Chapter 1 Crying of lot 49

The novel starts out Oedipa receiving a letter saying that her ex boyfriends has left the will execution to her when he died. Because he left this to her, it makes me think that he was a big part of her life or maybe wanted her to continue to be part of her life after his death. Her reaction when she realized he had died and that she was the executor the book stated, "Oedipa stood in the living room, stared by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible." I was a little confused about this reaction and whether she was reacting about his death or about the fact that she is the executor. The chapter goes into a little bit of detail about his personality and how he used to do celebrity voices. She describes the voices he used in a previous phone call as, "...slavic tones as second secretary at the Transylvania Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comic-Negro, the on into Pachuco dialect,..." I think that this will have a significant meaning later in the book, the fact that he has many voices that he used when speaking to Oedipa. The receiving of the letter goes into detail about her and her husband, Mucho's, relationship. He used to be a car salesman which is probably where the "lot" in the title comes from. She says, "He believed to much in the lot, but not at all in the station," about her husbands jobs. Maybe she means he isn't happy or passionate anymore because he is no longer working "on the lot." It will be interesting to see what the significants of the lot will be. It seems like this change in him is causing a downfall in their relationship.  There are also some psych references like when the doctor calls for he to be in a drug study....may foreshadow later events or a past event. The doctor wants her to participate in the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens on housewives. The chapter kind of opened up many different possibilities for how the book will continue.

9/16 readings

The first poem "A supermarket in California" starts by pointing out the authors thoughts of Walt Whitman. The poem makes it obvious that Walt Whitman is somewhat of a hero to the author. The poem goes on like it he is searching for similarities in Whitman's work and in the real world. He walks into a supermarket and then the poem reads, "What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!..." It is almost like the author is creating a more lively situation in the supermarket than there really is. Maybe he is searching for the world Walt Whitman created in his work? The author then states, "I saw you, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys." This line may mean that the author thinks that Walt was a homosexual or liked young boys. The author then goes on to talk about him following Whitman through the grocery store like he is trying to follow in his footsteps? I'm kind of confused about the ending but I think the author is lost in modern society and wants to be back in Whitman's world?

Father Poems

I enjoyed reading and comparing the two poems "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath and "Photograph of my Father in his Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver. I sensed resentment for the father in the words of both of the authors. I tend to have a hard time analyzing poetry but for these two poems I was able to find multiple possible meanings and themes. The end line of Carver's poem, "Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish?" kind of tied to poem together for me. I took from the poem that the son resents his father for being a drunk or alcoholic when he was a child and passing the trait down to him. As a child the father never did father-son things with the son, which is shown in the fish line. The father may have never figuratively or literally took the son fishing or never taught him what fathers should teach their sons, making the son resent the father.

For me, Sylvia Plath's poem was a little bit harder to interpret. When I first started reading the poem I didn't pick up on the fact that the relationship with the father was negative. Plath used many symbols of her negative relationship with her father. For example, "An engine, an engine, Chiffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I begin to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew," showed that she was comparing her father to a Nazi. She felt she was a prisoner or outcast to her father or maybe was abused by her father. The author then begins to talk about the fact that she married her father. This may mean she married someone like her father that was abusive. The main repetition in the poem was the line, "Daddy, I have had to kill you." She then begins to talk about killing two people: her father and husband. This was because they both were abusive. She says she is through with both of them in the end. I'm not sure whether she actually killed them or just "left" them and killed was a symbolism but the poem had a very powerful theme because many people say they "marry their dad"meaning they marry a man similar to their father.