Yeah...
First, I want to apologize for the madness. Warning heeded, most of you were able to withstand the sheer power and emotion emanating from my powerful words. It is suffice to say that children can be allowed back in the room.
From here on in, the shenanigans will be (mostly) moderated.
Thanks, and, again, sorry.
-Taylor
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Fourth Post aka Finding Understanding in Online Sources
For this entry, the readers of The Waste Land are entreated to search for helpful sources on the web in lieu of just reading the text and grabbing for understanding in the dark or with the footnotes given by the editor. For your own safety, I must warn you that my online searches can become a bit silly...
Anyways, here it is.
Search #1: "the waste land"
The search produces 24.8 million results. Goodness gracious.
Did you mean: the wasteland? Hell no! There is a space between "waste" and "land", Computer, so stop asking me such petty questions!
Wait, wait, wait Why is there a spa—
Shut up and keep going, Taylor! Alright, alright...
The first listing is for The Waste Land as a hyper text. It looks promising, so I click on it; turns out to be the very website that we use to read it in class. Using this would be cheating and redundant, so I reluctantly moved on.
Wikipedia's listing shows next. Historical and biographical information is redundant and uninformative. Moving on...
Scrolling down the page, I see Answer.com's listing. Looks promising. Turns out to be a full transcript of the poem, so I become discouraged. Before I leave, however, I scroll down to the bottom of the page and find an article posted by Yale under the "Annotated versions" category. Decided to try my luck.
Eureka! A modernist take on Waste Land is found on the page. Skipping the biographical information on Eliot (which seems to be on EVERY site I visit), I look on to the first investigative section on the web page.
Interesting Fact: T.S. Eliot was high conscious of his touch with traditional literature. I can see all of your surprised faces, so let me get to the point: He wrote an essay on modernist poetry, entitled "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in which he basically states that poets of the form, in their most original states, are engaging in dialogue with tradition. What this says to me, basically, is that The Waste Land is, in its entirety, an amalgamation of old literature and their ideas. I was under the impression that Eliot had only crafted about half of his poem in this style, but after reading his essay, I can see that the text is comparable to a puzzle being pieced together with small bits from many texts to produce a larger, clearer image, even if it may only exist in the author's own mind. Perhaps you have already figured this out, but I still feel quite good about this epiphany...
Another interesting tidbit about The Waste Land is that the original name was intended to be "He do the Police in Different Voices", a nod to Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in which one of the characters reads police reports in the newspaper in varying voices. The article suggests that the entire poem is a focus on the different voices that appear throughout the text, something that I, as a reader, have certainly taken to notice. More important in focus is the second section of the poem, namely with the dialogue between the irate female and the apathetic male. In the article, Lewis (the author), provides this interesting insight:
The use of so many voices in this kind of collage allows the poet to distance himself from any single statement. As the critic Louis Menand has put it, “nothing in [the poem] can be said to point to the poet, since none of its stylistic features is continuous, and it has no phrases or images that cannot be suspected of—where they are not in fact identified as—belonging to someone else….. Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are on everything.”
He later goes on to recount that, "[a]lthough The Waste Land is, by Eliot’s own admission, a highly personal document, it also aspires to a certain kind of impersonality." This accusation of "impersonality" is, to me, helpful since it brings to focus Eliot's dodgery, much like a patient skirts his own personal issues when being interviewed by a psychologist.
A very last interesting fact that I happened upon was that Eliot did not believe in such a thing as "free verse" and even claimed (with Ezra Pound) that he was experimening with tedious rythyms and meters found in everyday speech. Interesting.
After a while, I decided to move on to another source and see what I can find.
Search #2: "understanding the waste land"
The search only yeilds a disappointing 4.73 million hits. Geez.
Also try: understanding the wasteland. What is it with this computer?
The first couple of listings are for a website with free school essays, so these prove to be no help, although I was looking for a paper to turn into my Logic class. (Joke.)
I scroll down some more and find more links. Nothing of significance catches my attention. After a couple of minutes, I become frustrated and take a shower.
Twenty minutes later: Frustrated still, I decided that I needed some Cookout (spicy chicken tray, anyone?)
Thirty-three minutes later: Refreshed and objective, I return to the computer, but Oh Dear! the room is awful messy! I vow to not to return to my school work until after this putrid mess is obliterated, despite my (non-existant) inner strife.
Thirty seconds later: Dear Goodness, are those all dirty clothes? They must be washed!
Anyways, here it is.
Search #1: "the waste land"
The search produces 24.8 million results. Goodness gracious.
Did you mean: the wasteland? Hell no! There is a space between "waste" and "land", Computer, so stop asking me such petty questions!
Wait, wait, wait Why is there a spa—
Shut up and keep going, Taylor! Alright, alright...
The first listing is for The Waste Land as a hyper text. It looks promising, so I click on it; turns out to be the very website that we use to read it in class. Using this would be cheating and redundant, so I reluctantly moved on.
Wikipedia's listing shows next. Historical and biographical information is redundant and uninformative. Moving on...
Scrolling down the page, I see Answer.com's listing. Looks promising. Turns out to be a full transcript of the poem, so I become discouraged. Before I leave, however, I scroll down to the bottom of the page and find an article posted by Yale under the "Annotated versions" category. Decided to try my luck.
Eureka! A modernist take on Waste Land is found on the page. Skipping the biographical information on Eliot (which seems to be on EVERY site I visit), I look on to the first investigative section on the web page.
Interesting Fact: T.S. Eliot was high conscious of his touch with traditional literature. I can see all of your surprised faces, so let me get to the point: He wrote an essay on modernist poetry, entitled "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in which he basically states that poets of the form, in their most original states, are engaging in dialogue with tradition. What this says to me, basically, is that The Waste Land is, in its entirety, an amalgamation of old literature and their ideas. I was under the impression that Eliot had only crafted about half of his poem in this style, but after reading his essay, I can see that the text is comparable to a puzzle being pieced together with small bits from many texts to produce a larger, clearer image, even if it may only exist in the author's own mind. Perhaps you have already figured this out, but I still feel quite good about this epiphany...
Another interesting tidbit about The Waste Land is that the original name was intended to be "He do the Police in Different Voices", a nod to Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in which one of the characters reads police reports in the newspaper in varying voices. The article suggests that the entire poem is a focus on the different voices that appear throughout the text, something that I, as a reader, have certainly taken to notice. More important in focus is the second section of the poem, namely with the dialogue between the irate female and the apathetic male. In the article, Lewis (the author), provides this interesting insight:
The use of so many voices in this kind of collage allows the poet to distance himself from any single statement. As the critic Louis Menand has put it, “nothing in [the poem] can be said to point to the poet, since none of its stylistic features is continuous, and it has no phrases or images that cannot be suspected of—where they are not in fact identified as—belonging to someone else….. Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are on everything.”
He later goes on to recount that, "[a]lthough The Waste Land is, by Eliot’s own admission, a highly personal document, it also aspires to a certain kind of impersonality." This accusation of "impersonality" is, to me, helpful since it brings to focus Eliot's dodgery, much like a patient skirts his own personal issues when being interviewed by a psychologist.
A very last interesting fact that I happened upon was that Eliot did not believe in such a thing as "free verse" and even claimed (with Ezra Pound) that he was experimening with tedious rythyms and meters found in everyday speech. Interesting.
After a while, I decided to move on to another source and see what I can find.
Search #2: "understanding the waste land"
The search only yeilds a disappointing 4.73 million hits. Geez.
Also try: understanding the wasteland. What is it with this computer?
The first couple of listings are for a website with free school essays, so these prove to be no help, although I was looking for a paper to turn into my Logic class. (Joke.)
I scroll down some more and find more links. Nothing of significance catches my attention. After a couple of minutes, I become frustrated and take a shower.
Twenty minutes later: Frustrated still, I decided that I needed some Cookout (spicy chicken tray, anyone?)
Thirty-three minutes later: Refreshed and objective, I return to the computer, but Oh Dear! the room is awful messy! I vow to not to return to my school work until after this putrid mess is obliterated, despite my (non-existant) inner strife.
Thirty seconds later: Dear Goodness, are those all dirty clothes? They must be washed!
***
To spare you the details, I did not get back to searching for outside resources on the internet. I hope that you are not too disappointed with this outcome.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Part Three(ish)
As most of you have guessed by now, this blog has mostly dedicated itself to following my reading of The Waste Land in all of its splendor and glory. This post, however, is different; with this I will be discussing a literary review of the book written by the poet Elinor Wylie, written in 1923 in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (quite a mouth-full, huh?). An analysis of"Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn", the name of this particular review, is not only a part of the assignment for class, but it is also conducive to the reader's understanding of how the author's feelings correlate with the poem that he writes. Views like this are Biographical-Historical Criticisms, the predominant criticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and though they is technically obsolete, the Biographical-Historical Criticisms were relevant then and helped reviewers like Wylie understand the difficult poem that we are studying today.
Studying T.S. Eliot, as Elinor Wylie explains in "Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn", must be done objectively and in a closed manner with no assumptions outside of what the author gives us. Otherwise, examining what Eliot is not will interrupt our vision of what Eliot is. Previous authors have compared his work to the likes of Ezra Pound and Dante, being that his form is modernist, and others claim that he is "no more cryptic than Donne and Yeats", and some state that his work is not as "genius" as James Joyces, but Wylie dismisses all of these as close-minded and unnecessary.
Throwing aside all of the comparisons and arguable fallacies, Wylie examines The Waste Land as an emotional piece, one that, in each word, lies his very soul and being.
The most important conduit of emotion that an author can provide in any text is a channel to his very soul, something that must be offered to the crowd and examined for his sake. Wylie admires this and praises him for his openness:
He is a cadaver, dissecting himself in our sight; he is the god Atthis who was buried in Stetson's garden and who now arises to give us the benefit of an anatomy lesson.
Along these lines, as though he were giving us an "anatomy lesson" about his past, Wylie goes on to prove the validity of Eliot using his own experiences in this book:
I think that Mr. Eliot conceived 'The Waste Land' out of an extremely tragic emotion and expresssed it in his own voice and in the voices of other unhappen men not carefully and elaborately trained in close harmony, but coming as a confused and frightening and beautiful murmur out of the bowels of the earth.
Wylie goes on to explain that the lines the author produced were painful to him and that this can be seen in the words chosen, and even if these emotions were fabricated, the piece would still be wonderful, much like a choir sings their song or a stain-glassed window, as Wylie put it.
The next issue that was visited was the notion that Eliot was an intellectual snob of sorts, one that feels no depth of emotion or pain. This, of course, was refuted.
As for the frequently reiterated statement that Mr. Eliot is a dry intellectual, without dept or sincerity of feeling, it is difficult for me to refute an idea which i am totally at a loss to understand; to me he seems almost inexcusable sensitive and sympathetic and quite inexcusable poignant, since he forces me to employ this horrid word to describe certain qualities which perhaps deserve a nobler tag in mingling pity with terror. That he expresses the emotion of an intellectual is perfectly true, but of the intensity of that emotion there is, no my mind, no question, nor do I recognize any reason for such a question.
Many critics have concluded, though unfounded, that The Waste Land is nothing more than a display of "intellectual arrogance", but Wylie concludes the opposite and expresses much sympathy for Eliot's splay of emotion and hurt.
Overall, Elinor Wylie stamps The Waste Land with her utmost approval and refutes other less-enthusiastic authors, citing her claims that Eliot not only used his own painful experiences, but also gave himself up for our emotional entertainment. Wylie's argument is successful and also provides excellent insight to the author himself: T.S. Eliot.
More to come soon, including some examinations of the second section of the poem, so don't lose interest yet!
Studying T.S. Eliot, as Elinor Wylie explains in "Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn", must be done objectively and in a closed manner with no assumptions outside of what the author gives us. Otherwise, examining what Eliot is not will interrupt our vision of what Eliot is. Previous authors have compared his work to the likes of Ezra Pound and Dante, being that his form is modernist, and others claim that he is "no more cryptic than Donne and Yeats", and some state that his work is not as "genius" as James Joyces, but Wylie dismisses all of these as close-minded and unnecessary.
Throwing aside all of the comparisons and arguable fallacies, Wylie examines The Waste Land as an emotional piece, one that, in each word, lies his very soul and being.
The most important conduit of emotion that an author can provide in any text is a channel to his very soul, something that must be offered to the crowd and examined for his sake. Wylie admires this and praises him for his openness:
He is a cadaver, dissecting himself in our sight; he is the god Atthis who was buried in Stetson's garden and who now arises to give us the benefit of an anatomy lesson.
Along these lines, as though he were giving us an "anatomy lesson" about his past, Wylie goes on to prove the validity of Eliot using his own experiences in this book:
I think that Mr. Eliot conceived 'The Waste Land' out of an extremely tragic emotion and expresssed it in his own voice and in the voices of other unhappen men not carefully and elaborately trained in close harmony, but coming as a confused and frightening and beautiful murmur out of the bowels of the earth.
Wylie goes on to explain that the lines the author produced were painful to him and that this can be seen in the words chosen, and even if these emotions were fabricated, the piece would still be wonderful, much like a choir sings their song or a stain-glassed window, as Wylie put it.
The next issue that was visited was the notion that Eliot was an intellectual snob of sorts, one that feels no depth of emotion or pain. This, of course, was refuted.
As for the frequently reiterated statement that Mr. Eliot is a dry intellectual, without dept or sincerity of feeling, it is difficult for me to refute an idea which i am totally at a loss to understand; to me he seems almost inexcusable sensitive and sympathetic and quite inexcusable poignant, since he forces me to employ this horrid word to describe certain qualities which perhaps deserve a nobler tag in mingling pity with terror. That he expresses the emotion of an intellectual is perfectly true, but of the intensity of that emotion there is, no my mind, no question, nor do I recognize any reason for such a question.
Many critics have concluded, though unfounded, that The Waste Land is nothing more than a display of "intellectual arrogance", but Wylie concludes the opposite and expresses much sympathy for Eliot's splay of emotion and hurt.
Overall, Elinor Wylie stamps The Waste Land with her utmost approval and refutes other less-enthusiastic authors, citing her claims that Eliot not only used his own painful experiences, but also gave himself up for our emotional entertainment. Wylie's argument is successful and also provides excellent insight to the author himself: T.S. Eliot.
More to come soon, including some examinations of the second section of the poem, so don't lose interest yet!
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Second Entry
After looking over my last entry, I have decided that it would be easier to tackle this monster by not going line-by-line and examining it that way. Most of what I will do in this post is look at particular sections and not the lines themselves, and by doing this I will hopefully get a better glimpse at the bigger meaning rather than probe smaller pieces of the picture. This is what we did in class, and this is (hopefully) how Eliot would have wanted the readers to take his poem, that is, if he really meant for anybody to understand it at all.
Reading through the next paragraph in the first section (or at least the first couple of lines), obvious allusions to the Bible are made in lines 19-30, and the footnotes confirm this, citing the books of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. What the footnotes do not indicate, however, is if this particular paragraph is an allusion to a more specific part of the Bible, say, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, something that I am gathering from my readings. The first clue to this starts at the most obvious reference to Jesus, the “Son of Man.” The next one (“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,”) is a likely reference to the Cross and the Crucifixion, seeing that the “dead tree” is the Cross of stripped limbs with no branches for shade. The initial descriptions of a “stony rubbish” are also indicative of Jesus’ death, painting an accurate description of what many believe Golgotha (the site of the crucifixion) was like. We could even explore the landscape of what historians believe to be Golgotha and see that rubble and stone dominate the surface, certainly a site where “dry stone” exists. The last part of the paragraph is unclear to me (although the book’s footnotes indicate a quote from “The Death of St. Narcissus”) but could be loosely interpreted as Jesus’ resurrection. The only clear lines to show this would be about finding shade in the “red rock” since Jesus was inserted into a tomb cut into the side of a hill and sealed by a rolling rock.
Beginning with a German quote from the famous opera Tristan und Isolde, the next theme of the poem is about love, or so we can assume knowing the theme of the opera, running from lines 31-42. The speaker goes into a spiel about hyacinths, a flower named by the Greeks in reference to a story in which Apollo kills his lover, who is a young man. It is not made clear to the reader who the speaker is referring to, but if Eliot was a complete stickler for mythological analogies (and you bet he was!), then this could have been about a homosexual relationship. Even though the speaker would, hypothetically, take on a feminine role (e.g. “They called me the hyacinth girl.”), the assumption is plausible. Of course, with T.S. Eliot, any assumption is possible since nobody can understand his poetry. With the end of the paragraph being another German quote, the inference suggests that the speaker is still waiting to hear about this love, much like Tristan does with Isolde.
Speaking of Eliot’s unintelligible poetry, the next paragraph, the one about Madame Sosostris and Tarot, is unclear and almost placed haphazardly. If I knew anything about Tarot cards (which I can guarantee you that I do not), then I would take this space to try to decipher the meaning of the particular cards, like the drowned Phoenician Sailor and Belladonna; but, alas, I cannot. The only thing I can get out of this passage is that Eliot does have a bit of humor and pokes some fun at “dear Mrs. Equitone”. One certainly MUST be careful these days...
The last paragraph of Section I is a portrait of the London Bridge on a typical work day. Eliot describes the crowd as a sort of colorless mob, people that are both to blame and yet not to blame, something that is described with his quote from Dante’s Inferno. The passage goes on to describe the scene more, using King William Street and Saint Mary Woolnoth, and also engages in a bit of dialogue with a man who was apparently alive in 206 B.C. This is hazy, but I will say that “You! — hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frere!” is a very cool quote.
More fun to come later.
Reading through the next paragraph in the first section (or at least the first couple of lines), obvious allusions to the Bible are made in lines 19-30, and the footnotes confirm this, citing the books of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. What the footnotes do not indicate, however, is if this particular paragraph is an allusion to a more specific part of the Bible, say, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, something that I am gathering from my readings. The first clue to this starts at the most obvious reference to Jesus, the “Son of Man.” The next one (“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,”) is a likely reference to the Cross and the Crucifixion, seeing that the “dead tree” is the Cross of stripped limbs with no branches for shade. The initial descriptions of a “stony rubbish” are also indicative of Jesus’ death, painting an accurate description of what many believe Golgotha (the site of the crucifixion) was like. We could even explore the landscape of what historians believe to be Golgotha and see that rubble and stone dominate the surface, certainly a site where “dry stone” exists. The last part of the paragraph is unclear to me (although the book’s footnotes indicate a quote from “The Death of St. Narcissus”) but could be loosely interpreted as Jesus’ resurrection. The only clear lines to show this would be about finding shade in the “red rock” since Jesus was inserted into a tomb cut into the side of a hill and sealed by a rolling rock.
Beginning with a German quote from the famous opera Tristan und Isolde, the next theme of the poem is about love, or so we can assume knowing the theme of the opera, running from lines 31-42. The speaker goes into a spiel about hyacinths, a flower named by the Greeks in reference to a story in which Apollo kills his lover, who is a young man. It is not made clear to the reader who the speaker is referring to, but if Eliot was a complete stickler for mythological analogies (and you bet he was!), then this could have been about a homosexual relationship. Even though the speaker would, hypothetically, take on a feminine role (e.g. “They called me the hyacinth girl.”), the assumption is plausible. Of course, with T.S. Eliot, any assumption is possible since nobody can understand his poetry. With the end of the paragraph being another German quote, the inference suggests that the speaker is still waiting to hear about this love, much like Tristan does with Isolde.
Speaking of Eliot’s unintelligible poetry, the next paragraph, the one about Madame Sosostris and Tarot, is unclear and almost placed haphazardly. If I knew anything about Tarot cards (which I can guarantee you that I do not), then I would take this space to try to decipher the meaning of the particular cards, like the drowned Phoenician Sailor and Belladonna; but, alas, I cannot. The only thing I can get out of this passage is that Eliot does have a bit of humor and pokes some fun at “dear Mrs. Equitone”. One certainly MUST be careful these days...
The last paragraph of Section I is a portrait of the London Bridge on a typical work day. Eliot describes the crowd as a sort of colorless mob, people that are both to blame and yet not to blame, something that is described with his quote from Dante’s Inferno. The passage goes on to describe the scene more, using King William Street and Saint Mary Woolnoth, and also engages in a bit of dialogue with a man who was apparently alive in 206 B.C. This is hazy, but I will say that “You! — hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frere!” is a very cool quote.
More fun to come later.
First Post
As a staple of modern poetry, The Waste Land is widely considered “one of the most important poems of the 20th Century”, or at least to Alan Bennett of The Guardian and not the half-dozen poetry majors around campus whose impromptu reviews of the piece were virulent at the mildest. Yes, T.S. Eliot seems to have carved his face into the tablets of Modern Poetry with a poem that evokes only the strongest emotions in readers; a dichotomous split of love and hate that is found all too often in the classics (e.g. Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, “Stairway to Heaven”, etc.). This being said, how can such an important poem be hated by so many? The answer is the individualized reader response, something that I, myself, will examine in my own reading of the book and report back to you in this blog. Together we will show Eliot who is boss; together we will conquer The Waste Land! Haha!
So, do you remember that geek in high school with the bad acne, Haletosis, and horn-rimmed glasses that everybody hated because he could speak Russian fluently and took every opportunity to do it? Well, T.S. Eliot seems to be that kid. Except that instead of Russian it’s Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. And without the bad breath. Some scholars today scorn Eliot’s particular style as elitist and exclusive to the academic world, something that should not have any place in a craft devoted to the common people. This view is validated, and the reader picks up on this before the poem even starts. On the dedication page, an incomprehensible epigram written in Latin and Greek is shown at the top of the page with an Italian phrase posted below the only readable sentence on the page: “For Ezra Pound”. Normal circumstances would require the reader to grab a computer or an Italian to decipher such madness, but since the book has included the translations in the subtext, we are fortunate enough to have access to all of the information we so desperately need without having to lift our grubby little fingers off of the book. Assuming most readers qualify for “normal circumstances”, seeing this early display of linguistics could confuse or even push away readers who do not understand the text, regardless of the good visual property of having two languages printed close to each other. This, at first, threw me off guard, but seeing that these sentences actually had some significance revived my hopes that Eliot was not such an exclusive guy. I will give him the benefit of a doubt for this since Sibyl was an interesting character and since Italian “sounds totally badass” (according to my roommate, Ryan).
Reading the first couple of lines, I have easily picked up on the irony of April being cruel and Winter being warm, something that was quite pleasing after the intellectual shalacking Eliot dished in the dedication. I have also noticed the brevity of these first seven lines and the repetition of verbs in the present participle (“mixing”, “stirring”, “covering”, “feeding”). Particular emphasis is being put on these words to accentuate images of memory and roots, or so we can only infer. In the middle of this, the author actually introduces himself using a first person pronoun, but in the plural sense (“Winter kept us warm...”). Who is “us”? Moving through the next couple of lines about “Starnbergersee” and “Hofgarten”, we then come to a simple line written in German that starts the unquoted dialogue between a presumably Lithuanian woman (who is actually a “true German”). This transition is interesting since it introduces a new character to the text, even if you have to read the paragraph three times to realize that the speaker did not stay at the archduke’s as a child and did not have a cousin that uttered, “Marie, Maire, hold on tight.”
Seeing the length of this, I will stop here and let all of this sink in. The next post will cover the rest of the first section of The Waste Land.
So, do you remember that geek in high school with the bad acne, Haletosis, and horn-rimmed glasses that everybody hated because he could speak Russian fluently and took every opportunity to do it? Well, T.S. Eliot seems to be that kid. Except that instead of Russian it’s Greek, Latin, Italian, and German. And without the bad breath. Some scholars today scorn Eliot’s particular style as elitist and exclusive to the academic world, something that should not have any place in a craft devoted to the common people. This view is validated, and the reader picks up on this before the poem even starts. On the dedication page, an incomprehensible epigram written in Latin and Greek is shown at the top of the page with an Italian phrase posted below the only readable sentence on the page: “For Ezra Pound”. Normal circumstances would require the reader to grab a computer or an Italian to decipher such madness, but since the book has included the translations in the subtext, we are fortunate enough to have access to all of the information we so desperately need without having to lift our grubby little fingers off of the book. Assuming most readers qualify for “normal circumstances”, seeing this early display of linguistics could confuse or even push away readers who do not understand the text, regardless of the good visual property of having two languages printed close to each other. This, at first, threw me off guard, but seeing that these sentences actually had some significance revived my hopes that Eliot was not such an exclusive guy. I will give him the benefit of a doubt for this since Sibyl was an interesting character and since Italian “sounds totally badass” (according to my roommate, Ryan).
Reading the first couple of lines, I have easily picked up on the irony of April being cruel and Winter being warm, something that was quite pleasing after the intellectual shalacking Eliot dished in the dedication. I have also noticed the brevity of these first seven lines and the repetition of verbs in the present participle (“mixing”, “stirring”, “covering”, “feeding”). Particular emphasis is being put on these words to accentuate images of memory and roots, or so we can only infer. In the middle of this, the author actually introduces himself using a first person pronoun, but in the plural sense (“Winter kept us warm...”). Who is “us”? Moving through the next couple of lines about “Starnbergersee” and “Hofgarten”, we then come to a simple line written in German that starts the unquoted dialogue between a presumably Lithuanian woman (who is actually a “true German”). This transition is interesting since it introduces a new character to the text, even if you have to read the paragraph three times to realize that the speaker did not stay at the archduke’s as a child and did not have a cousin that uttered, “Marie, Maire, hold on tight.”
Seeing the length of this, I will stop here and let all of this sink in. The next post will cover the rest of the first section of The Waste Land.
Preliminary Report
Hello, everybody (but mostly Professor Hollingsworth)!
First, I want to apologize for formatting this blog so late in the game. We started reading The Waste Land at least a week and a half ago, and as you can see, I've just now made this blog. If it is any consolation, all of my postings are first written on my MacBook, edited for spelling and such, and then saved for this very blog. The bad part about this is that the first couple of postings will come very quickly within a short amount of time and then, after that, the postings will be sporadic and possibly variant in lengths, which should not be too much of a problem. Hopefully you will find it in your heart to forgive me. Or not...
Second, just sound off in the comment section if you have anything to say, or don't and just yell at your computer screen. Works for me either way.
Hope you enjoy the blog!
-Taylor
First, I want to apologize for formatting this blog so late in the game. We started reading The Waste Land at least a week and a half ago, and as you can see, I've just now made this blog. If it is any consolation, all of my postings are first written on my MacBook, edited for spelling and such, and then saved for this very blog. The bad part about this is that the first couple of postings will come very quickly within a short amount of time and then, after that, the postings will be sporadic and possibly variant in lengths, which should not be too much of a problem. Hopefully you will find it in your heart to forgive me. Or not...
Second, just sound off in the comment section if you have anything to say, or don't and just yell at your computer screen. Works for me either way.
Hope you enjoy the blog!
-Taylor
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