My paper

NOTE: This is my work and not yours anyone who wants to reference make sure you cite properly because I did this not you. Pain and death awaits all who steal from my sack of goodies. (This paper was not the final one that I turned in. I made many last minute changes that were not on my computer.)

There hasn't been a day this month where I haven't been completely overwhelmed. I'm trying to write this paper, but I'm throughly burnt out. The harder I try to think of some amazing topic to write about the further I am from starting. I don't want to settle on the generic topic of what I have learned and how it has changed me, but I can't seem to find a single original idea. But if I think about it, that generic topic isn't so generic after all. It allows me to find a coherent thought so I can run with it. Then what have I learned? It doesn't seem like I've learned anything except for a few names, numbers, and facts that are in the books and movies I've encountered. No, it's more than that. It's taking segments and clips and applying them to everything I've learned and using them for understanding other situations I will encounter. The more I know the more I can get out of life.

I have begun to play the connection game. It's trying to take passages and names that are in a text and connecting them with other passages and names. Sometimes I find what the author intended and sometimes I find more. I do this because when I start to read deeper than the surface those little gifts of enjoyment the writer adds for my pleasure appear. Its these references that bring a new aspect to everything. Each time we read a book we can catch those hidden details. The imagination will make the connections when we let it. Even when writing, if we follow a stream of thoughts soon our minds will be making connections we never realized were possible. It's the imagination that allow the statement, “trust the tale not the teller,” to be true because of it's supreme truth. When a writer has made a work, everybody can use it for their own connections in life. It could be for connections within the work or with other events in history. It is limitless.

Connections are difficult because my mind is pretty generic and anything other than the obvious connections are painstakingly difficult for me to make. In high school the best connections I could make would be works by the same author or settings that are the same. Deeper meaning and the triangle of hierarchy didn't exist for me. My high school literature teacher, Mr. Voigt, started me on the right path of interpretations, unfortunately I didn't spend more time with him. He gave me some advice that I've been trying to use in every project I do. “When you realize that you're digging a hole, stop digging.” (I hope I'm not letting you down.) How is it possible that everything we've read and seen connects? Since nothing is original anymore and everything we do is a spin off of someone else's experiences an overlap is bound to happen. In a South Park episode, one kid, Butters, aka Professor Chaos, wanted to do something terrible to the town of South Park, but ever idea he had had already been done by the Simpsons. He wanted to come up with an original idea so badly, but there wasn't any left.

So here I kneel trying to make a connection of this semesters class, but all I can do is think about tv shows and past classes. To bad everything we've read has been by different authors and they have different topics. No resorting to my old ways. Overall the book Lolita seems to have many roads traveling out of it. Nabokov was the king of wordplay. He left little hints and treasures for the reader (if I truly found any of them, let me boast now). There was so much more to Lolita than the subject matter. That is to say, more than the idea of being carried away. I believe this book could be the focal point of the class and within every line there was a link to some other place, world, and/or idea. Nabokov did this very subtly so I missed many of the treats, for I am not an attuned reader.

Nabokov is the king of the connection. No, Elvis is the king, but another word for king could be master. Until this class I didn't know the title of “the master” was already taken by to Henry James. When the name Henry James comes across I think of two things. One is Daisy Miller. Not the book itself, but the image of her. There she is, in an all white dress with a white parasol, but she's at the railing of a fairy boat as described by Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane who died in his Xanadu (pre net days of course), whispering his last word “rosebud.” Nary a sound was made, but quite a ruckus was caused with his final breath. The words rose and rosebud caught my attention when I was reading Lolita.

The next thought in reference to Henry James is him being “the nicest old lady I ever met.” Not that I ever met him, or understand why he's the nicest old lady, but William Faulkner said this and it was one of the many test questions I got wrong. I guess that people can learn from their mistakes. The idea of Faulkner and his unbearably long sentences which stretch for pages and paragraphs again and again making me lose all thought and comprehension as I pay attention to his punctuation instead of his words only confused and aggravated me.

I have seen his elaborate descriptions referenced on the Simpsons. During one episode, Moe, the bartender, told about his days being a child actor on the Little Rascals. It was his job to get laughs by looking into a car's exhaust pipe and receiving a face full of soot. The comment was made about how difficult it must have been to find reasons for looking into an exhaust pipe. Moe informed his friends that they had good writers like Faulkner to come up with elaborate reasons. It has always been lost on me, but now I find the humor. We need to know everything to understand anything and everything. Faulkner can easily exhaust me so I must go to the opposite end of the writing style spectrum which leads to Hemingway. I see the old man, Santiago, struggling to save his fish from the ravaging sharks. Ironically I bought that book in Butte along with Moby Dick.

I purchased The Old Man and the Sea because I remembered reading it in a literature class with Mr. Voigt and I purchased Moby Dick because my favorite epic story, Bone, has many references to Moby Dick. Another reason for choosing Moby Dick is because my advisor, Amy Thomas, has so many copies in her office. I thought I had better find out why she likes it so much. The first class I had with Dr. Thomas was purely fate. I changed from one section to hers because I had a friend in that class. Changing sections is something I never do. Some books we read were great and some were not so great. The first book was The complete history of new mexico. 11 year old Charlemagne J. Belter had written a few research papers on New Mexico for class, but the history was all wrong. Charles (name sound familiar) or Chum (the name of Humbert's gun) as he preferred to be called collected his stories from people he knew and met.

This collection of stories remind me of the folklore in Mules and Men. Not a particularly good book, but one that twists at the end with her learning voodoo. It's a rejection of the Christian faith. Which is so contrary to the picture of America. Wallace Stevens was a secular humanism. Free to create and be god with his imagery. I too like it under the leaves in autumn. Hazel Motes was also against Christianity with his church without Christ. He too, like Humbert, hand a rather young girl. Finding his doppelganger and killing him with his Essex was a bold and necessary move that many character eventually do.. Humbert Humbert got Clare Quilty. Why do you have to kill the other part of you? Is it to be truly free? Free to go on the open road away from your home like the road movies? Dorthy took the yellow brick road to Emerald City while Bill Blake took the #29 train to Machine. Both journeys are packed with interpretations. Many about The Wizard of Oz are equally as disturbing as the subject matter of Lolita. Oz should be left for the children like minded people. Bill Blake, even though he becomes William Blake, still has child qualities at the end. He was a wonderful reincarnation of poetry being a destructive force. Poetry is so much more than cute. Cute like a little girl, Lolita.

So that was my feeble attempt at playing the connection game. I now realize that I've learned more than I originally thought, but what difference does it make? It doesn't really matters. I don't foresee a job interview involving me comparing Lolita to (fill in the blank)________. The real difference is the game itself. The game is fun. The game is smart. The more you know the better you become at playing and isn't that the real reason for everything? The enjoyment of life. People play this connection game all the time. It's the backbone. Like the Six Degrees of Seperation with Kevin Bacon. Just the other day I received a myspace bulletin where you name an actor and a movie they starred in then someone will add to the bulletin the name of a different actor in that movie with a different movie they played in. The purpose is enjoyment and a test of knowledge. The only way to lose is not to play. That's the difference this class has made. To enjoy the finer things in life. To celebrate knowledge and the ability to exist. All in all it was hard, it was challenging, and it was stressful, but it was worth it and I enjoyed it.

Works Cited

Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Wells. Perf. Orson Wells. Warner Bros., 2001.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Perf. Johnny Deep, Gary Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, Michael Wincott, Lance Henriksen, Robert Mitchum. Miramax, 1995

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, Inc, 1994.

Faulkner, William. The Portable Faulkner. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. Kingsport: Penguin, 1983.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller. New York: Drover Publications, 1995.

McIlvoy, Kevin. The complete history of new mexico. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2005.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Bantam, 1986.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1991.

O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

“Radioactive Man.” The Simpsons. 20^th Century Fox. 24 Sept. 1995.

“The Simpsons Already Did It.” South Park. Comedy Central. 26 June 2002.

Smith, Jeff. Bone. Columbus: Cartoon Books, 2004.

Stevens, Wallace. Stevens Poems. Ed. Helen Vendler. New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1993.

The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Perf. Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton. Warner Bros., 1998.