Essay 4: Blogs

In searching for another blog to read and compare my own nanotext adventure with I found myself hunting for someone with a lot of posts. I wanted to specifically compare/contrast my own readings of the material with theirs. However as I began to read the blogs of the people with a great amount of posts I found myself getting either bored or annoyed. The majority of the posts were either summaries of the books I had read, in which case I didn't care at all to read what I had already read in the actual text, or they were annoying rambles that didn't interest me in the least. http://goodstvn.blogspot.com/ interested me the most simply because he didn't mess around with barfing the text back out. There aren't many posts about the texts, but what I did find I could not help but compare myself to.

Stvn's post about The Ticket that Exploded was very interesting to me because his reaction to it was so different from mine. He exclaims "Where are the women?!" in response to the obscene amount of rectal mucus found in the work. This was interesting to me because through out the work I never questioned why there weren't women included but accepted that the work was based on a homosexual society. Was this just a horny young guy's reaction to the work, or did it speak even further to the message that Burroughs was giving in his work?

My reaction to the amount of gruesome homosexual sex was a revelation the Burroughs was showing just how numb, or "clear", our society was becoming to sex and hate and violence in real life. I viewed it more as a finger pointed at the desensitized nation we had become in the wake of over-exposure. This also extends to the inability to accept any kind of homosexual life in a modern society, let alone one as erotic and masculine as portrayed in the work. Stvn seemed unable to see past the lack of women. This seems to be exactly what Burroughs was trying to point out: that we cannot handle a work like this because we cannot handle including homosexuality. This is not to say that Stvn is some raging homophobe, but more a slight jest at the irony of his reaction.

That being said, I have to credit Stvn's perceptiveness to the idea of different levels of reality. I took this post to encompass the reality of the characters in the work in relation to the reality they were, or were not, living in. The characters seemed to be real enough though the way the work was written allowed for very little exposure to the real workings of the society they lived in. The fact that I was unable to get a real feel for the society made me question the reality of it. This led me to think that the lack of reality was a point of Burroughs: mainly that reality in a societal sense is in the control of the character. Each character had their own perception of what the real society was and how it functioned. Though I'm sure they can all agree it had largely to do with sex and green boys. In any regards, I think Stvn was touching on this idea briefly when he mentioned the levels of reality in the work.

The post that really interested me was http://goodstvn.blogspot.com/2009/02/ribofunk-ending-god-particle-urb.html. Stvn's reaction to the ending of Ribofunk was much like my own in that he could not help but make the connection of the Urb to some sort of "God Particle" in our own society. At one level his post relates back to the Post-Modern Fable in that it addresses the level at which everything within the human experience happens. The minuscule model of reality is baffling in that it seems so big because it produces what we perceive as things of gargantuan proportions (mountains and oceans). However, the scale is quite small. This ties back to the theory that energy is not a product of the human but rather humans are nothing more than a product (and a temporary one at that) of energy.

Stvn and I both tied the Urb back to some kind of underlying notion of God. I compared it to a much more religious alternative; the Catholic God, whereas Stvn used National Geographic's article on the God Particle being an underlying force to all of life. Stvn took the next step where I finished by including what I thought was a very clever idea of sincerity to the idea of melting all of existence together into one Urb. Stvn points out that the class was more or less striving to become one whole "plurk organism". He hints at a kind of loneliness in a present day society and accusing it of being a "random disassociated existence". It then seems that this ulta-combined kind of living the Urb creates, a kind of melting together of being and experience, is an improvement like Stvn points out. All that is necessary to make it work is sincerity. It seems that with sincerity, humanity can exist peacefully in such a condition.

Stvn and I had similar ideas throughout the course, though his blog was able to direct my thought in a way it hadn't been before which I appreciated.