The Dirty Yellow Chair

I, over the past week or so, have come to believe in what Jonathan Lethem has to say. My whole life I've been taught never to plagiarize, never to use what others have written/spoken/done in the past and use it for my own purposes. Lethem points out that, in his mind, the artist is inseparably interwoven with his/her environment/surroundings which includes others' speech, artwork, attitudes, everything! He had developed, and is now exposing me to his radical new way of thinking about art.
So now, we're taking what he has to say at face value, and taking him at his word. My group was assigned the Dirty Yellow Chair scene: a juicy, sexual scene that takes place (time and time again) on a filthy yellow piece of furniture. Our group tried very hard to make it as interesting as possible, aiming to eventually have the past and present flashback and forth between the two, creating a dichotomy between the two in the scene. My only complaint was that we only had one class period. We had really good ideas while we were brainstorming, but eventually got to the point where we all looked at the clock and realized we had less than 20 mins to wind up what we had going at the time! I think that we could've come up with a scene that would've worked quite nicely (especially if one got the cinematography transitions between flashbacks down [ie. zooming into one of the telephone receiver's holes by the mouthpiece]), had we been given perhaps one more class period: one for brainstorming, another for actually getting the ideas down in a concise manner.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

The concept of intertextuality is one that, while it is quite new to me, i can look back in retrospect and remember many movies, TV shows, etc that were either centrally focused on or at least referenced a few pop culture icons/concepts. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is not only a textbook example of this concept, it also draws from metafiction as well. One of my favorite examples of this intertextuality is in the restaurant scene (and the events leading up to) when Jules has taken the male robber hostage, and has the female robber pointing a gun in his face. While she seems to be loosing control of her emotions, Jules tries to convince her to be calm, asking her, "what would Fonzie do??" He'd be cool.

While perhaps a bit more subtle (whether i'm right or wrong), I got a laugh out of this next example. At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia volunteers the both of them to perform in a dance contest. The only thing is that... her dance partner is none other than John Travolta, the leading star from everybody's favorite 1970's flick: Saturday Night Fever. This example may not be a direct reference, but anybody that knows anything about movies knows that John Travolta made a name for himself with those dance moves of his.

Paul Auster

This first text is very confusing, I’m not quite sure where it’s taking me, and it is psychologically convoluted. The main character, Quinn, has invented for himself identity upon identity, leaving no room for himself, it seems. Therein lies the metafiction: Quinn is an author of detective novels under the pseudonym William Wilson. When someone accidentally calls his apartment looking for some private eye called Paul Auster, he thinks that it’d be fun to play along and “become” this Paul Auster by acting out everything he knew about Max Work through the eye of William Wilson...this is Quinn we’re talking about here. Because of the multi-ID’ed Quinn, the story is hard to get lost in, as the reader is always trying to figure out which of the identities is saying what, or who he’s trying to be at that moment.

There are definitely times where I feel like Quinn when he’s playing Paul Auster, private eye, when he’s mapped out the walking pattern of a man over time, trying to decipher the pattern in the overall movement. What he has are lines and zig-sags that somewhat resemble symbols one may have seen before, but what it is is a man walking down and across rectangular city blocks over time, that are eventually bound to create some sort of geometric pattern. I believe that his task was hopeless, like trying to find some deeper meaning in the random pattern in clouds. I also believe that this story is going nowhere. I’ve been conditioned over the years to read stories that had a point to be made, and an objective to be accomplished. This book, it seems, is challenging everything i’ve learned about reading, and is putting “patterns” out there that I'm focus ing on, trying to make sense of it all, but in reality, I’m just grasping at straws.