on beauty-ending

I think that Howard was unhappy with how his life was going towards the beginning of the book, and so he messed everything up to start over.  I've already written this, but Howard seemed miserable about his family and job.  He always talked about his job, but he seemed either bored or extremely unhappy with it.  He also was married to a woman who used to be physically beautiful, but wasn't anymore.  He did not get along with his children either, he almost disliked them from this thoughts about them.  I think that is why he committed the affair.  Maybe he just needed a break from his life, or he wanted a way out.  I think it was one of those two things.  It was why he had an affair with a woman who was opposite of Kiki in every way.  Their race, weight, education; they were different in every way.  Then at the party when Kiki saw him with Claire, they were almost flirting at his household in front of his wife; I do not know what else he would expect to happen other then getting caught.  He then fails at the end of the book when he completely blows his speech in Boston.  I think subconsciously he must have wanted to fail, maybe to start off again somewhere else, almost start a new life.

on beauty-wednesday

On page 153 there is a poem that Claire wrote titled On Beauty that is obviously extremely important because that is what the book is titled, but I was wondering what he significance of it was.  I'm not sure if it was important because it was read when the Dean was talking to Claire about the affair, or because of the content, but it is for some reason.  I think maybe that it said that beauty does not take away sadness, nor does not being beautiful.

art and lies: monday

Towards the beginning of class, the subject of trophy wives has been mentioned.  It is funny, because when reading this book I thought Kiki was a type of trophy wife for Howard.  I do not mean a traditional trophy wife, but one unique for Howard.  Howard seems to have some sort of disdain for his parents, specifically his father.  In my mind, I imagine Howard marrying Kiki partly because it was kind of like him revolting against his father, and that is what made her appealing to him.  I think the book said that she was good looking as well.  Now, it has become much more complicated for Howard.  His children have problems identifying with their race (and seemingly annoy him) and his wife has gained a large amount of weight.  A lot of things have happened where it seems like his life has gotten off the track he thought it would be on.  It's no longer just Kiki and him having fun as young adults.   Near the end of the section kipps and belsey, Howard talked about how he still loved his wife when he was 40 when other men had gotten divorced.  I'm not sure if he means he then stopped, or if he still does and for whatever reason had an affair.  

My feelings towards Howard are pretty odd; at least unexpected.  I think it is because I'm a guy, and most girls would get pissed reading this, but Howard seems miserable throughout this book which makes me almost sympathize with him rather then feel anger towards him.  I just finished kipps and belsey though, so maybe Howard comes off badly in the near future stirring  my hate towards him; but for some reason I feel just as sympathetic towards him as I do towards Kiki.  He is in this no-win position with his kids and wife; books and movies like this make me hesitant of wanting to get married.  I can picture him enjoying the fact that he is going to marry someone like Kiki; then there are a lot of side effects that he never considered he would have to deal with.  Now, his children say he is selfish and blow him off while Kiki has let go of her body; it seems to me like Howard is miserable.  He even mentally makes fun of his wife and children, he does it a lot when they see the Mozart concert.  When someone gets stuck in a position like that, what do you do?  I'm not really sure.  I do dislike Howard though.  In this book, I'm not really fond of any of the main characters.  Howard is overly condescending towards everyone, he even looks down on other faculty members.  Kiki is kind of annoying, I think because she acts differently when she is around different ethnic groups.  Mostly because a lot of the book is describing her thoughts, which there so numerous it gets kind of annoying.  Jerome is extremely feminine, and does not add much.  Levi seems absurd.  Zora attempts to act extremely scholarly, but kind of comes off like a doofus, which is how her father describes her.  There are not really any characters that I can relate to, or really like.  The character that draws the most interest from me is Victoria, she seems like she has a lot of sides to her, or at least strikes interest in me.  Especially how she acted with Howard at the end of the section, she had some sort of "coolness" about her that no-one else in the novel has.  She was almost flirting with Howard, and had the nerve to put on rap music at his party.  I feel like she might become more prominent later on in the book.

on beauty-class 1

I'm glad we're going to read this entire book, and talk about it in class.  I really like this book so far, partly because the writing is pretty simple but I can tell there are a lot of underlying themes.  So it will be interesting to hear very intelligent opinions and to gain insight into this novel.  One thought I had when reading this book was that I really do not want to have children.  It was like what I was thinking when I was watching the movie "Dan In Real Life".  In that movie, Dan could do nothing right in the eyes of his children, and I feel like Howard is kind of in that same boat.  Howard is essentially treated fairly badly by Jerome and his wife, and seems slightly annoyed by the youngest son, Levi.  He obviously cares, he had good intentions when he went to the Kippses home when he thought Jerome was going to get married, but got into trouble doing that by his wife and Jerome.  I was also trying to figure out what Kiki was talking about when she talked about the mistake Howard made (43).  I thought she was talking about him going to the Kippses, but then she said, "she had measured a nameless, faceless woman in a hotel room next to what she knew of herself" and said something about one stupid night, and also said, "Your husband will screw somebody else, you will forgive him, you will stay".  It was interesting to me that such a big topic was mentioned so quickly.  And is Jerome mad at his father because of the debacle at the Kippses or because of his father's unfaithful behavior?  

art & lies: chapter reading

Picasso:  These questions came to my mind to ask when reading this chapter closely...

-I wondered why the father would name his daughter Picasso, but then discourage her from painting.  I feel like if you are a painter, and name your child Picasso, it is almost like you want her to be a painter, not the opposite.

-It is also weird that the father doesn't want his daughter to follow in his footsteps.  I thought that this book might be based in an earlier time period, but later on in the chapter it says that some gate is getting torn down in 1995, so I assume it is 1995.  In 1995, I feel like working in a factory is more masculine then painting.  I guess in their setting it is not, but if someone asked me which one of those professions is more masculine, I would immediately answer factory worker.  Most parents try to push their own interests on their children as well.  If a father played basketball, a lot of times he'll try to get his son or daughter to play basketball as well.  I found it weird that the father was so against his daughter following his interest in painting.

-I don't really get the part about there being two different staircases.  I guess one might symbolize (the path she wants to take in life), and how it doesn't align with her families'?

-She is obviously not very fond of her family.  I couldn't tell if there was some sort of sexual tension between her and her brother, or if that is not even close to being the case.  She said something about how they shared rooms through adolescence, and later he wanted her to sit on his lap.  He could just have teased her a lot, I couldn't really figure that out.  On page 43, she said she hated her brother, which did not surprise me, but I was surprised when she said she loved her mother because it seemed as though she was ripping her mother apart for a lot of the chapter.

-Picasso then starts describing a ship like it is a person, and talking about all these different colors, and she painted her body all these weird colors, and I really got kind of lost.  It was like she decided to smoke marijuana, and then continue writing, and all these colors were being described that were kind of perplexing her or something.  It reminded me a little of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" or some Beatles song.  It kind of confused me as to what exactly was happening.  On the last page of the chapter, her family calls for a doctor because they think she has gone mad, so my guess is that the author was trying to show this maybe?

This story makes me feel a little disoriented towards Picasso.  The word unconventional does not begin to describe Picasso or her family.  I almost asked "What is going on?" out-loud to myself during this chapter.  The father does not want her to be an artist, but if asked how I would describe her, and the chapter in general, I would probably say very artsy.

art & lies: 3/30

My first thought when I read the chapter name "Handel", I thought it was an artists name, probably because another name of a chapter was Picasso.  I googled Handel after I read a little of the book, and it was an old German man who wrote opera, which Handel does as well (Not sure if this is coincidence or on purpose).  This book is kind of hard to put together, or retain all of it.  It reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie, like "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Darjeeling Limited".  I like those movies, but I'm not sure why I like them or why they are good in a cinematic sense.  This book is kind of like that for me.  I'm not sure how to even describe this chapter.  It seems like it is following Handel's mind, almost like a blog.  It is not exactly like a blog, but the writing reminds me of how a mind works.  It kind of jumps all around, it is not perfectly laid out.  I think the "lies" part of the book so far is how Handel is giving his opinions about the realities of the world.  For example, he mentioned the homeless people; and how since it is illegal for them to be on the street, now people do not have as much sympathy for them.  

Handel interests me a lot.  It seems he has no interest in having a relationship with a woman, but loves women.  He talks about being a devout Catholic, yet he went to a brothel.  I wish there were a lot of footnotes explaining what some things mean, or how in DVDs, there are extra features where the director explains a lot of things.  I wish Winterson was explaining some of the depth of this book.  

When I was thinking of Handel though, it reminded me of a conversation I was having with a buddy a while ago.  A Bright Eyes song came on his computer, and it was a very depressing song.  It is a band consisting of one person, Conor Oberst.  He is apparently some kind of prodigy; he is super smart.  We then talked about how it seems like people who are extremely smart who think really deeply into areas of life are a lot of times depressed or cynical about life.  I'm not sure if this is true, but we were thinking of all these people who fit into that category.  I was thinking about how Handel fits into this category as well.  He is obviously very intelligent; he is a surgeon.  He also thinks a lot about how the world works and a lot of the bad in life.  There are a couple of sentences on page 26 that even touched on what I had been thinking.  Handel says he is about to leave his city and never return.  He then says, "This action, my friends conclude, comes out of an excess of what the French call La Sensibilite.  Too much feeling is not welcome in a man."  This is exactly what I was thinking about, that Handel is nagged continuously by these deep thoughts of his.  When Handel's friend asked "How shall I live?" a lot of people would not have pondered the question at the depth or length of time that Handel did.

I really wondered about a couple of things I couldn't answer.  I was not sure about the significance of the very first paragraph.  It is obviously very significant and important, but I'm not sure what that is.  There also seemed to be a lot of references to light.  Handel is always talking about how light is being shown on different objects.  Handel also points out the color white a lot.  He describes how white the shirt is that he wore to the opera, how white his bed is, how white the brothel was.  I think there has to be significance to all of these, but I do not know what it is.  This is why I wish there was some footnotes like I mentioned above, because I'm sure knowing some of these things would really help unravel the book.

3 versions of The Child and Flowers

The three different views of the poem "The Child and the Flowers" by Mrs. Hemans were all very different.  The view I enjoyed the most was the "page image" view.  It looked like 3 pages from a book that you can see on your screen; it was a scanned image of the physical pages.  I could even slightly see the words on the other side of the page.  I liked this the best because it was like I was reading an actual book, which I like more then reading words on a screen.  Getting to the end of a page feels good to me, like I'm progressing through the book.  I have no interest in the Kindle from Amazon, because I would not want to read a book electronically.  The next image I enjoyed was the HTML version.  It looked a lot like a webpage, or what I am writing on this blog.  It is not as easy to read as a book, but it is still organized in a clear, concise fashion.  My weakness is when there are that many words on a computer screen, sometimes they start to blur together and I really need to focus on what I am reading to grasp it and process it so I remember it after I read it.  The worst by far for me was the TEI version.  It was one big riff-raff of words which looked like an elementary student typed it.  It was one big paragraph with no clear spacing.  Not only was it one big paragraph, but there are random words and numbers within the one large paragraph, which made it very hard to read the poem/short story.  I think that version is what people program into computers so it shows up like the HTML version, but just reading that is difficult, as difficult as it probably could be.