Thoughts: on Moby Dick

Thought #1:
Damn I wish it was 1851 and I could be on a whaling ship contemplating existential questions about Man, and Nature, and what drives Humanity. But unfortunately I'm actually just contemplating these questions alone in my room, or in the library. Basically my point is that I'm jealous of Ishmael and Melville because it seems to me that exploring these questions was more interesting in the past, given there was more time available in a given day to really think about these grandiose kinds of questions. And perhaps there were more people interested in actually reading about them.
Then again this may absolutely not have been the case. It's very easy to look back on the past with an idealized view of philosophy in mind. It is equally possible that a relative amount of people from 1851 compared to people today, equally did not give a damn about existential questions back then.

Thought #2:
How absolutely terrifying hunting a sperm whale would be in actuality. These creatures are enormous. They have giant teeth and hunt giant squid. They spout scalding water from their blow hole and tend to ram themselves into the boats that are trying to kill them. They can swallow you without chewing you. They lurk below the surface and dive to unimaginable depths. I don't know... it just seems to me like the whole process absurdly scary and further complicated by the fact that you are literally stranded out in the ocean for a very long time.
Not to mention that you would essentially be trapped on a boat with a crew of crazy people. In order to embark on a quest to hunt a sperm whale one would have to be crazy. It is objectively a crazy thing to do. The crew of the Pequod are certainly crazy, and their captain Ahab is perhaps the craziest of them all. So on top of all of the inherent danger of hunting a sperm whale, and being out at sea for three years-- you would be at the mercy of an absolute crazy captain who's only motivation in life is to murder a whale that chewed his leg off years ago.

Thought #3:
There is something about this book that makes it truly and un-apologetically American. Obviously this book is a cornerstone of Canonical American literature, but there is something about it that effortlessly speaks to the condition of being American. I think that what was true for Melville about being American back in 1851, is still true today. The unending quest towards the unknowable. The restless pursuit of some invaluable something. The ceaseless pull toward an ideal of success. There's something about this book that really nails the whole "American Dream" theme; something wholly separate from the financial aspect of that dream like in The Great Gatsby. This book speaks more to the spiritual side of our quest towards the American Dream. Or maybe I just relate to Ishmael way too much.

I have more thoughts about this book and I will be periodically posting them on this blog.

Vignette: Sitting in a room and watching the snow

I’m sitting in a chair that was given to me by a friend, who was taking care of cats for a woman that was getting rid of her things because she had grown too old to live by herself. The chair is leather and you can recline in it very far. I have tipped over several times. 

I’m drinking coffee from a mug with, “I love you Grandpa” printed on it and some kind of design put together with triangles and brown lines. I purchased the mug from The Salvation Army store that exists about 3 minutes from the room I am currently sitting in. The coffee that is contained in the mug was brewed in a Mr Coffee machine that I have distant memories of seeing in the house I lived in when I was very little. 

I am sitting in this chair and drinking this coffee and watching the snow because the store I work in was closed today due to the snow. The job I work at was introduced to me by a lost lover, whom was lovers with a friend of mine I went to high school with, who also worked before me at the store that I am currently employed at. The coffee I am drinking is cold, and has been cold for a while now. 

Poem: Dark blue, light blue, light green, white, gray

Dark blue, light blue, light green, white, gray 

It is enormous. The only 

word that comes to mind is Mother. 

Tiny whirls and swirls, some girls with

pearls and the clouds are stormy looking.

Ishmael says that we have an affinity for the ocean. That it is in our DNA to gaze in that 

direction. Toward the sea. We dream of what 

our life could be. My mother sits next to me,

and asks me what I want my life to be. But right now we are both children of the Ocean. 

Poem: Drinking Beer on a Beach

The lip of the beer bottle whistles if you angle it right in the wind. 

The pitch deepens as you drain the liquid. 

If you’re really good, you can bend the pitch while the liquid drains into your open, upturned mouth. 

Rustling leaves sort of sound like a fire burning. 

Overhead planes disappear momentarily into clouds.

They sort of remind me of what I pictured a soul going to heaven would look like. I thought about that a lot when I was little. 

What makes Panda Bear important to music in 2019?

PANDA BEAR 2019 IRON WORKS 
What makes Panda Bear important to music in 2019? 
By Jack Candido 

Panda Bear’s 2019 Valentine’s Day show at Iron works in Brooklyn made me feel like I had gotten on a boat(or ark if you will) with everyone that I love, and we were sailing towards our dreams and a brighter future for everyone on board. You may think this sounds cliché, well that’s because it is, and that is exactly my point and Panda Bear’s. Mr. Noah Lennox isn’t afraid of sounding cheesy or contrived. He is a master of the age old saying, it’s not what you say that matters— it’s how you say it. You see, Mr.Lennox conveys messages of positivity and hope with a reverence and sincerity that is palpable and dripping with intensity. 
His most recent album, Buoys, is a prime example of the virtuous—borderline motivational— style that Panda Bear has crafted throughout his career. With lyrics like “look up from the screen,” from the track inner monologue, Panda Bear takes on the persona of a 2000s parent concerned with what they perceive to be a child’s addiction to technology. 
Taken out of context this line has every reason to be corny and hyper-cliché, especially considering everyone in the audience is encouraged to stare slack jawed and wide eyed at the 3 huge screens projecting psychedelic imagery, and the not so subtle fact that Panda Bear’s stage did not contain a single traditional instrument, given that his music is almost entirely— if not entirely— composed of samples and electronically produced sounds. 
But it is exactly this paradox that creates the sincere and genuine atmosphere that is Panda Bear. He is unafraid to sing (beautifully I might add) these words, while knowing full well that himself and his fans are active perpetrators of the actions his words command against. It is a result of musical progeny that Panda Bear can transmute a command (look up from the screen) into what feels like a humble suggestion that is in the best interest of everyone. 
Panda’s sincerity comes from his identity, both his projected and his actual. Noah Lennox is a family man who lives with his wife and two children in Portugal. His foil, Avey Tare front man of Animal Collective, elevates Noah’s identity by providing a counter to the rhythmic order of Panda’s message and sound. Avey projects an energy of chaos by summoning characters that evoke a sense of madness and disorder. While Panda is everything but that. His music, identity, and message, all evoke a sense of composure, order, and unity. 

There is no question that our generation is ruffled with an anxieties of an uncertain future, and plagued by depressive tendencies that are charged by a divided country and rapid technological advancement. Panda Bear attempts to deliver a message of hope that is constructed from, and is born out of the same anxieties, depression, and computerization, that created this hole to begin with. 
  Nothing proves this point more than the wonderful addition of Panda performing comfy in nautica, perhaps a Valentine’s Day gift to his longtime fans, during his set. With the mantra, 

“coolness is having courage
 Courage to do what’s right
I’ll try to remember always 
Just to have a good time”

Panda Bear led the audience in a chant promoting self confidence, and a brave moral suggestion—it takes courage to do what’s right, be brave. 
I think the experience of going to a Panda Bear performance can be a profound and uplifting event if viewed from the perspective I’ve suggested. But a morally enriching experience that isn’t deprived of the sensuous human desires that make us feel alive and excited to exist; happy to be present and witness to life.

Literacy Narrative

Buddha-Jesus: a Literacy Narrative

(Cloud of Literacy Inspiration): My parents divorce, personal faith, illiteracy, my 5th grade teacher Mr. Cavallo, every relationship I’ve ever been in, Buddha, the museum of natural history in New York City, artwork by Dahli, Chuck Close, H.R Giger, Alfred Hitchcock, Ray Bradbury, Nirvana,The Beatles, My grandmother dying of Cancer, Edward Gorey, Wes Anderson, The Matrix, rain...

The essence of literacy is something that escapes our ability to define. However this essay is meant to accomplish a practical or useful reflection of personal growth through becoming literate. The textbook Writing About Writing cheats a little with its definition of literacy, “Experts who study literacy typically think about more than the ability to read and write. They refer broadly to fluency or expertise in communicating and interacting with other people in many different ways. Thus, it’s more accurate to speak about literacies when thinking about what it means to be a literate person.” (Writing About Writing 64). Instead of trying to actually define literacy it claims that any definition would be inaccurate and it is more beneficial to discuss examples of ‘literacies’ instead. I agree with the choice to cheat, there are a tremendous amount of literacies contained in our world due to--as Deborah Brandt would argue--an individual’s economic place (Brandt 70). The reasons we become ‘literate’ spawn out of a need to survive; to maintain homeostasis. Survival has moved passed the point where basic needs (food, water, living space) can be met entirely on one’s own. This is because we now live in society, and survival at this stage in human evolution is dependent on some form of literacy because we are forced to ‘communicate and interact with people’(WAW 64). “Literacy, like land, is a valued commodity in this economy, a key resource in gaining profit and edge”(Brandt 75). In Deborah Brandt’s view ‘profit’ and ‘edge’ are the rewards for being a literate person. This is true when we look at the world through a Marxist lens. Literacy becomes roped into the constant dialectic of class struggle that has defined humanity forever. There is little room to argue against this. The goal of this paper is to show an example of how literacy reaches farther than the economic base of a society will allow. This paper chooses to accept Marx’s claim, while at the same time arguing literacy to be a means of transcending our commodified truths about the world; to define literacy as a tool to leave behind the self that exists gridlocked in systems upon systems of words and power that rob the agency of the mind of its ability to think.

Our ability to think is prefaced on how we’ve been conditioned to think. Being literate exists as a tool to allow one to progress further into systems of thought or to rebel against systems of thought. Literacy exists on the precipice of falling into ideology and being able to see and define ideology. What I mean to illuminate here is that the same tool that allows for one’s ability to think critically is also the reason why thinking critically is not encouraged. What does it mean to think critically? Thinking critically is when we challenge an understanding we have in our minds (a truth) with another thought that conflicts with the initial thought. In this way, critical thought challenges something we have come to understand about the world from our literacy sponsors. Critical thought is not encouraged because “the powerful work so persistently to conscript and ration the powers of literacy”(Brandt 76). This makes sense when we consider literacy to be the method of getting ahead in this world. But what if we consider literacy outside of the realm of economic progression? What if we consider survival based on truth and meaning; what we need to believe in order to feel okay with existing as phenomenal bodies in a phenomenal world.

The event in my life that catalyzed my consideration into this question was my parent’s divorce. The fissure encouraged an awareness within me of the ideologies and or literacies I participate in. If we think of literacy in terms of ‘literacies’ we imply the possibility of  one literacy running counter to another; those in favor of a particular literacy and those against. I am using my parents as an example of the earliest time I can recall understanding this concept. What becomes clear to me while writing this paper is that nearly everything in this life can be argued to relate to literacy. I would like to emphasize that I believe every literate person at some point has a realization about the vast complexity of our world; complexity in the sense that things are not simply A or B. My parents divorce happens to be the event in my life that sparked this realization. The importance I place on the understandings of the world we formulate as children is perhaps best expressed by Milan Kundera:

“Indeed the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”(Kundera 139)

Perhaps the earliest literacies we become fluent in derive from questions we ask our parents.  What we know of the world, meaning the base we build our understanding and interpretation of phenomenal stimuli on, comes from our parents. This idea can be extended into adolescence and adulthood once our parents become overshadowed by greater systems of control. For example, school, government, religion, etc… . Our parents, as well as greater systems of control, also become overshadowed by things that for various reasons influence us more or make our lives meaningful in ways our parents do not. An aspect of being literate is allowing ourselves to be changed by an understanding of the world that runs counter to what we’ve already established as true.

How I relate my divided upbringing to the pursuit of literacy is by my method of thinking that formed around a conceptual fork in the road. Everything I thought became a debate inside myself; a war between true and false. I felt that picking one understanding over another meant favoring one parent over the other. It seemed so dire in some respects that my love for them could only exist if my understanding of the world lined up with one of theirs. This carried on until I became conscious enough of my stark black and white view of the world to realize how restrictive this kind of thinking is. Perhaps Camus’ writing can illuminate this idea:

“For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true). And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an infinite number of true or false judgements. For the one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad infinitum.” (Camus 16-17)

An example of how this split understanding in my brain came about is through the individual faith of my parents. After their divorce my mother found it important to uphold some kind of Catholic education in me, while my father became heavily steeped in Buddhism. There would be times that my mother would drive me to my father’s house house after I got out of CCD, and I would walk into him meditating on the floor of our tiny apartment. I came to realize the very stark difference of my parents’ morality and metaphysical interpretation of the world. In one universe I was bombarded by western ideology of sin and punishment and in the other I was swallowed by eastern ideology of the turnings of thought and the code of the samurai. I found myself to question what was being told in CCD because it ran counter to what I was getting told from my dad. The immediate sense of contradiction between these two spheres of life prompted me to become critical of both. My mind became lost in, as Camus describes, “This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling.”(Camus 17).

It is the mind that studies itself that transcends the Hegelian plight of existing as a social being. It is precisely our ability to figure our own thought that allows for the transcende of meaning from merely just surviving in a capitalist system.  It is impossible to study anything outside of ourselves if we are incapable of studying ourselves. Otherwise, we fall victim to the force of undertow that is the essence of ideology.

Naturally discussions of religion eventually end in a conversation of morals; what is important, what brings happiness, who decides anything for us? My father believed that the answer to these questions was found within (in accordance with Buddhism), while my mother constantly searched outside for answers (in accordance with Catholicism). Although initially confusing, what I eventually realized is that although the two faiths and the two parents contradict each other, they can exist as true in and of themselves. For if it is my desire for both of my parents to be true this is the only way in which that truth was possible. It is exactly this conflict that is the source of truth as well as in a more general sense a source of literacy and critical thought.

The world became much more complex once my relation to it became rendered by my own mind. I became opposed to vicariously living through the perceived reality of my parents. This was not an act of rebellion, it was more so an act of self actualization. I didn’t reject the truths of my parents, I just realized that truth is not so easily universal. The acknowledgement of this fact is more important and greater than the fact itself. I’m not trying to say that everyone and everything is right because we are able to see the logic behind it. Obviously there is right and wrong, but an aspect of being literate is the ability to consciously acknowledge individual truth and think critically as to its relation to yourself and others.

Truths we come to establish are true in ourselves. The next question that needs to be asked is, from whose truth are we comparing our truth? God’s truth, Buddha's truth, Mom or Dad’s truth, Marx’s truth, Brandt’s truth, Camus’ truth, Kundera’s truth, America’s truth… . Being literate is being able to see the truth of all things alongside the simultaneous untruth of all things. The recognition of all answers amongst no answers. Being literate is impossible without understanding our singular limited capacity for understanding; meaning is born from the whole. However, at the same time we all exist within ourselves. So therefore all truth and meaning comes from within. This inherent contradiction to any formulation of meaning is the central tenet of what I define as literacy.

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays, translated by Justin O’brien, Vintage    

Books, 1991

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Harper

& Row, 2004

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing About Writing, third Edition, bedford/st.martin’s,

2017.

Article Critique

Article Critique of: 
“Explorative Exposure: media in and of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” 
by Juha-Pekka Kilpio 

Juha-Pekka Kilpio is a doctoral student of literature at the University of Jyvoskyla in Finland. He reads the novel as a cybertext and focuses on its engagement with cinema. Kilpio begins by drawing a distinct line between media as interface and media as subject matter, arguing that research done in this field falls only into one of these two categories. However, Kilpio believes that certain works (namely House of Leaves) call for a joint approach (57). Kilpio’s work highlights aspects of this novel in which form and content merge to produce a new type of work that is made possible in the genre of the cybertext. The first part of this article offers a formal analysis of how Mark Z Danielewski created a text that engages with new medial approaches to storytelling. The second part, “emphasizes the particular sensorial and semiotic challenge that cinema sets to a printed text”(65). In doing so, Kilpio suggests that traditional forms of intermediality--namely ekphrasis--fall short of meeting the challenges of describing the temporal and moving image and suggests the new term, kinekphrasis (65). 
The first half of Kilpio’s critique uses Espen Aarseth’s study of Cybertext, to provide a formal analysis of House of Leaves as a cybertext, Kilpio lists seven variables which are found within a cybertext (60). His analysis mainly focuses on variable 7, user functions, which refers to a user’s options for interacting with a cybertext, including interpretive function, explorative function, and the configurative function. Kilpio argues that this novel’s ergodic nature is more complex than others, which is made apparent by its unique treatment of this user function. Where as other texts within the same ‘media position,’ such as Julio Cortazar’s Rayuela, provide the reader with different paths to take through chapters, House of Leaves effectively uses footnotes to create an alternate version of this forking path explorative function. By using an example from chapter 9 where superscript 135 leads to an external destination followed by internal destination-footnote 129 located 3 pages back-Kilpio argues that the feedback loop created by this text’s treatment of the explorative function, separates this work from other works of ergodic literature. Kilpio argues that the increasing intensity put on the user to find the link associated with the footnote effectively foregrounds the search for a destination as an inherent part of any codex. In this way the random access function (which is associated with the 5th variable of the cybertext) is made increasingly meaningful (62). 
Unfortunately the examples Kilipio draws from the text in order to make his argument do not fully represent the novel as a whole. The majority of his paper draws only from chapters 9 and 10 and in doing so fails to show how this argument relates to the work as a whole. Although his work illuminates an interesting and engaging reading of these chapters, it doesn’t show how his ideas carry themselves from the beginning to the end of the novel. Kilpio subtly suggests that his reading will focus on only the cinematic qualities of House of Leaves, but his claims and arguments at times bleed into grand elements of the story. This would not be an issue if Kilpio had more explicitly stated and defined the cinematic elements of The Navidson Record as being paramount to every other engagement with the text.
Furthermore, Kilpio’s argument for this novel’s use of kinekphrasis exclusively relies on examples provided by Zampano. There is no mention of Johnny Truant. This is unfortunately a missed opportunity because Kilpio’s argument misses everything Johnny Truant is doing on top of Zampano’s work. The layered narrative element of this book is absolutely integral to the meaning contained within its pages. It would be interesting and more comprehensive for this article to include how Johnny deals with Zampano’s kinekphrastic response to The Navidson Record. Does this make Johnny’s reading of Zampano’s reading kinekphrastic in nature as well?  Perhaps some of these problems could be overlooked if this piece of criticism had been written closer to when the book was first published; however, this article was published in 2018. Therefore, it is inexcusable that this critique doesn’t take into account the novel as a whole, or at the very least each narrator contained in the text. 
On a positive note, the term “kinekphrasis” provides an interesting way to categorize how novels can
signify a different type of media within a text. I find Kilpio’s use of this term to be the strongest element of his critique.
This term is especially useful when discussing a text such as this which constantly challenges our understanding of intertextuality.