Author Archives: sl154447

Notes from Underground Check-In Part 2: Beginning the Labor

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This past Saturday, I (Shannon) met up with Jia at the arts and crafts store, Michael’s, to purchase felt, string, and scraps of crinkle and gift wrapping paper in assorted shades of brown and black to achieve an authentic, “Underground”-feel. We have five black copies of the book that are brimming with crinkle paper to signify messiness and the wooden boards of the floor the Underground Man lives under. Then, we also made five brown felt covered copies of the book, which are neat and beautiful, to represent the ideals that the Underground Man believes in and attempts to pursue. All of the copies will be bound by twine-like string to capture the sense that we, too, were struggling underground while making these books and could only tie together our manuscripts with bits of string that we scrounged up. As we get into the actual labor of making our ten copies of the Book About a Book project, we are getting into a position where we are more informed and better able to answer the professor’s questions and delve into details.

 Our work at the library

The audience of our book will be art critics, art enthusiasts, and consumers of culture. This broad category includes students of this class and the professor, but also the greater art community that appreciates punk zines and grungy garage band style music. After all, Dostoevsky’s novel was published near the turn of the century, at the end of the Victorian era for many Western countries, where traditions were beginning to be questioned and subverted. Our book’s chosen format and methodology is reflective of those historical implications. This particular aesthetic of embracing free will and the tendency toward messiness and chaos is very popular amongst purveyors of modern art and the pioneers of the modernist art movement.

More specifically, our book is made by artists who wish to pay homage to the influence of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground by imitating the aesthetics of the period (as if our book is an artifact from the 1800’s that has only recently been unearthed) and the aesthetics of the ideals that the Underground Man is keen on pursuing. While paying tribute to Dostoevsky, we are at the same time analyzing the labors that his work involved and the discourse that he sparked on humankind’s free will and the pursuit of lofty ideals. We want our book to ask and answer several questions including why is Notes from Underground an influential and “great” text? Who said so? (To some extent, artistic community judged it to be so.)

As we finish up our book, we have made a series of changes and upgrades to our initial idea. We will order our copies of the book as one through ten. The second book and the fourth book will have a special connection (more details on this will be determined as we reach completion of the project) to reflect the prominence of the mathematical formula 2 x 2 = 4 in Dostoevsky’s novel. The order of the contents of our book will vary from copy to copy, thus giving each copy a distinct and unique feel. The reader will get a different experience and interpretation depending on which copy they read.

The text and graphic parts of our book will be photocopied and reproduced for each copy but each copy will come with its own unique short poem to give the copies its own bit of fresh content. The many poems will be reflective of the Underground Man’s garrulous tendencies and his ability to write on and on forever so much so that Dostoevsky, or the implied editor of the manuscript, had to cut him off at the end of the text. We really like the professor’s idea about making part of the text ask the reader to flip the book over and start reading in a different direction, but as we haven’t reached this step yet, we are unsure of if it would really look good and be effective upon execution.

 

A Hot Mess, What and Why –Notes from Underground

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The What

We’ve decided unanimously to create a series of black and white pencil sketches coupled with explanatory text and analytical details in a handmade collage and mishmash of pieces bound together by string and hole punched. These black and white pencil sketches will include etchings of the Underground Man and the various villainous characters he meets along his journey that eventually lead him to hide underground. The cheekbones of the Underground Man are very defined; this is one characteristic of his face that the readers can use to differentiate this character from the others. Additionally, his eyes have very dark circles, from the lack of sleep and heavy buildup of anxiety he suffers from. All of these elements have textual evidence to back them up. There will also be one sketch reflective of our field trips, most likely influenced by the anime event some of us attended. Our descriptions will include a few, extremely brief poems inspired by the Underground, essay-like analyses, and an introduction to our book. Unfortunately, with the formatting we’ve chosen, there can only be one true original and nine copies but even this too is significant.

The Why

I doubt the Underground Man was sitting in the underground handwriting dozens of copies of his manuscript. Of course, there was only one, original manuscript in the story. This manuscript will be represented by the Book About a Book that we formulate. Additionally, the Underground Man’s obsession with math, with his own appearance, and with the haven-like qualities of the Underground will all inspire the way we craft the Book About a Book. More specifically, we will include formulas, drawings of his face, and dark poems and sketches that reflect the romantic appeal of the Underground. Furthermore, this format best allows us to display what we’ve learned about the craft and labors that go into making a book, since we will be making everything from scratch, in collage form. The repetitive nature of our work will reflect the repetitive nuances of the Underground Man’s thoughts as he ponders humankind’s free will over and over throughout the text. All these darkly romantic and confused pieces will come together to form a somewhat incoherent whole that captures the essence of what makes Notes from Underground great. It is quite literally a text that is befuddled–that is precisely the point. It was written at a time when the world was feeling confused, when an author finally admitted to and encapsulated that feeling in a text for the world to behold, and it had never been done before. By taking bits and pieces from god knows where, we will form a Book About a Book that is the ultimate homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Through the Dark Wood and Open Door…

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In the first panel, a man is struggling to climb out from the underground. This is represented by the many lines of the wooden panels inserted around his arm. We will know the man by his green shirt. Then, in the second panel, the man has emerged from the underground and into the house, which is pitch dark. He sees light streaming out from the doorway, so he decides to be brave and venture outside, since he is craving freedom. Outside, in the third panel, the biggest and most significant panel, it is revealed that there is only more wood on the ground. The lofty dreams and ideals he has are only in his mind. There is even a hideous cockroach laying near him, paying homage to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

These three panels are a reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s philosophy mentioned in the text. While he wrote of a man hiding underground to express his free will, I re-imagined it to be a man escaping the underground, whether figuratively or literally, in hopes of finding something more beautiful outside. Both the novel and this comic panel end in disappointment.

This scene is a derivation, a riff, off of the original text. By making these three panels, I’ve given readers a small taste of the novel without them actually having to slog through the 136 pages of philosophy and whimsy. I’ve taken the core idea of the novel and found the easiest simplified example to convey it.

The Interplay of Head Lice and Demons

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In “One Hundred Demons,” the author uses “demons” to refer to a wide variety of childhood and adulthood plagues. Specifically in the segment about head lice, she takes “demons” to refer to the head lice but also to refer to her ex-boyfriend. Demons, therefore, take on multiple meanings: they can be muses, dark delights, pests, literal pests, and people who are unkind. As the author draws the demons from Japanese culture, she is giving her own Filipino American spin on the idea of one hundred demons.

Regarding the panel above, the author depicts her giving head lice to her ex-boyfriend and how he nags at her in retaliation. In this panel, the “demons” take on an ironic twist. Instead of the head lice being the expected antagonist, the “demon” is actually her ex-boyfriend. The head lice is actually a way to connect with her first love, the Professor. Then, the author delivers another twist: the head lice is the “demon” because her ex-boyfriend is a head lice! There is a lot of interplay between the idea of a head lice a neutral evil, and her ex-boyfriend’s shared characteristics of being a neutral evil, as shown by how he is nagging at her while they both have head lice, “You keep talking about things that have nothing to do with me! You talk talk talk…” The chattering of his lips is almost like the scuttling movement of head lice on their heads. The author makes light of both of these neutral evils by relating it back to how she was in the good graces of her first love due to head lice and white people head lice (her ex-boyfriend).

The Many Lives in Walt Whitman’s “When I read the Book”

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When I read the Book

WHEN I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;          5
Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,
I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

In Walt Whitman’s poem “When I read the Book,” I used the Follow the Trail close reading method to pick out the instances that Whitman mentions the word “life” or details in reference to life in order to analyze the text. He repeats the word life four times in the poem, thereby imbuing the use of the word with greater meaning by each mention. In the first mention, Whitman writes of “a man’s life,” where he intends for “man” to substitute for “human,” (although any person for which a famous biography would be written would have been male back then.) “A man’s life” has a fossilized connotation, as if it is a preserved specimen or chronology left for posterity. Whitman implies that there is no agency left for the man whose life has been compiled, but only agency in the hands of the author, who can construe the man’s life to have been anything from the author’s imagination. There is also a quality of determinism or passivity to Whitman’s description of “a man’s life,” as if the end product of a well lived existence is simply to be recorded into a famous biography.

Whitman then flips the subject to his own life, when he mentions “my life” in the second repetition. Specifically, he is afraid of his own life being subjected to this kind of preservation and arbitrary reinterpretation at the hands of a future author. In this mention, Whitman contrasts his life with his future as being dead and gone. In a metaphysical sense, his life will take on a new existence as his soul leaves his body, but in an empirical sense, his “life” will potentially carry on in the form of a book.

Then, in the third mention of “my life,” Whitman is capitalizing on this distinct notion both as his whole lived existence and as a kind of “truth” of what exactly happened through the years he was alive. He refutes the idea that any man could know anything of his life, deriding this as an impossibility. In the 1867 version of the poem, he even mentions his cunning soul that hides a secret well. In this mention, Whitman conveys that there is a sense of mystery that shrouds any objective truth about his life.

Finally, Whitman turns all of the above meanings on their head in his final mention of “my real life.”  The word “real” can be contrasted with the first mention of “a man’s life,” as Whitman implies how vastly different the real can be from the historicized and imagined. The fossil can only contain a sliver of the truth. Even Whitman himself knows little or nothing of his real life, he states, which might be slightly more than the “aught” that any man knows, but it is still far from enough to write an accurate non-fiction book about himself. It is like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the man who ventures out of the cave to see “real” objects and is killed for it, while the believers of the shadows continue to live on. From this meaning, we can come to understand that Whitman may not simply be writing about books and lived experiences, but also making a bigger statement about human society and a need to defy the usual complacency to accept records and old texts as reality and truth. Whitman may be asking us to question how much do we human beings really know and how much is just falsely believed in. There is large evidence to believe that this poem is meant to signify more than just books, as even the book is left untitled and simply called “the Book.”