Week 47 of the humanities crash course was a smorgasbord of short stories and selections from novels, all by American authors. The works were:

My family and I also watched a classic holiday film that demonstrated some of the values of the readings.

Readings

Let’s start with the selections from Invisible Man. The book starts with the narrator making a bold assertion: “I am an invisible man.” Not a ghost — a Black man, and others don’t notice him. While frustrating, he takes advantage of his condition: he steals electricity from the power company and brutally beats a White man for disrespecting him.

Chapter one begins the story proper. The narrator is a bright kid growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. He delivers a speech at school arguing for maintaining the status quo. The speech is well-received and he’s invited to deliver it at a gathering of the town’s leading citizens.

The gathering turns out to be a bacchanal. There’s lots of drinking and smoking. There is a stripper. But worst of all, the narrator is one of several Black kids who’ve been brought in to be humiliated as entertainment. They’re thrust into a boxing ring in an all-against-all blindfolded fight. Only after he’s been brutalized, is he allowed to deliver his now-ironic speech.

One of the benefits of fiction is being able to see the world through other people’s eyes. These first two sections of Invisible Man are incredibly powerful. They made the plight of the Black man in America more relatable (and infuriating) than anything I’ve experienced before. I’m considering finishing the novel.

I can’t say the same for the selection from The Sound and the Fury. In his syllabus, Gioia warned this was a challenging read. He wasn’t kidding. I had no idea what was happening. The text presents fragmented impressions from the life of a rural Black family. But there seemed to be no through-line at all — just jumping around impressions, repeating some.

In frustration, I turned to ChatGPT, explicitly stating I didn’t want spoilers. This helped. As I understand it now, this first chapter is told from the POV of Benjy, a disabled child at the center of the family. Faulkner wants us to experience the family through Benjy’s mind. The following from ChatGPT helped me understand the author’s intent:

Faulkner uses a disabled narrator to expose truths the family hides from itself.

Because Benjy can’t lie, can’t rationalize, and can’t interpret, he gives you a raw, unfiltered record of:

  • tenderness
  • cruelty
  • disappointment
  • dysfunction
  • a family losing its way

It’s almost anthropological: you’re watching a household crumble from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what “crumble” means, only what it feels like.

Based on my experience with this first section, I’m unlikely to finish this book. I appreciate what Faulkner is up to, but life is too short.

The rest of this week’s readings were all short stories. I enjoyed all of them. Here’s a brief summary:

  • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: a young man goes to an exclusive boarding school. One of his friends, who claims to be the son of the richest man in the world, invites him home for the summer. There, we learn the terrible secret of the family’s wealth. A parable of social injustice.
  • The Killers: two men walk into a diner in a small midwestern town and take the staff hostage. They’re waiting for one of the regulars to assassinate him. The target doesn’t arrive, so they leave. One of the patrons visits the man to warn him, and we learn why he’s being hunted.
  • The Lottery: the residents of a small town gather for the yearly lottery, an old tradition — and as it unfolds, we learn it’s not an entirely welcome one. Tension builds until the end, when we learn what the “prize” is. A parable of Girardian scapegoating.
  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find: a family embarks on a road trip that takes a surprising turn. I won’t spoil this one — just to say it has powerful (if somewhat ambiguous) religious overtones.
  • The Gift of the Magi: an impoverished couple gives up their most valued possessions to buy each other Christmas gifts. A masterpiece of irony; I couldn’t tell if the story was meant to be heartwarming or dispiriting. (¿Porqué no los dos?)

Audiovisual

Music: modern jazz classics by Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Hugely influential + enjoyable music. I was most familiar with Monk. Hadn’t realized how influential Gillespie was in bringing Latin music into the jazz fold.

Arts: Abstract Expressionism — what I see as one of several attempts by painting trying to find its way in a world where photography exists. I suspect most people only appreciate these works after being told they’re “important.” (Kinda like this week’s Faulkner reading.)

An abstract painting showing vertical stripes; dark blue on the left, wide red in the center, and thin yellow on the right. *Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I* by Barnett Newman, via [Wikimedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman#/media/File:Who's_Afraid_of_Red,_Yellow,_and_Blue_I.svg)

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I by Barnett Newman, via Wikimedia

Cinema: Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.

This film is a beloved Christmas season tradition for many, but I’d never seen it. Yes, it’s a bit syrupy — and in at least one sequence (the “talking galaxies”) outright tacky — but it conveys an important message. (Lest the audience miss it, it’s literally shown inscribed in a book.)

Stewart plays George Baily, a decent everyman whose plans to escape his small town are foiled at every turn. Eventually, he finds himself head of a household, the family business, and in some ways, the town itself. Through unfortunate circumstances (echoes of Job!), his life spirals out of control. Contemplating suicide, he’s given an opportunity to experience what his world would look like if he’d never lived. It’s the Stoic approach: appreciate your current circumstance by imagining worse alternatives.

Reflection

One of the benefits of literary fiction is it allows us to vividly imagine other ways of being in the world. We can better empathize with others by walking in their shoes or, as I wrote above, seeing the world through their eyes — pick your metaphor.

While I’ll never know what it’s like to be a Black person in mid-twentieth century America, Ellison’s powerful writing made me feel in very particular ways. I could almost taste the blood, feel my swollen cheeks, and sense the humiliation of thinking I was to deliver a dignified speech only to learn I was to be used as a prop in a brutal spectacle.

The Faulkner piece also made me feel in particular ways. I felt frustrated, confused, and disoriented — and lacking the ability to probe for coherence. (In this case, I had to step out of the story to ask ChatGPT.) But this is obviously by design: the author has created a virtual reality made all the more powerful by leaving so much to the reader’s imagination.

Novels are a great way of creating rich virtual worlds. Short fiction can also take us “elsewhere” with a lower time commitment. While the world-building can’t be as rich, we still get to share other minds and experience their worlds through their perspectives. This week, the O’Connor and Fitzgerald short stories lingered in my mind; I see things a bit differently by having been there for a brief visit.

Films like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE are valuable too, but most lack the immersive power of literary fiction. With cinema, we’re spectators watching events happening to someone else (e.g., George Baily) inside a frame. The pictures on the screen are so compelling it takes extra effort to picture ourselves in their situations. We get the point, but not the feelings. (Must revisit McLuhan here.)

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I tried something new: going old school. So far, I haven’t captured any Obsidian notes for the readings or movie. Instead, I wrote everything straight into Emacs knowing I’d share my first-pass words with you.

As I’ve said many times, writing is thinking. When I type, the keyboard and Emacs buffer become parts of my cognitive apparatus. The blinking cursor and words on the screen are part of a feedback loop whose end product is clearer thinking. The artifact, which you’re reading now, is a side product.

In this post, I tried to blur the line between public writing and notes-to-self. I wrote the notes above to clarify for myself what I’d read, remembering you’d read them too. It a slightly different cognitive space than the one where I’ve worked out these readings most of the year.

Another old school tweak: apart from ChatGPT’s help while reading the Faulkner chapter, I didn’t use LLMs to review or reflect on any of these notes. As a result, I probably got more things wrong than usual. But I wanted to see how far I could go “unaided” after almost a year of using LLMs to help me make sense of ideas.

I like that I can bring another intelligence into these spaces when needed. In this case, I didn’t need it. That’s in part because of the clarity and intelligence of these authors and also because of their chosen medium. I can follow narrative fiction more easily than (say) verse poetry. So there’s a spectrum here. For the future: use AI judiciously when needed most. But the fact AI exists doesn’t mean it must be used every time.

Up Next

Gioia recommends Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and chapter one of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Borges is my favorite author and Ficciones my favorite of his collections. I’ve read Metamorphosis twice. And for many Latin Americans of my vintage, One Hundred Years was de rigeur. Which is to say, I’m very familiar with all three of next week’s readings. So I’m gonna focus on other readings that need my attention. (I may revisit some of the Borges stories.) Still, I expect to share reflections on the recommended readings at the end of the week.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!