least) we know what the reality of Andre's world really is.

The pictures throughout, though, are what really intrigues me. We could, as an audience, do well in understanding the work without them, I suppose, but I think their importance lies in the fact that it does give us a visual representation of Andre's tale. They obviously tie in closely with the narrative, but I think it would also be pretty cool if they were "out of order," in a sense, or without captions, so that their meaning or their reasons for being included in the narrative could be left up to us to determine. I guess the pictures do serve as a sort of literal reality for us as we're reading, which I think is juxtaposed pretty nicely with the surrealist text. 

Dreams... and Nadja, too.

The Surrealist Manifesto, though I resisted due to the title “Manifesto”, actually intrigued me, particularly in the way it talked about the integration of dreams and how they influenced writing and how they can be interpreted. I think at one point it even said that dreams could even be taken to mean more than reality or something of the sort? I could have misinterpreted that or read it wrong, I’m not sure, but all of the talk of dreams was fun for me to read because I have always been fascinated by dreams and what they mean and blah, blah, blah. On page 12, about half of the way down, it says, “Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute?” It all just really made me think, I suppose.

Like Jess, I started to read Nadja like something from the Nonfiction class. And then I would take a step back and remind myself. And then I would get reading again, and the same thing would happen. The beginning for me was a little messy and all over the place, until we actually met Nadja and then looking back I understood the beginning more and I appreciated the set up in a different way. At first just trying to wade through all of these thoughts and concepts was a little like, “huh?” for me, but once it was over and I stopped to think about it and process it, it was more interesting, and then applying it to his interactions with Nadja made it a little easier to comprehend. 

Style Choices

According to the back of the Grove Press edition, Nadja is the actual account of the author's relationship with a woman in Paris. While this isn't apparent at first, what caught me was the style of the book. It read like a book from my Nonfiction class. Breton takes many jumps throughout the narrative; it's almost a stream of consciousness type fashion. He goes from thinking on a woman he had met, to the theatre. Each jump is a surprise and introduces a new facet to his life. Nadja seems less like a cohesive narrative than it does an exploration on Breton's experiences and the idea of obsession and the surreal. The author gives us glimpses of Paris, of people, of places, without offering too much commentary on what each means to him. The emotional aspect of the piece is allowed to be inferred or gathered through the pace and direction of the narrative. (Another aspect of this book that makes me think of nonfiction, the lyric essay, and memoir, is the author's honesty. Page 39: "I have always, beyond belief, hoped to meet, at night and in a woods, a beautiful naked woman...")

I especially liked the parenthetical paragraph on pages 49-51, where it seems as if the author is trying to understand a disconnected event (the balloon falling) by exploring a dream (and the subsequent disconnected events).

Stealing!

Saw this on Tumblr this morning... Thought it might be relevant to... you know. Collages and stuff!

http://www.austinkleon.com/

Not so bad

Crap! Forgot about this until now. Oops.

Anyway, I detract my prior remarks about “The Wasteland.” It is far better than I remember, but I am also reading it in a much different context with significantly less pressure. I actually enjoyed it and was able to really pay close attention to the detail instead of constantly trying to wrap my head around every little thing he was trying to say, or what I thought that might have been.  When I read it the first time, too, I had been warned of how “difficult” it was, so that seeped into my brain and made me gloss over.
The vividness struck me, and I especially liked part II. A Game of Chess, because it seemed to really be telling a story. It was a back and forth and it was interesting to see how Eliot played with that.

As a few people have already mentioned, the repetition was interesting to see, especially in the context of this week’s exercise. It broke up the lines of the poem and interrupted what was going on at the center, so it made me a little uneasy, but that’s what made me like it and made it work.

Just as a side note with really little significance, I love the lines at the end of the first stanza in part V:
He who was living is now dead 
We who were living are now dying 
With a little patience

^Irrelevant. 

How luminous does the word shine

"The Dong with the Luminous Nose"... I have to be frank, and admit that I could not keep my head out of the gutter on this one.

But I feel as though, perhaps, that was the intent. In many ways the poem seemed to resemble Jabberwocky, the famous piece by Lewis Caroll (who was a Logician, by the way). The absurdities of a piece like that are found in the somewhat flippant and absurd use of amusing sounding, rounded, blunted syllables. The language itself is meant to be sort of, robust, quirky in its mockery of the epic, or at least of all those poems that would like to take themselves seriously.
Yet its irony seems to be extended far further than Caroll's, by both playing off of that kind of thought process, and using language that could be thought of as somewhat... flamboyantly sexual, to do it. Then it tapers off, before again reminding you of the inherent innuendo, simply in the title.

The Wasteland: Unpopular Opinion Time

Of course it's easy to see how The Wasteland is a collage. I felt like I couldn't read three lines without flipping back to the footnotes to understand what the author was trying to say. It's unfortunate that, as modern readers, we can't fully understand the context of the poem as we read it. I actually became kind of frustrated at having to flip back to the footnotes just to understand the German. (I'm sure this is exactly what makes the poem so popular and layered and "classic" but it got on my nerves... a lot.) I'm not trying to say that copying this is a bad thing, certainly not. But it shouldn't stand as a warning of sorts. Like when Koby presented his collage that had the philosophy formula. I didn't think explaining the formula was necessary--it's an interesting layer to the collage and leaves it open for multiple interpretations. Having a line in another language does not always help interpretation. It requires research and translation. So, it should be considered very heavily before being added to a collage. (Which I'm sure Eliot did and finally decided pro-adding it in.)

That being said, if I finally gave up understanding everything, I did enjoy the poem at times. The seeming dialogue in II. A Game of Chess was really interesting to me. For some reason, this section of the poem was really uncanny to me. It's a conversation with no end goal. Neither speaker is responding to the other. I also liked Death by Water. The simple gravity of the poem is a tone I'd like to replicate.

But there is no water

So, I really enjoyed listening to the recording of "The Waste Land." Actually hearing the words spoken aloud had a much stronger impact on me than if I had simply read the words on the page. I also thought it was interesting that there were three different readers--the various voices gave character to the different voices in the poem, often jarring against each other in a way that highlighted even more the pieced-together nature of the work.

Following along as I listened, I very much experienced the "bright splinter" effect that I mentioned in my previous post; there are so many broken, disjointed scenes, but they are each so powerful (even if most of the time you don't completely understand what's going on), you feel an emotional connection to the work. As Jessica mentioned, I think this has a lot to do with the repetition, and the uncanny of the "almost familiar." It also has this tendency to pull you in and nearly drown you, such as in the first few stanzas in section five: it is highly repetitious, and there is no punctuation to slow you down. You are caught on this mountain without water, tumbling headlong into rock after rock after rock, and there is no water, but that's all you can think about, because the longing for water is so strong, the imagining of the water is relentless...but there is no water.

Basically. I thought this was a great example of the ways in which we can use the splintered nature of collage to our advantage, through its ability to illicit a strong emotional response without consistent narrative or character.

Wasted Land

Both works in their own way give the reader a feel of fragmentation yet at the same time a sense of the whole in the sum of the parts. I'm kind of torn between just reading them and trying to piece together a sense from what I see at face value and chasing after each individual reference that contributed to their complilation. For the Ashbery I think it's more towards the latter not only because the format it was presented in, but also that it purposefully resists any kind of traditional narrative (even if the term is to be applied rather loosely for poetry anyway). Interestingly, the poem both traditionally 'put together' and taken apart with the reference to the various sources seem to be a legitimate representation in their own right. It makes you either try to interpret something into the whole or into each separate fragment, that - taken out of the context of it's original work - acquires a new meaning as well. What I really can't get over is the title, it just boggles the mind...
Concerning the wasteland, I find that the fragmentation enhances the narrative (in the sense that it is an emotional, rather than a traditional one) the voice is splintered, taken apart and put together with rough edges and mis-matched bursts of speech. It represents the very pillars of culture from the antique period through to the present, but perceived through a cracked magnifying glass that veils them in the unfamiliar, the uncanny in the purest sense.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

I loved the depth of the repetition in part 2, "A Game of Chess". While reading through it a second time, I felt myself becoming more and more engrossed in the middle section, right around the "those are pearls that were his eyes" line. And even though Eliot's notes were included with the poem, I didn't find it necessary to really worry about reading through all of them in order to find out what his sources of reference were. They are nice to have, of course, but I think the ambiguity of not knowing where the original 'ideas' came from is pretty compelling. I'm not sure why the repetition of HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME sticks with me so much... but then again, maybe I can find out why. I like the compulsion of repetition, and given the context of this section of the piece and how it ends (with Ophelia's repetition, no doubt) is really awesome in the sense that it makes me feel a sense of urgency and a rather uncanny feeling that something morbid is about to happen... or could happen. I almost wanted it to. I tend to think that if "A Game of Chess" were to be redistributed (and maybe it has been) outside of the whole of The Wasteland, it would make a perfect standalone work... but as it is included with all of the other sections I think it makes for a very awesome type of textual collage. I also particularly admired the way that Eliot pulled from so many varied classic sources to make a larger work of art that is obscure and so long-lasting. I think it's a good thing to have his 'sources' included, but the ambiguity of not knowing where everything came from at first and just guessing at some of the things I recognized from Shakespeare was intriguing.