Oak Ridge April 22, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Trinity.Tags: History, Memory
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My family takes trips to the mountains in East Tennessee: at least every year, sometimes two or three times a year for vacations. On the way, we pass Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Los Alamos and the test sites in the Southwestern desert or the South Pacific are familiar to those who have only had a brief introduction to the Cold War arms race. What is often forgotten in these conventional representations is that the arms race, at least at the beginning, took place not in a wasteland but in the heartland. The men and women who went to work there were not surrounded by desert or ocean but by everyday America. Their work was not a detached theoretical experiment in an isolated environment, but had very real, immediately visible consequences. These people all had unique stories—although they were linked by their work, the experiences and memories and defined them gave them their individuality. That can’t be found in a history book; it’s the sort of thing that comes from diaries and letters, the unique product of the individual rather than the homogenized output of an academic project. That is what must not be lost.
The Cold War
It Can’t Happen Here April 22, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Trinity.Tags: Image, Memory
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Smoky Mountain Mushroom Cloud
The Plot Against America
The Father of the Atomic Bomb April 22, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Trinity.Tags: Doxa, Image, Myth
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Part of our cultural lexicon is an excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” This quote, associated with the atomic bomb, has found its way into even the most trivial forms of social discourse.
Atomic Shirt
What is less well known is that he didn’t quote the Hindu saying at the first nuclear test, but said later that he was reminded of the passage. Even more interesting is that Oppenheimer’s association of the atomic blast was more explicitly a reference to the first line of the passage, not the end. The translation of the full excerpt is
- “If the radiance of a thousand suns
- were to burst at once into the sky,
- that would be like
- the splendor of the Mighty One—
- I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Sanskrit, from the Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita
Monument April 20, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Trinity.Tags: Doxa, Image, Memory, Video
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Memorials exist for all sorts of things. There are lots of monuments devoted to war and death, and most of them follow a predictable pattern. Everyone is probably familiar with the Vietnam Memorial and its wall of names; those who have seen it recall vividly the impact of seeing 58,195 names of dead soldiers engraved on a single surface. The corresponding event for my generation, the September 11th attack, was memorialized in a powerful way that I remember as particularly affective (rampant commercialization notwithstanding).
But what does a monument tell us about the event it memorializes? Names and numbers are important, but something important is missing. Anyone that knew someone whose name is one of those lists remembers them as a person, a collection of memories and experiences that told a unique story. It can’t be boiled down to a saying on a tombstone or an entry on a census form, and it is crucial to preserve those experiences. For an experience that can’t be boiled down to a singular event, maybe it would be more effective to let those experiences stand on their own, to memorialize them not with a mass of identical entries but with a ready-made figure that can represent individuality for each person who engages with it.
Entering the Conventional April 20, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Trinity.Tags: Doxa, History, Image
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Nuclear weapons were developed for a specific purpose: to be the most destructive force humanity is capable of unleashing on the world. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb obliterated the city of Hiroshima, killing over 70,000 people instantaneously. The effects of the bombing and the impact of its symbolic representation, the mushroom cloud, would reverberate through the remainder of the twentieth century and into the next millennium.
After Hiroshima, “conventional” warfare like that waged across Europe during two world wars took a back seat to the escalating nuclear arms race. In these weapons was the power of the sun, and their shadows powerfully affected all that they touched.
Only sixty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and less than twenty since the end of the Cold War, this powerful symbol of unconventional warfare has entered the cultural lexicon. What would those who created it have to say about this advertisement?
The Cold War
Project Poetics April 17, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Mystory
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When we were talking Monday about poetic techniques and structures to adapt for our own projects, I was puzzled as to a specific setting for my project. Then I remembered something from my childhood: every year my family takes a vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and every year we drove right past Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the way. Given that my project is concerned with the experiences of the people involved in nuclear development, that area could be a potent figure to use in the project, both for historical and personal reasons.
So It Goes April 11, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Creative, Vonnegut
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Billy was in the meat-locker the night Dresden was destroyed. The walls shook and dust sprinkled down on the prisoners, but Billy wasn’t there anymore. He was in the hospital listening as the esteemed professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord read a press release to an illiterate wallflower. Billy heard about a bomb that had leveled a city in Japan and ended a war. Billy knew that it was the same war that he had been in, but the idea of waging war across a world didn’t make sense when Roland Weary died walking to the next town. Besides, if the President wanted to level a city and end the war, Billy couldn’t understand dropping one bomb to destroy the city when the giants of Dresden could knock them all the way to Tralfamadore. Billy rolled over in his hospital bed and was in another.
In 1945, Eliot Rosewater was telling Billy about his favorite author, Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout wrote books about robots and aliens and Jesus and the fourth dimension. Billy remembered a little dirty bookstore in 1968 New York, where he flipped through a book he had read before (with Eliot Rosewater) about a man and a woman who were put on display in a zoo. The store had pictures of Montana Wildhack in the back, but Billy ignored these—he had the real thing in the zoo on Tralfamadore—all he had to do was a little fourth-dimensional traveling to see her and the baby. Billy remembered being friends with Kilgore Trout in 1964—maybe he should tell him about Tralfamadore. Maybe that’s what made him write the book Billy read in 1945. Or maybe Billy should take the secret of Tralfamadore with him to Chicago on February 13th, 1976.
After Billy experienced death for a while, he swung back into life. He stopped halfway back, in the hospital in Vermont. Robert was there, talking to the doctor. Billy supposed he should talk to Robert, but all he could think about was robots with bad breath dropping giants on the moon. He wasn’t sure what that had to do with Robert, so he visited 1964 to ask Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout knew all about robots and bad breath. Bad breath like mustard gas and roses—or gasoline and rubber.
The Tralfamadorians told Billy that they didn’t watch wars. The walls in the shelter were shaking. When one of the soldiers checked outside, the smell came in—like robot halitosis—and one of the prisoners throw up everything he had eaten during that month in Dresden. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. Billy traveled to his honeymoon. He didn’t tell his wife, but he knew that they—along with five other people—were conceiving Robert, who Billy remembered was a Green Beret. Robert was back from Vietnam to see Billy in the hospital. Professor Rumfoord was telling Lily about weapons in Vietnam, things that burned and melted and killed every living thing. Billy didn’t think that made sense—if everything was dead, there wouldn’t be any birds to tell about it.
“Poo-tee-weet?”
Historicity April 10, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Research.Tags: Vonnegut
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Slaughterhouse Five and The Plot Against America both provided a counter to consensus thought, but for the most part the dissonance was more explicitly defined by Roth than by Vonnegut. Roth formed a narrative that took advantage of the underlying historical structures available to him from the period, which threw into sharp relief the deviations from the accepted facts that made up the core of the novel’s effect. Vonnegut avoided these historical references for the most part, until the very end of the novel. He then introduced Billy’s hospital roommate, Professor Rumfoord, who taught history at Harvard. This character articulates the consensus, impersonal perspective of the Dresden raid (and by extension, war itself), and is shocked by Billy’s reaction to his academic stance. To me, this was the anchor point within Vonnegut’s text that grounded the disruptive narrative structure in a framework that allows the reader to place the novel within the historical context and clearly see the departure from consensus within the text.
Project Proposal April 4, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Unconventional Discourse.Tags: Mystory
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I want to address a specific identity within the historical context of the Cold War. Specifically, I want to explore the experience of those individuals responsible for developing weapons during the Cold War, most notably the scientists who worked on the hydrogen bomb projects. This interests me as a chemistry major and future doctor, especially the tensions that surface within the pursuit of scientific achievement and the moral questions concerning applied science and technology in the culture of the Cold War. Often this issue is boiled down to superficial generalizations, where students learn in textbooks about historical figures like Einstein and Oppenheimer and the “conflicted” nature of their relationship to their work, but rarely, if ever, is a serious attempt made to relate to the actual experiences of the people involved in this issue at all levels. I would argue (if I actually intended to be argumentative) that the experiences of these individuals were much more complex, and could not be reduced to the platitudes which are most often applied to this question in conventional discourse. These historical characters are often separated from their perspectives of their experiences, whereas here the goal is to create a textual representation of those experiences using the poetic techniques derived from our sources throughout the semester. Roth’s utilization of historicity to support his literary structures is central for this project, which must be rooted in factual authenticity before it can hope to become unconventional discourse. Similarly, the shifting of scale between collective and individual is an effective tool that can be used to address this issue. Another way of producing a stereographic text is using the interplay of history, experience, and myth exemplified by Momaday. All of these techniques can be compiled into a text that resists passive or automatic reading and forces the reader to contemplate the unified experience of the individuals that are associated with the specific identity addressed within the project. When trying to achieve this blend of personal, historical, and mythical discourse, one of the natural candidates for reappropriation is Oppenheimer, who expressly linked his personal experience to a mythical figure, which is recorded as history for us. Also, his is easily the most recognizable name associated with this area, and he can serve as a reasonable anchor to ground the rest of the text in historicity. Because this is a topic that has been exhaustively explored using conventional discourse, it will be absolutely critical to avoid falling into an automatic or traditional mode of thinking where the consensus opinion replaces the essential experience at the core of the text. Although key figures like Einstein, Oppenheimer, or von Braun may be vital touchstones of historicity for the text, focusing only on these high-profile individuals would be conterproductive. Their involvement has been amply explored and analyzed; what is missing and what I aim to express is the experience of the anonymous masses that were also directly involved in and affected by these projects.
Experience-Memory-Myth April 3, 2009
Posted by gbcarter in Research.Tags: Momaday
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The excerpt from Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain seemed unique to me in the way that it blended and linked experience, history, memory, and myth to create a reflection on the author’s heritage. One of the techniques that Momaday used was to take a natural object and cast it in the light of its place in Native American, and specifically Kiowa, tradition and myth. For example, he related the Kiowa legend about the origin of Devil’s Tower and the Big Dipper, in a way reappropriating them in the symbolic and mythical tradition of his people. This was particularly of interest to me, as I have been to Devil’s Tower and am obviously familiar with the Big Dipper, but to consider those things in this mythical way was somewhat disruptive to me. Momaday also used a familiar natural phenomenon, the 1833 occurrence of the annual Leonid meteor shower, to signify a shifting in his culture from myth to history. However, his descriptions of the memories and experiences of the “historical” period are inextricably linked to myth in a way that forces the reader to consider his portrayal of the Kiowa tribe’s past and heritage in a unified way.
Trinity 