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Notes Towards Day 12: Tasting the Book of Salt
What his tongue can do:
Tasting The Book of Salt
"She wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue..."
Mid-semester course evaluations:
I. Further Coursekeeping
Naming ("Emily=Kendalyn," "Hope=Holly")
Papers leftover for Laura, Melissa, Sarah, Sonal
Hold on to these/put in folder to re-submit w/
Paper # 2 in mid-November (=being in conversation w/ yourself & me)
Finish The Book of Salt over break...
read ahead: graphic novel Persepolis
think about picking a "last" text?
II. Key question of first 1/3 of course: what logic/use-value does the gender binary serve?
jzarate: I’m completely
bummed that we did not discuss the article about sexual reassignment in
Iran.... In the Islamic faith,
there is an important division of the sexes...based on
the idea that Allah creates in pairs and binary opposites. Therefore
deviation from the binary is seen as dangerous and potentially leading
to sexual transgression....In order to maintain order and avoid
“sexual transgressions” people are encouraged to change their physical
gender traits....This leads me to
consider cultural and societal definitions of sex....How have different religious and cultural standards
shaped our views and definitions of licit and illicit sex?
kscire: The article Truth of sex makes me re-consider the relationship between
biology and gender/sex. At least in Iran, "one's gender is rooted in
one's biological make-up which may have not adjusted well with
socializing norms, thus producing abnormality and gender disorder."
This would lead me to believe that there is not fault in biology that
results in gender disorder; but that whatever sex a person is born as
is not at all unnatural...because at least coming from a scientific
standpoint there are no "gender identity" disorders. These "disorders"
are only social.
jlustick: social reform is poorely suited to areas of society
where pleasing people is of the utmost importance.
Old Gender Roles with your Dinner?
Although the goal in many public places and in much of public life is to treat
men and women equally, most upscale restaurants haven’t reached that point.
Why Women Should Vote
"Race, Gender and Age in the 2008 Presidential Campaign"
12:45-2, Monday, October 20, 2008, Campus Center 200
The Social Science Center luncheon series on Understanding the 2008 Election
Michael X. Delli Carpini, Professor of Political Science &
Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at Penn
III. (Not unrelatedly:) a few more words about GertrudeStein's poetry...
anorton: It seems reasonable that most readers enter texts expecting them to communicate something from the writer to them....Certainly, we never fully understand what another person is trying to convey....Perhaps I put too much trust in the power of words....What are the experiences that can't be described, and how are they best expressed?
--decoding seems to miss the mark: the one-to-one equivalence that encryption presumes
would deny the polysemnic, indeterminate trajectories of Stein's vocabulary
--"insistence" draws our attention to the material of language,
which is generally rendered a silent ferry to the signified....
iteration invites us to engage sound and shape in a more intimate way--to enjoy close reading.
--the word can be erotic on two opposing conditions, both excessive:
if
it is extravagantly repeated, or on the contrary, if it is unexpected,
succulent in its newness
Some implications
*Stein's ambivalence about naming resonants with more
contemporary concerns about the limitations of identity politics...
the
simultaneous exigency and liability of naming abjected sexuality.
justlick: language interferes with a certain modern feminist agenda,
for it
forces us to create labels and names and differentiate outsider from
insider.
The Book of Salt, p. 117: "Words...are a handy shortcut to meaing.
But too often, words limit and deny."
p. 63: "there is no narrative...in good sex"
Abstract Paintings Masterpiece Series
(Thought experiment: how would you translate Stein?)
hope: while reading the Book of Salt i was thinking that it would be interesting to have Stein's poem read outloud to people who do not speak english and ask about their reactions to it. perhaps they could apreciate the rythem or flow or general sound of the words better since they would not be focused on attaching meaning to them.
Speaking of attaching meaning to words...
kgbrown: perhaps...we are
getting bogged down by how we should catagorize the poems...If a poem really is "sexy," can't we
catagorize it as just that and leave the hetero- and homo- out of it?
skumar: If lesbianism is nothing more than sexual pull towards women, well,
then I guess it reduces humanity to physical, biological frameworks.
This insists that we are nothing but our bodies.
Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll: I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
ebock: I don't think...that Stein creates...an
image of lesbian intimacy that becomes...spectacle....Of course physical attraction...is important.
If the first erotic bond is to the mother...could not the "natural"
...her conception of a "lesbian continuum" sparked especially intense
debate. Does lesbianism incorporate all support systems and intense
interactions among women, or is it a specifically erotic choice? What is gained
and what is lost with the second, narrower definition?
IV. Turning now to The Book of Salt
(to test some of these ideas about how words work)
Write a paragraph describing this image:
Here is Truong/Binh's description:
How are they like-and-different?
How do they comment on one another?
What do they tell us about the relationship between
the visual and the written?
like a documentary film technique, the camara imparts its
own sense of motion to still photographs--
a swooped, focusing, animating effect...
"bloodless": heavy reliance on images and repetition
(overwritten? inviting of interpretation?)
lacks fleshed-out people...
Binh flexible and mercurial,
but static, suspended between eventful memory
and present, w/ few choices
feminized stereotypes of Asian men
"flat": appropriate both to their iconic status and
cook's need to know them as behavioral probabilities
V. The novel begins and ends with a photograph....
why and what's that accomplish?
"GertrudeStein, unflappable, unrepentant, unbowed, starts back at me and smiles. This photograph of her and Miss Toklas, the second of two that I have of that day, was taken on the desk of the SS Champlain. It captures my Mesdames perfectly. I am over there, the one with my back turned to the camera...alongside the photograph taken at the Gare du Nord...I am partial to the one of them at the train station.
GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas are perched on the bench ahead of me. My Madame and Madame are posing for a small group of photographers who have gathered for the occasion. GertrudeSein looks almost girlish. The folds of a smile are tucked into her ample cheeks. Miss Toklas looks pleased but as always somewhat irritated, an an oyster with sand in its lips, a woman whose corset bites into her hips...."
The Accessibility and Assailability of Pictures:
are words more "assailable,"
more subject to common testing?
...and tasting?
VI. TASTE THIS...
and write a paragraph about what you are experiencing
The novel is filled with tastes....
how is that accomplished?
What is the relationship between the sensation of a taste,
and the words with which it is described?
Between sensations (more generally),
and the words which represent them?
Journal of American Folklore 107 (423), 1994: 181-196.
VII. What role does the representation of taste--and
sensation more generally--play in feminism?
aaclh: I was surprised to see that Truong's Book of Salt used taste so heavily.
I don't think I've thought about taste much before, let alone saw taste as
a useful way to describe other human emotions.
Can you see and feel in a feminist way? I don’t really think so, not in the
literal seeing things in front of you way. While feminism is a state of mind,
it is mostly a set of actions and you behave in the world.
jlustick: is it a problem if food arouses us?...What if literature arouses us?
What about someone of the same sex? Opposite sex?
Why does the means of arousal matter more than the resultant state?
limits of Truong’s representation of a gay male.