Comic Book Central

Okay so I know I totally dropped the ball on the whole posting thing last week and I apologize even though I'm about 98% positive nobody else actually reads this. Anywho, I actually thought this was pretty cool, not only because it was the book I used to kill my very first fly (which had been flying around my apartment for days) but the last like two or three pages completely changed my entire perspective on the entire story, which I appreciate after I got over the anger that always overcomes me when I realized I've been tricked. I think one of the cooler things about this was the whole finding out the old man was walking in a pattern, like he was transforming this already mapped out space into something completely different and unique, if only just to himself. But I thought that manipulation was really interesting. It reminded me of the idea of "lived" space we talked about last week, and how it's something in between perceived space and conceived space. Like, the city he's walking around in, you can physically see it from above or from the ground, and it's the path the people who live in the city follow. But by the old man, Peter I think his name was, creating his own map based on these hallucinations or beliefs, it's like he's pushing the boundaries of this already created space, manipulating it into something personal, something of his own. In class we talked about how "lived" space was kind of like an imaginary map put over perceived space, and that was all I could think of when I saw those letter maps. Like it took this already mapped out version of the city and threw over this fantasy map created in his own head. I thought it was an interesting idea.

Bullet Shaped Paradise

So, I was incredibly intrigued by the description of the Convent in the "Grace" chapter. How it starts off, saying "Fright, not triumph, spoke in every foot of the embezzler's mansion" kind of reminded me of my completely off-topic rant from earlier in the week about the emotions that go along with places. But the physical set-up was just so odd I had to re-read the paragraph to fully grasp that a house was seriously built like that. So it says "shaped like a live cartridge" so naturally I googled a live cartridge, not because I don't know what a bullet looks like but blogs are just so boring without pictures. So: what do you know, here's one now. So at the pointed top, that's where all the windows are, and at the back where the kitchen and "play room" there are no windows at all. And since there's no electricity, I can imagine how gloomy and dark those rooms must be, I guess contributing to the "fright" of the place. Then it talks about a veranda wrapping around the windowed part of the house. The more I thought about that, the more I thought that this one house probably looked one hundred percent different on one side than the other, as well as in the day as opposed to in the dark, which depending on the kind of person you are I suppose could be a triumph, but the way I'm imagining it isn't very aesthetically pleasing by any means. And it almost appears that the designer was planning on holding up for a long time, when it describes the "cellar of storerooms that occupied as much space as the first floor" (this is all pg 71 by the way). I know this is a stretch, but it seemed like the house was designed for the people who inhabited it, since it doesn't appear to be a house that would function completely intact. Because of the strange structure of the place, it seems fit that only people equally at odds with society should live in it, such as the embezzler and the women who take over after, who further dismantle the things they find "inappropriate" allowing their own activities to run ramped along with the house. It may sound crazy but I think the design compliments the people who live in it, and almost becomes a character itself by having the same odd attributes as the human characters in the novel.

Scary Spaces?

When reading the first two chapter thingys in Toni Morrison's Paradise, I felt like there was a particular emphasis on the feelings associated with the different places, specifically scary places. Like, what the hell makes a particular hallway scarier than another one? Risking the chance at someone throwing this horribly embarrassing story back in my face at some point in the future, sometimes when I'm at home and it's late at night and all the other lights are off, for god know what reason, I freak out and run like a baby into my room and shut the door. For whatever reason, going down that long hallway in the dark scares the shit out of me, and I'm twenty one years old. In the first "chapter" (Ruby) it's more of a fear of unknown space, I think it refers at one point to "out there" talking about the unknown. This is a little more understandable, and I realize usually when this is referred to it's talking not specifically about space, but about the situations, conversations, people, and everything else that's different than the place you're at. But I felt like the people in this town, the only black town or whatever the hell it is that makes it so exclusive, they people in it were actually afraid of the other places, afraid of the spaces that didn't fit into their tiny town, including the Convent. And granted we (annoyingly enough) haven't figured out what the hell is going on in there, the fact is, the Convent falls under the "other space" category, making it an immediately enemy, maybe even turning it into a "scary" place, to them at least. I felt like the landscape almost was alive, became a character of it's own. In the next pseudo-chapter (Mavis), when she's driving before she reaches this mysterious convent, she's driving down all these roads searching for California. She's not scared of the unknown, she's going because she needed to get the hell out of that shitty life she had before. Which brings me to my next comment, how people think physically moving can wipe away all your problems. I mean, let's face it, for almost all people, the problems in their life are because of the decisions they've made, or at least have some direct consequences directly related to themselves. Why does it occur to everyone that moving to a brand new place and starting over (the premise of every D-list horror movie that's come out in the past 10 years by the way) would fix that? I mean, I guess I get that you wouldn't have to deal with everyone knowing about whatever terrible thing you're running away from, but you still have to deal with all that shit, and new shutters on a new house really aren't going to help with that. It's like the idea that a person is the only thing with memories, which isn't true. Go to any house that's being sold, you'll see marks from their kids growth spurts, or nicks in the table from countless dinners eating together by another family. Houses, and places, have memories and pasts, and I feel like that is completely overlooked when people have this grand idea to move across the country and "start over." Short of building a new house from scratch, all you have is leftovers.