Project

Contrary to the popular feeling, I was so excited to be handed the semester project assignment sheet. I made an elaborate plan, it was going to be the best thing I had ever written in my entire life. I was unbelievably thrilled to be able to re-write history and kill Hitler. It was going to be awesome, really.

Unfortunately, things did not work out as planned. Reading the posts of my peers, I realize this doesn't follow the typical project progression. Everyone else was upset with the assignment, but realized halfway through the project that it was actually unbelievably interesting and they were so excited to finish and everything came together in the end.

Me, on the other hand, was excited in the beginning, and beyond frustrated by the end. My story was large, it was too big to be squashed into a short story. My problem, I guess, was that I refused to let go. I wanted to do my characters justice, and make them as full and as fleshed out as DeLillo does with his characters. I wanted to become the writing style that I said I disliked so much, and include so many details that my reader was drowning in them.

I didn't, and I feel ashamed of what I produced. It was a shell of the brilliant, beautiful idea I had in the beginning. I wasn't happy to be done and to call it "finished." I worked for hours and hours and hours, and what I came up with was extremely lackluster. Instead of the diamond I expected, it was that really annoying rock in the park you always stub your toe on.

I learned a lot from it, though. I realized how much research it takes to pull together a beautifully detailed work of historical fiction. This project gave me new found respect for all the authors we've read this year, even the ones I didn't like as much. Finding my own balance between history and fiction was excruciatingly difficult, but I'm glad I tried it. At the very least, it'll teach me not to be so cocky next time.

All in the Details

Libra has been a difficult book to read, to say the least. Partially because I'm not a big fan of its protagonist, and probably also because I'm not a big fan of the style it's written in. DeLillo has a very distinctive style. It's very vague, but at the same time exacting. He includes so many details, SO many details it's hard for the reader to discern what's actually important to the main flow of the story, at least in the beginning.

The beginning of Libra was pretty slow, in my opinion. I was struggling to keep up on multiple occasions. I was continually confused by the number of characters we were introduced to in the parts with Lee, and I found the chapters about the CIA plot to be much more interesting. As the plot thickened, and as DeLillo began weaving the chapters together, I found the book to be much easier to follow. The prose was still thick and difficult to sift through, but there was enough momentum from the plot to keep me interested, whereas in the beginning it was like trying to walk through glue with no end in sight.

His style was very different from that of Doctorow, who said things very matter-of-factly. Somehow, Doctorow managed to include details without overloading me with them, and I found his prose significantly easier to read and understand.

On that note, I have to say I liked DeLillo's use of historical characters much better than Doctorow's. I read Libra as something that could be taken as completely factual. Everything DeLillo wrote seemed completely plausible, and now that I've finished Libra, any other assumptions I had about the Kennedy assassination have been erased and replaced with DeLillo's account. I felt like DeLillo was very respectful of his characters somehow, whereas at some points it felt like Doctorow was just thinking up the most random situations he possibly could.

Overall, I think I wish Libra was written in Doctorow's style with DeLillo's regard for his characters. But I guess that's just my personal taste.

Oswald (redone version)

He's a bit of a poser, isn't he? Maybe that's an understatement. Regardless, I really don't like reading about him. He's one of those guys who thinks they're really cool and smart, but actually... aren't.... Everyone just lets him live in his own little warped world while at the same time getting him to do stuff for them. I can't tell what bothers me more, the fact that people take advantage of him, or the fact that he basically wants to be taken advantage of.

He's so self possessed, he thinks he's the greatest thing in the world, writing in his "historical diary" and thinking that he's able to play the US and Russian governments with his false defector in a false defector program, and I just hate it. He's an attention seeking little worm, but the way DeLillo writes about him confuses me so much. I don't know if I'm supposed to feel sympathy for him or not! That's tough for me. When I read a book, I like to be able to invest feelings in a character I like. But I don't really like Lee. He unnerves me. When he fires the shots from the window in "November 22," I inwardly groan something along the lines of, "Not this again...," because he does it all the time! He wants to get played, so he can make a big deal to the authorities of how he did get played so they'll sympathize with him and make him famous or something. He's like an old dog that's kind of cute but really dirty so you don't want to pet, and it's mean, too, so you don't really feel sorry for it.

If he actually felt bad about taking shots at the President, he probably would have done a better job of trying to hide himself. But he half assed-ly hides the gun and the clipboard, he leaves his jacket at work and runs around town doing "evasive maneuvering," and the whole time you're just thinking, "Goddamn it, go back inside," because you want him to succeed because he's the main character in the book but you hate him because he's just so annoying and arrogant and so many other things. The fact that I can't pin a "like" or a "dislike" on him is really frustrating. He creeps me out.

In short, reading about Lee makes me very uncomfortable.

(On another side note, this new layout for Blogger is really inconvenient and I keep getting lost, which is how I ended up back on this page to type this side note.)

On a somewhat unrelated note...

I haven't blogged in a long time. I've been working a lot on my project,and it's kind of hard to bring myself back to the 1950s and 60s after being completely immersed in Nazi Germany for so long. In retrospect, I've been doing a lot of things that creep me out lately. I watched this really weird Ryan Gosling movie (only because it had Ryan Gosling in it, yes, I admit it, so there's no need to judge) called All Good Things and not only did it kind of ruin him as an actor for me, I made a lot of parallels between Gosling's character and Oswald.

So, first, a quick plot summary of this movie: All Good Things is based on the true story of that notorious missing person's case in New York history about that real estate tycoon who is accused but never put on trial for murdering his wife. Ryan Gosling plays David Marks, the heir to this real estate dynasty, and Kirsten Dunst plays his really cute wife. Basically, David Marks suffered some really horrible childhood experiences and so he's kind of messed up in the head, so eventually his marriage falls to pieces and probably -- but not for sure -- kills his wife. Anyway. It wasn't even that good of a movie, but it was creepy, and I ended up sleeping on my parent's floor.

Moving on. I started watching it because it was recommended for me on Netflix, which definitely should not have happened and I will be sending the Netflix team a stern letter when I get around to it. (It's also partially my fault, because the picture they put with the title was of Ryan Gosling shirtless, so how can you resist) Regardless, the movie started off well enough, and I was pretty engaged, but then things started to get weird. Gosling has this really sinister sort of emotionless way of acting that's really mysterious and probably why so many women think he's attractive, but in this movie it was definitely falling more on the sinister side and not on the attractive side. He kept doing these really weird half smiles that weren't really smiles, and I was trying to remember where I had seen or heard about someone doing that before, but I didn't make the connection until later.

But it kept on bugging me, and I was really annoyed with it -- or maybe I was just annoyed at Kirsten Dunst because she was really exhibiting any kind of girl power and Ryan Gosling was just being creepy so there was really no reason to watch the film anymore. But it was a mystery and I had to know what happened at the end so I kept watching. I continued to not make any sort of connection, until this one part, after Gosling's character had done something despicable and his wife is confused and outraged -- I don't remember what the exact event was, I've kind of blocked most of it from my memory -- but she says, "I've never been closer to anyone, and I don't know you at all." And something in my brain just clicked, and I was like, "HEY! Oswald's wife says basically the same thing about him!" And it's true, she does! We talked about it a lot!

So I was super excited for about a minute, as I subsequently made the connection about the facial expression thing as well. Then I realized it just made me feel even more uncomfortable, because I don't really like how Oswald is described in Libra, and I didn't really like Gosling in this movie. I can't really decide if I'm supposed to be pitying either of them, or feeling sympathy for them? Because I don't, none at all. Sometimes a bit of mystery can be attractive, but when you start dressing up like a woman and killing your apartment building neighbors (that actually happened, but he was acquitted because it was apparently done in "self defense"), it definitely stops. (Killing presidents can also put a bit of a damper on your overall date-ability.)

Overall, this blog post isn't really that worthwhile. But I think both those guys are pretty creepy, and I just thought I'd share. I mean, they even look eerily similar...

Style

I find it difficult to comment on Kindred for some reason. I think it's because Octavia Butler's style is so different from the other authors we have read this year. It's true that with books written in different or unique styles, I have a lot more to comment on in terms of images in Mumbo Jumbo or the seemingly random use of historical figures and whether or not that's entirely ethical in Ragtime, whereas with Kindred I read it more to enjoy the story than I did for any other reason. Personally, I really like her style. It's a very conventional novel, I think, and I don't mean it in a bad way.

Unlike Doctorow, Butler writes as though she is very invested in the story. There isn't as much reflection back on herself, and I feel very connected to Dana throughout the whole book. She doesn't write in a tone of detached irony, instead it's very attached, powerful, and in a lot of ways, painfully straightforward. I like it better that way. While Doctorow's writing was funny in its irony, Butler's is more emotional, and I like coming away from a book feeling like I know the characters.

Butler's story has a very linear progression. Unlike Mumbo Jumbo, where everything is so mixed up that I had no way of making logical assumptions about where the story would go, Kindred was more gripping in that I had all these different possibilities of where the story could go. It allowed me to hope and feel sad when something didn't happen the way I wanted it to, which, in the end, made me more emotionally invested in the story.

I also liked that Kindred was linear in that Butler didn't skip around in time. Well, technically she did, with all of Dana's time traveling, but it wasn't as disorienting as reading Slaughterhouse Five. There were clear causes and effects for why Dana was traveling the way she was, whereas Billy Pilgrim's time travel didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Overall, I think it's going to be more difficult for me to come up with a response paper topic for Kindred than the other books we've read. All I can really think to talk about are plot movements and character development, or how much I hate Rufus. Oh well. Hopefully inspiration will strike.

Ending

I liked Kindred, I liked it a lot -- I forgot how nice it was to read books that I actually, truly was interested in. I'm not saying that the other books we've read haven't been good or even that I didn't like them, I'm just saying that if I was walking through a bookstore, Kindred would have been a book I would have picked out on my own.

That being said, I'm conflicted about the ending. Dana killed Rufus, which was some closure for me, but she comes away permanently scarred by her "adventures." The ending is happy, sure, but there isn't a sense that everything is going to return to normal after the danger has passed -- and I'm not sure if I like that or not. It's certainly atypical, I think, in some ways. It kind of annoys me how when she and Kevin take their trip to what used to be the Weylin plantation and they can't find the house, or very many records, really. But at the same time, I think that's really neat of Butler to do.

Kevin and Dana often find themselves thinking of the plantation as "home," even though they don't really like that association. By leaving barely any trace of the plantation, maybe Butler is trying to say something along the lines of, well, maybe Kevin and Dana don't have a home anymore? That, after what they've seen, they can no longer fully integrate themselves into the 1970s society that used to be their home, and that the home they made for themselves in the 19th century has disappeared.

And then there's Dana's arm. It's gone, she left it in the past -- well, they cut it off, but metaphorically speaking, she left it in the past. Her arm is still being crushed by Rufus, in a way, but it's detached from her body. Is that good or bad? There is a part of her that's still being controlled by her ancestor, but she no longer has it with her.... I realize I just repeated the same sentence, but the way I said it in my head emphasized its importance somehow.

Maybe the idea of losing her arm is simply Butler's way of showing us that after looking at the past in great detail, you can never really be whole again. Maybe she's saying that you leave a part of you in that time and you never really get it back. Especially when examining history as gruesome and as horrible as antebellum south -- no one comes away from human atrocity unscathed.

So, maybe it's just that I don't like that message. Why don't I like that message? Perhaps it's just not the happy, hopeful message that I'm used to -- the idea that everything's going to be okay. But even though I don't like it, I think it's a really refreshing idea somehow -- it's not boring and simple and cathartic, it's unsettling and disturbing, and that's probably how we should feel after reading something about slavery.

Rufus

I HATE RUFUS. No really, I do. Never, not once, in the entire book have I felt even an ounce of sympathy for Rufus' character. Okay, maybe that's a little harsh. When he was a little boy drowning in the river, or maybe when he set the curtains on fire, I felt for him because he was little and cute. When he was Alice's friend he was okay, too, but when he grows up I wish I could stop knowing him as a character.

I know he's just a victim of his time, and that there were probably guys way worse than him, and that by making him monstrous, Butler is showing us how the system corrupts everyone, even the people who you think are going to be good. But I hate him, I hate everything he does. To quote Nikita, reading about the things Rufus does is like "an affront to my humanity." I just can't stand it. Is it because I'm a woman? Is it because I feel some gender based connection to these characters as Rufus tries to rape them or beat them, or even simply justify their beatings? Maybe it's all the political heat around issues concerning women these days that is making me so sensitive, but I don't care. He makes me sick.

In a way, it makes me hate Dana a little bit, too. Perhaps it's just me being a reader, looking at the situation from the safety of my couch, just thinking, "If that was me, he'd be dead in a second," even if it wasn't really true. But so what? It makes me hate her, the way she puts up with him, the way she was willing to "forgive him even this," at the end of the book, the way she sees herself starting to mold into the time and accept human atrocities and be a victim of them herself like it's no big deal.

Anyway, back to Rufus. He's just a child in a man's body. Maybe that's the point of the antebellum system -- he never really matures, because if he had matured, maybe he would have seen he flaws. You can sort of see him start to mature when he finally allows Joe to call him daddy, but that's far too late in the game for him to get any sort of forgiveness out of me.

He's pathetic -- all slave owners were, and don't tell me that's why I should sympathize with him, because he's a victim, and he's trying, and he's not as bad as he could be, save it, please! I don't agree. I don't think, in anyway, I could sympathize for Rufus ever. Pity him, maybe on a good day. But sympathy? Never.

Dresden

I thought the article for last night's reading was exceptionally interesting, even though it made me kind of angry. In particular, the sentence, "There was nothing exceptional about the bombing of Dresden," kind of made me want to stop reading immediately. In a way, I kind of feel like this article moved to discredit Vonnegut's account, to make the bombing of Dresden seem like nothing.

I don't see why we have to belittle the bombing of Dresden, just because it wasn't "exceptional" -- (What does exceptional mean, anyway? What about a bombing makes it "exceptional"?) -- doesn't mean it's not important. Vonnegut says 135,000 people died, a number he got from the author of a bestselling book by David Irving, but I feel like Packer is using the fact that Irving has now been discredited as a Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite to also discredit Vonnegut's book, and I don't really think that's fair. So what if the bombing of Dresden killed only 20-40,000 people instead of 135,000, and how can anyone have the nerve to use "only" in that sentence? 20,000 people is not worthy of an "only."

For one thing, it doesn't matter how many people the bombing killed, and for another, I don't even think the number is important to Vonnegut's argument. Vonnegut could have started using 20,000 in the beginning of the book and I still would have been shocked. Vonnegut is trying to write an anti-war novel, not a Nazi-sympathizer novel. He is, in no way, saying that by bombing Dresden, the Allies are on equal playing field with the Nazis. He's saying that war isn't a battle of good and evil, and he's saying that war gives people an excuse to do morally questionable things no matter what side they're on.

It also says somewhere in there that the Allies were carpet bombing civilians all over Germany -- why not write about those? Well, for a simple answer, it's Vonnegut's experiences, not just a book about bombings on Germany. He's giving it a personal edge, an effective personal edge, which makes me, anyway, see all those other bombings in a new light. 

So, I don't know. I kind of feel like this article is unnecessary. I didn't even think of taking Slaughterhouse Five in a Nazi-sympathizer direction until I read this article -- and I think it's kind of horrifying that someone would suggest that. Maybe that's naive of me to say, but I don't really care. I think Vonnegut treats the war in a very realistic light, which is something we don't get very often. He's not tarnishing the "good, angelic" Ally appearance, he's bringing them to a human level, which I think is really important when we talk about war.

I like your style.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm having a good time reading this book. From his irony to his odd repetitions, Vonnegut has a very unique writing style. The writing itself is very simple and unadorned, yet he somehow is able to remain attached. Unlike Doctorow, who is completely out of the picture in Ragtime, Vonnegut still has a very clear presence in his novel. 

The first chapter kind of set us up for it, even though I half expected his narration to be very distant because he called it a "failure." He includes himself in a lot of scenes, and even says things like, "I was there," kind of like how Ishmael Reed inserted himself into Mumbo Jumbo. Admittedly, it does kind of pull me out of the story for a moment, but I think for a war novel, it brings a whole new dimension to the story knowing that the person writing the story actually lived similar moments, too. 

I also sort of like Vonnegut's repetition of "So it goes." It kind of draws your attention to the deaths in the novel because it marks them with a catch phrase that you notice instead of simply glossing over them, which we are sometimes guilty of doing while reading other war novels. At the same time, when he says "So it goes," he's saying that life goes on without those people. It's almost as if he's saying, "These people died, and it's important, but at the same time no one cares, because no one can care." Life goes on no matter how you died. 

Finally, we were talking in class on Friday on how weird it was that Vonnegut gave up his climax in the first chapter. I think that's a really interesting way of writing a war novel, because we're not constantly focused on whether or not the characters are going to make it out alive, but instead we're thinking more about what they do when they're alive. Personally, I think that's a very unique and refreshing way to read a war novel. I like being able to focus on the characters more than constantly stressing over what's going to happen to them -- because believe me, I do. 

So I suppose it's a little bit late for a "First Impressions" blog post, seeing as how we're more than halfway through Slaughterhouse Five, but I feel like rather than things you only take in at the beginning of the novel, these elements of Vonnegut's style stay with us throughout the book. 

Slaughterhouse

I don't know, I guess I really like war stories. That's kind of a weird way to begin a blog entry, but I do. I like watching war movies, I like reading war books, I like listening to people telling war stories. Real war stories, though. My grandpa fought in World War II, so I often find myself in St. Louis or Chicago at reunions of his regiment. They don't really swap stories though, they just kind of sit together, remembering together, but not out loud.

That's kind of what I was reminded of, I guess, when Vonnegut and O'Hare were sitting at the table trying to remember the "good stuff," but they couldn't. My grandpa doesn't have "good stuff" to tell me. He always laughs when he says, "In the prison camp, I lost 45 pounds in 45 days." But that's not really that funny. Or when he tells me about the day of the prisoner exchange, and how he was the last one picked, and how the only thing he could do when he got to the other side was eat pancakes, and how they made him sick. He never really tells me how nervous he was, or how horrible it was.

But I mean, I can hear it in his words in other ways. He tells me about the Battle of the Bulge, and all he says is, "A lot of people froze in that battle." It's pretty simple, but it carries so much weight for him. How else do you describe something with so much death and destruction? He almost froze, he spent 30 days flat on his back in a field hospital as his legs cracked open and oozed. Doctors talked about amputation, but in the end he made it okay. He talks about his friends, points to them in pictures and says, "That's Hodges, he's dead now," in a simple way, yet one that is so powerful and sad.

This isn't really a blog post about the novel, which I kind of realize now. But I can't really think about this book without thinking about the things my grandfather's said to me. We talk a lot in class about how war is so glorified for everyone in America, but I've never really had a glorified view of war. Well, maybe, when I was very small, when I looked at the medals on the wall. A French Legion of Honor, Purple Heart, Silver Star, Prisoner of War -- I can go on, but I won't. Kids in elementary school would ask me if my grandpa fought in Vietnam, but I was proud to say no, that he'd fought the Nazis instead. It gave me more street cred on the playground.

But really, though, our family doesn't gather to listen to grandpa's wartime stories. He doesn't really like to talk about it, unless he's doing a presentation. It's more a silent presence looming over the glass boxes that held the ribbons, or over the trunk in the corner of the living room that still holds his knife and helmet, coat and boots. I only know so much because I've been to a few presentations and because I wrote a paper on him for Non-Fiction Writing last year.

So I guess, to make this related to class, I appreciate what Vonnegut is doing in writing an more accurate portrayal of the things that happen in wartime. My grandpa was only 18 when he got off the boats on Utah Beach, D+94, and I think he would very much agree that it was just a children's crusade. Vonnegut does a really good job of making me hate war more than I already do, but I can only see his memories in black and white. It'd be interesting, I think, to hear my grandfather's take on the novel -- to hear from someone who shares the memories in color.

Caricatures

So... I haven't blogged in a while. To be perfectly honest, Mumbo Jumbo leaves me exhausted after each reading that I haven't had the energy to blog about it. But tonight's reading was short, and I'm ready. Awhile ago in class  we were asked the question, does Mumbo Jumbo offer a fair depiction of Western Society? At the time I said yes, but for different reasons than I do now.

At first I said yes because history shows us that, as a general rule, Western Society has been pretty horrible to all groups of people that try to disagree with its ideals, and that Ishmael Reed was simply offering another example. That was kind of a basic assumption on my part -- it was probably a Monday and Iprobably wasn't actually thinking that hard. Regardless, after today's discussion about Thor Wintergreen, I kind of think differently.

Someone wanted to discuss Thor Wintergreen's betrayal of the Mu'tafikah, and that discussion led us to a new one on the topic of Reed's treatment of white characters in general. Thor Wintergreen is kind of flat -- all the white characters are flat. They don't have any dimension, they're just straight up evil or easily manipulated into being evil -- which is how most western pop culture has depicted members of other races for the past who knows how many years. (Well, they aren't necessarily depicted as evil, but they certainly are fairly flat and one dimensional.)

In short, Reed makes his white characters caricatures. As evidenced by the art Abdul keeps on his desk, which were "cartoons" of people with chalk white faces. LaBas remarks that the white people "did not realize that the joke was on them" ( 97) in those carvings because they had no sense of humor. Reed goes on to describe different races and tribes that punished people for lacking a sense of humor, and then says that Christ was always "stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard" (97), which is pretty much how all of Reed's white characters act.

Essentially, Reed strips his white characters of all their other qualities, and leaves them with weakness, greed, stupidity, and the ability to sit drunk on a barrel. The evil, despicable-ness of Reed's white characters knocks you on the head with a club -- it's impossible to miss. So do I think that in this way Reed is fairly depicting Western culture? Sure, I think it's pretty fair considering the number of times ethnic groups of have been cartooned in Western media. And the way Reed makes it so obvious almost suggests that he's daring someone to disagree with him, but you can't, because he has so many years of evidence to back him up. Does that annoy me? No, not really, I think we pretty much deserve it.

Clarifying for Myself

So... I'm not really sure where I stand on these discussions we're having in class. The whole idea of the blurry line between fiction and history is kind of complicated for me, and it seems like every time someone presents evidence against that idea, it can easily be spun to support it. It just depends on how you look at it, and I guess that conclusion is kind of bothering me.

Sometimes I just like it when things are absolute, when there's a clear dividing line between what you can and cannot do when it comes to history or a novel. But... Doctorow kind of broke me of that somehow. His subtle critique of the early 1900s was a brilliant shock to my system, but now I'm struggling with this internal argument over whether or not I like what he's doing. In my earlier posts I think I did, but after reading "False Documents" and the small snippet of that interview, I feel like Doctorow is more arguing for the idea that there is no line between history and fiction and he can kind of do what he wants no matter the consequences.

And I'm just not sure I'm comfortable with that anymore. I like what he did with it in his novel. I thought the things he did with Morgan and Ford were so brilliant -- I mean, how can we really know if that happened or not? While discussing the reactions the Ford historical society had, I was of the mind that they were being kind of silly. It's just a book, and it's not like Doctorow did it in a malicious way. It kind of seemed to me that after he wrote it he kind of shrugged and said, "just sayin'."

In other words, I like the way he uses history and fiction in the novel. They compliment each other nicely. But the idea in general that there is no line between history and fiction, that "there is no truth!" as Mr. Mitchell would say and wave his hands in the air, is kind of weird to me. As someone who's fond of history and who wrote their painfully tedious historiographical essay, I'm familiar with historical bias. It's just a natural part of the subject, and it can even help tell the story in some cases. And as someone who's a lover of fiction, I know that sometimes what's written in a novel can be even truer and more powerful than history can, but to say that nothing stands between them can be so dangerous!

I'm kind of a middle of the road person in life, and I guess that's where I am here too. I don't think there's a clear line between history and fiction. I don't think there's no line either. I think there's overlap, but we shouldn't get carried away with our overlap. I think someone said that was like giving the man who denies the Holocaust complete license to do so, which just doesn't seem right.

Pools

I really enjoyed the discussion we had in class today, and while I'm kind of afraid to delve into our nice, long, packet of reading on the subject just yet, I'm sure I'll enjoy that, too. Basically, the main question was, was I irked/bugged/offended by how Doctorow essentially steals Coalhouse Walker from Heinrich von Kleist's story? No, I'm really not.

For one thing, I don't think "steals" is exactly the right word. Stealing implies plagiarism, and this definitely doesn't seem like plagiarism to me. Doctorow puts Coalhouse in a completely different context. In Kleist's narrative, it seems to be just a struggle of class: the rich man abusing the poor man, and so on and so forth. In Ragtime, however, Doctorow kind of reverses that. Coalhouse is an upstanding citizen, he's a musician in Harlem, a pretty worldly guy, while Fire Chief Conklin is widely accepted as a thug. Coalhouse is clearly Conklin's superior in all aspects, except for one, and that is race. Conklin is angry because a black man is his superior, so he destroys Coalhouse's car on the spot. In the Kleist story, the horses are "allowed to deteriorate into a woeful state." Not that I don't love horses and that's not a terrible thing, it just doesn't have the same kind of weight (and maybe I say that because I'm a horse person and I know horses are unbelievably temperamental and can deteriorate from just about anything). In any case, it's obvious that there are very clear differences between the Doctorow version and the Kleist version of the story, and I definitely would not classify it as plagiarism.

On another note, I ask the question, how is what Doctorow does with Coalhouse any different than what he does with his other characters? Doctorow draws from the pool of historical fact quite frequently and spins it to make it his own, so why can't he draw from the pool of literature and spin it to make it his own? If you're going to get mad at Doctorow for plagiarizing Kleist,  then you have to get mad at him for, I don't know, screwing with the historical record. The point was raised that people get angry with Doctorow for twisting historical fact because it changes perspectives on the people that actually existed. But is that negative? I don't really think so.

Doctorow picks characters, I think, anyway, that he can flesh out and make his own because nobody really knows the other side of them. Take Harry Houdini, for example. Everyone knows he was an escape artist, but no one really knows what his personal life was like unless they're willing to do research and read the entire Wikipedia article. Doctorow is capable of taking these historical figures and creating this believable, yet fictional scenes because nobody really knows what was actually going on inside their heads, or behind the scenes at a Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish party, or 12 stories up in a straight jacket. Doctorow fleshes them out, he gives previously "dead" historical figures new life and emotions, he changes our perspectives on them, but not necessarily in a bad way. None of his caricatures are particularly malicious, he just makes them more believable as people.

J.P.

I take issue with J.P. Morgan on many occasions. Firstly and unrelated-ly, he charges me a butt load when I want to take money out of my account from an ATM without his name on it. Come on, man, that's hardly fair -- you claim to be so rich already, why do you need a 2 dollar service charge? 

More importantly, he frustrates me in this novel. I'm not really sure how we're supposed to view J.P. Morgan as a character. Is he being treated ironically, or are we supposed to be taking him seriously? Doctorow seems to change his mind a lot about it. When Morgan was introduced, Doctorow presented him in this kind of distant, godly light. But then... Doctorow had him meet Henry Ford, and Morgan shed his aura of superiority and authority. It seems like Doctorow's stripping him down, leaving us with this picture more akin to a little boy who's super excited to show off his tree house to some random kid than the man at the top of business pyramid.

Don't get me wrong -- I definitely like the childish Morgan better than the business man. That's probably why it surprised me so much when he sent that telegram to the District Attorney: 

Give him his automobile and hang him. (287)

Maybe I'm wrong, but it just seemed a little bit harsh for him to be saying that after we see him slumped in his chair full of childish disappointment when Ford blows him off. This isn't strictly speaking an academic observation, but he just seems like such a little cutie when he's forming the Pyramid Society, and then this telegram totally shatters that image for me.

I guess it is Morgan's library, full of his wonderful, invaluable treasures, but you'd think somehow he'd take pity on Coalhouse. Coalhouse is more articulate than Henry Ford, and certainly better dressed -- you can see Coalhouse frowning upon L.L. Bean shoes, can't you? Coalhouse is a musician, so he must have some appreciation for art, whereas Ford has absolutely none -- "Fancy Paintings," anyone? It just seems to me that Coalhouse and Morgan are both on a higher level than Ford. Coalhouse isn't an industrial genius, but he's certainly got a lot more class, and there's nothing to say he does most of his thinking on the toilet, so I was holding out for that random Doctorow plot twist that would have Morgan inviting Coalhouse to join the Pyramid society and everyone lives happily ever after.

Needless to say, when I didn't get that ending, I was upset with Morgan. I'll probably remain upset with him until I get another chapter with him playing hide-and-seek in the sarcophagus with Ford. Maybe I'm reading too much into him as a character, maybe Doctorow meant him to seem like a jerk all the time, maybe I'll forgive him the telegram eventually, but I won't forgive the ATM thing. That's just ridiculous.

First Impressions

Let me be frank: I don't think I've regularly kept up with reading assignments in an English class since we read the Joy Luck Club in Freshman English. Even then, I read the entire book in a day, which wasn't really following instructions either. That being said, I've surprised myself and everyone in my family by actually staying on top of the readings for Ragtime. I don't know what exactly it is, but I'm seriously loving this book!

Some of my classmates don't feel the same way, as I've found out rather awkwardly after professing my love for the novel only to have them stare and respond flatly that they disagree, but it's given me some opportunity to think about why exactly I like Ragtime as much as do.

First, I'm quite fond of Doctorow's writing style. Normally, I'm a comma fanatic; I'm used to reading things more akin to Lord of the Rings where you can sit and read for an hour only to find you're still on the same sentence you were when you started. So I guess there's something refreshing for me about Doctorow's simple, comma-less sentences. It's straight to the point without being to the point, (which I'll get to later), and it moves quickly!

I think, overall, Ragtime has been kind of funny. I love the voice of the narrator. It's so detached and obviously ironic that I can't help but smile. I imagine Doctorow sitting at a desk chuckling to himself as he's writing. I was reading last night the part where Grandfather is telling the little boy stories, and he slips in and out of Latin and English because he thinks he's giving a lecture. It's not like I burst into tears of laughter, but it certainly made me smile.

I also really like how Doctorow treats his characters. He pulls them from history and gives them a new story just because he can -- and I admire that somehow, as well as the huge amount of research he must have done. I also like how he manages to bring them all together, real and imaginary, (Evelyn and Mother's Younger Brother, anyone?) and makes a giant web of interesting, interconnected plot lines. My two favorite characters would probably be Houdini and Henry Ford. I thought Ford's introduction to the story was exceedingly clever -- I love that entire chapter, which kind of brings me to my next point.

Doctorow is pretty good at compiling a bunch of seemingly unrelated sentences together into a huge, chapter-long paragraph. He seems to mix things that don't matter in with things that do matter, and the chapter about Henry Ford is a perfect example. I think Doctorow  is somehow able to put a positive spin on Ford's character by doing this -- which, is pretty impressive considering he was a raging racist and Nazi sympathizer. In particular, I liked this part:

He had a way with words. He had gotten his inspiration from a visit to a beef-packing concern where cows were swung through the plant hanging in slings from overhead cables. With his tongue he moved the straw from one corner of his mouth to the other. He looked at his watch again. Part of his genius consisted of seeming to his executives and competitors not as quick-witted as they. He brushed the grass with the tip of his shoe. (135)

Obviously important to the picture of Henry Ford is that he got his inspiration from the beef-packing plant and that he pretended to be stupid in the face of his competitors. Doctorow surrounds those points with seemingly less-important information about his watch and his way with words and the grass and the shoe and whatever, but I don't think it's useless at all! I think it helps paint an even more complete picture of Ford by showing us his mannerisms and how he thinks.

Overall, I think Doctorow is a very talented writer. He makes me laugh, he keeps me interested in what he has to say. I've always been a fan of historical fiction, but Ragtime is something completely unique and new to me. I can honestly say I'm really interested in where this book is going to take me next!