Journal Entry 2: 4/08/15
So far the project has been running fairly well. I have been able to get a hold of the people I need to in a timely manner and have been enjoying the feedback I am receiving on my rough draft. Looking back on my memories, the only memories that help me relate to why I want to interview my grandfather, mother and long lost uncle Steve, are those from my childhood. Like my uncle, I too have experience with adoption to a certain level. We share a common feeling of of having this whole side of our families we are not related to but truly love, and a whole other family we are related to but don’t even know.
My mom had me at nineteen. My biological dad, Mike, and her were high school sweet hearts and had been dating for three years before I was born. Once I was born however, my dad decided that he couldn’t handle the responsibility and wanted to pursue his dream of being a sound engineer in Hollywood. He packed his things and never returned to Washington.
Although it was strange he left, things weren’t all that sad. He hadn’t been very helpful even when he was around and my mom and his best friend Joe had fallen in love. Joe accepted full responsibility over taking over as my dad. I remember him telling me the story of when he knew he was going to be my father. He was seventeen years old and he and my mom and Mike were all in the same friend group from high school; in fact, Mike and Joe where even in a band together called Hippie Juice. It was one evening when Mike was nowhere to found and my mom needed a babysitter so her and her friend Amy could go to a Red Hot Chili Peppers show. They offered Joe a pack of cigarettes and taco bell for payment and he happily accepted. He fed me a bottle, danced around with me to a Led Zeppelin C.D and rocked me to sleep. He told me that it was while he baby sat me for the first that he fell in love, he said he just knew he was supposed to be in my life and I in his.
When Joe turned eighteen, my mom, who was now twenty, and him, got married. Mike heard about this, and although wasn’t thrilled still did not return from California. It was after they were married, in the year 1996, that Joe decided he wanted to officially adopt me. My mom contacted Mike and told him of their plans and that if he wanted to appeal he could show up to court. Mike bought a plane ticket and even got as far as the airport fully ready to not allow Joe to be my father. My mom and Joe waited for him to show up at the court house but he never appeared. Mike had turned around and went home. Joe was now officially my dad and for a time we were a small happy family.
Because Mike was never in my life and didn’t make any real contact with me again until I was a teenager, I never knew his side of the family or even him. I grew up calling Joe dad and being raised with his mom and dad as my grandparents and his brother and sister as my aunt and uncle. I always knew I had some other dad out there but it really never mattered to me. I had a dad that loved me and a new family that accepted me as their own even though I wasn’t related by blood. Although I wasn’t opposed to meeting this family I was actually related to, I wasn’t really looking.
When talking to my Uncle Steve about how he felt about being adopted he told me he had similar feelings. He knew he was adopted but had two loving parents so he didn’t see the necessity in finding his biological family. He said if he did ever meet them he would not be opposed but he as well wasn’t looking. He was satisfied. Having a mystery family is what connects me to this project the most.

The article focuses on describing the series of systemic prejudices that have disenfranchised Black Americans since Antebellum as well presenting an argument that a ‘national reckoning’ (Reparations) is needed for Americans to right our historical wrongdoings and failures to make good on our promises of equality and liberty.

Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality… They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society… In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.

“A difference of kind, not degree.” Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson.

But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them. John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

The title is provocative though the article is very nuanced: Is this an effective technique to get people to read?

Quantitative Reparations Vs Qualitative Reparations

Comparison with Germany: What role does personal guilt/memory play?

On page 195 of the sexual politics of female criminality there is a cartoon titled “Feminist demands…” It shows the male and the female role during this time but switched up because the female role has a man’s face and the male role has a females face. In this section it is being said that the modern woman was winning her freedom but also being masculinized. Even before I saw the comic strip I automatically thought of the Rosie the riveter poster from the 1940s  and how shes showing off her muscle while she has her bandanna on her head from working at home but it’s her elbow and hands that’s dramatized and looks rough “like a mans.” Representing feminism and women’s economic power.

“Society is afraid of both the feminist and the murderer, for each of them, in her own way, tests societies establish boundaries… Nor is it surprising that the panic provoked by feminism and the alarm at female criminality coincide almost perfectly, as though according to some plan.”
Ann Jones, women who kill, 1980

I’m not sure if this is right but what I drew out of this quote is that society is afraid of women and what they’re capable of and the power that women have beyond their own home. And from my interpretation I thought of how society today looks at women in power. It’s ironic and quite sad when women in a high position in the work place is categoriezed/looked upon as if we either A) slept our way to the top or B) worked so hard that we are considered a bitch/prude/ and sometimes masculine etc. i feel that women are only looked at this way because it is men who are intimidated by such success in a person of the opposite sex. I also was interested in this quote because it reminds me of the power dynamic of female characters through out In Search of Lost Time. Several women such as Odette and Albertine have this hold on their men  and it makes the male characters crazy-obsessed not only with them but with getting the upper hand on them. There was a time in “The Guermantes Way” when Odette says that men can be manipulated to do anything by a woman. If this is so, it makes me wonder and its unfortunate to say that women who are aware or have this power over any male or even another individual can use this to their advantage for the good or for the bad.

This morning I was running late for class. I had to drop my son off with his father and needed to get gas, and on top of that I had to drive by my house to make sure my daughter and niece were outside to catch their bus. As I’m driving down my busy road with maybe 5 cars in front of me and 10 cars going the other direction, I noticed an elderly man on a bike fall into the road. The 5 cars in front of me and I were stopped at a red light. I watched him for a minute while I wait for the light to turn, and he wasn’t moving. His helmets flow off so I was thinking the worse.

The man falling isn’t what upset me. What upset me was what happened next. All 15 cars drove around him! There were people walking by that didn’t even look at him as he laid there. It was at that moment I was ashamed at our species. I say species because I’ve seen a video of a dog dragging another dog out of traffic after he got hit, or another video of a goldfish helping another goldfish that had a broken fin swim to the top of the tank for food.

So once all the assholes past this man on the ground I stopped. By then he hasn’t moved yet. Luckily as soon as he seen me coming he started to move. I helped him up and gathered he groceries. His helmet that flow off his head was actually a construction helmet which is why I didn’t prevent him from hitting his head. Sadly I didn’t get his name and he declined my offer for a ride. But I got back into my car and was fighting back tears for what I just witnessed.

When have our lives become so engulfed with ourselves that we can’t take 5 min to help someone? There will ALWAYS be time to give someone a helping hand especially if they look hurt. Our society is run by our ambition to make money. Time is money right? But as we look at ourselves so capitalistically we lose our humanity. Our society cannot climb out of this whole we are in without helping each other, there will always be one person left in the hole that will need a helping hand.

I am not righting this to get a high 5 or be “recognized” for what I did, which shouldn’t be a big deal in the 1^st place. It is a big deal that I felt the need to share this story so that there will never be a person that society “drives” around again.

I really enjoyed the supplemental reading this week, Breaking the Codes.  I enjoy learning about history.  I can’t believe I am saying that since I have been saying how uninterested I am for the past 38 years.  But, I am finally enjoying learning about how things used to be and the effect on how our world is today.  This article especially because of the subject matter.  I didn’t know so much of the information that was provided, like how women being independent was seen as “dangerous” and the extent of control husbands had over their wives.  I also had no idea that woman used to not have any rights to their own children.  The subject of sexuality and prostitution is also fascinating to me.  Women were not allowed to enjoy sex but men were hanging out a brothels.  I also enjoyed looking at the art in class today.  Another thing that I cannot believe I am saying.  It was very interesting to hear the back stories on the pieces of art that we were looking at.  I see how it is important to know about history in order to understand and be able to look critically at art work.  This is an appreciation that I may want to look further into and gain more of.

Understanding what woman have been up against for such a long time gives me a new perspective on why people become feminists.  Again, it was a subject that I was uneducated on and therefore didn’t understand.  The more I learn, the more I want to learn.

The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin is a fascinating essay. Perhaps it is most fascinating for me because I feel that it is itself a story. I really love that about it. Most of all, I love how he structures this piece. I love how each new subject builds upon the previous ones without necessarily following it logically. This is wonderful collage at work and I’m impressed by it.

In addition to form, I love his arguments about the novel. As wonderful as novels are, they are a flawed medium. It comes entirely from one person’s solitary imagination and can never truly enter the lives of others, but that is exactly the goal of telling the story, of writing the novel. The other problem with the novel, and this has become even more problematic today, is how it is dependent on the printed format. Yes, now we can get it on our Kindles and iPads, but it still looks like a printed book. And yet we no longer live in that world. The online news doesn’t look like a newspaper, does it? I’m very interested in the concept of creating multimedia stories.

Like Benjamin, I worry about the information given in writing. He’s right, information can’t really transcend the time. But there is some type of information in writing that can. It’s some sort of information about the soul, I think. But how do you define that? It’s impossible. Like he says, we read to experience death. This is true, but don’t we also read and write to experience life?

What are we trying to tell people when we write?

Why do we need to tell each other things in novels with purpose?

Why do we write novels?

Where is the novel going?

Why do we write?

Why?

After David Shields talk last night, tonight I went to the ballet with my mother. It was Swan Lake, so famous and yet so easy to miss seeing live. I opened the playbook as we sat down and was immediately struck by the reminder that the Swan Queen is named Odette!

I can’t help but assume that Proust sort of did this on purpose. Not only does he name his first female main character Odette, but he names her lover Swann! And sets their entire romance to music. And makes the description of Odette de Crecy sound like that of a ballet dancer.

So what are the differences? They exist mostly in character, while the similarities lie in the plot. These differences are mostly that the Swan Queen is gentle, kind, vulnerable, and looking for unwavering love to save her from her curse. In ISOLT, Odette is manipulative and adulterous, but appears to Swann to be more like the Odette in the ballet.

The similarities are in the plot. In the books, Swann falls in love with Odette because she is intriguing. Similarly, the Prince falls for the Swan Queen because she is different from the princesses he is supposed to marry but doesn’t like. In ISOLT, Odette has two sides to her as well, like Odette (the gentle Swan Queen) and Odile (the manipulative double who works for the evil sorcerer). Their romance revolves around the musical phrase, like the Prince and the Swan Queen dancing out the story of their love. And in the end, it seems like they are torn apart, only to find themselves back together later in worse circumstances (depending on the ending of the ballet).

In ISOLT, Odette is literally the Swan Queen. She is the ballerina figure who manipulates her way to become the Queen of M. Swann’s heart.

Oh the irony.

“All books dissolve a genre or create one.” – David Shields

I was excited to see David Shields scheduled to give a Hugo House evening Word Works lecture, speaking on collage. They described the lecture as one that would change your life. My skeptical interest was piqued and I did my research on this David Shields.

He is a well know writer and professor at the UW. His recent book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was highly acclaimed as the best book of the year in 2012. It questioned the current use of genre, form, and originality in literature. I watched videos of David lecturing and having discussions about his work. And I learned that he gave up on traditional novels.

Now this was interesting to me. I understand everything he said about why he turned away from novels; he got bored, they didn’t portray reality, etc. While I have not completely given up on literature, I feel this is partly why I don’t read as much anymore. It is a legitimate criticism.

And as I watched these videos of David, he said that he believed that Proust was the greatest western writer. But he had just said that current literature is too long and boring! I had to attend the lecture to ask him about this duality.

Going anywhere for writing always makes me excited. Bookstores make my heart flutter, classes make my stomach flip,  but anything at Hugo House, especially events, make my body, mind, and soul sing.

This particular event really got to me because I had no idea if I would actually get to attend. Tickets were sold out, so I went early, in the hope that maybe they would have an empty seat. I was excited, hopeful, and very nervous. I saw David walk in and I knew it was almost time, and I wasn’t sure if I was even going to see it.

Suddenly, one of the staff poked their head into the open cafe space outside the theater where I and others were sitting. They had open seats for sale! I jumped up and ran to the counter to get one. I grabbed a seat in the second row, feet from the podium and got out my writing notebook.

Looking back at the notes I took tonight, I can barely read my own handwriting. But they are imbued with the incredibly exciting things I learned and the almost spiritual experience of that vigorous learning. Some things I learned are:

• You can’t just work in one “drawer” of your “consciousness and understanding desk”; the drawer underneath has to sneak open too.
• Each writer has to find their own form that plays to their strengths.
• Write the way your mind thinks.
• The ultimate test of a book is whether the writer is able to slip in everything they want to say; this makes it alive.
• To put reality in quadruple quotations: truth is unknown or relative, reality is subjective.
• Form evolves to serve the culture.
• Collage is a wisdom seeking form of thought.
• Collage works are about what they are about; they manifestly explore the subject in each paragraph.
• All definitions of collage imply that meaning is not just in each scene or shot, but in juxtaposition.
• Collage, like mosaic, flaunts the reality of what it is made of.
• Fiction either helps us escape real life or teaches us how to live, but is mostly a bubble-wrapped retreat.
• Collage tries to get as close to real life as possible.
• Collage lets you tell a thousand stories at once (because plot is less important).
• Collage wrestles with the crazy way our lives today are made up of so many non-linear threads.
• Collage is anti-linear, anti-mastery, and anti-narrative.

Whoa.

When question time came around, my hand shot up to ask about Proust. How do you reconcile your belief that Proust is the “author of the greatest book in the history of Western civilization” (quoted from his video) and your statement that the novel is too slow and boring?

His answer both astonished and thrilled me. He said that Proust dismantled narrative, which allowed him to create real psychological information. He is not ashamed of his meditation on life and, indeed, revels in these meditations. David said that he read Proust at an important moment in his life (I assume around the time of his transition to collage) and it allowed him to see that you don’t have to stick to the classic novel, that you should write in the way that fits you best.

And this is exactly what I am experiencing now in Proust. In every page I find ideas and inspiration for how to tell a story and what makes it compelling. It pushes me to understand the unreliable narrator and the mystery of half-known characters.

Proust has been pushing me towards viewing writing differently. David has finally inspired me to shed the need for the classic novel formant and encouraged me to branch out into the wide world of experimental writing. Where I was afraid, now I am inspired. And I think that perhaps that is the point of writing.

Michael Chapman

Journal 1 March 31- I have just started reading Swann’s way and so far I am enjoying it. I think that the detail that the narrator goes into describing personal relationships is fascinating. I have never read anything like Proust before. Reading Combray makes me think about my own experiences as a child and makes me think back on times that I spent with my own family and the very minute details that made those times important to me. It makes me think back to my trips to Oregon when I was a young boy. Reading this has made me look back and think critically about things that I have not really thought about in years and in some cases ever. Another interesting aspect of the reading is the detail the narrator goes into while explaining his own childhood experiences. This was a new experience for me because I do not think that I have read anything before that delves into the mind of a child quite like Swann’s Way does.

Journal 2 April 4- I really enjoyed watching boyhood in class this week. I found it very interesting and I found a lot of the comparisons to my own childhood growing up in the 90s and 2000’s. In some ways I kind of saw myself in the main character. I think this was because of the experiences that we have both shared. I really identified with the main character in many ways. One thing that really struck me from the film was the technology and how it progressed throughout the movie. There was scene where he is playing a Gameboy and I thought that I was probably doing the same thing around the same time period. I thought the way that the movie used technology was really on point with the time period. I remember playing that Gameboy for hours and how cutting edge it felt at the time. As well, I thought that the music was very well done. There is a scene when the main character is riding his bike with friends and the hip- hop song Soulja Boy was playing and it reminded me of my freshman year in high school when this song was extremely popular. It was and still is just a horrible song but it really had a way of transporting me to the past. There were other examples of music in the movie that were really important to exact periods but I am having trouble remembering them.

Journal 3 April 7- I have continued my reading of Swann’s Way and I have found the narrator’s Aunt Leonie to be a fascinating character. She is so grief struck by the death of her husband that she believes that she herself is physically ill and on the verge of dying. From this I made a direct connection to how the narrator feels about himself and how he becomes to feel like an invalid in the eyes of his parents. It seems that he may have inherited the same hypochondria as his aunt. I personally connected to this feeling because I was also a somewhat sickly child, I suffered from really bad asthma attacks when I was young and I still feel like that same boy even though I am now 22 years old. On a different note the part of the reading that discusses the character Vinteuil and his love for his daughter was very sad and I definitely felt for his character even though he was portrayed as being somewhat of an off putting person.

Journal 4 April 10- I really enjoyed watching The Stories We Tell this week. I thought that it was very well done and had a lot of emotion in it. I though it was a very interesting premise for a documentary. I thought that the way Sarah Polley explored and deconstructed her family experience was heart wrenching on many levels. It definitely took a lot of courage for her to set up this whole project and then have it open to the public audience. The movie really made you feel for Sarah, her family and her desire to learn more about where she came from. I think it is very natural and important for a person to have a definitive narrative about their life and you could see throughout the movie how important this project was to her and her family. A scene that was especially poignant and gripping was the scene when her older brother talks about losing his mother. Even though I have not had any experiences similar to that I found that particular scene to be the most moving in the documentary.

Journal 5 April 14^th– I have found it interesting to learn more about Swann. We met him early in the book and I found him to be compelling from the start, so I was eager to read more about him. The relationship between Swann and Odette is fascinating. Swann is hard to place, he is an aristocrat but in some ways but he seems to disdain the aristocracy that he belongs to and feels more at home among more common folk. Maybe this is a reason why he is attracted to women of a lower class than himself, which would explain his growing infatuation with Odette. Their relationship is fascinating and complex. In a way it seems that Swann’s love for Odette is one sided. It is obvious that he loves her but the way in which he loves her is more like the love of an object than the love of a person. He does not view her as an equal but as something to be possessed, which can be typical of men in general. It was interesting for me to see the relationship unfold because I became interested in learning more after Gilberte and Odette are introduced in Combray, in the scene when the narrator and his family are walking across Swann’s property. Swann to me seems to be a vain and insecure man if he puts that much stock into just one woman. I understand the importance that women play in a man’s life, his confidence, his contentedness, but Odette does not truly love Swann and because of this he is a fool. But I can relate because I have previously felt reliant on a woman for happiness, which I admit is inherently weak.

Journal 6 April 17^th– I found the Sorrow and the Pity to be a fascinating look inside World War 2 France. A part of the film that I found of particular interest was the men of the French Resistance. I found their accounts of war- time France to be particularly compelling. The way that they described the war was a narrative that I was not previously familiar with. I definitely had a stilted view of the French during this time period; I thought they were all a bunch of pushovers because France was under German occupation. But after hearing of the trials and tribulations of the French Resistance fighters it really made me reconsider what I thought I new. These guys were total bad asses, they fought and died for what they believed in. It was also interesting to hear the German perspective of wartime France. It is easy to demonize the Nazi’s but they were just people to and it is hard for me to believe that they were all evil. It is fascinating to think of the mentality of the German’s because what they did was heinous. I would like to learn more about the German and Nazi mentality and how this happened. Growing up it World War 2 felt like a million years ago but as I have gotten older I have realized that people haven’t changed that much in the last 75 years, so it is just crazy to think about the realities of the Holocaust. In the scheme of things this all happened not that long ago.

Journal 7 April 22^nd– I have just started reading Within A Budding Grove and so far I have found it not as engrossing as Swann’s Way, I found Swann in Love particularly engrossing. The first ten pages were interesting. The conversation between M de Norpois and the narrator’s father was interesting because it is just gossip about Swann. For me the train ride to Balbec was a little tough to get through.