The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVII -- chapter 16: DEFENESTRATING FOG

1. The first paragraph holds Eco's second mention of tapeworms (proglottid), and this time regarding their divisive mode of reproduction.  Is this (I'm being a little sarcastic here) Freudian?
2. I love the indirect comparison between the Seven Dwarfs and the kings of Rome.
3. Le corna, or "the horns," is the inadvertent obscene gesture in the aspirin ad.  The version shown is the augmentative of the one-handed horns, which are made by closing the thumb and the middle and fourth fingers and then pointing the remaining fingers (index and pinky, if you're not keeping track) at your target or, more figuratively, toward hell.  It's a versatile gesture with a number of variations, and happened to be the favorite and much-abused gesture of a close friend when I was in Italy.
4. Why is a stamp a perfect window--and so much simpler, if not cheaper, than books and comics--to another land and/or time?
5. Interesting how all the pulp and press from Part 2 find connections, subtle, tangential, and/or direct, to the truths of his memories in Part 3.
6. As far as storytelling is concerned, who is Gragnola?
7. "...it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros...."
8. Compare the figurative, fog-laden gorge of Yambo's memory to the real, childhood nightmare.  The latter was overcome by dedicated and systematized training.  Is there a correlative here to penetrating the memory fog?
9. Next character: as far as storytelling is concerned, who is Durante?
10. "...because we knew that half a Hail Mary would basically paralyze them."
11. "I lack the courage to go to Don Cognasso and confess… and besides, confess what? That which I did not do, nor even see, but only guessed at? Not having anything to ask forgiveness for, I cannot even be forgiven. It is enough to make a person feel damned forever."  There's something big here.  This story of terror and heroism and guilt occurs just at Yambo's coming of age.  All this, combined with Gragnola's ideologies and that of Yambo's books, comics, and grandfather, should add up to who he became as an adult.  Thoughts?
12. Following up from #8: The bottom of both the figurative and literal gorges hold the same event.  Is this Clarabell's treasure?  Is this, after everything, a parallel of some sort to the First Folio?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XI -- chapter 10: TIME'S TEMPLE, IMMURED

"Ugolino' by Carpeaux

According to Brer Rabbit, everyone needs a laughing place, which, as far as I'm concerned, is really about as crucial to life and existence as water and food and air and whatever else.  Everyone--more especially, or at visibly, kids, but all adults have them as well, just with more variation in form and location--needs a brier patch, a hiding place, a closet or tree-house or attic or, in this case, a wall-up former-chapel now forgotten where treasures can be stored, secret prayers offered, dark rites performed, etcetera; but how many have such a fantastical treasure house--Cave of Wonders--as does Yambo?  Having such a place is as cliche' a fantasy as immurement is a terror, and here in chapter ten, both coexist and balance, almost symbiotically.  I've hopefully check every attic of every house I've lived in, hoping for that escapist's window to the past, and felt the vicarious thrill of reading about it in books or watching it in movies (Harry Potter's Room of Requirement, the attic here, The Bridge to Terabithia, and even corny movies like The Lake House).  This is why I hope someday to build a house with a private library at the top of a tower accessible exclusively by an iron spiral staircase.  This is why I have family members who love old rundown barns or houses.  This is why I keep a flashlight in the car.  I think I speak for everyone: we all want to discover and possess a secret place grander or more romantic than our current, likely inadequate, laughing place.

1. Based on Paola's psychologist's explanation, are Yambo's fears and insecurities regarding his past valid?  Along the same lines, cross-textually, who was/is more affected by the Alice books, Alice Liddell or Lewis Carroll/children or adults?  Is Paula over-simplifying?
2. "This one knows you always bring him chewing gum.  That's all."
3. How is it appropriate that the doorway is walled up and was also once the entrance to the chapel?
4. "...and I often hid there and did God knows what."  (Haha!  Get it!?)
5. This is a circumstantial connection of course, as immurement is among the most primal of fears (and Poe's bread and butter, no less), but this reminds me, at least on the outset, of Count Ugolino from L'Inferno, not to mention all those Poe stories.
6. "At that moment a thunderstorm was gathering."  In just the last chapter, Yambo (if not Eco, but here I think indistinguishable), criticizes Romance-period writers for their manipulation of the elements to echo a book's plot and circumstances.  Isn't that what he's doing right here?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana X -- chapter 9: FLIP-FLOPPING ITALY

1. This might be entirely out of context or beyond the scope of the book, but the disregard (contextually justified) of his sister's box of elementary- and middle-school things makes me think about the degree of selfishness this trip represents in Yambo.  He has had one afternoon with his daughters and grandchildren that, perhaps, pulled him at least slightly and temporarily away from himself.  Of course we have no indication that their visit did any more to help him than all his much less selfless hours, but yet I wonder: might he not be better off simply living his life as best he can, and if the memories come, great, and if not, then, oh well?  This taps into the issue, of course, that we've touched on already: would a character realistically want to rediscover (and likely thereby have to relive) his past, having to balance and negotiate the potential discovery of unsavory memories, acts, thoughts, etcetera.  None of Yambo's friends or family have acknowledged (beyond his infidelity, which, apparently, is no big secret anyway) that there's anything Yambo should be scared or hesitant to discover, but still, is there a potential advantage (I don't know of any advantage specifically, so I'm throwing the question "out there" for suggestions) to altruism rather than selfish seclusion?
2. What do you make of Yambo's dubiously effecting act of turning on the radio panel light and then playing a record? The last chapter indicated the necessity of the records rather than radio, but why does he bother with the entirely connotative radio light?
3. Gee Whiz 1: The B and V phonemes are very similar, and in some alphabets even interchangeable, and commonly misused by children learning to speak, among others.  I'm not going to get into the details, but if you don't believe it, try out each letter and consider what your mouth is doing to produce each sound.
4. Connect the lie of fog to the fascist propaganda; then disconnect it (or whatever you think best) by the "truth" of fog.
5. Gee Whiz 2:  Italian pronouns for address, and their levels of formality: tu (singular) = you, informal; lei (singular) = you, formal; voi (also 2nd person plural) = you (singular), more formal; loro (also 3rd person, plural) = you (singular or plural), super formal, as in for royalty or, more likely today, sarcastic formality.
6. "That song must be why, years later, I took note of this passage from Corazzini’s poem 'The Streetlamp': Murky and scant in the lonely thoroughfare, / in front of the bordello doors, it dims, / and the good smoke that from the censer swims / might be this fog that whitens out the air.  [¶]  "'Lili Marleen' came out not too long after the giddy 'Comrade Richard.' Either we were generally more optimistic than the Germans, or in the interim something had happened, our poor comrade had grown sad and, tired of walking through muck, longed to go back to his streetlamp. But I was coming to realize that the same series of propagandistic songs could explain how we had gone from a dream of victory to one of the welcoming bosom of a whore as hopeless as her clients."
7. What is the potential for the Italians' experience in WWII to be a parallel of some sort to Yambo's current predicament?
8. What is the value of one's past childish ambitions and dreams to an adult?
9. Unbreakable.
10. "I was still missing some link, perhaps many links. At some point I had changed, but I did not know why."
11. Finally, what do you make of the chapter title?

A BEAUTIFUL QUOTATION FROM HULME

Taken from letter Hulme wrote while on the battlefront (emphasis added):

The only thing that makes you feel nervous is when the shells go off & you stand out revealed quite clearly as in daylight.  You have then the most wonderful feeling as if you were suddenly naked in the street and didn't like it. [...]  It's really like a kind of nightmare, in which you are in the middle of an enormous saucer of mud with explosions & shots going off all round the edge, a sort of fringe of palm trees made of fireworks all round it.

*

I believe I've said this before, but I'm reminded uncannily of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front every time I read anything Hulme wrote regarding the war.  The book is a beautiful and poetic examination of WWI through a German soldier's eyes.  His narration offers the same fireworks that Hulme mentions above.

*

East of Eden LV -- chpt55: THE END

I've written about 30 questions for this final entry, but they're all redundant; if you've made it this far, you've answered them all already.  Here are three:

1. Describe Cal's guilt (a deliberately ambiguous usage), and in the context of his family and family's history.
2. Discuss the role of the idea of "the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the heads of the children," especially considering the contextual fact of God as a father.
3. Is Caleb free?

East of Eden LIV -- chpt54: LATE AZALEAS

Happiness blooms late as the azaleas in the Trask residence and the tardy spring.  Interesting that as the inhabitants of the Salinas Valley find their superstitious way into blaming the war for the uncommon seasonality, so the Trasks' happiness might be considered late, though happy it is, and--well--is this happiness in spite of or because of the war?

Does the ultimately required resolution of the book's conflict depend on Aron's mortality (not morality, thank goodness)?

***

I think it's hilarious that both Cal and Abra ask, one after the other, Adam and Lee to come and join them on the picnic.  I wonder if for the maybe the first time in his life Adam catches on and claims necessary business at the ice house.  Lee, who's becoming both softer and more acerbic in his old age, just tells Cal he's a moron and refuses.

the very reason I wouldn't mind
living in California

East of Eden XLVI -- chpt46: HYPOCRISY, STUPIDITY, and SHAME

Chapter 46 is another one of Steinbeck's periodic inserts, and division from the central plots, that mark the story's presence in time, place, and--extrapolation of both--American history.  He opens, as he often does, with a reference to the land and local agriculture, and points out that the superstitious farmers--such a superstitious nature typical of agricultural communities throughout human history--blame the war on the year's irregular rain.  After all, two extreme irregularities must be connected, else they wouldn't occur simultaneously!

There are three items in this chapter that are likely important to, or at least indicative of, our overall story: the cruel treatment of the local German-American (a cruelty and hypocrisy typical of any inter-cultural conflict--can you think of any more modern examples?), the shame of the narrator and his sister at their joining in the communal abuse of the man, and the stupidity and tunnel-vision evident in the final sentence: "We thought we invented all of it [, a community's experience by its participation in a war] in Salinas, even the sorrow."

These three points all match one of the overall issues of the book.  What is it?  How do our main characters exemplify so much of these same hypocrisies, stupidities, and shames?  Also, and definitely more importantly, however, do they transcend them?

East of Eden XLII -- chpt42: THE GREAT WAR STRIKES THE SALINAS VALLEY

James Smith has kindly consented to offer his warring expertise to the benefit of this particular chapter, and I am grateful.  All I know about war is what I read in novels.

Counter-arguments notwithstanding, World War I was the most horrific war in world history.  What made the war so ghastly was combination of two things: one, the centuries-old tradition of lining up large armies of soldiers fairly directly against each other; and two, new technology.  Planes and tanks were used for the first time in World War I, and deadly poisonous gases produced a brutal type of mass murder with minimal effort or second thought for the human consequences.  Meanwhile, the soldiers themselves would spend months, at an enormous cost of human lives, fighting in trenches in deplorable conditions.

The war started with the political murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkans, an act that, while controversial, should never have precipitated such a war that would kill over nine million soldiers.  However, there were so many secret alliances at the time, and each declaration of war triggered another, that within less than a month, a regional conflict had quickly escalated into a horrible pan-European war.  From 1914-1916, the United States stayed out of the bloody conflict (in fact, President Wilson was famously reelected because, “he kept us out of the war”), but after the Germans torpedoed the RMS Lustiania, a British ship with over 1000 Americans on board, popular anger at Germany finally led the Americans into the conflict, which they would decisively swing in favor of the Allies, namely the United Kingdom, France, and Russia—although Russia would drop out by the end, due to the Bolshevik Revolution.

The war finally came to an end with an Armistice on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918 (now Veterans’ Day, or Remembrance Day), when Germans, dissatisfied with the progress of the war, started a general strike, freezing the German economy, took power, and negotiated with the Allies.  The Allies imposed extremely harsh conditions upon Germany, which many blame for the eventual start of World War II, and, in fact, Germany’s debt was so great, that they did not pay it off until earlier THIS YEAR, officially ending the First World War.

Reading Questions

Chapter 42 

1. “A war always comes to someone else.”  Is this still the way people think about war?  Has anything, perhaps television and news coverage, changed the way war becomes real for us?  What difference does it make if the war comes to you or to someone else? 
2. “One American was worth ten, or twenty foreigners in a fight.”  One of the themes of East of Eden seems to be delusion.  Adam is deluded into thinking that Cathy loves him and will be his faithful wife.  In turn, Cathy is deluded into thinking that she is so much smarter than everyone else that she can easily manipulate them.  How is this another example of delusion?  What does Steinbeck seem to say about its effects?  Does he offer any solution to the problem? 
3. “Pershing’s expedition.”  This refers to General John Pershing’s expedition into Mexico in 1916 and early 1917 in order to retaliate for Mexican Pancho Villa’s attacks on American border towns.  Although Pershing claimed the mission to be a success publicly, it was widely acknowledged as a disaster and an embarrassment to American forces. 
4. “Liberty Belles.”  This was a mass movement of women who helped raise support for the war effort.  Afterward, their effort and patriotism would help earn women the right to vote.
5. Notice how much more pessimistic the tone becomes as the chapter continues.  Is the Great War another example of a god that has come crashing down?
6. Will was right on the beans.  What does it say that he and Cal have to profit on other people’s misery?
7. “No Man’s Land.”  This term was first coined during World War I.  It was used to describe the land between the trenches on each side, in other words, the land that, “no man,” controlled, and over which they fought. 
8. “Hello, central, give me Heaven.”  “Hello Central,” is actual a key phrase in a book I just read, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain.  It dates back to the advent of the telephone when people had to call through a central operator before connecting to anyone, thus the phrase, “Hello, Central.” 
9. “I guess we were like a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose in the first flurry and it hurts and we wished it was over.”  Consider how Aron always cries but then, and somehow for the tears, fights stronger than all competition.  Is it possible he's being compared to America?