Tag: Technology

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory

Rabassa. Harper Perennial, 2006.

Summary of Work
This novel gives an account of the fictional, isolated town of Macondo and the Buendias, who found the town. For a great period of time, the town has no contact with the outside world except for gypsies who visit and bring fascinating trinkets and technologies, like ice and a telescope, which Jose Arcadio Buendia likes to buy or investigate, as he is both curious and impulsive. He becomes obsessed with investigating the mysteries of life, particularly through alchemy, and even though he is a leader, he isolates himself from the people of the town. Jose and his wife Ursula were the great grandchildren of survivors of a massacre. They marry, but because they are related, Ursula refuses to consummate the marriage for fear of having genetically deformed children with tails, and this leads to Jose’s ridicule by the town; one day when he is ridiculed, he murders the man, Prudencio Aguilar, and he is haunted by Aguilar from then on, which causes him to leave and found a new town. His children and grandchildren and other descendants all inherit these traits in some form from him. His eldest, Jose Arcadio, inherits his recklessness and physical strength; his youngest, Aureliano, inherits his impenetrable focus.

Jose Arcadio disappears, and his partner Pilar Ternera gives birth to their son, Arcadio. An orphan girl who suddenly appears also joins the family, and her insomnia and pica and memory loss affects first the family, and then the town, as they suffer from both insomnia and memory loss, and must put up signs to help them remember what is important. When the gypsy Melquiades returns (supposedly from the dead), he brings a cure with him and other technology. He and Aureliano coop themselves up trying to use a daguerrotype to prove the existence of God.

The town starts to come in contact with Macondo as the world grows. The foreign government tries to take over, and when Aureliano falls in love with a magistrate’s daughter and is denied, he sleeps with Pilar, who then helps him to win Remedios. Meanwhile, Amaranta and Rebeca Buendia fall in love with a stranger who comes with a pianola for their home, and he decides he wants to marry Rebeca. Both Aureliano and Rebeca get their wishes to be married, but Amaranta wants to stop Rebeca’s marriage for jealousy’s sake. Melquiades passes away, and Jose Arcadio Buendia goes crazy and he has to be tied to a tree for the rest of his life. Remedios dies soon after her marriage to Aureliano, and Rebeca’s marriage is postponed because of that and the wait while the church is built. Pilar has Aureliano’s child, and he is named Aureliano Jose. Then Jose Arcadio returns, and he starts an affair with Rebeca, and Amaranta becomes close with Crespi, the stranger who Rebeca was to marry.

Meanwhile, violence comes to the town as civil wars break out and the Buendia sons become swept up in the action. Aureliano, worried about the government, achieves fame as the leader of the Liberal rebels, becoming the famous Colonel Buendia. Macondo’s government changes many times, and is eventually taken over by Arcadio, who becomes a cruel dictator and is eventually shot by firing squad. Arcadio does have three children: Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo, and Jose Arcadio Segundo. Amaranta gets her wish for Crespi to ask for her hand in marriage, but she rejects him and he commits suicide, and in her grief she burns her hand black, covering it with a black bandage she wears until her death. Aureliano is also condemned to die since the Liberals lose the war, but is saved at the last minute by his brother. He fights many more times, but realizes that it is fruitless and starts writing poetry. After another mayor is killed in Macondo during another civil uprising, the civil war ends and a peace treaty is signed. Colonel Buendia becomes so upset that he attempts suicide, but survives, and Ursula steps in to pick up the pieces and rebuild the family.

While all of this is going on, the Buendia family has many events in the individual family members’ lives. Some of the Buendia sons take lovers and regularly go to brothels, and others are solitary and take after Jose in that they like to experiment and review scholarly works. The women in the family have just as much breadth in their personality types, with some, like Meme, being socialites who regularly bring large groups home, and others, like Fernanda del Carpio, who are so conservative that they will not even undress for sex, allowing her husband to consummate their marriage only if she can wear a nightgown with a special hole in the crotch during the action. However, for the women, the grandest figure of all is Ursula Iguaran, the wife of Jose Arcadio Buendia and matriarch of the family who holds the entire family together no matter the differences. Her age is uncertain, but she remains alive through the entire book, which spans an indeterminate, but long period of time (perhaps over a century).

The Segundo brothers both look so much alike that Petra, the woman they sleep with, does not realize they are different men. When Jose Arcadio Segundo is scared off by venereal disease, Aureliano Segundo stays with Petra and becomes very wealthy as their farm becomes very fertile. He is very lavish and the whole village benefits from the prosperity. When Fernanda del Carpio enters town, Aureliano Segundo falls in love with and marries her, but he also still sleeps with Petra. Meanwhile, Fernanda tries to turn the Buendia home into the old aristocratic home she grew up in and refuses to deviate from a very formal structure, making the home miserable. During this time, Colonel Buendia’s seventeen illegitimate children, all named Aureliano, come to celebrate their father and the anniversary of the founding of Macondo. They participate in Ash Wednesday and all keep the ash crosses on their heads until their deaths. Some of the children stay and start an ice factory, and others leave, while others build a railroad to Macondo, making Macondo more connected with the outside world.

After the wars, capitalism comes in and takes its toll, with a banana plantation built near Macondo. Americans own the plantation and build a fenced off town, and they force the local workers to toil for pittance wages. The 17 Aurelianos are hunted down and murdered, causing Colonel Buendia to fall into depression. Ursula realizes that time is passing more quickly than it once did; she is going blind, but no one knows because she knows the home so well. Everyone in the house becomes more miserable since the children are gone. When Amaranta dies, Ursula goes to bed and will not get up for years. The banana workers, led by Jose Arcadio Segundo, strike because of the inhumane conditions, and the US Army comes and massacres them for the plantation owners. However, after the army dumps the bodies into the sea, a 5 year rain begins, destroying the plantation and Macondo in a flood. Ursula gets out of bed and tries to put the Buendia family back together. The town and the Buendia family wish for older days, and the village once again becomes solitary, but this time it is in decline rather than thriving. The Buendia family, what remains of it, try to keep their line going through incest, and they become alienated from the world. The last Buendia, Aureliano Segundo, translates a set of prophecies from Jose Arcadio Buendia’s library with the help of Melquiades’ ghost (gifted to him by Melquiades) and finds that they predicted the rise and fall of both Macondo and the Buendia family, showing that the town and its people have simply lived out a prophetic cycle of tragedy.

Discussion of Work
A work of magical realism, time does not seem to flow or function like it would in other novels. The names of the characters overlap enough that the children of the original family members blend with the past and the future genealogical lines. The past, present, and future become combined into one great entity. Language and interpretation play a great part in this, as both the characters and the readers experience the need to interpret the, things, actions, and general goings on in Macondo, leading to a creation of meaning amongst the long narrative that does not indicate a past, present, or future in any formal sense outside of technology and books of prophecy.

Another largely important part of this book is the discussion of progress, and if progress in the Western sense is always the best for every society. Macondo goes from what might be considered a state of innocence–they believe that they are completely isolated from the world by water on all sides until Ursula discovers a pathway into another town–into one of knowledge, first from contact with the gypsies who travel to the town with technology, and then with foreign people and their governments and conflicts. While the town may progress in terms of technology and interconnection with more people and towns, it is actually in decline as first war and then capitalism ravage the town, its people, and its land. This obsession with greatness, progress, and superiority are also present in the Buendia family, who may be said to represent the same questions of progress in human evolution at a more personal level: as the family grows, they become insistent on engaging in the world in ways that make them honored or remembered, either through war or through technology and learning and government. The women of the family do similarly through their beliefs about marriage, family, and running a household. As the Buendia family progresses into later generations, the house becomes more formal and technological, and yet more rigid and unloving, more degenerate in behavior. As the city is conquered and forced to conform to Western ideals, the Buendia family ends up destroying itself in its attempt to maintain some sort of original cultural identity.

 

by bluesyjune

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1831. Dover Publications, Inc, 1994.

Summary of Work
This novel begins with a series of letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret; he is preparing for a journey to find a passage to the Pacific through the North Pole or discover something of equal importance, but he feels alone and cannot make friends with his shipmates because of their difference in social class. Still, he feels confident he’ll achieve his goals. When they reach the North Pole and his ship gets stuck in the ice, they see a monstrous creature traversing the ice. And the next day they see another person trying to make their way across the ice, but stranded on an ice floe with all but one dead dog to pull his sled: the man is almost dead. Walton helps him live, they become friends, and the man tells Walton his life story and what led him to the North Pole. Walton then gets permission to tell his friend’s story.

Born to a good family, Victor Frankenstein grows up with a kind mother and father and a ward who is later adopted, Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Victor were best friends, and he also has a good schoolfriend named Henry. As they all grew older, Victor became obsessed with the natural world and the occult sciences. He starts studying alchemy enthusiastically, but when lightening strikes a tree near his house and destroys it, he learns about electricity and then finds alchemy outdated.

Ending his teenage years, he goes to Geneva to college, but before he can leave, his mother catches scarlet fever and dies. Her one wish on her deathbed is that Elizabeth and Victor marry. He is still grieving when he leaves to college. He determines once he gets there that he will study the sciences, and he ignores his social life and devotes his life to studies, making great progress. He begins studying anatomy and death, and soon his professors have no more to teach him, so he decides he will teach himself and discover the secret to creating life. Using his knowledge, he builds a creature from body parts of dead criminals, imagining that he will be the god of a new race.

When he finishes his creation, he brings it to life, but when he sees it animate, it terrifies him, and he leaves the room to try and sleep, haunted by the ghost of his mother’s corpse and nightmares about Elizabeth. The monster is smiling at him over his bed when he awakes, scaring Victor even further, and he runs from the house, leaving the creature there, and he is unwilling to return to his apartment. While out, he runs into his childhood friend Henry, and they start talking and he takes him back to the apartment. The creature is gone, but it causes Victor a nervous break that lasts for months, and Henry helps nurse him back to health.

Elizabeth writes him while he is ill and begs him to come to Geneva, but he determines at first to stay and help Henry around the university. He introduces him to his professors, but soon finds that any small reminder of his past deeds, seen in every scientific instrument and every professor, worsens his illness. Seeing this, he decides to go to Geneva and writes his father to learn when he should go. He goes with Henry into the country to wait and enjoy nature. But when they return, Victor learns from his father’s letter that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered, which shocks Victor and makes him set out immediately for Geneva.

He gets there at such a late hour that he cannot enter his family’s property, so he walks around out in the woods and comes across his creation. This makes him certain that his monster killed his little brother. But upon entering the home, he learns that the woman Justine, who had lived with them as a ward earlier in life, has been accused of his murder. The evidence they have is a picture of Caroline Frankenstein that had been William’s, but was in Justine’s pocket after the murder. Victor claims she is innocent, but since he refuses to provide any evidence and the evidence they have cannot be denied, Justine confesses her crime to gain salvation, but tells Elizabeth and Victor that she is in fact innocent of the crime. Still, Justine is executed for the crime she didn’t commit. Victor is doubly guilty now, seeing that the monster has now taken two of his family members.

His father takes what remains of his family on vacation, hoping it will cheer everyone. Victor tries to put on a good show, but even the short bursts of happiness don’t last long. He goes again to nature to appease him and heal him, climbing Montanvert to the glacier, and just as he finds himself consoled, the monster appears. Victor threatens the monster, but he is far too quick for Victor. The monster tells him that he would like to speak to him, and persuades him to go back to his cave, where there is a fire waiting. The monster then discusses his life since his animation.

The monster speaks of his confusion upon waking, his flight from the apartment and his learning of basic life knowledge: hunger, cold, heat, etc. He comes upon his first human encounters outside of Victor, and the man who sees him is very afraid, and other people run away upon seeing him. After these experiences, he decides to hide from humans, but he does observe them and finds that they are often unhappy, but then learns that they are living in poverty and he has been making it worse by stealing food from them. He starts bringing wood to their house to compensate them for their losses, and when he does so he hears language for the first time. He listens to them in order to learn, and he comes to love them.

When a foreign woman comes to the cottage, the people teach her to speak English, and the creature jumps at the opportunity to listen in and learn better. As he continues to observe them and listen, he realizes that he is alone in the world and ugly. He learns that the family are also a group of outcasts, not unlike himself: they were caught trying to save a man from prison, and their wealth was stripped from them and they were exiled.

The creature by this point has learned to forage for food, and he finds some books in a satchel on the ground one night, and he determines that he should read them. One of the books is Paradise Lost, which he reads as fact rather than fiction. He then finds some of Victor’s old papers in his clothing and discovers how he was made, which disgusts him further. He wants to talk to someone, and decides he should reveal himself to the cottagers. He approaches the blind man first when he believes all the others are away, but they are home unexpectedly and the creature is driven away. This causes him to determine that he will take revenge on all humans, but especially Victor. Still, he cannot fully follow through with the claim on his way to Geneva, where he rescues a drowning girl. But the man with her believes she is being attacked, and he shoots the monster.

Upset and enraged, he runs into William in the woods in Geneva, and upon hearing that the child is a Frankenstein, strangles him to death and then plants the photo on the sleeping Justine to frame her for the murder. And having finished his tale, he instructs Victor that he will be making a mate for him or he will continue to murder. Afraid and feeling trapped, Victor says he will create another creature, but he needs to go to England to get his notes on how to do it. Victor is filled with grief and doubts about the affair.

Victor’s father thinks his son’s grief is over his impending marriage to Elizabeth, but Victor ensures him that isn’t so, that Elizabeth is his only happiness. Still, he refuses to marry her until the task he has set out to do is done, and asks his father if he can travel to England first. Victor, his father, and Henry prepare a two year trip, and Henry is particularly excited because he wants to start his studies up. When they get to Scotland, Victor pawns off Henry to tour the country and he starts off to an island to complete his project. But unlike the first time he worked on the project, this time he finds it grotesque. He starts thinking about what will happen when he finishes his work, and with his concern, he destroys his work. The monster appears, enraged, and tells Victor that he will pay for it on his wedding night.

Henry is tired of Scotland and wants to leave, so Victor cleans up his space and disposes of the body parts in the ocean, only to get swept out to sea with the winds. The wind eventually dies down, but when he returns in the morning, he finds himself wanted for murder. The magistrate has him look upon the dead body, which is the body of Henry, and Victor becomes very ill immediately and remains so for months. When he recovers his wits, he is in prison. His father comes to visit him, and during the trial Victor is acquitted.

When they get home, Victor marries Elizabeth, and she tells him that she has a secret that she can only tell him once she is married to him. They go to spend the night at a family cottage, and they walk the grounds in the evening. What should be a beautiful night is sullied by Victor’s worries about the impending arrival of the monster. He thinks that he will be dying that evening, and sends Elizabeth to bed before he goes in. When he hears her scream, he realizes that the monster wants him to lose everyone. The tragedy of her death sends his father into a piteous state, and he dies a few days later. Deciding that it is time to tell someone of his misdeeds, Victor tries to convince a magistrate of the existence of the creature, but he does not believe Victor. After that, he determines that he will spend the rest of his life hunting the monster to destroy it. This led Victor to the North Pole.

At the end of the narrative, Walton says he believes Victor. Then his men start to entreat him to be able to go back home when they break free of the ice, and Victor states that they should not and gives a rousing speech, but that does not convince them, and Walton consents to head home if they break free of the ice. Just before they are going to be able to leave, Walton hears a noise and comes upon the monster weeping over his creator’s body. He tells Walton that he regrets having become a murderous creature, and that he would like to die now that his creator is dead. He leaves the ship and is never seen again.

Discussion of Work
This work’s main themes are of monstrosity, creation and science, and nature. Victor’s character may be said to be the real monstrous being, as his obsessions and passions lead him to performing unconscionable acts. He becomes an all-powerful necromancer, but without the same techniques and skills as God; he cannot create anything but horror. The dead body parts coming from criminals also speak to a belief that only wickedness can come from wickedness, a belief that Victor does not hold upon his initial entry into the work of creation. When the creature awakes, he is much like an infant, and Frankenstein cannot deal with what he has created, incapable of seeing the clean slate that he has created and instead only seeing his poor handiwork in creation of the body, which is several times the size of a normal human being. The creature’s initial forays into the world bring forward a discussion of nature vs. nurture.

Science is also a large portion of the book’s discussion, as alchemy, electricity, chemistry, and biology are all part of Victor’s development. The subjects themselves seem innocuous, but in the hands of the obsessed man, they become tools for a madman’s monstrosities. The science is seemingly pitted against God and his goodness, as what is created from the science that Victor utilizes turns into a great evil.

Nature plays the part of the healer, as it is the only space that any of the characters, particularly Victor and his creature, can find any solace or relief. This is particularly true of Victor, who regularly goes to the woods or to any space where natural growth lives in order to clear his mind and rid himself, either figuratively or literally, of the creature he’s created. It lies in stark contrast to the dead, reanimated flesh that is the creature himself.

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Wilson, August. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Plume, 1985.

Summary of Work
The play opens in a recording studio, with two men, Sturdyvant and Irvin, discussing Ma Rainey’s work. Sturdyvant, the owner of the recording studio, thinks that Ma Rainey is a diva, and he’s upset that her last recording didn’t sell as well as he wanted in the North, even though it sold in the South. He wants nothing to do with talking with the black people in the studio, and leaves Irvin to take car of that. He also requests that Levee, the horn player, have more of a role in the music because that is what is the new sound that’s selling. Aftewards, the band sets up for rehearsal. Levee is late because he is buying new shoes. When he arrives, he immediately starts bantering with the other band members: first about the price of his shoes and how Cutler helped him pay for them; then about how to spell the word music, and then about how the songs should be played. Levee wants to add more of a jazz feel to the music, and he doesn’t want to rehearse songs they’ve played numerous times.

They start rehearsing, but are regularly interrupted by arguments between Levee and Toledo, who reads books and has a lot to say about race relations and black entertainment and advancement. Slow Drag, a man who’s as laid back as his name implies, keeps trying to divert discussion so they can get back to rehearsing, but he fails. In the meantime, Ma Rainey has still not shown up, and Irvin is nervous about it. Just as Sturdyvant is getting angry, Ma Rainey, her girlfriend Dussie Mae, and her nephew Sylvester walk into the recording studio, escorted by a policeman. The policeman tells Irvin that she had hit another car with her car and then tried to run away in a cab, and then assaulted the cab driver when he wouldn’t take her. Irvin tells Ma he will handle it, and he slips the police officer some money for him to forget about taking her to the precinct.

Since the production of the record is delayed from the incident, Irvin gets sandwiches for the band, and while eating, they discuss their pasts. Cutler tells about how Slow Drag, dancing in a competition with a woman one evening, nearly got knifed for dancing with her when the woman’s boyfriend saw them. He talked the guy out of knifing him by saying that he was trying to help the girl win the competition so she could buy him a gold watch. After that, all the women wanted to Slow Drag with him, which is how Slow Drag got his name.

Toledo discusses how black people are the “leftovers” (57) in America, and after a brief discussion about race relations, they start to rehearse Levee’s version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Ma hears it from upstairs and confronts Irvin about it, who tries to convince her that it’s the style people want, but she’s not hearing it. She goes downstairs and tells them what they will be playing, and tells them that Sylvester will do the speaking part at the beginning of the song. Afterwards, Levee goes off, and in his anger, tells the story of watching his mother get gang raped by white men, and how he tried to stop them by getting a kitchen knife and cutting them, and they took the knife and sliced his chest open, nearly killing him. Then he tells about his father selling the home to one of the white rapists so they could get out of town.

Act Two opens with Irvin and the band discussing how Sylvester can’t do the part, and Irvin tells them to stick with Levee’s version of the song and he’ll work it out with Ma. Ma goes to record and sees there’s no coke to drink, and she will not record until she gets one. She waits, and tells Cutler that she knows that she doesn’t mean anything but money to these white men. She says that because of that, she’s going to do everything she can to ensure that they treat her how she wants to be treated even if it kills the white men. She talks about how the blues are a more than a form of expression for her, they are a form of survival, a way to understand life. Meanwhile Levee starts seriously flirting with Dussie Mae.

When they finally get to recording, they first have problems with Sylvester getting the line right. When he finally does, they don’t get it recorded due to technical difficulties with the sound equipment. Ma threatens to leave, and Irvin hurries to get the issues fixed. While they are waiting, the other men in the band tell Levee to lay off Ma’s girl, and try to tell him the problems that it will bring him to meddle with women who are involved already. They also try to tell him that the way he dresses won’t change anything in the eyes of white people, and that they even know black preachers who, very well dressed, were publicly humiliated and harassed by white people. Levee gets angry and says he isn’t an “imitation white man” (94), and he starts in about how he is going to be successful with his music once Sturdyvant lets him record. When Cutler tries again to talk to him about God, he insults Cutler and says that his God, if he is real, can strike him down.

Finally, the issues are fixed, and they finish recording. Afterward, Ma confronts Levee about his playing and tells him that he is to play his horn in a way that fits her music style for the band. When he gets upset at Ma, she fires him. Figuring he doesn’t need the job anyway, he goes to talk to Sturdyvant about his music, and he finds out that Sturdyvant will buy his songs for a few dollars, but won’t let him record. With no job and no prospects, he is upset, and as the band is getting ready to leave, Toledo accidentally steps on Levee’s shoes. Levee, in a rage, stabs and kills Toledo.

Brief Note on Themes
This play is the only one of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to be based on a historical figure, although he insisted that Ma Rainey was not a researched character. The play itself deals with how the music and entertainment industry treated its black artists, who sold very well and yet were terribly treated and underpaid. Issues of segregation, how popular music is marketed, race relations, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and black rage brought on by systemic injustice and oppression feature throughout the play. One distinct example is the altercation with the police, where only a white man can pay off the white police officer to keep Rainey out of jail. Still, the power black entertainers held was more than the average black person: Rainey describes being able to be forceful and get what she wants from white men in the business when otherwise she has no power to command respect, or if not respect, then decent treatment.

Music plays a big part of this play, the first of Wilson’s Century Cycle. The purpose of the blues is a theme running through the work. Blues is one of Wilson’s main influences for his work (he stated this many times in interviews during his lifetime). While Rainey outright states how she feels about it, the blues also feature as each of the characters tell their stories of sadness, travel, and life experience. Recording technologies are explored, as glitches occur throughout the process (a known problem for Paramount, since their recordings were regularly poor quality). The recorded and unrecorded blues songs can stand in as a form of cultural memory, music that passes on important information from one generation of listeners to the next.

by bluesyjune

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Picador, 1968.

Summary of Work

Tom Wolfe documents the lives of the Merry Pranksters, the group of acid-tripping hippies who drove around the nation in a Day-Glo covered bus with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The group forms around Kesey as they start using LSD to have transcendent experiences, a drug he had on hand from volunteering as a test subject in a study at a college and from working at the mental hospital for a time while he wrote his first book. However, upon the announcement of the destruction of the neighborhood he is living in, he moves to La Honda, California, where a group of people, later known as the Merry Pranksters, follow him. They all live in the same home, spread out on the land and in the woods, and each work on their own projects. But two things bring them together: LSD and sound. Taking after William Burroughs’ ideas, they decide to wire everything up with both microphones and speakers and record all of it. They play back the sound by splicing it and speaking over it, as well as gathering any and all sound they can. When they decide that they’d also like to make a grand movie to cover their experiences on LSD, they take it one step further. Kesey buys a bus, which they paint in various Day-Glo colors. They completely gut the bus and remodel it to be a road-trip vehicle for them, and they wire it for sound inside and out so that they can play music, broadcast sound, and record while they are on their trip. Neal Cassady is the driver of the bus, and they take off across the country, doing acid at various points along the way and filming the acid trips.

As they start to become noticed across the country (LSD was not yet illegal), Kesey becomes a main face of the counterculture movement, and they start to come in contact with people such as the Grateful Dead and Hells Angels, and the relationships and associations help all groups they come in contact with gain more prominence. Kesey writes one more novel but then gives up writing and focuses on making acid tests catch on for the public. He and the Merry Pranksters host many different acid tests in California, fooling the cops along the way. They even attend a Beatles concert ridiculously high on LSD and don’t get caught for it. They watch the crowd and see how enthralled they are by the Beatles and the control the Beatles have over the crowd but do not use for anything outside of the music or money-making business itself, and Kesey and the group leave back to their bus to make noise on their microphones and tapes. They host a big party for the Beatles, who never show up.

When they do finally get in trouble for something, it is for possession and use of marijuana. The first time the sentencing is lighter, but the next time Kesey is caught with it, he knows that it will be a prison sentence. So he runs away to Mexico, becoming more and more paranoid that the cops are after him and he is going to be extradited. The Pranksters make their way down to Mexico and stay with him for a time, and then help him get back across the border, where he spends some time in California before he is caught and thrown in jail. He avoids sentencing by saying that he would like to tell people that they need to go “beyond acid.” The authorities, thinking that he means that he will tell everyone to stop doing acid and talk about the dangers of it, give him a light sentence and ask him to go on public television to make his statement. But when he goes public with his statement, he never outright declares acid to be a bad influence or as having negatives. He simply says that once you go through the door that acid opens up, you have to take more steps rather than just keep opening and closing the same door.

Kesey and the Pranksters host one more “Acid Graduation” event, where they show that the next step is trying to achieve the transcendence they experience on LSD without the mind-altering drugs. Many news crews, journalists, and others show up to document the event, but leave before it ends, unable to understand what is going on.

The Pranksters themselves aren’t sure that they understand what Kesey’s new goals and direction are, and eventually, one by one, the group members go their own separate ways. Kesey serves his time in work camps in California while his family lives in Oregon. The movie never gets finished, although during the whole time the Pranksters are active people are cutting it and editing it and shooting more film. The film, writings, and sound recordings that are in the Prankster archive are what Wolfe used to piece together the biographical, very subjective narrative that is the book.

 

Brief Note on Themes

This work is a prime example of New Journalism, and it is considered a great representation of the counterculture of the Beat Generation in the 1950s and 1960s. Sound and music plays a large part in this book, making it great for sound studies considerations. Pseudo-religious activity is also a major part of the work, as the Pranksters nearly worship Kesey as the new Messiah, with the Pranksters as the apostles, and they utilize LSD trips to have essentially religious experiences. Drug use is a major theme, particularly acid use. Intersubjectivity is prominent in the work, and focuses on the idea that people can enter into a space where they know what it’s like to be someone else and achieve the ability to think and act as a group. For counterculture, the work focuses on the differences between what others were doing at that time, which was largely unknown, and what the Pranksters were doing, which was bringing the alternate lifestyle to the public eye rather than keeping it underground.

 

Questions about the Work

  1. In this book, we see clearly the obsession that the Pranksters have with mixed media content in conjunction with their acid trips. Claire, a young and naive girl who shows up to an Acid Test event in Watts, states in her account that before she, unawares, dosed herself with LSD, she didn’t understand what was going on: “This may explain why a lot of people were digging the film, laughing, and also why a lot of people were there . . . I’m sure that I was one of a minority who had no idea what to expect. The word must have been passed, but didn’t get to me” (272). After ingesting the LSD, Claire’s perspective of the film and sounds changes from simply odd nonsense to an otherworldly environment. This got me wondering, what is it about sound, lag, and reverb that create situations that seem otherworldly or out of place? What is the purpose of the acid trips and the sound and image manipulation beyond the vague notion of expanding understanding or knowledge?
  2. Tom Wolfe describes his process as one that tries to encompass the full Prankster experience: the drugs, the pranks, the adventures, and the recordings. He states, “The Pranksters recorded much of their own history in the Prankster Archives in the form of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour movie of the bus trip” (415). How does having so many recordings of people change the way we approach writing a nonfiction work, and when is it useful to stray away from transcription and become more subjective, as Wolfe suggests that he does throughout the work?
  3. Geographically speaking, the many of the acid tests are done in largely black communities (see the houses they rent/use, geographical areas like Compton). What is problematic about the image the Pranksters and other whites have created around these black communities?

 

by bluesyjune

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. Del Rey, 1991.

Summary of Work
Fahrenheit 451 starts with Guy Montag coming home from work and meeting a girl, Clarisse, who is odd. She looks at people, she asks questions about the people she meets, and makes actual conversation about her surroundings and others’ lives as well as her own. It is so strange to Montag, but as he gets used to it, he looks forward to the conversation. When he comes to his house and in his bedroom, however, he finds his wife overdosed on sleeping pills, which means he has to call the emergency services to have her stomach pumped and blood cleaned. She doesn’t remember it the next morning, or at least pretends not to remember.

Guy Montag is a fireman, a man who burns books when they are found in people’s homes. Reading books is forbidden, and the firemen are in place to make sure that the books are burned, and sometimes the people with them. This happens on a job, where the woman with the books actually sets herself, and her books, afire. Montag saves a book from the pyre and sneaks it home. He is sick with the image of the burning woman. He later learns that his friend Clarisse was hit by a car and killed. It further destroys him. He misses work the next day, and his boss shows up to talk to him. After his boss explains the history of the firemen and why books are banned (the minorities and other people didn’t like that it caused people to disagree and argue about things that were best left to other, governmental figures), he tells Montag he knows that he’s taken a book, which happens sometimes, but that the goal is to look through it and then burn it if Montag values his job and life. So Montag reveals to his wife, who is a TV obsessed woman interested in spending all her time staring at the three TV screen walls on the parlor room walls, that he’s been stealing books over the last year and has twenty of them. He forces her to read them with him, and then realizes that he knows someone, a professor he met in the park, who will know what to do with the Bible, the book he stole from the woman’s home collection. He goes to Professor Faber, and they talk about the downfall of intellectuals and how many of them are living in hiding on the railroad tracks in the country.

Montag comes up with a plan to bring the system down, but fails because he gets angry at his wife’s friends and reads them poetry aloud. His wife and the women call the firemen on him. Of course, he doesn’t realize this, and goes to work, where he is forced to go back to his house and burn it with all the books in it. Afterward, when Beatty tries to take him to jail, Montag burns Beatty alive and then fights off the mechanical hound that tries to subdue him with injected chemicals. He escapes to the country right before the war officially starts, and as he is spending time with intellectuals in the country and they tell him that they have memorized books, all of them, and so they can recite the great works from history to people when they’re ready for literature again, the city of Chicago is bombed to the ground, leaving no survivors. The intellectuals talk about how now may be the time to help, and they head toward spaces they think may contain survivors. The big idea they want to drive home in themselves, though, is that they are not more important than anyone else because they contain that knowledge. They are simply knowledge receptacles, and the knowledge is important so that it can be shared with others.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The big themes of this novel are about how we deal with knowledge, particularly written knowledge, and what it does for people. There is also a theme about how technology changes information and often destroys its beauty and meaning in an attempt to make it more bite-sized and digestible. The dangers of having knowledge is also a big theme in the novel: what happens when we don’t do anything with the knowledge we have, act in the wrong way, or consider ourselves better than others because we have the knowledge? The work makes us consider the power of the written word and helps us to understand the different ways technology changes the way we transmit knowledge and consume knowledge, and ultimately, how people are the ones who decide how that technology changes culture, not the technology itself.

by bluesyjune