For 102!
Write about one of the following themes:
Technology (do we control it, or does it control us?)
Communication (miscommunication)--person to person, telephone, telepathy (empath, sensitive), post office
Entropy
Drugs/Alcohol (remember, this is 1965)
Popular Culture (tv, cartoons, music, etc.)
im not sure if this is where we are leaving the comments or anything. but i thought it was pretty intense how that dr hilarious guy was just passing out lsd like it was advil or something.. i know its the sixtys and all but wasnt there some regulations on that ?
ReplyDeleteThis was certainly a confusing book. That's all I really have to say about it. When I read a book I enjoy to know what's going on, and this book left me not knowing.
ReplyDeletethrew out the whole book there is talk about different bars. Drinking and drugging back then were more acceptable then now. I think that back then it wasnt a big deal to drink all the time or go from bar to bar.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that I really understood about this book was the whole drug usage for a medicinal purpose. The alcohal and the fact that Oedipa was trying to figure out what the post horn was about. other than that I was lost while reading the book.
ReplyDelete("Bakunin miracle," p. 97)
ReplyDelete"There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of believing. This class comprising all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:
'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion.' That is the safety-valve.
There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs; that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as bourgeois Socialists.
With them, or against them, discussion is out of the question. They are too puny.
-Mikhail Bakunin
are you trying to say don't try to pin point the meaning in a book that has more than one direction to it? and that if you do you it wont matter that you read it because it took the enjoyment and pleasure out of reading it?
ReplyDeleteLisa, that's a really interesting way to put it. You're absolutely right. The novel may be an elaborate game, with a sense of play that can be frustrating. But if you think about it, how many games, for instance video games, are very frustrating & confounding at first, before you really "get" the rules of the game, or the "laws" of the fictional world the game is played in?
ReplyDelete