Best of Week: Cathedral and Intimacy

This year in English we have, obviously, read many stories of all sorts. We've read Shakespeare, modern depictions of Afghanistan, and all in all a huge variety of literature. I find it awesome that, after all these things, we're finally touching on short stories. I find that short stories can be the most meaningful to read and possibly the most fun to write. They can have all of the meaning without an intimidating amount of length-- writing or reading long books can be, well, difficult.

So, our entry into the short story unit should naturally have begun with reading a short story. This week we read Raymond Carver's Cathedral and I found our discussions on it to be very interesting. The major topic that we brushed on was intimacy of all sorts present in the story. There's a whole lot of it going on, so it was somewhat of a difficult task to break it all down.

The class, I think, agreed that the most passionate form of intimacy lies between Robert, the blind man, and the narrator's wife. Between the narrator and his wife is a pretty big lack of intimacy: physical, emotional, religious, or Romantic, it's all lacking somewhat. A class example came on page 218, where the narrator's wife only mentions Robert's name and never the narrator's, though he anxiously awaits its mention. We all agreed that Carver had intentions for this, to demonstrate the void of intimacy between them. Lastly, I find it interesting that all the intimacy in the story is centered around the narrator's wife. Her ex-husband, Robert, and her current husband, all shared some form of intimacy with her.

Intimacy is present in pretty much every story every made; I can't name a single one without it. It is the thread that binds characters and people together, and without it there's really nothing for an author to work with. It's very important, especially in a short story, to establish ties between the characters whether they be physical, emotional, or social. As we write our own short stories, I think it's very important to take this all into consideration.

Without any intimacy, the entire world would just be meaningless and void of emotion. Carver's story does a great job establishing it, even with a somewhat drone and simple narrator. This goes to show that intimacy exists aside of the speaker, that like postmodern memory, it exists around us and we are part of it. Intimacy is not a choice, but rather is omnipresent and we must acknowledge this in our writing.

iMedia: Tommy Igoe on Drums

The following is a video from New York City's Birdland Jazz Club:

You might be thinking, great, a drum solo. What could possibly be artistic or meaningful about slamming wooden sticks into plastic heads and making loud noises?

The simple answer is that, if you find any other instrument artistic, then you can say the same about drums. A drum head is simply a string stretched out, in a way. So, melodies, harmonies, rhythm, soloing- they can all be done on drums.

I picked this specific solo mostly because of the man behind the kit. He Tommy Igoe, son of famous drummer Sonny Igoe, plays weekly at the Birdland club and also plays sessions for countless jazz musicians around the NYC area. Most importantly, though, he is perhaps the best professional teacher. It seems many professionals can't teach at all, but he can do it all.

So, before going off completely on a drum-related rant, it's important to actually relate this to something. A drum solo, in a way, is like language. It must still contain rhythm and a sort of structure, but creativity is allowed within that structure. Look at the end of the solo, when Igoe finishes and the entire band comes in perfectly. The root of the song is never lost, and that's a cool thing. Not only is he drumming fluidly and quickly, but the whole time he is counting and making sure to be ready.

This perfect drumming combination is just like a great author- on a simple layer is their basic structure, the form of paragraphing of their work. More complex is the fluid manner with which they use language. Music is just like writing, and really like any art form. People too often divide up art forms into different forms, but it's pretty obvious that all art is art. Sure, there is a technical difference between typing words and playing drums, but it's all in the ultimate search for artistic beauty.

Drums are the perfect example of an instrument in terms of structure, often being called the backbone of music or the driving force behind all of it. I'm not arguing that they're most important (but certainly the most fun to play), but they relate to language in many different ways.

What I'm ultimately getting at is that art is basically a simple structure, stacked on with creativity and improvisation of sorts. Professionals- writers, musicians, painters, photographers, etc.- always pay attention to that structure but never accept sticking to it completely. This is why we read classic works: to learn history and get a feel for the structure. Now, in our own writing, it is our job to push the boundaries of writing and think of new thoughts.

So, for our next unit, we should take a field trip to New York and see some music.

Connection: Heart of Darkness and The Hurt Locker

Heart of Darkness and The Hurt Locker. It's interesting to think that two different kinds of works of art (book and film), created over 110 years apart, can be connected. I'd say that's the true mark of a great classic book: if it can stand for 100s of years and still be relevant, the writing must be forward-thinking and well ahead of its time.

This was clearly the case with Conrad's novella, and as I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker this past weekend, the connections were relatively easy to make. Just for anyone who hasn't seen the film, it's about an American IED (bomb) squad in Iraq and especially the man who suits up and defuses bombs. Without spoiling the end, it's important to note that he has a sort of addiction to his work with IEDs and battle.

The first, and most obvious connection between the two works is that the main character is seen as imperfect. There's no glorifying here, either in Marlow's horrible situation or in the bomb squad's missions. The Hurt Locker is really one of the only war movies I've ever seen that's not glorified with some overarching message. It's a very raw, personal film and that's the kind of story that Joseph Conrad gives us as well.

On a much deeper level than the plot is the inclusion of postmodern philosophy in both works. We've drawn many postmodern parallels to Heart of Darkness, such as the fragmented view of Kurtz throughout the story. In The Hurt Locker, though, we get a similar, very disconnected perspective on the whole story. Time in the film is almost random, events are spliced together in such a way that we don't understand the whole picture. We never hear orders from a higher official in the military or anyone giving orders to these men. In the same way that Conrad's story is one with a backdrop in the Congo, the Iraq war serves as a foundation for Bigelow's real plot.

Another huge postmodern element in each of these two works is the idea that "everything is a commodity." The implications of this statement are pretty obvious in Heart of Darkness, where all African resources are to Europeans "just another commodity," and human life itself can be pushed out of the way to achieve economic goals. The Hurt Locker, and war itself, work in a similar way: human life is just another tool to reach a goal, to be victorious or to gain something. On the postmodern scale, everything belongs to somebody and that's just what war is about; when everything is owned by somebody, we're simply talking about properties being exchanged between owners. Nothing else matters.

These two awesome works of art will likely remain classics for decades to come, and it's interesting to me that they inform each other even when they were so spread out in time, and about such different topics. It's almost like the connection itself brings about postmodernism- time is nothing but a fragmented staggering of different ideas. It seems that both works picked up on similar ideas, and this is important because we understand a little bit more about the Iraq War now- through Heart of Darkness' morals and through The Hurt Locker's sense of closeness to individual soldiers. War is a very postmodern affair in some ways, and given that we as a country spend time, money, and most importantly human lives on war, it is essential that we explore every aspect of it.