Blogging Fusion

Inception and Ariadne's Labyrinth

Inception: The Nightmare Labyrinth, A Short Film Review
July 2010, So-Rim Lee

Three hours pass by in a wrinkle of time when a film is visually rich, fast-paced, blended well with arresting music, and, most of all, presents a meticulously structured montage that keeps the storyline intact within omnibus subplots and syncopates the general unnecessary. After seven years of writing and another three in the making, Christopher Nolan's Inception turns out to be a well-built labyrinth that takes the audience through different levels of the "subconscious" represented by action-packed worlds of dreams. Since its opening, the film has received a variety of mixed reviews and a good load of possible assumptions and reader-response theories regarding its rather deceitful ending. The film is open to many interpretations, as its tagline boasts, "Ideas define a person and his world." The audience's demand for a definitive, if not entirely positive, ending, has indeed made possible so many ideas about "what really happened" that continue to live and haunt so many minds after the movie ends and the real world reels back.

Inception does not call for an elaborate, scientific decoding of its seeming mystery; the previsioning part has already been finished by Nolan himself, and, as much as the film seems to scream out for an all-prevailing interpretation, the audience should always be reminded that the primary role of cinema is to deceive, lure, and therefore, to entertain, not to plant philosophical meanderings and other mind-games that far exceeds what it originally offers. In the end, every film is an "inception" as this particular film defines the term, or rather, Dom Cobb defines the term. Through two-thirds of the film, a keen viewer should realize that everything that happens on the reel happens from Cobb's perspective, insight, mind and thought. It is Cobb that takes the crew into the world of dreams, into dreams within dreams, and into the "limbo" which, in the strictest sense, is only his generic creation in itself. If the cinema could manipulate the audience within its given time, in this case which is three hours, Inception uses it admirably well; even after the movie ends the audience stumbles back into reality with lingering thoughts that question how the end is the beginning is the end.

All in all, the role of women in the film calls for attention. Ariadne is the designer and the weaver of the labyrinthine dreams the crew risk their lives to jump in for action, in the middle of whose labyrinth is the Minotaur, Mal Cobb. Ariadne, whose identity is hardly revealed throughout the entire journey, is the "architect" of an infrastructure that proves to be out of her control, as it is ruled by the ghost of a much more feminine monstrosity of Mal. Not far apart from the feminine-beastly themes, one fundamental question rolls into the picture; does the weaver come first, or does the monster? It is not easy to answer when each defines one another. Whether Mal Cobb exists in reality does not matter in the film, as is the case with Dom Cobb and all characters, all happenings, all dreams. The only truth to be reminded is that visual and auditory sensations that the cinematic device presents is real, that this reality continues on for a good three hours, and that when they are over, they linger in fragmented visions and sounds.

Dreams are not supposed to be allegorical or premeditated-structuralist, or are they? Either way, if Inception gave a good pleasurable three hours, it has accomplished its objectives; we cannot regret having nightmares and dreams, we can only blame ourselves having fallen asleep.

Wrapping Up the Anti-Thesis Movement

Beyond the Machinery of Improvisation:
Demystifying Allen Ginsberg's Performance Poetics
July 2010, So-Rim Lee

Ginsberg was a pioneer who bridged the gap among literature, theatre, and music. He was also what Artaud called “an authentic madman,” who deliberately broke norms to represent the subculture of the contemporary socio-political academia. Ginsberg not only challenged the conventions of the established literati but also those of the Beats by living past the generation he is most widely known to represent; the poet became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, followed by a bolder move of nominating himself to be crowned a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in 1993.[1] In many ways he was a nonconformist, as discussed in the second chapter; he lived by the ideals of madness, nakedness, incorporated drugs and hallucinogens into the scheme of writing, experimented freely with sexuality, and practiced his own religious beliefs without restrain. In 1997, the poet witnessed his controversial works included in major literary anthologies before he died at the age of seventy-one. Ten years after his death, Columbia University teaches “Howl” as a prerequisite for earning a degree in humanities. The Allen Ginsberg Trust, established by Ginsberg himself and currently represented by Bob Rosenthal, provides resources for all attempts to recollect the life and works of the poet. In short, Ginsberg and his legacy have grown into living legends.

Above all, however, Ginsberg opened a path for a novel art form consisting of literature, theatre, and music. His improvisatory aesthetics, which entail meticulous previsions and revisions, embodies a new ideal of poetics that the poets today are following as new vision. His performance poetics, in particular, suggests a new academic discipline yet to be developed. Translating, transfiguring, and thus transforming the written form of “Howl” into the visual and auditory performances embody an interdisciplinary eclecticism that serves as the fundamental premise on which this thesis is based upon; as mentioned earlier in the introduction, poetry in its spoken form is firmly rooted in two disciplines modern-day scholarship denominates as literature and theatre, on top of which Ginsberg and the Beat Generation writers also incorporate the ideals of spontaneity and improvisation of bebop jazz.

The society is a battlefield where revolutionaries and underdogs are often treated with contempt and disdain. Throughout the four decades since the publication of “Howl,” Ginsberg has been banned, imprisoned, arrested and expatriated. Ironically, as the poet was thrown off the stage for his antisocial behaviors, Howl and Other Poems continued to snowball into a multi-million bestseller translated into numerous other languages that penetrated the readers with a determined alacrity. When Ginsberg became a self-nominated Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1993, the established academia saw, for the first time, how such undaunted self-promotion has been the ultimate drive behind the poet’s every utterance. Following the wake of Ginsberg are talented poets, actors, literary critics, spoken word performers and Ginsberg scholars that deliver, in their respective unique ways, “Howl” to the audience on the stage that the poet stood on countless occasions.

Among these young generation of practitioners is Turturro, whose rendition of “Howl” was discussed in the last chapter. As his performance of “Howl” in The Source proves, the ultimate goal of Turturro’s performance poetics can be defined as to appear natural and minimally contrived when, under the surface of improvisation, the performer trains himself a machinery of memorization, variation, and adaptation that creates an invisible structure of techniques and schemes that augment such apparent naturalness. Such machinery beyond the realistic is a working dynamic in all modern poetry performers, among whom this thesis particularly has chosen to discuss Ginsberg and his literary origins; one major difference between Ginsberg and Turturro is that the former is essentially a writer whereas the latter is, more than anything else, an actor. In effect, the fundamental differences in Ginsberg’s and Turturro’s renditions of “Howl” lie under the fact that Ginsberg’s approach to performing the poem is a literary one, while Turturro’s approach to performing the same work pertains to the aesthetics of drama and theatre arts, not to mention film. 

The most predominant risk an artist has to take in creating a work of interdisciplinary studies is to expose himself under critics of different disciplines. To the academia that regards a particular discipline as higher or more authentic in its pure form, not conjugated with another discipline, the attempt to interbreed a new genre of art can be sacrilegious, if not disqualifying. The artist has to have a concrete knowledge of the disciplines he attempts to mesh, and he has to know how to respond back to criticisms from all sides. In this context, performance poetics still has a long and winding way to go, more artists to develop it as an authentic and independent art form in itself, and, most importantly, more knowledgeable interdisciplinary critics to refute each work and draw out the mistakes and loopholes the artist has yet to make amends. Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a seminal work in this sense, since it has built the foundation upon which performance poetry, a historically established discipline but is also largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, is to grow and blossom into novel forms.

Due to such double-edged nature of performance poetry, the contemporary poet-performer is constantly challenged not only by the traditional process of art creation but also by the already established academia that often cast much too critical eyes to interdisciplinary efforts as unsuitable for scholarly investment. Although the current American literary anthologies include Ginsberg next to his non-Beat contemporary writers as Gertrude Stein, one should accept the fact that the two most acknowledgeable deeds the poet accomplishes with “Howl,” i.e., revolutionizing the traditional mode of expression and using the contemporary jazz ideals of improvisation in writing the verse form, will probably never suffice to put him on the same literary niche as T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson. For another decade at the least, instead of having his own placing within the academia, Ginsberg will be taught in university lectures almost always within the larger context of the Beat Generation writers as a whole. And this is not only because Ginsberg cannot be regarded outside the boundaries of the Beat Movement, but also because he, as a writer, does not have a rich oeuvre as T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson respectively does.

This thesis not only acknowledges but also endorses the innate and inevitable hierarchy that exists among literary figures, and does not attempt to assert in any sense that Ginsberg is truly the most exceptional and underrated poet American literature has seen. The object of this thesis is, instead, to stress the ways in which Ginsberg should be appropriately merited for the idiosyncratic accomplishments he accomplishes with his unique style and accumulation of verses, especially as one of the very few Beat writers that lived to see the end of the twentieth century. By attempting to demystify the “Howl” manuscripts and performances through close reading, this thesis ultimately seeks to contribute to forming the foundation upon which many more scholars in the future will continue to build their critiques and evaluations on the poet and his literature. Whereas this thesis focused on “Howl” only, Ginsberg scholarship has countless other resources to branch further; for instance, a study on the manuscripts and the performances of “Kaddish,” a much later work as compared to “Howl,” will yield a different perspective on the poet. Only by combining the scholarly efforts to bring Ginsberg’s works into light will develop the literary scholarship on which “Howl” will be placed as suitable for its merit as an example of contemporary American poetry.

Review of Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story (Full)

The Politics of Storytelling in Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story
May 2010, So-Rim Lee

Richard Jefferies’ Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story is short, condensed, and chock-full of rich complexity of layers that allow room for diverse interpretations. One could interpret the story according to the metaphor of the chess game, arguing that the female protagonist may appear to be a player-narrator of the game-narrative that has full control as the teller of her own story, but is actually a chess-piece being played by the three suitors, each of whom has varying importance in the overall plot structure. As a matter of fact, the narrator likens herself to “a shuttlecock” or “a tennis ball” (20) in the beginning of the narrative, refers to her position of being courted by three different men and having to ruminate upon whom to choose. And this narrator is indeed a part of the game of matchmaking.

However, it is crucial to notice on the readers’ behalf that she is not a player of the game that holds the power to alter the result, but is merely an object being played with; the ways with which she ruminates in blind illusion that she could choose her husband as she chooses words to describe her situation with, possess no control over how the narrative ends. And what is even more important is that she is delusional and oblivious of her powerlessness as a protagonist and narrator. In the end, she does not even have the ability to finish the story and the last word is left unsaid, substituted by a blank bracketed space. This particular way to un-finish the story can be interpreted as the author’s gesture to extend the competition of the game to the readers as well, suggesting anyone can be active participants of the sport where the narrator is helplessly tossed back and forth the narrative court.

Although the protagonist does not realize her insignificance and misrepresents, overestimates, and even take pride in herself as being an illusory ringleader and nucleus in the love triangle, the game is mainly played by Alderman Thrigg whom she calls “a gigantic greengrocer,” Lord Bilberton whom she calls “silly,” “ugly,” and “old.” Aurelles, to whom the protagonist is physically attracted and who wins the prize in the end, is relatively less significant a player in the love game. He is likened to a “Newfoundland dog,” which is a black, large, purebred swimming dog most predominantly used as the retriever in hunting games. This allusion is incorporated into the narrative when Aldermann Thrigg and Lord Bilberton finally tosses the protagonist over to Aurelles, telling him to finish the game by marrying her. Instead of getting upset or angry by parrying her back and forth and then over to Aurelles, our antiheroic protagonist is overjoyed at the thought of marrying a handsome young man. And she literally contradicts herself by saying she envisions herself being a “poetess some day” (20) and boasts that her father wants to play chess “with me as the queen” (20) but undermines and degrades the authority of the narrator by being capricious, volatile, and most of all, untrustworthy; her suitors come to terms with her father in discussing marriage, not with herself.

Having such an incompetent storyteller can be both frustrating and intriguing to the reader. Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story is a story about storytelling, in which the storyteller is not exactly the narrator-protagonist but the story itself; told and telling at the same time, the story takes place among the company of characters and in between actions, words, and phrasings. Facing the story itself the storyteller is diminished into a structural element, fully manifest in the manner of her storytelling. To begin with, the narrator’s desires are unnamed, vague, and remote at times; she wants to “go to Nice” (20) or “run away with Philip or somebody,” (21) and laughs at Thrigg’s language with her invisible and often incandescent authority as a storyteller. She also contradicts herself in numerous occasions, starting with mentioning how proud she is of her fur jacket bought off by Thrigg’s money and stating, at the same time, that “a penniless soldier” is “just what I wanted.” Also, she daydreams “if only the guardsmen would manage to be rich,” and immediately follows, “but I am not to be sold exactly.”

At this point, one should question the consequences of having such an unreliable female storyteller; does Edie undermine the authority of women in the social structure she is in, or does she enhance it by being an unconventional storyteller that, despite the flaws and obvious linguistic as well as emotional blunders, earns herself a niche of holding the power to tell the story in her personal biased point of view that ultimately distinguishes her from the traditional model of female narrators? One important remark to be made is that, as much as Edie transgresses the role of traditional storyteller, she also denies the conventional Jane Austen ideal of an intellectual, competent feminist protagonist. Instead of leading the courtly game, Edie settles herself a self-proclaimed toss-ball that functions primarily as a bridge between the four main male characters. In this manner, it should be noted that perspectives can be beguiling; although Edie may not be the textbook female storyteller, her lack of storytelling skills and her fickle nature can be interpreted as another form of exercising the power of the storyteller; that is, Edie could be telling the story with an authoritative eloquence by deliberately choosing to be an incompetent storyteller and showing herself as a bartered product among her suitors, instead of being an active participant in the social game. 

As a matter of fact, the idea that Edie consciously chooses to play the role of an incompetent storyteller reinforces the looming role of the snow in the overall story. Since the snow cannot narrate the story itself, Edie becomes a weather forecast and a diarist that keeps a subjective record of how weather changes move the dynamics of power struggles within the male characters in Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story. As a matter of fact, the intrinsic protagonist and the most powerful authority figure of the story is not any of the human characters but the snow that starts as an excuse for Edie to wear the fur coat but becomes a necessity to survive. In the same manner, the continuation of snow makes the act of writing a necessity and an outlet to submit to larger forces. From a point in time, Edie writes to “pass away the time” (26) and to keep record of daily happenings during the presence of a natural calamity. As strange as it may appear, the growing importance of snow and the fall of the storyteller as a weather forecast emphasize, rather than diminish, the role of the storyteller as the maker and creator of a situation that cannot be salvaged in any other way but by the means of storytelling. And this is precisely why the ending of the novella proves Edie a controversial storyteller questionable in her competence as a narrator; she is unable to finish her sentence and a bracketed space successfully leaves unfinished and suspended what she had started with a promising assurance to the readers.

All in all, Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story is a story about binary oppositions. Aurelles is “strong, tall, noble-looking” but has no social grace, Thrigg is rich but is “stout, fat” and is compared to a pig, and Lord Bilberton has political authority but is “wizened.” Moreover, despite the fact that Jeffries fundamentally shows a cautionary metaphorical approach on what happens when society is deprived of transportation and other technological support, there lingers an unarticulated, unidentified desire for such a catastrophe to take place and an unconscious desire to be cornered within the very primitive setting where life and death situations render the social hierarchy effete. This is the underlying anxiety of the entire story that, oddly enough, springs back into the social order as the snow stops and patriarchy is reestablished in the end. What the apocalyptic allegory proves in the end is that the physical and brutal power of nature suppresses the economic as embodied by Thrigg, then the traditional patriarchal as embodied by Edie’s father, and lastly, the political as embodied by Lord Bilberton. What remains questionable is Aurelle who embodies the physical-brutal, sexual and military, all of which qualities at one point is deemed “courageous” by the storyteller. (25, 26, 28)

It is the snow, however, that embodies the greatest binary opposition; starting as a romantic flickering, it grows into a calamity that breaks apart human civilization and deems all human ideals ineffectual. In the end, the snow creates a convent in which the intrinsic love triangle is tested under the fires of survival. Amidst all this the storyteller and writer becomes fruitless in her attempt and ideal of keeping a journal, which, at best, is boiled down to a minimum of keeping track of what she has eaten that day. The snow becomes a physical as well as an allegorical monster as gaps start to appear when it first becomes a ‘serious matter” (22) and shuts down the storyteller into a creature “as quiet as a dormouse.” (28) By the end of Edie’s diary and the end of the story, Edie is fallen to a degree that she cannot be redeemed of her authority as a storyteller. And hence, to contradict the previous argument that she is so incompetent as to be unable to finish her sentence, Edie leaves the last word blank. Before the reestablishment of patriarchal order and female subjection, the best she could do to claim her place within the society of males is to deliberately un-finish her sentence. By doing so, Edie conscientiously chooses to remain an incompetent storyteller and joins the regression into re-aestheticizing, re-economic human society.

Reference
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cehsiemDxbMJ:www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/psychoanalysis/
2007f_snowed_up.ppt+Jefferies+snowed+up&cd=11&hl=ko&ct=clnk

Lost in Trans-Sensation

I had a fluorescent dream of you. I had a small stuffed puppy in my arms, you had a shot of vodka in your hand. I stammered into the night, talking of what glorious mornings we used to have, what hands of time had moved us apart, what miracle should take place to bring us back into the real. You looked at me with breaking eyes, you embraced the brittle solitude, and you asked me,

Have you ever loved enough?

Silence ensued, chilling our collarbones under the feverish klepto-dawn. I thought of the early nighter who had kissed my feet and went wasting away under the aura of vicious and frightful electronika. I didn't want to follow his luring death. And gradually, then suddenly, I knew, oh I knew, in that last waking minute, that 

Love will tear us apart.

See the Différance: So-Rim Lee, Not Sorim Lee

Ever since I started to write in English and spelled out my name So-Rim Lee with a hyphen between "So" and "Rim," so many people have asked me why I needed that big line between the two letters of my name. Most seemed to generally assume that I spelled my name the way it is because I first started doing so or because that is my official name printed on my passport. But I got so many queries regarding the necessity of the hyphen especially since I renewed the domain of this very website from Oceanflow.org to So-RimLee.com, with a distinct and in-your-face presentation of that horizontal line in between the first two letters of my name. As opposed to the popular belief, I have a concrete reason to why I need to spell my name So-Rim instead of Sorim or So Rim, and here it is:

So-Rim Lee is, like most Korean names, originally comprised of Chinese letters. They are ? (So: "bright") ? (Rim: "forest") ? (Lee: surname derived from a general denomination of a particular family of plum trees), and So-Rim Lee, or ???, takes on the meaning of "bright forest."[1] It should be noted that Chinese letters are often referred to as "characters" since they derive from pictographs, and pictographs derive from pictures, or graphic images that are boiled down to modern-day ideograms by a combination of repeated usage, tradition, and the passing of time. And it is quite an ordeal to translate or transcribe these ideograms into the English alphabet system. The common error that could happen is:

1. So-Rim misspelled as Sorim, and my initials turning into "SL (Sorim Lee)" instead of "SRL (So-Rim Lee)," which is a blunder in itself as "SL" is not true to the original meaning of the name, "bright forest." Addressing me Sorim is equivalent to calling me "bright" with the forest literally taken out of the picture.

2. So-Rim misspelled as So Rim, and hence my name turning into "Miss So Lee" with "Rim" as my middle name. This is the most common mishap I've experienced throughout my life, since a predominent amount of the Western inscription systems don't allow hyphens in between letters of a single name.

For these reasons, I take on the pains to include the hyphen in my name, and even in my domain. This site is So-RimLee.com, not SorimLee.com. Names are one of the most fascinating aspects of the innumerable forms of human language, and every person has a right to claim his own distinct place of his own. Shakespeare induced Juliet to say, "What's in a name?" and immediately killed her and her beloved for their forsaken namesakes. (An overstatement, I know, but-) And I laud his work.

[1] I believe that a name can say so much, even to the point where it builds a path for a person to walk on through the journey of life. And "bright forest," to me, is an oxymoron. A dense, healthy forest should be dark, although most people don't seem to give this idea much thought. As a "bright forest" myself, I am proud to have an oxymoronic name and is empowered to say that I have a humorous, if not slightly flawed, twist to my personality that has allowed me to live up to my name.

Korean-Paragraph-Korean

After 26 years, I am tired of websites and online applications coercing me to define myself as "South Korean," as opposed to "North Korean." I am Korean, I've always been Korean, and although my family is originally from North Korea, I do not want to identify myself as to represent a particular region of Korea. I was born and raised in Seoul, a crazy beautiful city where the subways are so complicated I always get on the wrong line and the summer showers and winter frosts come in dogs and cats and grenades, where everyone speaks the edgiest, tangiest language ever created that has over seventeen ways to express the color "yellow," where the best minds of my generation can be found on the streets dancing to colossal beats of tradition and nontradition, and where I learned to be drunk all the time on mind-numbing, awe-inspiring people to live and die for. 

If you're from any part of this politically insane and supernaturally energy-bombing country, you'd know.

Or if you prefer use one of our linkware images? Click here