Notes 2-24

Get a copy of the Bozeman Chronicle--look at news reported as a mythical document. Please see Dr. Sexson's paper published in the Mississippi Review "Man Reading".

Address three deaths: Dorcon in Daphnis and Chole (pg 46-48)
Pagan Hero, Christian Saint: two deaths (horse and woman)--all three are the elements of descent

Please read Paul and Thecla for Monday.

Displaced Fairytale

So there’s this old washed up guitar player named Eric Miller who works at Town Pump. One day at work, Miller’s working and his old buddy from the high school band walks in. Wyatt the King is his name. Miller and Wyatt get to talking, and Miller finds out that while he dropped out to raise his kid, this guy got discovered and plays for The Wet Sprocket, one of the biggest names in the music industry. Miller finishes his shift and the two go to these really sleezy bars and reminisce about the old days. And when they’re less than sober, Miller starts telling stories to try and save face. He starts to brag about this daughter, and how she’s a really great musician herself, and while Miller’s career failed, his daughter will make it big. And the friend yeah, sure Miller. And Miller gets pissed, so he tells his old buddy the rock star that his daughter writes beautiful music, that she’s a composer. And his buddy says, really? And Miller starts going on and on about how amazing the music is, and the guy gets fed up and calls bullshit. And Miller says, no really. She can. So the buddy says, alright. If she’s really that brilliant, I will listen to a song that she’s written. And if it’s gold, I’ll record it for my next album and give you full royalties. And that sounds pretty good to Miller, so when he stumbles home the next day he puts his daughter on a bus and sends her downtown to the King’s recording studio. And the girl starts crying on the bus, because she’s never written a measure of music in her life but she doesn’t want to let her father down. So she’s panicking and not sure what to do when this kid with huge glasses and owl eyes sits down next to her. What’s wrong? He asks. And she tells him everything. He listens without saying anything, and when she finishes he’s like: But I’m a composer. I could help you out. And she’s like oh man that would be so awesome if you could! But why would you help me? And he’s says, I’m a good guy. But also, I really dig seeing you. Could we have a date after you get out of this mess? And she says yes and gives him her number, and he hands over this sheet of music. Well, Wyatt the King loves the music. He records the song and plays it for all his buddies, and they think it’s gold too. So Wyatt wants another one. But the girl doesn’t have another one. So she calls up owl eyes and is like, duuuuuude. That was so good, the King wants another song. Could you write another one? And the composer says yes, because I’m a good guy. But also, I would really like to see you again. Would you like to go on this trip to the coast with me this fall? The trees are so beautiful then…and because the girl is scared and doesn’t know what else to do, she agrees. So the composer sends her another song and the King loves it and records it. By this point, both of these singles have attracted the attention of everyone the King has played it for. And the King decides he wants an entire album written exclusively by Miller’s daughter and wants to hire Eric Miller as the lead guitarist for the upcoming tour. So the Miller’s daughter, who loves that her father is finally happy and about to live his dream, runs to the composer and asks for an entire album of work. And the composer says, yes, I will, because I’m a good guy. But Miller’s daughter, I love you. Marry me, and I’ll do whatever you ask. And even though the Miller’s daughter doesn’t love him, she agrees because she loves her father and they have sex for the first time that night. So the composer gives her an entire album, and when the king hears it he is so overjoyed that he asks the Miller’s daughter to marry him and cowrite all of his songs, because he’s fallen in love with her music as well as her. And the Miller’s daughter doesn’t know what to do, but she loves her father so she says yes and sleeps with the King. Later that night, she gets a call from the composer, who’s crying, saying that she played him and doesn’t love him. And she’s says, but yes, I do! And I’m pregnant with your child. And the composer says I want nothing more to do with you. But I want that child. And she says you can’t have it, I’m going to marry the King and he’ll raise it as his child and we’ll tour the country in our band. And the composer says fine. If you can prove that you loved me, I’ll let you keep the child and have nothing more to do with you. And she says, oh yes, but how will I prove it to you? And he says: speak my name. And then she realizes that she doesn’t know his name. She never asked. So he says call me when you find it out, but if you don’t by the time the kid is born it’s mine. You owe me that much at least, and hangs up the phone. So she’s distraught. She takes to walking the streets at night and visiting bars to try to forget her troubles. One night, she goes to the Cat’s Paw and the composer is up on the stage for open mic night, performing an original song. And it goes like this:

Today I’m blue, but tomorrow’s day is new

The next I’ll have the product of a love gone sour

I hope that whore never knew

That my name is Ronald Brouwer!

So she calls him the next day and says your name is Ronald Brouwer. Maybe you shouldn’t have sang about that at the Cat’s Paw last night. And he screams the devil led you there! The devil! And snaps his phone in half.

Notes 2-15

Displaced Fairytale presentations start tomorrow! From the top of the alphabet down.
Read: Lucius and the Ass, Paul and Thela, The Pagan Hero, Christian Saint by next Monday
Read Kenny, Oranda, Ashely, Jessica, everyone's blog!

To add to the list of peripherals: castration.
A cicada flew down Chloe's cleavage to be plucked out by Daphnis. Look at the mythology of the cicada--people transformed, forgot to eat because they sang too much
Dionysus--god of deconstruction and undoing

Eros--feels the drop of oil from the lamp when Psyche looks upon her lover. He wakes up and runs to mother, Aphrodite.

The great donkey stories: Don Quixote (Donkey Hotay)
both a comedy and romance:
-lives in his imagination
-rest of novel done in realistic setting
-endures most the most cruel acts and inhumanity from rest of humanity

Lucius gets what he deserves--the transformation into the most base and vile of creatures: the Ass.
Midsummer Night's Dream: goddess engages in bestiality with a donkey
hierogamy: sexual ritual that plays out a marriage between god and goddess

Synethesia: a great gift of chance, to confuse the senses.

Notes 2-13

Look at Jill, Jessica, and Matt's blog.
Make displaced fairytale sound like a news report.

Midsummer Nights Dream: "the best in these things are but shadows and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them". It's all in how you imagine it--imagination must go to work on the crude types of romance to amend them (Frye).

Watch "Au Hasard Balthazar" if you get a chance--movie about mistreated donkey, version of Ass story.

Another ongoing list of Peripherals essential to romance:
pits
twins
brother battle
sparagmos (Echo)--the dismemberment of a victim forming a part of some ancient rituals and represented in Greek myths and tragedies
paradox
mirrors
incest
best friend
Harlequin
animal companions
fall

Happy Valentines Day! Celebration of Eros, love between man and woman
Lucius needs to eat roses to transform back to human--the lowly animal who can speak. An aspect of romance...
How can there be redemption for the characters--when bottom gets to top and top to bottom, the paradox.

Read the Pagan Hero, The Christian Saint in The King and The Corpse (same chapter)
If you get a chance read The Myth of the Birth of the Hero by Otto Bank

Climbing out of the Bitter

"There is no remedy, no cure, for Love, no drink, no food, no spells to chant, nothing--only kisses and embraces and lying down naked together" (159). Like Jill's choice of a painting representation of Daphnis and Chloe, I chose this one because the colors of the lovers and the rocks all blend together. The pastoral lovers are a part of their landscape.

We would like to believe that imagination, when left to its own devices, produces original and fantastical work. However, this is not the case. Imagination is more inclined towards conventions and formulas than the fanciful. The actions described are external, not internal. However, these formulaic plots describing external events layer in such a way to describe our human internal structure: "The realist, with his sense of logical and horizontal continuity, leads us to the end of his story; the romancer, scrambling over a series of disconnected episodes, seems to be trying to get us to the top of it" (Frye 50) or "Perhaps literature as a whole, like so many works of literature, ends in much the same place that it begins" (Frye 51). Which seems to point to the function of romance is to lead us back to the beginning; back to our role as the wide eyed listener, the child with naive wonder and innocence. In Daphnis and Chloe, the world associated with this innocent child stage--the pastoral setting, the seasons of spring and summer, and the animals--are all associated with the innocent stage according to Frye. Daphnis and Chloe must eventually leave the idyllic for a world of conflict (and adventure, but of a less exciting variety). They endure a winter apart as well as unhappiness caused from a momentary apparent unequal birth. However, all is restored by the end with the mystery of birth solved, and the plot climbs out of the nightmare world of discontent to the top again--the happy ending. It returns to the same state of happiness depicted at the start, but innocence is lost. To fulfill the conventions of romance and complete the mandatory happy ending, the woman must lose her virginity. "That thing that they do must be something sweet, something that wipes out the bitterness of love" (D&C 179). The bitterness of love is the conflict of the romance, the loss of virginity the resolution. As Frye discusses, the stresses and plot complications associated with the virgin before her marriage are at the center of the conflict of the romance. Once she has passed out of the virginal world, we lose interest. She's happily married and having happily married sex, and I guess we don't need to hear about that. Bring back the blank white sheet and the stresses that go with it. And the pirates. I could hear about that again.

Notes 2-10

Read Lucius of the Ass for the next meeting.
Look at Jennifer and Matt's blog

Revelation (Apocalypse) sense of fiction as a quest
Everything that you need to see is there already--you just need to draw back the curtain.
All revelations are remembrances

Satire is a lesson, parody a game.

(pg 72) Frye: Daphnis and Chloe referenced--person honored above all else is Eros

Old Comedy--Aristophanes, Death and Resurrection
New Comedy--Shakespeare Comedy

Notes 2-8

Raymond Carver "What do we talk about when we talk about love?" idyllic and ideal.

What is required for a romance?
Required: quest, revelation, apparent death, happy ending
A continually lengthening list of Peripherals: pirates, marriage, oracles, substitution, foundlings, noble birth, etc.
(Marriage is by pirates because all marriage is essentially abduction, all marriage is rape--this woman belongs to this man)

Men always blame the women.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) "The Blank Page"--the wedding sheet before the stain of blood, the virginal page before ink, the deflowering of the paper with words.

Dionysus is throughout Daphnis and Chloe (see Jessica's blog)
Dionysus intoxicates and he destroys--he is the god who appears.

The word Daphnis comes from the tree--the laurel tree, Apollo chasing the human women.
Trees are important in Daphnis and Chloe
Chloe is the first shooting of the tree of Daphnis
Art and nature are the same--fusion of male and female, celebrating their union as one.

Look at the antpilot everyone is on. Be driven out of your head and release the brave reckless gods within us all. Relate beyond the formulas.

Diaphanous--light, delicate, and translucent

Not only is there no apparent death, there is no death.
Romance is the core of what we call fiction.

Read: To My Coy Mistress (if you get a chance)
Sex: the basis of popular culture.

Notes 2-6

For next meeting: use one of the image representations from Google of Daphnis and Chloe as well as your favorite passage from Daphnis and Chloe.

The best about literature is apparent in the lowest forms (especially in the formulaic structures of romance).
Alcestis: saves her husband's life by dying on behalf of him--taking his place--the substitution.
Comedy doesn't like people who die: becomes tragedy. If there is a death in a romance, it is only an apparent death.

Look at Ashely's blog--you want something greater than mere formulas in your life.

(pg 78) Frye: "It may be thought that I am...emphasis on virginity"
Daphnis and Chloe are a reverse of the other two romances (Ephesian Tales and Callirhoe), in which erotic love is back grounded and adventure is in the foreground.
Virginity is suggestive of a realm of innocence and purity and ideal relationship in romance.

Chaos that has been brought into artistic order--D&C is the ideal romantic relationship. The two lovers are deeply equal to each other.
The loss of one's virginity is a fate worse than death (please see "Paul and Virginia", Virginia drowning in petticoats with one hand on heart and the other on her clothes.

(pg 82) Frye: "Sometimes, of course, the heroine has to..."
Romance wants to take us beyond death.
Mystic marriage--a fusion--the ideal union of marriage. Romance insists upon this.

Notes 2-3

For next meeting: read Ch. 3 in Frye and Callirhoe in Greek Fiction book.

Ashely and Jill perform Callirhoe! With puppets.
Perfect romance: very complicated plot, happy ending
Callirhoe is one of the archetypal romances

Jung: sees patients describing the same stories and symbols in dreams over and over again, formulates idea of the collective unconscious (founded in myths and archetypes).
Collective unconscious: part of unconscious mind that is derived from ancestral memory--psychological zone beyond the personal unconscious, remember everything that has happened to everyone.
Jung's dream of descending floors and trapdoors to find a ground floor littered with broken pieces of pottery. Ground floor is connected to everyone else's basements
Freud said collective unconscious was unverifiable, no evidence to suggest existence
Jung's "Psychological Types"--look at the quaternary test, Myer Briggs Test.

5 ancient romances are incredibly crude
(pg 73) Frye: pay attention.

Force and Fraud
Force: male hero (The Iliad, poem of force--violence, adventure, sheer strength)
Fraud: instead of force--fraud, cunning, trickery, deception

Woman must use deception and trickery (her wits) to survive.

Notes 2-1

Day of displaced fairytale presentations has been moved up to February 17th. Try to keep your fairytale to a single page.
Read introductory material in all books if you can.
Additional reading material we talked about: Bryan Boyd's "On the Origin of Stories"

Little is known about the Dionysian mysteries: Daphnis and Chloe can be seen as a kind of code to these mysteries.

(pg 36) Frye: "The long standing association..."
(pg 58) Frye: "We said that in romance as a whole..."

Read Jessica Thomas' blog about the movie (and perfect romance?) Natural Born Killers (we identify with the lovers and desire their happy ending even with the knowledge that they committed horrible crimes and should be punished).

Why are works of literature subscribing to the crude romantic storyline of Daphnis and Chloe? (an example: Ada by Nabokov)
Many versions of "The Blue Lagoon" have been made and remade in the image of D&C: "wedding and bedding" convention. Obstacles lie in the way of the ultimate goal: to get into bed. How do films (such as It Happened One Night) made in more conservative times avoid the censorship and portray this? Euphemisms.

Romance and comedy are all about sexuality and, at the right moment, losing the preserved virginity.
In Daphnis and Chloe, spring and summertime are the seasons for coupling--the world of birds and bees. Biology itself is telling the story: no sense in dabbling in morality, only in propagating itself.

Story of Rapunzel--rampion is self fertilizing, both mother and daughter. Enchantress and Rapunzel have a stable relationship in tower but it takes two to tango: the prince comes along.
Virginity is used as a bargaining chip for the female? (Frye)

All obstacles to the union of young lovers are eventually won over to the other point of view: youth and freedom.
Ephesian Tales: romance as adventure, Daphnis and Chloe: romance as young, innocent love.
Virgin=naive? How does this relate to preservation of virginity?

Abu Kassam's Slippers: Don't be a miser, be kind to people, change your shoes (change your path)
What you do in this moment is what becomes unchanging in the past.