Money! Money Changes Everything!

“[S]he belonged to him forever and forever. Nothing that he could do (so she told herself)...could change her in this respect.”

This is the quotation I brought up in class. Trina has, at this point, convinced herself that she is in love with McTeague despite liking anything that defines him. She does not like his oafishness. She does not like how sloppy and lazy he is. She does not like how he drinks lowly steam beer over bottled beer. She does not like how he dresses.

It seems as though she is more in love with the idea of the man than she is the man. McTeague, at this point, is dedicated to her and does not seem to be after her money, so perhaps this makes her feel safe with him. (A poor decision, had she been able to possess future sight.)

Not only does she feel safe in that, she feels safe in belonging to someone. She was the property of her parents, then McTeague, then, as pointed out in class, money. She won the lottery, and with the money came greed.

She hoarded money. It became more important to her than even McTeague. After an argument with McTeague where she refused to pay her half of the $35 of rent, she decided it would be nice to give him $10. Then she decided, “I can’t do it. It may be mean, but I can’t help it. It’s stronger than I” (pg 119). She even admits that she’s lost control over her own self.

She then admits, “I didn’t used to be so stingy... Since I won in the lottery I’ve become a regular little miser.” Money changed her. It caused her to become a skinflint. Ultimately, when McTeague becomes an abusive drunk, her stingy ways cause her lose her life. She decided it was more important to have money than to live.

Also, the title of my post is in reference to an amazing Cyndi Lauper song. YouTube it!

19th Century Film

Consider this a bonus entry for the week! I was just on AV Club and they had an article on the best films of the 1890s.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-10-best-films-of-the-1890s,87648/

In particular, I want to point you to The Haunted Castle. Filmed in 1896, this short film came out twenty six years before Nosferatu, the movie often credited as being the original horror movie. Like Nosferatu, it's not a talky; it's all silent. Unlike Nosferatu, The Haunted Castle doesn't feature any narration titles. It's all up to the view to interpret what's going on.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OPmKaz3Quzo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

What I find most interesting are the special effects. While the frame rate of the video is a bit choppy, the effects are smooth. They look far more natural and real than many of the horror movies from the 1950s. Part of that could be because of the limitations of the medium. Since it is grainy with a choppy frame rate, they were better able to hide the strings and cutaways.

On the other hand, that is a part of film making. One should understand their medium. In this era, things are expected to be photorealistic, so when lighting is off, or when textures/coloring are off, the audience loses the immersion.

As a horror buff (1950s B-horror in particular), this amused me. It's not literature, per se, but it gives a little insight into what was occurring in the latter part of the 19th century, so I thought I would share it with you guys.

Dismissing the "Other"

Pudd’nhead Wilson has left me with many things to think about, but for the purpose of this blog entry, I’d like to focus on the idea of “dismissing the other.” Since the book is titled after him, let’s just start with Pudd’nhead Wilson himself. When David Wilson moved to Dawson’s Landing, he saw it fit to tell a joke about this annoying dog that had been bothering him: “I wish I owned half of that dog…Because I would kill my half.” The townspeople did not understand his joke. Confused, they began to speculate. Did he mean he would keep one half of the dog alive? Why would he want half a dog? Which half would he keep alive? Instead of asking him for clarification, they assumed he was some kind of idiot. If they cannot understand what he means, then the problem is with him, not with them.

David was an other, or outsider. He is different. With the Us vs Them mentality, if you are not one of us, you must be one of them. Since we are good, that must mean you are bad. So David was labelled Pudd’nhead because they considered him to be a fool. The lawyer side of his business flopped hard, even though he was actually quite good at his job. At the end of the novel when he solved the crime, the people realized that maybe he was no longer such a Pudd’nhead. But that was two decades later. Two decades of not giving this poor guy a chance because he failed to assimilate upon first contact.

Roxy is also outright dismissed. Although her skin is quite white, she is considered black, and therefore a slave, because she is 1/16 black. Because she’s a slave, she is not entitled to an education, and thus is assumed to be ignorant or childish. 

In reality, she is one of the smartest characters in the novel. She knows that if she is sold in town, her child will eventually be sold down the river, so she devises a Prince and the Pauper scheme to ensure that her son not have to face that harsh life. (The fake “Chambers” was never sold down the river. While her prediction was wrong in that regard, she was justified in feeling that way as the real Chambers was eventually sold down the river upon the scheme being revealed). Later, she comes up with a blackmailing plan to get her ruined son to do anything kind for her.

After "Tom" sells her down river, she is abused for a while, then pulls off an impressive escape. She headed back up to Dawson's Landing and disguised herself as a man, knowing that nobody will recognize her that way. She then uses blackmail again as a way to get what she wanted out of "Tom".

I guess I'm so drawn to this idea because I've been the "other" who has been dismissed many times before in my life. One of the worst things, to me, is to be dismissed without letting me get the chance to prove myself. It's so easy to dismiss those you don't understand, but it's so much more worth it to take the time to understand these people.

Battery Died

My2007 MacBook's battery has died, and I apparently forgot to pack a power cord, so I'm attempting to rewrite my entry on my iPhone. It was about my visit to the MASC.

Upon hearing we would be going to the MASC, I didn't really know what to think. I hadn't been there before, and have never really looked at too many old books outside of a museum.

When Tuesday had rolled around, I was not too happy with my situation: my head was pounding with pain from a migraine that developed between my break between English 302 and 368. When I get migraines, I become very irritable. My vision blurs, i become dizzy, my head hurts, and it's all made worse by the light, reading, and noise (both volume and high frequencies). Needless to say, the MASC was not a good place for me to be at that time.

I never know when to quit, though, so I dug through my bag and found some Excedrin Migraine. Was it still good? I don't know. I didn't want to have to read the bottle. The pills did the trick, but they took a half hour or so to work. Boo! So I had to read an old book with a throbbing head. That was t so much fun, but I was able to gather some interesting details. The book was a dime book, yet was still mostly in one piece, thanks to its rusted staples

As we move on, my headache began to fade, and my ability to enjoy the place increased. The temperature/ humidity controlled archive library blew me away. As did the Virgina Wolfe library. I had no idea we had that. I also had no idea Dolph Lundgren went to WSU.

My phone is now dying, so I'll finish this up quickly. The room with the moveable shelves was amazing. I felt like I was touring Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. This feeling continued when he showed us the giant scanner. I would make excuses to scan things if I had that expensive piece of technology.

Sorry if auto-correct ruined any of my words. I'll have a better entry next week.

Moby Dick In Media

I am a regular reader of a website called AV Club. It’s a subsidiary of The Onion that factually reports on pop culture news in a comedic fashion. Anyways, in the past couple of days, two new Moby-Dick projects have popped up in the news.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/moby-dick-in-space-movie-in-spacedevelopment-in-sp,86172/

The first of which is a new Moby-Dick In Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace movie. Sound familiar? That’s because, as Cecilia showed in class, Futurama already did this (albeit as a 22 minute episode of television and not a 90+ minute movie).

That episode of Futurama (entitled “Mobius-Dick”) was a really great episode (which is rare for the current era of the show). I think fleshed out, a space Moby-Dick could be very entertaining. As Star Trek and various other Sci-Fi shows and movies have shown us, outer space and the ocean are very similar. They both consist of vast amounts of nothingness. If your space ship or ship ship bust, you could be stranded, or worse, be pulled into the void. There’s also the aspect of exploring the unknown. Space is the final frontier! (The band Iron Maiden, however, would argue that death is in fact the final frontier.)

So this movie has a lot of potential. Will I see it or will it ever go beyond the development stage? Who knows? If it’s done right, it could be great. If it’s done poorly, literature types may riot.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/in-a-twist-m-night-shyamalan-has-his-own-moby-dick,86237/

The second project is an M. Night Shyamalan (Shimalamadingdong, as he likes to be called) television series. This one I’m not so optimistic about. First of all, it’s M. Night Shyamalan. Everything he does is so pretentious and so reliant on gimmicky twists. This could work with a more mystery oriented novel, or even a novel full of secrets like Behind a Mask, but it doesn’t play well with Moby-Dick. It’s a “dense symbolist tome” full of whale descriptions. Unless they take lots of creative license, the series will be very unbalanced. One week will explore the possible sexual relationship of Queequeg and Ishmael, whereas the next, it’ll be like a 19^th century version of an episode of a whale-centric Nova episode.

The only positive I can think of is that this might give them the opportunity to explore Ishmael a bit more. We know nothing about the guy. We don’t even know if Ishmael is his real name. It would be nice to see an Ishmael who isn’t just a guy who is there. (Though based on the last chapter, it certainly seems like he was but a guy who happened to be there and live to tell about it.)