Again, it's been too long. I keep promising to recommit myself, but the rhythm of the semester hasn't come together yet. Everything still feels choppy, though this is only our first full week. Myles and I are still working out the infamous balancing act of time together/time apart/time for work/time for fun. I never feel like I'm winning the battle, especially with the work overload, but we'll see.
I won't make excuses for not posting, but I can say, when it's hot and summer-like, I have no inspiration. I loathe the heat and humidity and lately my room feels something akin to a sweat lodge. When the sun is out, I just want to bask in it and revel in the fleeting vestiges of summer, usually with a glass of chardonnay and some crab meat and crackers. Autumn and winter give me time to contemplate, cooped-up in my haven, watching the snow fall on bare maples.
It always disappoints me when I can't seem to get through my fun reading book. Indeed, I haven't even chosen an author to become enamored with; last year it was Bukowski; the year before, Vonnegut, etc. I think a trip to the library is in order. I'm shying away from the Beats only because it's so trendy right now and I don't want to be mistaken for a hipster. But, I'm thinking Sontag or maybe Paglia. I've read some of their stuff but I need more!
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So, part of this blog is going to be devoted to textual analysis and reflection. I'm taking a class with Michael Johnson (whom I secretly call Mikey J, a trend that seems to be catching on for all those enamored with his soft tone and wonderful bits of insight): Multicultural Literature and Film. In addition to the course, we've added a second component that acts as an independent study. This week: Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
Alexie creates tragic characters, trapped by their own histories and tells us firmly: rez life, Indian life is cyclical. Alcoholism, escape from the rez, the fleeting moments of basketball heroism never change. The world of Thomas Builds-a-Fire and Victor Joseph is awkwardly post-assimilationist: the Indians are already infected with alcoholism, live in HUD homes, are intermittently employed, sometimes for the BIA. Simultaneously, these Spokane Indians are rebels: Victor's father protested the Vietnam war, heard Jimi Hendrix play "The Star-Spangled Banner" (at once patriotically American and dissident), and Thomas Builds-a-Fire criticizes the Tribal Council and gets convicted by the local BIA for his story-telling.
The point of view shifts throughout book too, but we're never quite there, wherever we are. Readers becomes Indians at a distance: witnesses to "crimes of an epic scale." The perspective torments us as we struggle to unravel the hyperbole from realism and slowly discover that we can't. History, wedded to tales of modern rez life, leaves characters indifferent to atrocity and agony, unable to move out their indigence. To change would make these Spokane Indians participants and protagonists in their own drama. But, if "to do is to be" (Sartre), then Victor and Thomas and Julian and all the other characters can't do, because then they might be, be real people, be Americans, be Indians, be defined and confined by identity. Alexie's stories grimly inform us: Native Americans must be stuck in the in-between.
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