nightowl's blog

Conflict of silences. Flawed from the start, ESP is a decaying island that stands as a reminder of the suffering it caused. Gone are the tiny insanity-inspiring chambers, replaced by shared-chambers capable of providing a life to their inhabitants. It was not a luxury to live in it, to be confined to your thoughts. The communal spaces and open water could only do so much to cleanse the place of its past. Eastern State Penitentiary now looks the way it made the prisoners feel: empty, broken, and alone. The endless and repeating days are terrible. Conflict of silences.

Conflict of silences. It is ridiculous and useless. Why are these visitors visiting? For prisoners inside, it’s not much different: no freedom, isolated, frustrating, desperate and somehow made the lonely people more aggressive. How is it possible that people can really be penitent in this mentally torturing condition? It’s not going to make a difference for the guilty, in such a place of fear and loneliness, nothing could evoke their mortality when they’re in torture. With all the daily introspection on my crimes, I know I would have gone crazy within the first week. The isolation is the punishment actually in this place. I cannot imagine if I stay in such place day by day without talking. Conflict of silences.

Zadie Smith’s novel NW does not have a distinct structure; it tries to mimic the randomness of real life. The novel does this in its presentation of words, sentences, chapters, themes and overarching plot. In the novel the lack of clear structure and closure in the ending left the majority of my classmates and me feeling slightly agitated and disorientated. This disorientation is possibly a manifestation of Zadie Smith’s intent to make us aware of our human instinct to put the world into simple patterns that don’t account for exceptions. A New York Times article on putting meaning into randomness says that, “Believing in fate, or even conspiracy, can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact that sometimes things just happen.” (Belkin, 1) When humans hold on to the comfort of relaying on their faith in a mixture of patterns and coincidences, they prepare themselves to ignore things that could possibly contradict that faith. 

My first paper focused on Shar and the number 37 in Leah's life in terms of randomness. My initial idea was of 37 as a lens, but that kind of formed into randomness being the lens. In my rewrite I want my lens to be Randomness and how people prefer patterns over randomness and try to find patterns in randomness. My examples might be the number 37, Shar, the beginning of Leah and Keisha’s friendship, the general plot/lack of structure in the book, and a possible explanation of why some people in class did not like or were agitated by the book. 

The number 37 and Leah Hanwell are introduced at the beginning of NW and resurface throughout it. Leah probably learned about the number 37 from her friend Natalie who said, “The number 37 has a magic about it, we’re compelled toward it. Websites are dedicated to the phenomenon. The imagined houses found in cinema, fiction, painting, and poetry-almost always 37. Asked to choose a number at random: almost always 37. Watch for 37, the girl said, in our lotteries, our game-shows, and our dreams and jokes, and Leah did, and Leah still does.” (46) This quote conveys that the number 37 has a “magical” significance, and is somehow part of the underlining structure of society. The number 37 stays in Leah’s subconscious throughout NW and she notes whenever she sees it.

Leah has many chance meetings with an old schoolmate named Shar. (5) After these encounters, like the number 37, Shar stays in Leah’s subconscious. Shar knocks on Leah’s door one day asking for money. Leah lends Shar money, and Shar promises to pay her back. After that incident, Leah starts to have multiple chance encounters with Shar, and Shar doesn’t pay her back.

What defines people more their cultural exposure or what they want to be? What was happening when Natalie yelled at the black man smoking the cigarette in the park on page (337)? What defines Keisha/Natalie more, her cultural identity or her drive to be on the so-called right side? As she argues with him she calls him “man” at the beginning of her sentences and points out that she grew up in Harlesdon. Throughout the argument she is worried that the crowd might perceive her as ridiculous. If I wrote about this I would focus on Natalie in this scene or maybe compare Natalie’s and Leah’s upbringing and drive and how they ended up being as adults.

In order to have a clearer picture of something as a whole, a person has to look at it deconstructed into parts. In the first half of this course I have looked at the city and writing in scattered playful components.

When we first went into the city, we road in by the Septa and saw the outside environment change from suburban, to a bit urban, and then underground as the train deposited us under the city. We emerged from Suburban Station to see some the city’s biggest landmarks within walking distance. We were given maps with landmarks and streets that we eventually attached physical memories to. These memories were not only made up of the landmarks and streets, but also of the homeless population and other demographics in Center City. By the end of the trip we had a clearer idea of Center City; and in later trips we gained a greater understand of some of the neighborhoods that branch off from there. We built up a clearer picture of Philadelphia by looking at its components of buildings, streets, and people.

Quiet volume deconstructed the way we think about words by playing with how we comprehend letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. Visiting the mosaics in the Magic Gardens provided a platform for us to dismantle the way we view the city and ourselves, and the two interacting together. Then when writing, we were given room to recollect our raw and deconstructed thoughts.

Reading NW reminds me of this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KstA2ZVYipA

When people play in the city they naturally and serendipitously get blocked and fall into the critical structure and concepts of our society. Asking why something is in a certain place and looks the way it does, and what knowledge is conveyed to us in the city traces us back to the past.

The past is an abstraction that people live with the effects of. The minor details of the past are too extensive to record. People cannot record or remember every word, thought, gesture, tile, or perspective of the past. When I went on The Ghost Tour of Philadelphia, I paid to hear stories of the past and to possibly get scared. One of the first stories of the tour was about a housekeeper who saw Benjamin Franklin’s ghost in the American Philosophical Society Library. Besides this story being entertaining, it left me with vague images of that scene and wondering if the housekeeper had seen something that night. It led me to the questions of, “What was the housekeepers name?”, “What were her motives for reporting the ghost?”, “What time of day was it during the citing”, and “Where did she come from?” The answers to these questions were too broad and trivial for the purpose of the tour and the details were therefore lost on us. However, their result is partly why we heard the housekeeper’s story when we went on the tour.

1. Read Today in Philly in the Tuesday newspaper

2. Googled "Today in Philly"

3. Clicked on: http://www.philly.com/philly/calendar/

4.Went to events on Friday and so fall themed events:

http://www.philly.com/philly/calendar/?search=y&eDay=2&section=&page=3&sortBy=date

5. Googled Philly ghost tour

6. Clicked on http://www.ghosttour.com/philadelphia.html

Haunted tour by candlelight!!

$17 tour, $15 if you order in advance 

The city is a concentration of humanity. It demonstrates economic triumph in tall buildings and the downfalls of humankind in its homeless population and high crime rates. The modern art world often lives between these two aspects of the city. While art needs money in order to survive, it also needs thoughtfulness, honesty, and some spontaneity in order to make a statement and be provocative. Money can produce a biased prospective and dilute arts’ meaningfulness, so art usually tries to survive only on a substance level of money, with enough room to play with ideas.

Artists are described as “creating outside commercial establishments.” (Flanagan, 3) according to Critical Play by Mary Flanagan. Isaiah Zagar follows Flanagan’s definition of an artist. Zagar’s art was rejected by museums, so he brought it to the streets. His art form is mosaics, which he layers on top of buildings in his hometown of Philadelphia. His mosaics are made of tiles, molds, broken mirrors, bicycle wheels, bottles, and other found objects. Zagar’s Mosaics are so widespread in Philadelphia that they have become part of the cultural identity of the city. Even though Zagar’s mosaics are less prominent than the cities’ museums, they are more unique and regional.