Tuesday, October 16, 2012

There are popsicles everywhere


This painting by the contemporary primitivist John Lurie is watercolor, ink and oil pastel on clayboard. It feels reminiscent of the scene on pages 372-3 that we close-read in class today, with all the "oozing" and "squeezing"--ostensibly a coalescing as opposed a fragmenting--though in this case, the "compartment," the "crammed smelly place" which contains what might be termed "the undifferentiated blob" is a mental rather than a physical public space. I'm fascinated by this idea of the fragment-mistaken-as-whole, either within consciousness (as in the painting) or manifested within a public space as a crowd/mass (as in the passage); every "whole" ultimately has it's container--is in fact a fragment. The floating eye (also contained) might be equated with Anna's self-consciousness, the moments in which she becomes explicity "conscious of Anna" (373), almost as if she splits herself in two or looks down at herself from an analytic balustrade.
As for my gloss, I've selected the kopje, a geological formation, usually dome-like, which becomes isolated through the process of erosion. This feels important considering the theme of isolation (which also relates to fragmentation) that runs throughout the text.

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