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Oswald, Ruby, and Women

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Here’s an obvious statement: Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald have countless differences. Not many people compare them at all and simply see Jack Ruby as the assassin of Lee Oswald, the assassin of JFK. However, with our past two in-class discussions, I started to see many similarities in the way that Ruby and Oswald interacted with people around them. Specifically, their interactions with the women in their lives were extremely ambiguous and confusing for me, so I write this in hopes that their reasonings for this ambiguity become clearer. In the chapter “12 August”, we met Jack Ruby, who (we know because we are informed civilians) is the person who shot Lee Oswald. We first hear him mentioned by two of the strippers that work at his club, the Carousel Club. Lynette mentions that he has heard that he calls girls “dumb c****” and threatens them. Brenda/Baby LeGrand denies that he would ever physically harm his dancers. Later on, they see him outside the window thr...
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Strange Days in the Fabulous East

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* the title of this blog post is on page 85 of DeLillo's work As I was reading the “In Atsugi” chapter, I was expecting more focus on the military action at the base in Japan, but was surprised to find that most of the reading was about Lee’s experience in the city. In particular, the first half of the chapter describes in detail his experience in Tokyo with Matsuki and Konno. The effects that these characters have on Lee start to reveal a lot about him, not only to us as readers, but also to himself, as he is starting to understand his own worldviews. First, his budding relationship with Matsuki shows his ability and willingness to let himself go for pleasure, regardless of any work that needs to be done. He briefly mentions seeing “Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen” in the beginning of the chapter, and sooner than later he becomes one of these war-men that he described. They’d have intercourse in a traditional yet seemingly “imitat...
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Pretending is Believing

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    For this blog post, I would like to focus on one section in chapter 7 of The Fall that really stood out to me. On page 99, Dana and Kevin saw a group of slave children around a tree stump. Upon closer analysis, they realize that the kids were playing pretend-slave auction. Dana leaves in disgust after hearing how the children argued over the price of their friends, just as they had seen white slave owners objectify and bargain over their own mothers and fathers.     In their following discussion, Kevin seems much more detached from what they had just observed while Dana is distraught and insisting that the game was much more than a mere game of pretend. Although Kevin’s point about them not being able to change part of history is sort of valid, the fact that he admits to never being shown the whippings or the terror in punishments for slaves on the plantation reveals how sheltered white people were in the Antebellum south. If you were any part of a white family ...
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Billy, Mr. Wilson, and Time Hopping

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(Disclaimer: I'm not claiming Mr. Wilson is a time-hopper. Just read to find out) As we’ve constantly encountered Billy time-hopping in Slaughterhouse-Five , I’ve become more accustomed to the idea of time being unconfined to the terms “past”, “present”, and “future”. Instead, we have been introduced to capsules of time being chained to each other rather than blending together. This means that one is able to take a chunk of time as a link in a chain, instead of all of time being a flowing stream. In this way, we have seen Billy entering into different, sporadic moments of his life unconsciously. Now, in psychology class, our class is infatuated with the concept of dreams: what they mean, why we have them, and how they work. We talk about them a lot as we discuss what kinds of dreams we have had (nightmares, good dreams, prophetic dreams) and why we dream what we dream. Not to bring names into this but it’s important to mention him because of the fact that he has lived throug...
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Is Jes Grew Still Growing? Dance/Music of Today

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On the night that we finished the novel Mumbo Jumbo , Mr. Mitchell asked us to answer this question in our notebooks: What is the current state of Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order? In class, we touched on the history of Jes Grew in the form of jazz. Jazz is now seen as a form of “classical music”, and is now performed in fancy concert halls rather than in bars and out on the streets as it was in the 1920s. As a music genre, it isn’t seen as radical anymore, and though it definitely is not “dead”, it has become institutionalized - namely, by white commercialization. However, a music genre that still is perceived as black dominated thrives today. Both rap and hip hop are two of the most popular styles of music listened to in the modern day, and the most notable rappers/hip hoppers are African-American. When Mr. Mitchell mentioned the incident when Macklemore won 4 Grammys for Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best New Artist, while Kendrick Lamar won none, altho...
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Jes Grew's a-Brewin: The Flapper

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As I started reading Mumbo Jumbo and gradually realized what Jes Grew really was, I was constantly reminded of what I learned in Race Class Gender class last semester with Mr. Leff. For one unit, we talked about the Roarin’ Twenties, specifically the cultural conflict of Old vs New. We discussed challenges toward the old, criticisms against the new, and what came out of these perspectives. For this blog post, I wanted to share Mr. Leff’s wise teachings and apply them to what we’ve seen in Mumbo Jumbo thus far. First, modernity - a mixture of the growth in mass production, mass consumption, and urbanization - revealed two ideologies of cultural consumption in the 1920s. The old prevailing ideology glorified thrift, deferred gratitude, and hard work. Now, the new ascendant ideology idealized desire, gratification, and spending. With this new ascendant ideology came challenges toward “the elders’ way of life”, including Freudianism (freeing of sexual desire) and cultural relativism...
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Hou is Harry Houdini?

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As we have been reading through Ragtime and discussing the novel, I have developed a particular interest in Harry Houdini. As members of the 21st Century, we are still fascinated by the idea of magic and defying reality - horror movies, virtual video games, and even simple card or object tricks all continue to keep us on the edge of our seats because of their various effects of tricking our brains and tapping into illusions. As children, we have grown up knowing the name “Harry Houdini” and recognizing him as a really good magician/escape artist. However, every person is more than just a name with a label. Who really was Harry Houdini, and for our purposes, how true-to-life is Doctorow’s depiction of him? To try to answer this question, I started researching (shoutout to Gale and Credo) Harry Houdini. More accurately, I learned about Erich Weiss (real name indeed is mentioned on page 35 of the novel), born in Budapest on March 25, 1874, and immigrated to the US with his poor fami...
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