ok - I need to post this week because I always end up putting it off then remembering at like 11:40 on saturday... so here goes

Notes from the Underground Playlist:
1) Modern Love - David Bowie ("Don't belive in modern love"/"Never gonna fall for modern love/stands beside me (modern love)/walks on by..." and it goes on; its a seriously up-beat song that talks about secularism and modern isolation from God and man and love etc. plus it's Bowie... and Bowie rules.)
2) The New Underground - Guster
3) Jolene - Ray LaMontagne (really beautiful song about a guy in a tough place in his life, beat up and lying in a ditch, trying to find something to hold on to/dealing w/ emotions about a girl, chorus = "Still don't know what love means")
4) Money - Pink Floyd (UMan wants to reject the ideal of wealth and power in someways I think but cant reject it really, and still probably wants it... Money is a problem for UM)
5) Where is My Mind? - Pixies
6) Outsider - The Ramones
7) Conquest - The White Stripes (because UMan keeps telling himself he likes to conqure people)
8) Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan
9) I Predict a Riot - Kaiser Cheifs (Uman's world is pretty scary; he lives in poverty, he can't speak his mind w/o being hauled to Siberia and since '48 there's been revolutions all around him + on his own soil with the decembrist revolt and murder of the Tzar liberator... also I don't think UMan really likes the madness of his world and would like not to have to deal with it so BAM this song works)
10) Drain You - Nirvana (has UMan's outlook on love (at least outlook he tells himself to belive) kind of nailed)
11) I am a Rock - Simon & Garfunkle (this could be UMan's themesong)
11) Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd (UMan = syd barret in a lot of ways - Syd is the former member of Pink Floyd that "The Wall" was based on)
12)Eleanor Rigby - The Beatles ("all the lonley people/where do they all come from?")
13) Hey You - Pink Floyd (UMan= pink, the fictionalized syd barrett and character in "The Wall")
14) Creep - Radiohead (could also be UMan's themesong)

well that's all I have.
feel free to add

Underground Man as Scrooge

Today, while re-reading the passage about Underground Man's childhood, all I could think about was Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. They were both sent off to boarding schools at a relatively young age with relatives that just didn't seem to care. They also both didn't really have friends while at school. I think it is really interesting that people, or characters as a reflection of real people, tend to be so severely impacted by their childhood and school experiences.

Whatta Creeeeep

Does anyone else feel as though Underground Man has the qualities of a serial killer. The way he stalks the soldier for years is obsessive and unhealthy. In fact, obsessive is a very good way to describe UMan. He obsesses over little occurrences in his everyday life imagining revenge until he drives himself crazy. He is definitely "sick" as he said in the beginning, but I'm not sure it's a liver problem....

Underground Man = Grendel

I mentioned this in class, but I think that the simularitiea between Grendel and Underground Man are uncanny. They both are solitary characters, yet ache for connections that they can't seem to find in the outside world. They are very psychological characters. Most of their respective books are written largely in their thoughts. They both find themselves unique and separate from the rest of humanity in some way. They're also both kind of depressed and full of despair. This is midyll because they feel confused and unable to relate to anybody.

ART CLASS

"At any rate a certain awkwardness can be observed each time he approaches the achievement of similar goals. He loves the process, but he's not so fond of the achievement, and that, of course is terribly amusing."

This quote from Notes from Underground basically describes how I feel about all of my art projects. I enjoy making them, but then I always hate how my pieces turn out.

Isms

I found a list of over 200 different -isms.

http://phrontistery.info/isms.html

For example:
utilitarianism - belief that utility of actions determines moral value
realism - doctrine that objects of cognition are real
naturalism - belief that the world can be explained in terms of natural force

It is definitely a useful website to keep on tabs.

Notes from Underground meets an awesome 20th centry book

I'm only a little ways into Notes from the Underground but I'm really into it so far. One of my favorite books, the first book I ever read by Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans, draws quite a bit on Notes which I didn't realize until now. The Subterraneans, besides drawing from just Notes' title, opens in much the same way and has a lot little of stylistic similarities. Keroauc's book begins "Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do- just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do-. It began on a warm summernight- ah, she was sitting on a fender with Julien Alexander who is... let me begin with the history of the subterraneans of San Francisco." In this book the narrator Leo eventually looses love but gains a book, this book, about it and slinks home to his mother, lonely. It's a beautiful book; it got me hooked on Kerauac and I started reading his books like they were a series detective novels. This is a little more story-focused than Notes, I've only gotten a little ways into it but so far Notes seems more character-focused. The Subterraneans are a group of hipsters that basically make up a big part of the Frisco-scene for Leo in the book and the group of writers and artists he associates with; they're mad for jazz and kicks and love etc - Mardou is one of the Subterraneans, which is more or less a playful term.

The contradictions, the little ellipses, the dashes, and the quick running thoughts all seem similar to me in the bit of Notes I've read and then The Subterraneans. Also Leo, like the Underground Man, is a bit lovably neurotic at times; both are self-conscious books which makes the narrative voice really interesting and strong. Underground Man keeps mentioning the reader collectively and anticipating the reactions of the reader, the "gentlemen." Leo agonizes over what he's revealing; its a confessional, he confronts painful memories of loosing love as objectively as he can by writing the book which weirdly is similar to the pleasure Underground Man gets from refusing to have his liver checked out for instance. Leo and Underground Man also suffer lack of money, tendencies to self-destruction, and their own neurotic-ness. Leo drinks and Underground Man thinks man is drawn to destructive things and is himself pretty disillusioned.

This is dull but its what my circa '81 Kerouac copy has to say about Dostoevsky: "Kerouac's most immediate source, however, as evidenced by the title, was D.'s Notes from the Underground, which propounded the idea that in our overly intellectual era, man can no longer face the reality without first shielding himself with numerous impenetrable layers of fantasy and dream. The role of the novelist, then, as D. saw it, was to unpeel this modern madness layer by layer though a continual forced confrontation with the most feared and forbidden - or as we say nowadays "repressed" - aspects of human personality. In this approach, D. was a precursor of Freud."

Leo looks for reality in dreams but those dreams ironically destroy the reality of his relationship with Mardou and Underground Man definitely wonders about free will and says that if man reaches the epitome of reason (blending reality with an imaginative, symbolic outcome), people will rebel against 2+2 until it's 5 and loveless logic is subverted so people can have feelings and imaginations and fantasies again... anyway Underground Man wonders a lot about free will until you wonder how free he is because he's finally rebelling against himself, causing himself pain for no reason except because he seems to prefer pain to numbness.