Arielle Baer

What is it like to be an all-singing, all-dancing bat of the world?
By Ch*ck Pal*ni*k

I am Joe’s wings. I keep Joe afloat during his night feeds.

You wake up on your ledge.

Every night another flight that takes you out of your home. Takes you away from your guano hill that you spent so many nights building. Each drop placed perfectly. Spent your daylight hours working on its construction. Looks like it’s straight out of a catalogue.

All hail the giant, perfect pile of shit.

You wake up mid-flight. These rituals are second nature to you. You wake. You fly. You feed. You wake. You fly. You feed. Don’t even need the “you” anymore. Wake. Fly. Feed. Wake. Fly. Feed.

You wake up on a ledge. Not your ledge.

If I could wake up in a different cave, at a different time, could I wake up as a different bat?

I am Joe’s hopelessly lost sense of self.

(+5 points for anyone that can identify that song lyric!)

Reading about Anton's Delusion not only completely frightened me (I think becoming blind is one of my greatest fears, but the possibility of not actually knowing that you were blind somehow made this prospect even more frightening) but also reminded me of the only chapter in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat that I can actually remember: A man is in a very bad accident and loses all ability to see color. It's not that he's colorblind, where you mistake one color for another, he's color blind. (I can't remember his name so we shall refer to him from now on as Mr. Color Blind). Apparently he can only see black and white. I had no idea this was even possible, but I guess the mind is just crazy like that. So Mr. Color Blind is so destroyed by this ailment that he chooses to make the entire world around him coincide with this predicament. He makes Mrs. Color Blind cook him foods that he knows are only black and white, he trades in his golden lab for a dalmation and so on.

your wings are too rough, she said
your black coarse fur.
and you never wash
your teeth are stained with blood
and you smell like shit.
you only eat and mate
when you're not drunk
and you? I asked

I'm just a bat

bat, bat, bat
she kissed me
and gave me her breakfast.

"No, no-there are depths, depths! The more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear."

Sitting down to write a response to Mrs. Dalloway turned out to be a lot harder than expected. Was it because I was the only one who seemed to dislike the novel (Jess how could you abandon me!)? Was this causing me to second guessing myself? Well no, not second guess - if anything it was forcing me to really analyze my reasons for not liking the book. Truthfully, I didn't even know what my reasons were. It was just a very natural reaction. Mrs. Dalloway? Don't like it. Kind of like fennel. Hate it. Why? Because it's fennel! Plain and simple.

I didn't think Prof. Tougaw would approve of that reasoning. Obviously I had to dig deeper.

With all this talk of implied authors, author vs reader, metarepresentation, death of the author and so on - I can't help but think of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (I guess it's just a Vonnegut week for me). It's been a while since I've read the book, but the one thing that always stands out for me, and I'm sure for anyone who reads it, is when Vonnegut shows up in his own scene to "check up on" his characters. Talk about breaking down the fourth wall.

Apparently the book was a 50th birthday present to himself. That makes sense. It is pretty much a 300 page love letter to himself. But I guess you could describe most of Vonnegut's books like that.

In general I felt like Zunshine was just wading through well worn territory - oh no wait that was me wading through her terrible syntax and unecessarily heavy reliance on quotes. Sorry, that came out a lot more bitter than I meant it to. I guess I've just always had trouble with teachers/literary critics who were so intent on pushing their interpretation of the text on us (hello Judith Butler, I'm talking to you) when that interpretation seemed a little far-fetched. Reading this just filled me with the urge to scream "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!" or I guess in our case "sometimes donuts and pickles are just donuts and pickles" (Yeah that was an Ethan Frome reference right there)

Maybe it's the writer part of me that is hurt and just a little offended by the idea of the "death of the author." Ouch.

(That line is a quote from a Tegan & Sara song - it came on just as I was pressing save. Freaky!)

Memory is a funny thing, isn't it? I spent so much time in high school (and hated almost every minute of it) and now I can barely remember any part of it. Friends will bring up stories, even just mention old classmates and a lot of the time I find myself completely lost. I can't connect names with faces, teachers with classes, brief memories with the grade in which it occured. The few friends I kept from high school are always shocked and confused at my complete lack of memories from those four years. Not that they enjoyed it (I live by this theory: never trust anyone that liked high school) but at least they still remember it.

OK I know that title is kind of disturbing, but keep reading and you'll understand...maybe...hopefully...either way I loved that book growing up so let's just pretend it's all about that...

Reading Slater's Lying was incredibly enjoyable, probably my favorite book so far this semester. I loved it so much I called up my mom mid-read to recommend it to her. I was giving her a brief rundown of what I had read so far and when I got to the part about the phantom smells Slater got right before seizures she stopped me and goes "Oh yeah I get those sometimes. I'll smell something and a very strong memory will be attached to it." I was completely shocked. I hadn't told her anything about the smell being attached to memories. Truthfully it was a piece of the story I couldn't really understand, I guess its just one of those things you have to experience to understand.

Well, I was going to write about Metallica's video for One but since Dominik completely stole my thunder I guess I'll have to go in a completely different direction with this post.

The idea of the "authenticity" of the autobiography really struck me. Maybe because as an autobiography we are led to believe that this is the most authentic account we could be getting. It is the author's personal story being told, through eye witness accounts. What else could be more authentic a story? Yet a few examples were brought up in class where we see that maybe we could be giving the author too much credit on this front. Or are we?

How do I manage to miss the two classes where we talk about my favorite books of the semester? First I was out for Lying, now I miss Never Let Me Go. Definitely a dissapointment that I didn't get to hear what everyone had to say about the novel, but it's been interesting reading your posts.