Be Kind: Rewind

As a high school student I walked the three miles around my neighborhood every day for exercise. I got to know every mailbox, dog, tree, pothole, and storm drain in every kind of weather and at every time of day. It comforted me to know my own stomping grounds so intimately, considering that I went through high school unable to map my own identity.

The same cannot be said for Quinn in Auster's City of Glass. The more he walks the same grounds in New York, the less he seems to know about himself. It's as if my neighborhood walking was a rewinding of character, while his is an unwinding. I found that my daily walks allowed me to collect myself and think more clearly about what I had to accomplish for the evening, while he seems to lose more of his identity with every step. Perhaps it's the complex nature of his task that makes his walks different from mine. I always left the house with no qualms about anything, because it was my one time of day when I could be alone. Quinn is conversely so isolated that it doesn't matter whether or not he's alone on his walks: he is unraveling all the same with the intensity of his task. The more he invests in it, the more of himself he loses. The difficulty for him lies in the tradeoff: should he continue following Stillman, which gives him a sense of literal and figurative direction, or should he stop walking and lose direction in order to save his identity?

Ask the Panel

I was never into comic books as a kid. It wasn't until after I went to college that I began to follow several monthly publications, crossing the street on the third Wednesday of every month to pick up my subscription. Graphic novels are newer to me, though. I was especially surprised by how quickly City of Glass read, considering the slow, contemplative pace of many of the works we've read this semester.

It's not even the pace of the plot that makes the novel a breeze. Rather, it's the ease with which one is able to glide from frame to frame, if one knows how dialogue/narration bubbles work on the page. In short: layout matters. I would venture even further to say that the layout of Glass compliments the story itself. Most of its pages are made up of identical rectangular frames, the same per row and column. I believe this arrangement lends itself to the "noir" novel as a genre, where plot and characters are often identical to those in other books, though with several small, crucial differences. I have often found that mystery books follow a common formula, much like the police procedurals seen on television. This pattern is reflected in the grid-like arrangement of City of Glass, which is notably abandoned after the author's primary concern is no longer the case of Peter Stillman. When the mystery takes a backseat, the form changes to reflect Quinn's deteriorating state of mind. No longer do we see uniformity, but an increasing dependence on triangles and open frames, whose uneven nature confirms that the book's characters and story influence their own delivery.

Life in a Glass House

In keeping with last week's literary comparisons I wanted to talk about Auster's City of Glass with regards to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. From what I've read so far the former appears to be a variation on "film noir," that genre of movies about hard-boiled detectives who run around in the shadows. It's interesting to see how the blacks and whites of these films translate on to the page, not to mention the implosive, invasive themes that are a cornerstone of such films as The Maltese Falcon and Rear Window. Many of these devices are present in Androids as well, though Dick's novel is much less illustrative in its approach to its own mystery.

I finished reading Androids shortly before starting City of Glass. Perhaps it's just because I'm reading them back to back, but the theme of isolation kept jumping out at me as I perused the latter. There are so many frames containing only a single character, despite the fact that these people live in a huge city. Auster's character spends so much time in the head of his imaginary detective that I began to wonder whether or not Auster's character actually existed. This form of isolation is just as present in Androids, in which a bounty hunter must navigate the deserted streets of San Francisco alone as he searches for rogue robots. The bounty hunter is so utterly alone that he fashions a companion similar to Auster's detective by way of an electric sheep. It cannot speak to him, but he finds more comfort in the singular presence of that sheep than in any human. I find it interesting that Auster appears to use the same device in his story about cities: sometimes we are most alone when we are surrounded by people.

Anger in Paradise

As we reach the meat of Morrison's Paradise I can't help but compare its style and content to several works by Stephen King. It's probably something I should have brought up in class while we were on the Fight Club tangent, but King's short stories "Jerusalem's Lot" and "Children of the Corn" both express the same small town anger I feel in Ruby.

The first aspect of this anger that comes to mind is isolation. The citizens of Ruby escaped the mainstream in order to build a strong, supportive community for themselves. However, once isolated, this goal became the town's curse. Isolation from the world has distorted the people's perspectives, making what was once normal in everyday life an abomination in this cloistered realm. One such instance of this in King's stories about small towns comes in "Children of the Corn," in which a couple find themselves stranded in a Midwest town surrounded by children who worship a monster in the cornfields. Isolation plays a role in that the children have been away from society for so long that killing one of their own in the middle of the street becomes normal behavior. The couple, who hail from somewhere in typical America, are aghast at the murder they witness, which goes to show the discrepancy between norms in each location. A similar event occurs in "Jerusalem's Lot," an epistolary story during which a man battles the demons who inhabit his house and woods. The citizens of the town do not consider it odd that demons run wild in the woods, while the man enters a crazed panic because of their presence. Again, the discrepancy between mainstream and small town views causes the latter to be portrayed in anger.

The Condominium

I was at home last weekend when my dad and I started talking about the condominium he used to own along with our house. He once rented it to a couple whose children I knew from school. One of these kids was my classmate and I can recall saying one day, when he was poking fun at me, that my dad was his landlord and could evict him. In retrospect, this was a really low blow. The jokes he was making about me did not warrant this kind of counter. But I wanted to finish with the upper hand, so I played the best card I could think of off the top of my head.

He didn't say anything about it to his parents. I could tell because my parents never got a call from his parents about what had happened at school. The exchange stuck with me, though. I'm no longer worried about being scolded by my folks, but I am interested in how the space that a man calls home can be claimed by another. Renting apartments for college is one thing, but to truly dwell in place that is not really one's own is, I would imagine, unsettling. Maybe that's the reason why part of the American dream is to buy a home. The Levittowns of 1950s New York support this notion: everyone needed to own land, not matter how akin it was to the plot next door. Not having this piece of the dream leaves one isolated from the ideal and unnerved with oneself. I've noticed that true adulthood in this country is achieved when one leaves his or her parents and moves into a house of one's own. Maybe it's this tension between childhood and adulthood that brought up to the topic of the condo when I was talking at home with my dad. College is creeping closer to a close with the passing of each semester and I'm still not ready to grow up!

Black and Blue

Though we didn't view the film in its entirety, I have a feeling that watching too much of Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial might just have ruined a beautiful Thursday. The black and grey of K.'s world with its strange sense of industrial attics, contrasted with the dark blue and bright white of the sky outside our classroom window, made for a class that was at once torturous and intriguing.

I'll be the first to say that last Thursday was "one of those days." Attending class to talk about The Trial after CT's bout with the rain seemed to betray the waiting I'd done, cloistered in my dorm room, waiting for a dry spell so I could run to get lunch. However, upon watching several key scenes from later in the film, I gradually began to appreciate what Welles was attempting. Steel girders slapped across bookshelves in the house of a lawyer: something's gotta be in play.

What most interested me was how much larger some of the book's settings were depicted on camera. Take that same lawyer's house, for instance. Whereas Kafka offers readers a sense of claustrophobia in the lawyer's abode (which goes to show how stifling the law can be), Welles' sound stage looked like a wing out of Bruce Wayne's mansion. I interpret this to be something that Welles did to put K.'s feeble defense in perspective with the giant of the law. This keen difference distracted me from the blue sky outside the classroom (that's where the 'intriguing' comes in) and made it all the more desirable once the picture stopped ('torturous').

A Trial Run

After viewing the opening scenes of Orson Welles's film adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, I wanted to blog a bit about its visual take on claustrophobia. The film opens in K's apartment, the ceiling of which hangs about two feet lower than most other ceilings I've seen in residencies. K is barely able to stand at full height and seems to be pressed down in his house, a notion closely related to the novel's assertion that we are not even safe from the hands of authority in our own dwellings. I'd even go further to say that because Welles shoots his scenes almost entirely from low angles, he's insinuating that even things familiar and homey to us may be turned into oppressors.

The difference lies in how the ceiling and shots become higher once K leaves his room. When he is eating his breakfast in the community dining room, the camera looks down on K and ceilings are nowhere to be found. I for one felt a little easier once he was seated at the table eating food, something familiar and normal. Perhaps this also had to do with the fact that someone friendly was serving him, a situation absent from his own bedroom. The presence of this friendly figure actually made the room bigger for me (or at least distracted me from the feeling isolation that otherwise pervades the building). I'm interested to see how locations other than K's apartment, especially the courtroom, play on these different forms of claustrophobia and safety.