Setting and changes in viewpoint

After the panel presentation on Friday, I was left with a lot of realizations about the way in which I consume books. I became aware of the fact that how I read Ragtime in class almost definitely would have been different from how I would've read Ragtime as a random novel on my own time. Whether we like to admit it or not (and I know for a fact that that's something most people don't like to own up to), our likes and dislikes are always somewhat tied to our environment and how other people perceive things. In a classroom setting where I am essentially forced to analyze, reread, and contemplate each chapter (I'd even go as far as to say each passage), it becomes so much easier to appreciate the literary value of a book. That, combined with all the other voiced opinions in class, helps to solidify my budding curiosity into a full fledged interest for the book. On the other hand, wolfing down a novel on your own time provides a completely different experience. When I enjoy a book, I can't help but read through all of it in the shortest time frame possible. In doing so I miss out on a lot of the subtleties that would've otherwise contributed to the book's overall wow factor. When I am not immediately enthralled by a book (and this might have to do with our generation's ever-shrinking attention spans), I abandon it out of disinterest. It seems more and more now that a book either has to provide cheap thrill and action, or a solid recommendation from someone whose taste I trust, for me to really bother finishing it all the way through (let alone appreciate it for its full value...).

Who was Evelyn Nesbit anyways?

With all its scrambled plots and characters, its easy to get lost in the sea of stories in Ragtime. Despite its solid entourage of recurring characters, one specific character has particularly piqued my interest, Evelyn Nesbit. Painted as an especially confusing character, Evelyn's actions always strike me as a weird combination of hesitant and bold. Though we are given glimpses into her background (including hints at several traumatic experiences), it surprises me that more people are not more sympathetic towards her. Maybe her naivety and often resigned demeanor don't endear her to most readers, but I found Doctorow's rendition of her pretty realistic given the things she's lived through. As I read more about her from other sources, I was shocked to learn the extent of her misfortunes. The loss of her father at a very early age, the exploitation of her body by her own mother, and eventually the rape (rapes?) and physical abuse we come to read about in the book all contributed to the damaged psyche she now lives with. Reading about her from an 'objective' standpoint raises again the question of history vs fiction, as I found that I definitely consumed a 'historical' biography of her differently than I did the passages in Ragtime. Regardless of how she may have lived and suffered in her own lifetime, she is largely remembered posthumously as one of the last, great tragic beauties. 

What it means to love

I was very much in shock after reading about Sethe's past. The little hints and glimmers scattered throughout the book made it easy to see that yes, the baby was probably killed by Sethe herself, but the circumstances and motivations remained unclear. Before I actually got to the retelling of the events, I could, in no way, justify Sethe's actions. Isn't killing your child the absolute worst thing you could do? Hasn't it been ingrained in our minds by every medium of society that murder is just about the worst crime? You probably could argue yes, but in the context of this specific situation, Sethe wasn't killing, she was, as she said in her own words, just sending her baby away to a safer place. To finally taste freedom, to finally realize just how oppressed, how enslaved, and how restricted a life she lived in Sweet Home added a whole new layer of resentment to Sethe's dilemma. Sweet Home was intolerable, she knew she had to get away, if not for herself, then for her children. She took comfort in the fact that she sent away her children alone and vulnerable in the arms of strangers, because that, to her, was a fate more favorable than a lifetime of slavery. With no previous warning, no other means of escape, Sethe had to choose the eternal escape, the only place that her children could be guaranteed safety and protection. In her scrambled state of mind, only one thought ran through her head, and that was keeping her children away from the life that she had endured. If death was the only viable way to save her children, then well Sethe sure took it. Death was the ultimate gesture of her love, honestly the biggest sacrifice any parent could ever be forced to make. She took the cliche of loving someone enough to let them go to a whole new level, and at the end of the day, it worked.

The child that is Denver

So I haven't started my weekend reading, but from what I have read so far, if things weren't laid out in such an explicit chronological order, I honestly would have thought that Denver was a small(ish?) child. Isolated and friendless, Denver is not socialized, she is stubborn, and childlike in her ways. Reading the first few chapters (and even the first few pages) left me very confused. She was mad at Baby Suggs, her grandmother, for dying (dying?!?), overtly rude to Paul D within their first encounter, and much like a small child, she didn't want to share her mother. We are also told that she is basically 18. Still, even in the beginning, I found her character extremely sympathetic. She has essentially been deprived of everything we like to associate with childhood, and really only is hungry for love, attention, and friendship. In the early stages of the book, Denver really reminded me a lot of Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God, because both characters were enamored with the idea of love (though different kinds), had grown up under the care of women who had lived through the realities of slavery, and had also grown up away and separated from children their own age. In a lot of ways, she also parallels the ghost of the dead baby. The spirit that haunts 124 is prone to tantrums and innocent mischief, and when Beloved actually enters the story, we see that she is a beautiful, young woman, trapped in a state of infancy. Denver too, just like Beloved, is a fully grown woman, that acts like a child. However this slowly changes along with Beloved's intrusion into the story, and we already begin to see changes within Denver as she adopts the role of an older sibling and caregiver instead of the childlike role she played before. I wonder how she'll continue to evolve.

Is public property more valuable than private property?

This week, mostly when we had our discussion right after finishing Style Wars, one of the biggest arguments that we had, I think, was about whether or not private property was more valuable than public property. I think the general consensus in the room was that the graffiti on the outside of the subway trains were beautiful, artistic, and inspiring, but the main difference in opinion existed about whether or not we cared about the legalities of it. Maybe we all do little things that 'break the law' (I'm sure at least that we all jay-walk), but we all also understand the fine line between actual criminal activity and harmless habits. People who were for self expression through graffiti claimed that since it was public property, it didn't belong to one single owner, and that the artists had as much right to paint on it as others had to ride on it. Conversely, people against graffiti on the trains used the argument that defacing private property (like someone's house) would be disrespectful, and would cause justifiable anger. Is defacing public property less 'bad' than defacing private property? Its hard to say, public property is something that all of us pay for, including those who don't like graffiti. We all pay for the right to have access to efficient, public transportation, but do we all also pay for the right to have clean, efficient, transportation? Graffiti is meant to speak to other writers, but when this exclusive group of writers compose an incredibly small minority of the people who pay for trains, is it fair to impose their art on the majority that either don't care or don't want graffiti? Likewise you could argue that graffiti is a form of self-expression, and it was probably one of the only artistic outlets that early writers had available to them. It's easy to form strong opinions on this topic, but there are always two sides to a story. Its sort of like Nanny and Janie, I'm not really sure who or what I sympathize with.

Yoshiko--The Mail Order Bride

I know it's a little late to be talking about White Boy Shuffle, but it just dawned on me how crazy Yoshiko's role in the book actually was. We all knew that Psycho Loco said he was going to get Gunnar married by the time he turned 18, but I didn't actually take that seriously at all. I skimmed over that little promise, convinced myself that he was joking, and completely forgot about it until Yoshiko was actually a physical presence in the book. The craziest thing was not that Psycho Loco got a mail order bride from who-knows-where out of who-knows-what circumstances for 18 year old Gunnar, but more that later in the novel it turns out that Yoshiko is the perfect girl for Gunnar, and eventually the love of his life. There was definitely a tone of surrealism throughout the whole story, but it struck me especially with Yoshiko and Gunnar's marriage. I mean how many guys have never ever been with a girl in their life, get set up with their wife from a mail order service at 18, and then realize that their new wife is actually their soul mate? For a long time I couldn't believe that Yoshiko was even there in the first place, and secondly that she and Gunnar were really and truly in love. The most puzzling part is that, as we get acclimated to Yoshiko and her character in the novel, the more it feels like she was always there. She fits right into the story, develops into the perfect girl for Gunnar, and even gets pregnant with his child. We have to constantly remind ourselves that her character doesn't even appear until the last quarter of the book, despite the huge impact and influence she has over Gunnar's adult life. The most curious part to me is that regardless of the little time she is given to be a part of the story, Yoshiko blossoms as a character without having any real introduction. We never find out about her past, what drove her to become a mail order bride, how she picked up English so well, and whether or not she even had/has a family. From an outsider point of view she seems like a sorely undeveloped character, but in context, in the actual text of the novel, she is a pivotal piece in Gunnar's narrative. Maybe I should get a mail order husband.

The Multicultural Education Ideaology

Okay, so this title is a little confusing, but for some reason I kept seeing parallels between Gunnar's previous school in Santa Monica with the Brotherhood from Invisible Man. In class during discussions, most of my classmates seemed to be against the 'multicultural' education that Gunnar underwent during his years in Santa Monica. Despite all of its good intentions, the whole schooling system was flawed, it pushed its students to fit into a mainstream mold that was mostly representative of 'white culture'. Likewise, it was almost patronizing in the way that it claimed all students were human, as if some students were privileged to be treated humanly, and as if by acknowledging their human-ness (for lack of a better word), the school was doing something great. After attending this kind of school for such a long time, it was almost next to impossible for Gunnar to fit into the totally different culture he encountered in Hillside.

The ghetto culture in Hillside was as big of a shock to Gunnar as the zootsuiters were to the Narrator. Both of these groups fell outside of the range that the Brotherhood and Santa Monica school catered to, they fell outside of the mainstream, and in the eyes of both institutions, they were nonexistent and not worth caring about. As the Narrator became more involved with the Brotherhood he realized that the Brothers did not care about his individuality but that they only saw him as a useful tool to meet their needs. He was the skilled, black, public speaker, much like Gunnar was the funny, cool, black guy. In order to be successful, both the Narrator and Gunnar had to conform to the societal values that were forced on them.