Course Blogs 4 & 5

 As you may well know, I have been very sick and foggy minded in the last week and a half. I decided to clump these two posts together so I could get them to you all as fast as I could, though I still think I'm late! Everyone else said such engaging things on our readings, though, so I don't think anyone was at a loss for my input.

Since this is extra long, I've put it under a cut



Blog Four

I actually quite like the seemingly universal "where were you" trope. I was in the 7th grade on 9/11 and was going to get my hair done. I didn't actually go to school that year, I just stayed home and read Kafka and watched TV, so I had the ability to sit with my parents and listen to the news all day. I had very bad anxiety at the time and couldn't stop crying and thinking about ways/reasons for terrorists to attack the tiny rural town I lived in.

Many ideas came up to me strongly in these readings, but the class discussions brought one idea to the forefront; that there are levels of understanding to a traumatic event like 9/11 - the critical/visceral, the academic/layman, the patrician/plebeian.

Some readers, myself included, were immediately turned off my Jill Dolan's lofty aesthete idea that she became an empathe post 9/11, that she could not bare to think of the events lest she mentally transform herself into someone who lost their life. She writes,

...[I] felt myself standing in a burning office, knowing that to move one way means a fiery, horrible death, and the other, through the broken windows, a death no less certain, but one in which my last memory will be of flight, of freedom, of air rushing past my face as neurological chemicals release in my brain and shut off my consciousness before my body breaks on the ground.

My thought on this was not that she didn't necessarily feel this way, but that it is intriguing how she mentally performs those last minutes. Each scenario she describes is one of the imagined heroic martyr. She describes feeling fear, but she doesn't offer a scenario in which she breaks down crying, or in which she does something frail that might illustrate a [very human] failing. Her imaginings of the victims of those plane crashes are, whether she admits it or not, filtering through the popular script of what it meant to be killed in the Twin Towers, a victim of a war not yet fought.

Blog Five

This is the first play I've read in a long time: I think before this I read Parker's The Ladies of the Corridor and before that nothing since my high school Oscar Wilde obsession. It can be somewhat difficult for me to get involved critically in a reading of a play, since I'm so unfamiliar, but I tried to put myself in the mind of set building. I realized, upon doing a little research, that I have seen the film version of the play, but tried to keep that out of my mind. As I typed that, I wondered why I tried to keep it out of my mind, I suppose something about the "authenticity" of the words themselves, some idealized notion of drama I've picked up along the way.

The Exonerated appeals to me, however, because I deeply interested in the nature of memory and the prison industrial complex. That sounds like a pretentious thing to be "deeply interested" in, but let me give two examples from my life that illuminate the interest. My father was in jail from 1960-1961 for possession with intent to distribute (though it's unclear if he was actually charged). If you ask him why he went to jail, he will say, "the cops set fire to my house so they could do an illegal search and seizure." Both things are true, but the narratives are very different. My oldest friend's uncle is in San Quinten, and is noted to be "the most dangerous prisoner there." He on death row for killing three people. If you ask my friend's family about it, though, they will say he had an IQ of about 70 and the gangs never allowed him to participate in murder, because it was unfair.

I'm always intrigued by the state-sanctioned memories cultures are given by court rulings and arrest reports. It seems like most people believe there is often more to the story, but that the story itself is true. Which brings up questions of how we choose to perform our "truths" and what we accept as part of our national scripts. Hopefully that wordplay isn't too cheezy.