Winter 2018

How does gendering nature as a woman fit into the role it plays in protecting masculinity?

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Silent Spring, Brokeback Mountain:

THE PROBLEM: of pace and scale || of where we locate the bounds of an event || of dispersion, diminution, gradual accumulation

• Carson: We don’t know how to ask about our own ignorance
  • Like Brokeback -> no language for it; does language invent as well as represent the already-invented?
• Jack can’t quit Ennis…Ennis can’t quit his job…lol
• Ennis: “all the travelin I ever done is goin around the coffee pot looking for the handle” (273)

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Mourning:

• How do we mourn/develop rituals of mourning for something that has not yet happened or something that is happening/manifested far away?
• Planetary mourning -> why the fuck would you be reading literature when the planet may be fucked?
  • Playing violin while the titanic goes down

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The first image in The Sublime End really rattled me into a different understanding of the dead body. There was no gravestone, there had been no grand event, no one else was there, it made no statement, except that it was there. The body was going away, but it was still there and in plain sight. It wasn’t what I had expected. It had a different kind (?) or amount (?) of dignity than the images of death I usually see. No martyr, no ceremony, just present death, stripped but still clothed.