Cassio: "Oh, I have lost my reputation!!" Me: "Oh shush already."

It is truly amazing how much the people within Othello are enamored with this idea of reputation. Othello himself has built a reputation for himself, impeded as he is by being a Moor. Desdemona has a reputation of innocence and her father is the one who has spread this reputation around so that everyone thinks of her this way. However, Cassio seems to wonder what will become of him now that his reputation is soiled. It is fascinating to see how Iago consoled his 'friend' by saying that reputation is not who you are, but who people think you are.

Personally, I am fascinated with this idea of a reputation being more of a rumor; a colored glass through which people view your actions before they judge you. It is so true that the only thing a person can control is their actions. Once we do something, it is completely taken out of our hands. The opinions that people form from that moment on that will become our reputation are completely outside of our influence.

In a way, this idea is very liberating. Rather than worrying about how what you do will affect how people see you, this idea allows for you to relax and simply 'be yourself'. Although it can be frightening to realize how little control youa ctually have over your reputation, this means that the people who see you correctly will be the ones who are really taking the time to find out who you are; those who aren't content to just stop at the thin veneer of a reputation and call that a person's character. In the end - for all his faults - Iago makes a very valid point. What you do is not who you are, and your reputation certainly is not who you are. In the end, you decide who you are, and in so doing form your character. And that is who you really are. All else is simply a rumor.

WANGECHI MUTU

-MASK-

Wangechi Mutu is an artist originally from Nairobi, Kenya, who currently resides in New York. Having studied anthropology and fine art at Cooper Union and Yale, she graduated with her Masters of Fine Arts in 2000, and uses collage within her artwork. Mutu often cuts out her pictures from fashion magazines, national geographic, and magazines on African art in order to combine them in a collage showing a different perspective on beauty and feminism.

The piece above, entitled "mask" is a perfect (clean) example of her art style. She is very conscious of her own heritage and that of Africans all over the globe, along with the lies spread by the media in regard to the idealistic view of women. Within her art pieces, she actually criticizes these views, and so can be considered a true Feminist Artist. Often she uses her collage technique to distort the picture in the same way that the culture of our times distorts the ideas of what it means to be "beautiful".

It would be very fascinating to investigate her life story to see how that has affected her work, or to see how her work reflects her past experiences. Unfortunately, she seems to be very private about her personal life; choosing instead to allow her art pieces to act as her voice concerning world issues.

As far as this picture goes, it is a very interesting piece. In researching mask, I found that the image serving as her clothes is that of a voodoo doll, while the picture behind her is an image of a museum relic. What is intriguing is that the cutout of the voodoo doll covers part of her face as a mask, yet the rest of the image reveals more of her skin - arms and legs - as if she is both revealing and modest. Further yet,  the image of the voodoo doll seems to be cutting into her skin; this shows the restriction of the cultural image of beauty and perfection which limits the woman's self expression. Her body language is also contradictory. The legs suggest sexual prowress, or at least domination, while the position of the hands suggest submission. It is as if the very culture she lives in is tearing her in opposite directions between what it wants to see her as - an object of sexual desire - and who she really is.

Throughout her artwork, it is as if Wangechi Mutu is posing a question to each one of her viewers: What is it that you let define you? Do you define yourself, or do you adhere to the unfair and warped expectations of the society around you.

Website of Mutu's gallery in Las Angeles with Susanne Vielmetter

http://www.vielmetter.com/index.php?site=artists&fromlink=&a_id=63&detail=biography&artistname=wangechi_mutu

"Before me things created were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here..." -Dante

 ~*~

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that they can no longer see it The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."    -Invisible Cities

~*~

When I first read this paragraph I was a bit confused about what it was saying. Fires and suffering, not to mention infernos that still are not infernos and how to tell the difference. It took a few re-readings before I fully understood what this paragraph was trying to say. Calvino packs a lot of information into this one closing paragraph in order to explain the entire point of this novel. It just required me to step back and view the book as a whole in order to get some understanding of it.

Through the entire novel, Marco Polo has been telling Kublai Khan fantastic and whimsical stories about his empire and the individual cities within it. These stories about an empire that Khan believes to be decaying into ruin depict instead a flourishing empire, one that is progressing towards a better version of itself. Which one is true then? Is the empire indeed as corrupt as Kublai Khan says it is? Or perhaps Marco Polo is right, and each city he comes across is alive and thriving, even if they are not going about it in the most wholesome way. It is possible that real life examples could answer this question.

In anyone's life, whenever there is a complication, that person can only see the problem at hand. Not understanding or seeing the entire context results in the problem seeming much more important than it actually is. In his story, Calvino illustrates that life is in fact cyclical; different scenes or problems repeat themselves, but our human free will allows for change, a permutation that can completely change the course of events. Like gears working together, to remove or switch one causes the whole thing to change. To be slightly melodramatic, one small mutation has the potential to completely change the entire fabric of space and time. Marco Polo's stories serve to show thousands of small permutations that have changed each individual city (or the same city) to change in countless ways. Within his stories, time means nothing; he disregards it for the purpose of showing how the different decisions affected the structure of that city. Each different story then becomes an example of how the city could progress towards a perfect version of itself, free of the decay that Kublai Khan so fears.


But then why an inferno? Any mention of fire usually calls to mind negative mental images. Getting burned, destruction, and even ideas of Hell are tied into the visual images created by an inferno. And yet apparently this is the entire point of the book. Perhaps the inferno is the passion of the book; the obsession that makes Invisible Cities a novel. When you are caught up in an obsession, you often do not even realize that you are trapped within one. The walls of addiction and passion are often disguised, making the one trapped completely ignorant to their presence. Khan, trapped by his obsession with the decay of his empire, was unable to even look past that to see the bigger picture just as the people within the individual cities were trapped by their passions of death, beauty, dreams, and so on. Being so ensnared immediately takes away some free will, as the group of people are forced into place, like tiny gears, by human nature, and have no choice but to blindly follow the path set for them. The worst part is that, once trapped, they forget that they ever were any different, and so make no effort to change. Their lives immediately become circular, with no possibility for either change or progress. This would be the suffering of the inferno, which indeed does call to mind images of Hell; being forever fixed within the same state of being.


If this was the end of the story, it would be a very dreary novel. Instead, Calvino actually answeres the question born out of despiration; how to avoid such a fate. Each of us is within an inferno of our own. Whether of our own making, or formed by the society we live in, we are dictated by the passions that hold sway over us. However, it is said that the strongest steel is forged from the flames of Hell. Therefore, within suffering, or even (to be less dramatic) within the trudge of everyday life can be found Truths, things that illustrate meaning when things seem pointless. Through Marco Polo's discussions with Kublai Khan, Calvino shows that to avoid a predestined fate is to step back from the endless circle of life's events in order to discover the cyclical pattern that runs through it all; to find the truth wherever it can be found, whether in an empire or within individual cities, to find the one invisible city, the perfect version of all of them combined, and to follow the ever-narrowing circles that lead us to it. For it is only in stepping back that we can fully grasp the complete picture.

Invisible Cities

- by Italo Calvino

   So far, this is my favorite text that we have studied. It is amazing how Calvino uses the book to describe entire landscapes and cities to us, without any set narrative voice aside from the italicized conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
To me, this book is all about displacement. If displacement is indeed being forced to view a situation from the point of view of an outsider, then this story perfectly illustrates that concept. Marco Polo, having traveled to the court of Kublai Khan, has chosen to displace himself out of his normal surroundings of Venice, while Kublai Khan himself feels very displaced from his empire, stating that when you are an emperor, everyone is a stranger.

Calvino's book explores the idea of: how do you know and understand a place? Is it by the people? Or perhaps a place can be understood by its archetecture and what that shows about the people that live there rather than vice versa. In any case, if this entire book is in fact a story aabout one city and all the different perspectives of that one city, then it seems that the point is to say that the more you know, the more you know you don't know. In other words, Kublai Khan, who ruled over these cities which Marco Polo told him about had never seen them except through Polo's words. Without the explorer to tell him tales of the cities, Khan would have remained ignorant of them. Through hearing about a few cities, Khan realized how much he did not know of within his own empire.

Through the reflections of Marco Polo and the thoughts of Kublai Khan, this book emphasizes the idea of universal displacement; that no matter how powerful or learned someone is, it does not matter where they are or where they have been. The truth is that everyone feels displaced within their own situations, and this feeling changes how they see certain situations in the same way that Marco Polo's forced displacement within these 'cities' changed his perspective of them.

I find myself ambivalent...

am-biv-a-lence:
Webster dictionary
–noun

1.	uncertainty or fluctuation, esp. when caused by inability to make a choice or by a simultaneous desire to say or do two opposite or conflicting things.

2.

Psychology. the coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action, simultaneously drawing him or her in opposite directions

           In my opinion, Girl, Interrupted was really more of a reflection on growing up and maturing than just a documentation of one girl's experiences in an institution. Susannah did not believe that she was crazy until the doctors told her she had a problem with 'borderline' disorder. In the same way, each individual believes themselves to be normal until the institution of society manages to convince them that they are insane.

            Ambivalence IS the perfect word to describe Susanna, or anyone trying to find out who they are. Within the process of self-discovery and development, one is often ambivalent; torn between two different paths or choices. For Susanna, her choices were to either deny that she had any problem and continue behaving the same way, still in her comfort zone, or to grow up and change the way that she acted: still afraid, but knowing what she believed in and wanted to be.

          Personally I loved Susanna's description of crazy; that it was "you or me amplified". It is so true! we barely understand ourselves as it is; if our personalities or tendencies become too much for us to understand, we almost immediately jump to the conclusion that we are insane. For Susanna, her real problem was not insanity, but simply not understanding herself; something she learned while at the hospital.

          After reading "The yellow wallpaper" and watching this movie, I find the similarities very interesting indeed. Both women were sent away to get better and turned to writing/journaling to help them understand their situation. For Susanna, this habit helped her to understand those around her while she tried to understand and control herself. For the woman in "The yellow wallpaper" who was not allowed to write, the pent up frustrations and doubts led to her deteriorated mental state by the end of the short story. Obviously then, if you can not find a way to understand yourself or your situation, you soon find yourself on the verge of insanity, or something very like it in Susanna's case. The ambivalent attitude towards the two choices of 1) ignoring your problems and staying safe or 2) braving your sub-conscious in the hopes of actually seeing whast is wrong in order to fix it, is one of the most important questions of all. Which choice is the better one? As Socrates said; "Know Thyself". It is better, then, to self-examine and find something horrible or damaged rather than ignoring the fissure until it destroys you.

A room of my own. (Woolf Chapters 1 and 2)

First of all, I happen to think that "A room of one's own" by Virginia Woolf is in fact a work of nonfiction. In a sense, it is similar to the comment about the bible, that "all these stories are true, and some actually happened". To say that this story is not true simply because it seems like a work of fiction seems unacceptable. Woolf uses the story of Shakespeare's sister to illustrate the universal plight of women at the beginning of the 1900's. She talks about her research for this book (actually two lectures), and her surprise at finding out that the books about women were written by men. This seems a great injustice, as the men who wrote these books often had no more credit for writing them except for the fact that they were not women.

Woolf was asked to write her lectures on women and fiction, and says that this is an impossible task for she could never actually come to a conclusion about it. Rather, she says that she will talk only about one opinion; that a woman "must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Now the part about having a room of ones own in which to write makes sense. Again, in a time when it was the woman's job to take care of the household, writing would have been nearly impossible. Unless you were intending to write about your family, the noise and bustle would have been a distraction, and would have effectively inhibited inspiration. Woolf points out the inequality of men and women, saying that men were given the greater things by merit of their sex, and so had inspiration and the ability to write. Meanwhile, women were forced to survive on 'pea soup', a bland form of inspiration, lacking all the finery and richness of the male fare.

Again, it is my opinion that a person can write anywhere, even in a noisy household. If Jane Austen could write her stories in the parlor, hiding them under the ink blotter for fear of being caught, then anyone can write, no matter their surroundings. It stands to reason, however, that one's writings reflect the situation in which they were written. Austen's writings may very well reflect the duress under which they were penned. Woof argues that inspiration is tied to class. She says that inspiration requires space to bloom, and that every writer needs wealth and privacy (or a room of their own) in which to write, effectively confining inspiration to the middle and upper class. It does not seem right to say that the ability to write or the inspiration to do so is only available to those with some level of monetary comfort.

Perhaps Woolf is simply pointing out that a writer needs to feel powerful, or have some power over their environment before they are able to write. Over this point, at least, we can agree. In order to devote concentration to the writing of a story, the writer must first feel comfortable in their environment, or be forced to view their present environment as an observer rather than a participant. As the best works are most often written when reflecting on a personal experience, this need for space and control makes sense. In that sense, for a woman to write, or even for anyone to write, they do indeed need a room of their own.

I don't know about you, but I am not a Zulu warrior...

I have to say that I did not particularly enjoy Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life". Throughout the entire piece, she repeatedly would contradict herself, saying that space did not matter to her, when the entire work was full of references on her location. According to Dillard, writing is a painful process, full of numerous rough drafts and re-workings, and the end result is hardly ever satisfying to the writer's soul. She talks about chopping wood (a metaphor for writing), of shedding her inhibitions, and swinging the axe towards the chopping block, not the wood. And yet she never did get warm.
In my own experience, it does not depend on location, or a deadline to get me to write. I find myself much more sympathetic towards Sanders who, in "Writing from the center", seems to gather inspiration from everything around him, no matter where he is. Personally, I do no think that location really matters for a writer in the sense that inspiration can be found in any location if the writer will simply look for it. In this sense, no writer can honestly say that they do not care where they work, or that they do not notice where they are working, for the environment around the author affects the written work as much as the author's idea itself.
Dillard often says in "The writing life" that the entire writing process is a struggle. splitting wood, a lion tamer wrestling with a lion, a dying friend. These metaphors suggest that writing is a chore or a struggle, a fight to wrestle the last drop of worthwhile inspiration from our subconscious in a harried dash to get it down on paper before the inspiration is lost. Writing seems more like turning a faucet on. If the tap is turned off, writing, or at least good writing, will not occur. It is only when the faucet is turned on and water is flowing freely that one can write, and then it is as easy as holding a bowl or a glass to catch the water.
I believe that it is better to gather inspiration from everything around you than to say that you do not notice your surroundings and then struggle for an idea. Writing should not be a painful process that taxes the mind and vexes the writer. Although anything worthwhile requires work, that does not mean that the level of effort and sacrifice required to write anything of length should rival the Spanish Inquisition. It is the job of any artist to take in the world around them through their own particular filter, and give back to the world a translation of what they saw through writing. When it is understood that writing is not a struggle but simply a different point of view, all the struggle is removed from the process. In the end, with the completion of a meaningful work, the artist feels satisfaction in knowing that their process has yielded a different view of the world, society or even of themselves. If you want to write, then simply write. The story itself will take care of the rest.