Yesterday was another good example of credit union oddity. We have a coin counter machine – a large ATM like contraption that you can pour your loose change into and it will sort and total them for you. This machine is almost always at the center of the CU circus – the kinds of people that hoard large amounts of change are apparently not your usual crowd. We find odd things in the reject bin too – foreign coins are common, along with paper and lint but occasionally stranger things make a showing. A few days ago it was a bear claw, not the pastry but a  real bear claw, once attached to an actual bear.

A man came in to use ours yesterday. This man had somehow used a coconut as a piggy bank, with a way to put coins in but no way to retreive them. I do not know if he forgot how to open it, or forgot to check if he could open it before heading into the branch, but either way this culminated in him asking to borrow a hammer from us and proceeding to attempt to smash open a coconut in our lobby. This man obviously had no prior coconut-opening experience, because it took him close to 5 minutes of pounding, smashing, cursing, and generally scaring all the other patrons in our lobby before he finally retrieved his prize – $4.38 in change.

Boeing Loses Out

Basically, the US Air Force has awarded its $40B contract to a company that is affiliated with the European plane maker AirBus. For shame. What have we come to in the country when we are practically outsourcing our national defense? Granted, the company that was awarded the contract, Northrop Grumman, has agreed to build a manufacturing plant for the tankers in Mobile, Alabama. But the frames they use are manufactured by AirBus, in plants outside the US. Not only that, but how much defense information will they potentially share with foreign companies? And shouldn’t a certain degree of national solidarity outweigh any differences in budgets? Can you imagine the uproar if our police and public servants began driving nothing but Toyotas and Hondas simply because they were cheaper?

Obviously, I have a personal interest in the situation. My father has worked for Boeing for 31 years. Our family has tightened belts through strikes, crossed our fingers through each period of layoffs, put aside our personal needs when he works 14 days in a row, but everything has come out right in the end. I am proud of the contributions my father makes to the largest exporter in the US, a company that is one of the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. To our family, and any other American manufacturer, this news is like a slap in the face.

Despite all this, it is sometimes hard to reconcile how it feels to be a part of the company that simultaneously builds machines which bring people together and also wage war. I have to remind myself often that machines are only tools, and the purpose to which they are used is decided by humans.  I would be happier if the company my father worked for only made airplanes for commercial purposes, but even I can recognize that a peaceful world without the need for standing armies is a utopian dream probably beyond human grasp.

On second thought, writing is much more like kittens. Warm, fuzzy kittens.

And this really great editorial piece in the NY Times…I wish every fundy right winger who had an opinion about gay marriage or prayer in schools or the ‘Founding Fathers’ would read this: A Nation Of Christians Is Not A Christian Nation

I know its not very tolerant of me, and overall I don’t mind Christians…the normal ones. Even if I do think they are all a bunch of lunatics, usually they are harmless. It’s just a few extremists that have to ruin it for the rest of the bunch.

But let’s begin by examining the few female characters available to us, Marla and Chloe. The interesting thing about Marla, and Chloe to some degree, is that they are two of the characters which we get the most physical description about. On page 18, the narrator describes Marla for us – “Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of roses…” Again, on pg. 36 the narrator talks about her “black hair and pillowy French lips…Italian dark leather sofa lips.” Why is it that Marla gets so much attention devoted to her looks, more so than any other character in this novel? Because we have the propagation that women are defined by their appearance. Neither the narrator nor Tyler appear to really like Marla at first, but it is not difficult for us to believe that they would sleep with her because she is initially created as a sensual character. In juxtaposition to this we have Chloe, a woman who seems to garner a great deal of respect from the narrator, perhaps a genuine degree of affection, and yet she cannot be seen as an individual worth initiating a relationship with simply because of her appearance. pg 20 “Our Chloe, however, is a skeleton dipped in yellow wax.”

Another interesting aspect to the construction of Marla’s character is the repeated mention of her wearing dresses. On pg 18 we hear about her wallpaper patterned dress, pg 67 she describes her bridesmaid dress, on pg 93 there is distinct mention of her Indiaprint skirt. Granted, some women still prefer to wear dresses but in today’s times it is far less common without a religious or cultural motivation. Why does Palahniuk feel the need to paint such a stereotypical picture of a modern woman?

Even with all her other hang-ups about life and society, Marla cannot seem to escape the obsession with youth and beauty that is pushed upon women in society today. She remarks on pg 91 that she is keeping the collagen from her mother in case of old age, the fear that it will rob her of her “Paris lips.” Also Marla and her mother relate best through the context of beauty – hence the continuous gifts of collagen from Marla’s mother, and that the only real contact they seem to engage in, via telegram, is appropriated by Tyler to read “Hideously Wrinkled – Please Help” (pg 89) which her mother finds nothing strange about.

Interestingly, although the men in Fight Club say that they are reclaiming their masculinity from an effeminate society that has robbed them, a society that has reduced gender roles to cookie-cutter dimensions, the narrator creates a character like Tyler. Confrontational, engaging in relationships purely for sexual motivation, the culturally-accepted stereotype of what it means to be a ‘man’ – merely bouncing from one preconceived notion to another.At the point in the book where we may imagine that Marla began to fight back against Tyler, to revolt against his imposed rules upon her of asking no questions and asserting herself after witnessing his commit a murder, Tyler reacts in a very stereotypically masculine way as well. On pg 195 – “‘You can suck shit’ Marla says and pushes her punched-out black eye at me. ’Just because you and your little disciples like getting beat up, you touch me ever again, and you’re dead.’” His inability to deal with a woman that doesn’t fit his ideal of obedience results in her physical punishment.

In regards to lesbian/gay theory, this story is ripe with innuendo that can be plucked out. Perhaps the biggest is the idea of moving into a home with a man you met on a nude beach – definitely not typical behavior. For many men, they would never even initiate a conversation with another man if he were naked while in a public place where women could also be. Perhaps it would be more acceptable in a locker room or gym, but not in a public area. 

Also, the branding of the disciples themselves. Earlier I talk about how much emphasis is given to Marla and her lips. This is carried out with the narrator and Tyler as well. Tylerbrands the narrator with a kiss, a burn that shows up as “swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips.” (pgs 77, 85) The purpose of lipstick for a woman is to draw attention to the lips, because swollen, red lips are a physiological sign of sexual arousal. What does this say that the narrator describes his brand as such, or that Tyler chooses such a means to mark his disciples instead of something more benign? 

     First, tenet number one of the LH : The timeless significance of a piece of literature. If we assume that a text should speak to what is constant in human nature we have a perfect example in Fight Club. The driving forces of this story are emotions and concepts that are found throughout the spectrum of human existence: love, leadership, culture, history, violence, gender identities. Although the scope of the elements may vary from person to person, from society to society, they exist in one form or another. The questions posed by the narrator regarding family, obligations and duty to society, the roles of men and women and how they relate to each other, what it means to be a man or a woman, none of these are new themes or questions. These have been argued and struggled with since the earliest stories of man, in the dramas and epics of the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Anglo-Saxons, the first chapters of the Bible. The dichotomy of man, the struggle of the base against the elevated, the war within us to subdue what is bestial for the existence of culture is at the heart of all our conflicts. In this way, you can extract the basic elements of Fight Club from their rinds of culture and they would be no different than those first discussed by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.

      Tied to this is the second tenet, that understanding of a work can be achieved through close reading, without the need to search outside of itself. If you were able to show this book to a room of ancient Greek philosophers, they may not be able to grasp the small details of what a film projectionist is, or what a car is, but the basic themes and elements would be easily identifiable and conveyed. The war of classes, emotions, the structure of authority and the individual, these are all things that even an ancient Aztecan would be able to understand, regardless of the context. The text is not so heavily ensconced in its culture that it would be able to be transposed into any setting or time and still have relevancy.

     Obviously Fight Club has no issues with tenet six, that a work must enhance life and propagate human values. The success of the story, and the move to film, have both shown that it speaks to people and entertains us effectively. And in a strange twisted way it does propagate human values. Although Tyler begins the story with lofty goals of things we would see as anti-value, all he ends up doing at the end is to highlight how important those things are to us as humans. A sense of self, the formation of meaningful connections with other people, reverence for life. Fight Club does its best to propagate human values by showing us where we are going wrong right now, so that we may have an opportunity to fix the problems that plague our society. This goes just as far to motivate us to the greater good as any fluffy story of heroics or after-school specials ever could.

      In Fight Club, Palahniuk shows wonderful adherence to the seventh and eighth tenets of LH, that form and content must serve each other and that literature should above all be sincere and free of cliche. Palahniuk seems to exemplify everything great about Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’, in that he takes the concept of showing and not telling to its extreme. So much of the emotion in this story is conveyed through action. While the narrative voice and first-person perspective rob the reader of some of the necessity to draw their own conclusions, most of the key plot and story points are left to the reader to deduce. This does not mean that Palahniuk necessarily leaves things open to debate, or leaves them horribly ambiguous. What he does is to set a stage and then, instead of giving the audience floodlights, puts us in charge of the spotlight and deciding what to highlight. At the same time, Palahniuk uses structure and the form of his novel to convey a specific set of emotions. The choppy sentencing, repetitive phrasing, all of these serve to convey emotions in ways as effective as any explicit description could.

     In another note not tied to a tenet, Palahniuk also adheres directly to Keats’ ‘negative capability’, the allowing of space for the silent workings of the mind and the unconscious. This story is as much a fantasy as anything else, and requires a certain degree of the suspension of disbelief for it to work. Do most of us honestly think that there are things like underground Fight Clubs and homegrown terrorists? To some degree yes, but on a conscious level we probably don’t. We continue to live our lives almost exactly as we did 10, 15, 30 years ago. Those things exist as bogeymen to us, isolated incidents and shapeless fears that are rooted in our subconscious. By teasing those fears out into the light, by asking us to set aside our illusions of safety in order to illustrate something greater than the everyday, Palahniuk is directly angling for the silent working of the mind.

Obviously between my original reading and this one I have seen the movie many times, and some details of the movie had overtaken the book. I remembered that the ending in the book was different, but my memory was fuzzy as to exactly how it was different. Although I think the book ending fits a bit better, I did like the movie ending just for the emphasis on Tyler’s vision of the two of them becoming an Adam and Eve for the new society, the two of them alone atop a building surveying the ruination of our culture.

I think that no matter how many times you read a novel, it is always going to be different. Because so much of a book is based on a symbiotic relationship between author and reader, a book will change along with its reader. And as Heraclitus said, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’ We as readers are in constant flux and our perspective is eternally changing, altering the novel along with ourselves.

This is also an interesting read for me because of the difference in myself between the first reading and now. When I first read the book in 1998, just before the movie came out the next year, I was seventeen. If anyone ever doubts the duality of a reader/author relationship, try going back and reading books that you had first picked up as a teenager…when you were smart enough to understand, but didn’t have the life experience to interpret. When I was a teenager, I was entangled in my loathing for authority and interpreted Fight Club almost entirely as a struggle against the powers-that-be. Now that I am much older, Fight Club’s ideas of materialism, gender, and the search for identity ring truer. In some ways I am better able to understand the narrator, because I am him. When I was seventeen, the culture was still whispering to me that I could be a rock star, a movie star, I could be someone. Now that I am 26 I understand the pain and confusion of the narrator when you begin to realize that you have been lied to all along. 

I cannot claim any particular genre or type of book as favorite, despite having just lauded the abilities of fiction to birth nonexistent people. I do read a lot of fantasy…consider it my literary junk food. Guilty, satisfying, but filled with empty calories. The realm of creative nonfiction has sparked my interest a lot recently, and I have been reading as much of that as I can get my hands on. I try to keep a running list of ‘classics’ in my head, and mark a few of those off a month whenever possible. And there are always my comfort foods…Jane Austen, Chuck Palahniuk, and Daniel Quinn.

As far as the purpose of literature, it should act as a mirror. Literature should reflect the priorities, the qualms, and the issues facing any culture. Especially when dealing with works of history, the only window into the inner workings of a society is through its stories. The archaeologist can tell you the what, the how, the when, and the where. But the why is in the myths, the poems, the novels. It’s in every folktale and campfire story, every poem and penny dreadful. Long after a culture passes on, its rotting cities dessicated by the winds of time, one can find its soul with all aspects of good and evil living on in the literature. If you want to understand the morality of a society, or the problems marring its harmony, read its stories. Dickens will teach you more about Victorian England than the History Channel. Ovid will not show you the cities razed by Romans, but he will tell you why they were moved to imperialism, and how they justified it. Literature motivates, captivates, and titillates us.  Literature shows us the beauty of a culture, and with our analysis we are capable of forcing it to lift its skirts and expose the soft underbelly, satisfying the voyeur within us all.

Some may disagree, or find that only certain ‘classics’ should be deemed literature. Their idea of literature is often pretentious and elitist, and I would beg to differ. Every word recorded has literary value, from the greatest of epic poems to the shaky paragraphs of a child diary, because each of these manage to capture exactly how the world is being interpreted at a single moment in time. These fragments are necessary to form a whole, because history is written by the victor and too often relative, while life is merely syntax. 

Wait… did you hear that too? That was the sound of 13% of our population (all those below the poverty level, my own poor self included) sighing at once. It just goes to show that people are capable of finding ways to live beyond any means.

Despite the best attempts of most breweries to coat our tongues in tastebud-deadening resins, there were a few offerings worth writing home about. Flying Fish Brewery from New Jersey had a wonderful Bourbon-Barrel Aged Belgian Abbey Dubbel. In all honesty, most of my favorites were just variations on breweries existing line-ups, spiced up a bit by being brewed in different ways. Golden Valley Brewery from McMinnville, OR had a great ESB they aged in wine barrels and in a move that had me saddened, Deschuted brewery offered an Oak Barrel Aged Cinder Cone Red which they were only pouring at the Oregon Brewers Guild dinner on Wednesday night. Thank heaven for Uncle Jerry and his OBG membership, otherwise I might not have been able to go to the dinner!

The thing I’m always disappointed about is that there are always local breweries I would like to see there that never make it.  Silver Moon Brewing, Bend Brewing, and Cascade Lakes Brewing, all from Central Oregon, have yet to make a showing. Same with Mia and Pia’s, or Caldera Brewing from Southern Oregon. With all these breweries so far away, it would be nice to see them join in the festivites!

I could (almost) care less what kind of grades I got, I’m just damn glad to be this much closer to finished with school.

This is why I had to question my own sanity when I myself suggested that we all go to dinner together Friday evening. Downtown. At 4:45. In my car. Understandably, I was excited to chauffeur. I had just gotten a new car and the folks had yet to ride in it. Still, zeal and enthusiasm were no match for the debilitating power of my father’s running commentary.

“Are we there yet?”

“Is this as fast as this thing goes?”

“Couldn’t you have bought something with more leg room? Maybe more head room? Maybe a V-6.”

“Don’t be such a coward, just muscle your way in there! Turn your blinker on and make them get the hell out of your way. We’ll be here all night at this rate!”

This tirade being punctuated by various appeals to God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and most major saints in a wide array of volumes, depending upon how close to death I had just apparently brought my family…all before we had even gone the five miles to the freeway.

SHOE: I bought you a few scant weeks ago, oh paragon of shoe investments. Since then, I’ve taken you hundreds of miles from your homeland, from your native country of Bend to my home in the valley. Whisking you away like a mail-order bride from everything you once knew for a paltry sum of $25. In the few weeks we’ve been together, we’ve seen towns 300 miles from here, and you have done your duty of protecting my feet admirably and stoically. Through dust and crowds, at concerts and classrooms, you have shielded me from harm as no spouse ever could. No woman should ever be in need of a man with a good pair of footwear to her name.

TATTOO: You turned three years old a few days ago. I remember the day we came together, how excited I was and yet how nervous, like a bride before her wedding. Silly actually, to act like a nervous bride at what would be my second wedding, I who should be an old hand at this having done it before. You were my second tattoo, and the most beautiful of the pair, but please do not tell your companion on my back. I find that he is defensive of his position as the first, with the self-assured possessiveness of an ex-boyfriend who knows he was your first love. You may be beautiful, Kanji Symbol, but the Tribal and I have history.

PEN: I owe much in this class to you, Black Papermate Visibility. Your soft rubber grip comforts my awkward left-handedness. Without your smooth-rolling and unsmudgeable ink, my insistence on writing with the nonconformist hand would turn out much messier. Let others glorify their space-age gel ink pens; those do little for me but smear wildly, streaking across the page and leaving the edge of my palm stained a bruising black, as if I have been banging desperately on a door for entrance. Your stoic humility serves my needs well, and the clicking you make as I lower and raise the ballpoint makes such a satisfyingly irritating sound. Surely, you are the king of all writing utensils.

Conclusion: It’s interesting how we personify objects. Is it because we place so much importance on the things we surround ourselves with? We speak of how Americans become ‘married’ to things, how we invest ourselves in items or projects. Is this how we rationalize our attachments to them? People love their cars. They love their shoes, their computers, their vacuums. How odd that we feel the need to try and absolve our guilt over placing such monument on things by humanizing them. We describe our items as we would spouses; reliable, convenient, loyal, comforting. I wonder if it is only in America that our consumerism can begin to eclipse the institution of matrimony.

Moving away from my vaguely obscene tangent to Shooting War: how inelegant was that? Granted, a fascinating medium for storytelling. (And was anyone else amused by the McCain ad banners at the top of the webpages?) This story is sobering in ways, especially with the news that May was the deadliest month in Iraq for US soldiers since November 2004. No mention of how many civilians died though…shocker. However, in some ways I feel as if the artists here were elaborating their points with all the finesse of a monkey driving a bulldozer. I think to some degree the artists are doing a disservice here by cramming well-known theories down out throats, and losing some credibility in doing so. Everyone is aware of the battle-cries: corporate America is the devil, US foreign policy is a joke, etc. etc. And I subscribe to these beliefs as much as the next left-wing nutter, I’m proud to label myself a liberal. But I think it’s a telling panel (chapter 2, panel 13) where the news bigwig belittles Burns and his beliefs, because it is so often true. All Americans lip-service about how we want to improve the lives of people in other countries, but we all reside at bloodyhypocrite.com comfortable with our cheaper-than-the-rest-of-the-world oil and our $150 Nikes and our cathartic ‘Save Darfur!’ ‘Free Tibet!’ bumper stickers that lull us into thinking we care. But do we check the labels on our clothing, or live a completely energy-free existence? Hell no. Maybe Daniel Quinn has it right, Anarcho-Primitivism is the only way to equality…but then I’d have to give up my high-speed internet and my PS2.

But I think it is an interesting comic nonetheless, as far as its examination of the US war machine, and its prophesying the future of Iraq without definite changes in our war policy. I also appreciate its examination of the war hero, as a being that may not always be the paragon of morality and heroism that we make them out to be. I do not think that being a soldier is inherently wrong, or that the people who choose to do so are in the wrong. It takes a greater amount of courage than I possess to volunteer for a job that might result in your death. But I also think that the glorification of our military attracts people who may indulge in behavior unacceptable to most of society, as illustrated by Crash. In what normal situation would it be considered appropriate to turn a gun on an unarmed civilian, regardless of the circumstances you may believe he was a participant in? My biggest problem with our military is that it provides carte blanche for actions that should not be tolerated under any means. (Guantanamo Bay, anyone?)

It was only the beginning of November, but it was already bitterly cold in central Oregon. The ground was still free of snow, but the grey skies frowned ominously upon us as we meandered our way along the path by the Deschutes River. Various locations we passed were weighed and discarded, until we eventually ended up on the softly curving wooden bridge that connects Sunriver to the BLM land on the other side of the river. There, we huddled further into our winter jackets and leaned over the edges, watching the water as it galloped its madcap autumn way towards the ocean. My uncle still held the box in his hands, a small unassuming white cardboard cube about eight inches high. It was heavier than it looked, and he set it down carefully at his feet while he watched my mother.            

She and I unearthed the brown paper-bagged bottle out from where it had been hiding within the storage area underneath Aidan’s stroller, and my numb fingers fumbled with opening the stubborn foil while she began to pass out the tiny paper cups. It had been a good thing we brought so many, with more than a few of them falling victim to the sharp breeze and our cold fingers. Eventually I managed to get the cork from the bottle, and soon our small group was clutching full cups, shivering and trying not to spill any.           

I had always assumed that ashes of any type would be nearly weightless. But as we raised our glasses, toasted Aunt Marilyn with Moet & Chandon out of our Dixie cups, and watched her earthly remains being dumped over the side of the bridge, very little of it was caught in the breeze. I had expected a cloud to billow over us, for the clever November wind to carry her up and away, but instead she just sank. Straight down into the river, where the long white streak of her clouded the water a bit but eventually settled to the bottom. This thought comforts me, that perhaps I can return to that place, peer over the side and through the clear Deschutes water still see the white silt of her stretching away underneath that bridge, her bones now a part of the river’s skeleton.  

Prompt: 5/10/07 - Write about a memorable gathering without using any dialogue.

The hardest part is when he cries as they pull him out of your arms. Frantic, chubby limbs wave wildly in your direction as the nurses march resolutely down the hall, his outraged howls falling on deaf ears until distance and walls muffle the sounds as the nurse turns into an incongruently cheerful room. Pastels and cartoon characters are the background against which they plan to assault him. Against your will you find yourself pulled down the hall, feet moving under their own compulsion, as powerless to stop yourself as a sleepwalker. A tiny exam table, a flock of nurses crowded around it, jostling like crows over roadkill. Seconds are frogmarched by minutes around a Winnie The Pooh clock as they search methodically for a vein. His tiny circulatory system, shrunken by the 24-hour fast the surgeon has imposed, and his flailing limbs all make the process even more difficult. At just over 2 months old, he can’t say your name yet but its there; the echoes of his wails whisper “Mommy!” in your ears as he stretches his tiny hands towards you, a supplicant begging for mercy as they insert needles into his scalp, the only place they are able to draw blood. But you are as helpless as he is, as powerless as a ghost observing the scene, and some detached corner of your mind is amused by the irony of calling the tiny apparatus they use a ‘butterfly needle’.            

An infant is only capable of losing about cup of blood before they are in danger of dying. Aidan is going into his operation with a disadvantage, being at least a few vials of blood lighter than he was before you arrived. This, they explain after hour three of what was supposed to be a two hour operation, is why things are taking so long. Being dehydrated and missing blood already, it took them awhile to find somewhere to put the IV. An hour, actually. One full hour of poking and prodding and sticking and missing, during which he is fully conscious because that is the purpose of their search, to start his anesthesia intravenously. But things are now underway and they reassure you that everything is going smoothly. Resume pacing, staring blankly at walls, whatever you have to do to remain sane while your only child is on a table somewhere less than one hundred yards away, his chest cracked open and a man you have met only once is rummaging his beefy hands through your life’s internal organs.           

 All the time in the world cannot prepare you for the end though. When the news is delivered, and the surgeon is done patting himself on the back. When they escort you to the room that you will live in for the next few days and anxiously await your baby’s arrival. When you see him the first time, drainage tubes filled with gore snaking out from beneath his ribcage, half a lung lighter than he was before. Nothing can ready you for IV tubes needled directly into a jugular vein because that was the last option they had, or the tiny red prickmarks like angry ant bites on his wrists, arms, legs, knees, scalp, palms, and the soles of his feet where they tried unsuccessfully before that. The nasal cannula that brings back horrible memories of days after his birth when he was unable to breath properly without one. The swollen face, the lips cracked and dried from being wrapped around a breathing tube for hours. The piteous croaking wail that limps its way through a parched throat, past those raw lips as he regains consciousness. No amount of pre-op pep talk will brace you for the feeling of futility when you want to hold your child and find that you cannot, because there are simply too many bits of plastic separating you.

Prompt: 5/8/07 - Think of a significant personal moment. Tell it without using the first person (me, I, or we)