fragile y

AWESOME book. Nice.

The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garciá Márquez

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude posit reading strategies linked by similar methodologies and complementary conclusions. The exposition in the following chapters examines the novels' methodologies on three levels-the utilization of historical background, the Principle of Uncertainty, and apocalyptic endings-to establish a basis for the novels' shared perspective on narrative and, by default, approaches to engaging narrative. This thesis argues that the novels demonstrate that as uncertainty increases within narrative the potential for meaning increases, and the converse-as uncertainty decreases, the potential for meaning decreases. The resultant apocalyptic endings of the novels depict the opposing extremes and the requisite failure of both. Finally, this thesis will demonstrate that through metaphor connecting these failed attempts to reading narrative, both novels show reading to be a dynamic act in which one must negotiate the compass of uncertainty to reach not necessarily meaning, but rather the potential for meaning. iii

American Childhoods on Humanities and Social Sciences online, 2017

The first in a 3-part series for the American Childhoods series on H-Net, What is YA? begins framing how I conceptualise YA in my research. In short, I see YA as a field of literature and media marked by liminality. This piece defines those terms, while also situating my arguments.

This is not mine. This is a book written by Rachel Carson - a nice book to read.

Feminist Review, 2018

Leviathan, 2019

He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had his feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality." (McCarthy 75) A man and his son wander through a dark and eerie landscape. An unknown catastrophe has ruined the known world and a new, sinister one has emerged from the ashes. In the ruthless and savage postapocalyptic world, they rely entirely on each other, but simultaneously, they are alone. The man, who was born before the catastrophe, and the boy, who was born after, come to realize the stark contrasts between them, which are a result of their different pasts. Their common place is the post-apocalyptic world and they both attempt to make sense of this world, which none of them are truly familiar with. Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road (2006) takes place after the world has seen its end. The novel portrays the remnants of a catastrophic happening, a world in which the very world we know so well has been cut down to the bone, to mere "parsible entities", and so has the language that McCarthy uses to portray it. The focus of this paper is language, memory and experience, as these are intricately connected and substantial for understanding the complications of the post-apocalyptic world. The paper starts by defining the distinct characteristics of the minimalist writing style to establish a broad understanding of the genre. Hereafter, the paper turns its focus on The Road and characterizes the man and boy with emphasis on memory, experience and language. The relationship between the man and the boy is investigated with particular focus on their way of communicating in the post-apocalyptic Jane Ladefoged 49 world. The paper proceeds to discuss minimalistic features in regards to the novel and investigates in which ways the novel conforms to minimalism and in which ways it is atypical for the genre. I then examine what effect the distinct writing style has on understanding the narrative. Finally, I examine and discuss how language and memory become paradoxical in the post-apocalyptic world. The boy and man are significant for understanding the interconnections between past and present, but the novel in its entirety is also a necessary and inevitable component in understanding the paradox of language and memory. The paper argues that The Road, in its encounter with readers, becomes an ironic work, because readers subconsciously engage their own memory, experiences and connotations to make sense of the post-apocalyptic world, although the post-apocalyptic world is foreign and in many ways incompatible with the world that readers know.

1988

Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, 2007

Introduction by G.M. FOSTER I've worked with many jazz musicians in my life, including Art Blakey, Juniah Booth, Ron Carter, John D'Earth, Joel Futterman, Burton Greene, Dave Kikoski, Stefan Lessard, LeRoi Moore, Hilton Ruiz, Walid Taha El, Omar Wilson, and others. I learned more about creative improvisation from Buhaina [Art Blakey] than from any writer. He used to say: "You have to give up everything you know in every performance." Creative improvisation takes a lifetime of preparation and practice. New poems are composed in my mind long before I commit words to paper. Writing is the gesture of a prepared mind. When I read a poem in performance with jazz artists, I improvise on the written text, introducing new phrases, images, stanzas - whole strings of ideas that come through me. Responses arise in rhythm and tone as we listen to each other. A parallel consciousness is born out of collaboration: not the ordinary working mind, not the subconscious, but a third state. I may feel like a deer standing in the road, stunned by the headlights, but I'm speaking.