sexual hunger

professor amyhungerford: so, today we find ourselves ina very different novelistic world than we've been in for thelast week and a half: on the road.did anyone take this course because they love on theroad?

anybody?one, sort of ambivalently. yes.okay. sometimes i do get students whohave just an image of this novel in their mind,or they read it when they were

in high school and have a sortof irrational, passionate love for it.and so, sometimes people approach it in that way,and i think in a way it holds that aura around itself in ourculture and in the history of the novel in this period thatwe're studying together. i'm going to talk a little bitabout its publishing history, its compositional history,actually, at the end of my two lectures on the novel.so, i would ask you just to reserve whatever curiosity youhave about that.

so, in a way,i'm flipping my usual practice; i would tell you a little bitabout its publication history at the beginning.i'm going to do that at the end for this reason:that it has such a special place in the imagination of ourculture. and so, i'm going to talk aboutthat after we have a better understanding of what's going onin the book. my point, at the end of mylecture on lolita on monday, was that nabokov istrying to imagine an autonomous

work of art that has a life toit, that is in some sense animatedor personified, and that this desire to makethe aesthetic something living introduces to the world of theaesthetic the problem of mortality.it's mortality that gives it that sense of ephemeral value,but it's also mortality that threatens to cancel it outaltogether. the language that the beatstried to imagine, tried to write,takes up some of these problems

that we saw in nabokov.unlike nabokov, these writers are not trying tomake a language that is autonomous and separate from theworld, so you will not see the kind ofartifice and the labored attention to form.you're not going to have a writer spending a month on therepresentation of a barber from kasbeam.you're not going to get that in the beats.instead, you're getting something, a language that triesto come as close as

possible--not necessarily tolife in all its facets--but to life as we experience it.in a certain way, this is not a rejection ofmodernism and its desire for the autonomous work of art,because partly, as i've shown,the desire for the autonomous work of art shades into thedesire to replicate life. there is that desire much moreexplicitly in the writing of jack kerouac,the desire to replicate experience as you read,the feeling of having the

experience that the writer wantsyou to have and that the writer himself has had.that's always going to be important to understanding thiswork. so, that's one aspect in whichit shares something with modernism, even thoughstylistically, and as a matter of craft andcomposition, it looks very distinct.the other way it shares an ambition of modernism isprecisely in that effort to communicate experience,consciousness.

so, if you've read at all inthe novels of virginia woolf, for example,or in james joyce's novels, you know that part of modernistinnovation, part of the stylistic difficulty,is the effort to put on the page what happens in the mind,that sense of the mind drifting from one idea to another thatyou get in virginia woolf's prose,so magically in woolf's prose. so, that is something thesewriters share with modernism, but there is one big differenceand i want to exemplify that for

you just by reading to you twoparallel texts, one from the modernist canonand one from the beat canon. so, first i want to read to youthe footnote to t.s. eliot's the wasteland.now the wasteland was the first poem to havefootnotes, and you have to ask yourself: what do you have tothink the poem is in order to think that it needsfootnotes? so, i'm going to say a littlebit more about that, but let me just read to you,first, from the notes on the

wasteland:not only the title, but the plan and a good deal ofthe incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by missjessie l. weston's book on the graillegend, from ritual to romance (cambridge)." he has a little bibliography, there:indeed, so deeply am i indebted,miss weston's book will elucidate the difficulties ofthe poem much better than my notes can do;and i recommend it (apart from

the great interest of the bookitself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worththe trouble. to another work of anthropologyi am indebted in general, one which has influenced ourgeneration profoundly; i mean the golden bough;i have used especially the two volumes adonis,attis, osiris. anyone who is acquainted withthese works will immediately recognize in the poem certainreferences to vegetation ceremonies.and then there are particular

notes for the different parts ofthe poem. that's the introduction to thefootnotes. what i want you to note thereis the sense that the matter of the poem comes from an archive,an archive of scholarly work, a body of knowledge that youread about. and i also want you to notethat language: "miss jessie weston."it's a very mannered, decorous language.now i would like to read to you from the footnote tohowl, allen ginsberg's

famous poem,that for many people embodied at the time what it meant to beengaged in this new literary project.so, this is footnote to howl:holy! holy!holy! holy!holy! holy!holy! the world is holy!the soul is holy! the skin is holy!the nose is holy!

the tongue and cock and handand asshole holy! everything is holy!everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!every day is in eternity! everyman's an angel!the bum's as holy as the seraphim!the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!the typewriter is holy! the poem is holy the voice isholy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!holy peter holy allen holy solomon holy lucien holykerouac holy huncke holy

burroughs holy cassady holy theunknown buggered and suffering beggar holy the hideous humanangels! a little different tone,don't you think? a few things i want to noteabout that besides the obvious. the fount of poetic inspirationis not to be found in an archive.it is not to be found in miss jessie weston's book on ritualand romance. it is not to be found with abibliography saying "cambridge." that's not where you find thefount of the great poem.

the footnote to howlsays that the source of howl--that's whatfootnotes are; they're an indication of thesource--it says that the source of the poetry is that holy,lived experience, and a particular slice of livedexperience: the formerly rejected,the indecorous, the ecstatic. i noticed that several ofyou were smiling, in a way, as i read,that suggested you were embarrassed by the performance.right?

i did not elicit this byaccident. embarrassment is something thatthe beats value. when ginsberg first readhowl, he was on stage, and there was a littlebathroom. it was--i think it was--in abook store. (i can't remember;i didn't reread my notes on howl.) and so,when the show started he was in the bathroom,on the pot with the door open, and then he got up,and he hiked up his pants,

and he waltzed out and he gavehis reading of howl. this is indicative of the sensethat he wants to lay bare, in a literal way,all the seaminess of human life, all the aspects of what itmeans to be an embodied person, all the ecstasies that comefrom that embodiment. and, of course,this is not at all original to ginsberg.if you read walt whitman, you will see much of the sameethos (and probably a lot better poetry).so, ginsberg is not the first

to do this in the americantradition, for sure, but it's a very important partof what the beats revive. and i want to get at thatquestion of embarrassment, because it comes up veryexplicitly on page 36. embarrassment is thematized inon the road, and it's assigned what i think is avery interesting provenance. so, this is chad king talkingto sal paradise: a quavering twang comesout when he speaks. "the thing i always liked,sal, about the plains indians,

was the way they always gots'danged embarrassed after they boasted the number of scalpsthey got. in ruxton's life in the farwest there's an indian who gets red all over blushingbecause he got so many scalps and he runs like hell into theplains to glory over his deeds in hiding.damn, that tickled me!" the sense of embarrassment isthe sense that the excess of--what?--joy,in this passage, the indian's bravery,his achievement,

his success;all of that is in excess of the decorous presentation of thatexperience, of that real world of life, of that excessive joy.and it's given here this sort of clichã©d,noble origin with the native american, the plains indian.so, there is a sense, in the plains indian,that he is both the embodiment of a noble, restrained lineage;but also, deep in that american past, is this sense of greatexcess. embarrassment tells us we're inthe presence of the excess,

and that's why beat writerscourt it. that's why i courted it todayfor you. the excess requires,for the beats, a new kind of language.one aspect of their language which maybe you've noticed inon the road--it's not quite so pronounced in on theroad as it is elsewhere, certainly--in the letters thatthese figures write to each other.part of that is the elimination of small words,"the," "and";

the abbreviation of certainwords, "your" to "yr." there are all kinds of littleabbreviations they make, and it suggests that languagehas to be wrenched out of its conventions;syntax can be set aside; language needs to move at thespeed of experience and at the speed of ecstasy.so, that's one small way in the language that they practicedtried to imitate the experience that they were immersingthemselves in. but there were more formulatedways of capturing that

experience in language.jack kerouac had a list of essentials that he taped up onhis wall when he was writing, and this is what they include:scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewrittenpages for your own joy [and that's "yr," your own joy].submissive to everything, open, listening.try never to get drunk outside your own house.[well,this is a piece of advice clearly he never took.]be in love with your life. be crazy dumb saint of themind.

blow as deep as you want toblow. write what you wantbottomless from bottom of the mind.the unspenspeakable visions of the individual.in tranced fixation dreaming upon object beforeyou. and then, my favorite one is:"you're a genius all the time." now, try putting that up infront of your desk: "you're a genius all the time."it will help you to produce a lot of writing;i guarantee.

kerouac tried over and overagain to write on the road, and it was an effortto practice this kind of free language that would beuninhibited and that would gesture towards some deeper,bottomless part of the human experience, the human soul.sometimes it was spiritualized. in this sense,this is why i put this quote up on the board from on theroad: "we've got to go someplace, find something."there is a relentless seeking sense that's at the heart ofthis work.

now, for those of you whodon't know, on the road does document pretty closely theactual road trips that jack kerouac took with neal cassadyand a whole host of others, and i can do a little decodingfor you. old bull lee is williamburroughs, and his wife, jane, jane lee.so, allen ginsberg is carlo marx, and ginsberg went tocolumbia. he was kicked out of columbia,and then sort of went back. he was in and out of school.so, a lot of them were in this

little community,and they picked up wanderers and various people who wanted tolearn from them. and that's what neal cassadywas to them at first, a kind of wanderer who wantedto be in their intellectual, but bohemian,circle. so, you see the kind oflanguage that neal represents at the very beginning of the novel.first of all, he's introduced in this verymysterious way: "first reports of him."this is on the first page of

part one, the middle of thatfirst paragraph: "first reports of him came tome through chad king, who had shown me a few lettersfrom him, written in a new mexico reform school."so, his letters come out of this western land,new mexico, and a land of criminality, the reform school.so, he's exotic just from the very beginning,and it's an exotic language. it's the letters that come outof this exotic place that first catch their attention.i was tremendously

interested in the lettersbecause they so naively and sweetly asked chad to teach himall about nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual thingsthat chad knew. at one point carlo and i talkedabout the letters and wondered if we would ever meet thestrange dean moriarty. this is all far back,when dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. then news came that dean wasout of reform school and was coming to new york for the firsttime;

also there was talk that he hadjust married a girl called marylou.it's that passive sense: "there was talk."who's talking? we don't know.that passive verb, "there was talk," gives you thesense that there is this wide community passing word mouth tomouth of the coming of a mysterious spiritual figure:"first reports of him;" "news came;""there was talk." so, language is this communalset of rumors spiritualized by

its very vagueness and sharedquality. and then, it's just fascinatingto listen to what dean says. now this on page 2.this is how he talks: all this time dean wastelling marylou things like this."now, darling. here we are in new york andalthough i haven't quite told you everything that i wasthinking about when we crossed the missouri and especially atthe point when we passed the booneville reformatory whichreminded me of my jail problem,

it is absolutely necessary nowto postpone all those leftover things concerning our personallove things and at once begin thinking of specific worklifeplans ..." and so on in,the way that he had in those early days." his language is a sort of mishmash of poorly used academiclocutions: "worklife plans." it sounds almost like corporatespeak, in a way. it has that dry quality to it.and then, on the top of 3, we get another example:"in other words we've got

to get on the ball,darling, what i'm saying, otherwise it'll be fluctuatingand lack of true knowledge or crystallization of ourplans." so, this is not yet thatidealized speech that kerouac is dreaming of when he writes thelist of essentials for spontaneous prose.dean's language is not that in these passages.his desire for the intellectual download from chad is not what'sgoing to make him the figure of the new language for sal.rather, it is another kind of

language that he represents thatwill be that kind of germ of what sal is looking for.this is, you see, also on 2 at the beginninghere: i went to the cold-waterflat with the boys and dean came to the door in his shorts.marylou was jumping off the couch.dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to thekitchen probably to make coffee while he proceeded with his loveproblems for to him sex was the one and only holy and importantthing in life although he had to

sweat and curse to make a livingand so on. you saw that in the way hestood bobbing his head, always looking down,nodding like a young boxer to instructions to make you thinkhe was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand "yes"esand "that's right." there is this sense ofenthusiasm, so his response is not an articulation of somethought, but an effusion: "yes;that's right." it's a visceral response,and you see it even more

clearly on 4.so, he's staying, dean is staying with sal,and sal has been writing. and they're ready to go out,and sal says: "hold on a minute.i'll be right with you as soon as i finish this chapter," andit was one of the best chapters in the book.then i dressed and off we flew to new york to meet some girls." so, i'm going to skip along alittle bit. ("i was…"oh, let's see.

"as we…"actually,i am going to read that part.) as we rode in the bus inthe weird phosphorescent void of the lincoln tunnel,we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled andtalked excitedly and i was beginning to get the bug likedean. he was simply a youthtremendously excited with life and though he was a con man hewas only conning because he wanted so much to live and getinvolved with people who would otherwise pay no attention tohim.

he was conning me and i knew itfor room and board and how to write, etc., and he knew i knew.this had been the basis of our relationship but i didn't careand we got along fine. no pestering, no catering.we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.i began to learn from him as much as he probably learned fromme. as far as my work wasconcerned, he said, "go ahead.everything you do is great." he watched over my shoulder asi wrote stories yelling,

"yes, that's right.wow, man," and "phew!" "wow" is dean's word."wow" is the kind of word that means nothing,but it suggests the immediacy of dean's engagement.so, all that talking on the bus, and the way they're movingtheir hands, the bug, that's all where this languageis rising from. that's where the new languageis going to come from, and you can see how salassimilates that on page 35. this is just as he is cominginto denver:

i said to myself,wow, what'll denver be like? i got on that hot road and offi went in a brand-new car driven by a denver businessman of about35. he went 70.i tingled all over. i counted minutes andsubtracted miles. just ahead over the rollingwheat fields all golden beneath the distant snows of estes i'dbe seeing old denver at last. i pictured myself in a denverbar that night with all the gang and in their eyes i would bestrange and ragged and like the

prophet who has walked acrossthe land to bring the dark word and the only word i had was"wow." so neal's--sorry--dean'ssense (i will do this and please forgive me.i will sometimes slip in to calling him dean because he,dean… nevermind.you know what i'm saying. i will sometimes slip in tocalling him neal when his name is dean.) dean has alreadyprojected this mode of language into sal,so even as he's saying to sal,

"teach me how to write," whathe's doing is teaching sal how to write,how to write this kind of book, how to be the prophet of "wow."this is all over the text. if you look at page 62,it's in these little stories: remi woke up and saw mecome in the window. his great laugh,one of the greatest laughs in the world, dinned in myear. and then, if you just skip upto the top of 63: the strange thing wasthat next door to remi lived a

negro called mr.snow whose laugh i swear on the bible was positively and finallythe one greatest laugh in all this world.the laugh is a lot like the "wow."it's that sound you make just because you're experiencingsomething, just because you're having a response to what's infront of you, something someone says.okay. that's another example.and the last one i'll give you is on 55.this is when they've gone up to

the mountain pass after gettingin fights in the bars in denver: in the whole eastern darkwall of the divide this night there was silence and thewhisper of the wind except in the ravine where we roared andon the other side of the divide was the great western slope andthe big plateau that went to steamboat springs and droppedand led you to the western colorado desert and the utahdesert all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in ourmountain nook, mad, drunken americans in themighty land.

we were on the roof of americaand all we could do was yell i guess across the night,eastward over the plains where somewhere an old man with whitehair was probably walking towards us with the word andwould arrive any minute and make us silent.their yell at the top of the world seems to sal somethingthat calls for a replacement; it calls for some other prophetto come walking ragged towards them and make them fall silentwith his word. but, in the meantime,what you have is the continual

reproduction of that yell,that laugh, that "wow," that "yes," that "that's all right,"all those things that they say just to register their existenceand their relation with one another.i want to note something else, though,about the first time that dean and sal meet and thecontextualizing of that meeting. when they first meet in thatpassage that i read to you, he's just rising up from havingsex on the couch with marylou in someone else's apartment.he sent the owner of the

apartment into the kitchen so hecould have sex with marylou on the couch.in other versions he says that dean got up and was naked,not that he was in his shorts. there is an immediate sexualsense that charges the relationship between thesepeople. those relationships take placein the context of continual negotiations of sexualrelationships, and so the book begins withthat explanation that: i first met dean not longafter my wife and i split up.

i had just gotten over aserious illness that i won't bother to talk about except thatit had something to do with the miserably weary splitting up andmy feeling that everything was dead.dean's negotiations between marylou and camille indenver--where he has his schedule,and he has his exact time he has to get from one hotel to theother to sleep with each of them,and then he has to meet carlo ginsberg, carlo marx,in the basement to have his

conversations to get to the"bottomlessness" of each other's mind--all those negotiations areabsolutely crucial. it's what they spend their timetalking about, often.it's what they spend their time negotiating.so, the search for the immediate language of experienceis part and parcel of a very complex negotiation of sexualties between multiple people. and it's not just between themen and the women. it's between the men and themen.

and that moment when sal meetsdean at the door, and he's naked;it's reflected when he sees dean with camille.camille opens the door to their room when they're in denver,and he finally sees dean in denver.he opens the door to the room, and there is a picture thatcamille has drawn of dean: a portrait of him completelynaked, and it notes his penis in thatpicture. it's as if sal's firstexperience of dean is already,

in that scene,assimilated into the image of dean: the disembodied,aesthetic image of dean. but that aesthetic image ofdean is all bound up in these negotiations.so, it's a picture that camille has drawn, and of course camilledoesn't know that he's sleeping with marylou in another hotel onthe same day, and so on.so, all of that is very palpable, and sal's own desirefor dean is sublimated in those scenes, but it's everywhere atthe level of the language.

and, if you note the repeatedpresence of that question, where was dean?where was dean? he's always missing.when sal gets to denver, that's what he wants to know.when he gets back to new york, finally, at the end of thisfirst road trip, he has missed dean.there's always the sense that dean evades him,and i think part of that sense of an evading object of desireis, again, the pursuit of sex inthis novel;

it's part of the pursuit of sex. you might think,given all this, and given the ultimate plot ofon the road, that being on the road is aboutpursuing that kind of desire, and that it is necessitated byleaving home: you have to leave home in orderto pursue that desire. but i would suggest to you thathome is absolutely crucial to the production of this desire.and i want to point you to page 26.

this is sal's story about bigslim hazard, a hobo that he once knew.he was a hobo by choice: as a little boy,he'd seen a hobo come up to ask his mother for a piece of pieand she had given it to him and when the hobo went off down theroad the little boy had said, "ma, what was that fellow?""why, that's a hobo." "ma, i want to be a hobosomeday." "shut your mouth.that's not for the like of the hazards."but he never forgot that day

and when he grew up after ashort spell playing football at lsu he did become a hobo.being a hobo is produced in this little vignette by theexperience of seeing a hobo get pie from your mother.now, did any of you notice how often sal eats pie?let me just demonstrate the litany of pie.okay, page 15. actually, let's start on 14,or perhaps on 13: "along about three in themorning after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadsidestand…."

that's sal.top of 14: i ate another apple pieand ice cream. that's practically all i ateall the way across the country. i knew it was nutritious and itwas delicious. fifteen, bottom:i ate apple pie and ice cream.it was getting better as i got deeper in to iowa,the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.there were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere ilooked in des moines that

afternoon.they were coming home from high school but i had no time now forthoughts like that and promised myself a ball in denver.and if you look on 107, the first thing sal does whenhe gets home is eat. when i got home i ateeverything in the icebox. my mother got up and looked atme. "poor little salvatore," shesaid in italian. "you're thin. you're thin.where have you been all this time?"i had on two shirts and two

sweaters.my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and thetattered remnants of my huarache shoes in it.my aunt and i decided to buy a new electric refrigerator withthe money i had sent her from california;it was to be the first one in the family.there is a sense in which hunger, the hunger generated bythe road, in sal's case in this last scene--he's been penniless;all he had was cough drops to eat at the very end--that thehunger generated by the road

exists in a necessary relationto the consumption of home. and i would suggest to you thatthe consumption of home is driven by a certain kind ofdesire as well, that desire to move up in theamerican class structure: "the first electricrefrigerator in my family." he's earned a little money onthe road and sent it home. what it does for him is allowhim to buy his aunt this symbol of a middle-class americandomesticity, and he is a happy participantin this new purchase.

this is not exactly justwhat the women do while the boys are out on the road.the boys want the pie. the boys want to become hobosbecause there's a kind of hunger that's generated at home;it's satisfied at home, but it's also generated athome. and i want to suggest to youthat part of the misogyny of the novel--which i'm sure ispalpable to all of us as we read--part of that misogyny isconnected to this consumptive ethos.so, when we talk about desire

for something--"we've got to gosomeplace, find something--the very vagueness of that desire isconnected with the basic hungers of the body for sex,for food, for sleep even. we see dean sort of begging forsleep after his conversation with carlo marx in the basementin denver. those kinds of desires areconnected also with that american habit of consumption.this is a consumer society; in the 1950s it was alreadyvery much so. the mass production after worldwar ii had already taken hold.

supermarkets,as we saw in wise blood, are already something onecan be fond of, as enoch was.and so, if this is a novel whose aura has always said tous, "be free, be countercultural," what i'm suggesting is thatit's structured around a very deeply embedded americancultural trait of consumption. it spiritualizes that kind ofdesire, and my symbol for it is pie.

i want to show you one lastthing about how the language works, and this is on page 49. to set aside the critique ofthat search for a moment, i just want to move back intoit in these spiritual terms and see what we can see.when dean and carlo are talking to each other,there's a lot of anxiety on either part about whether theyhave actually attained that thing that they were lookingfor. on 48, their talk is describedas business in the beginning.

then they got down tobusiness. they sat on the bedcross-legged and looked at each other.i slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it.they began with an abstract thought, discussed it,reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in therush of events. dean apologized but promised hecould get back to it and manage it fine, bringing upillustrations. and then, they have this verycomplicated back-and-forth about

things that they remembered,or didn't, and they hashed these things over:then carlo asked dean if he was honest and specificallyif he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul."why do you bring that up again?""there is one last thing i want to know.'""but dear sal, you're listening. you are sitting there.we'll ask sal. what would he say?"and i said, "that last thing is what you can't get,carlo.

nobody can get to that lastthing. we keep on living in hopes ofcatching it once for all." so, all this language isproduced because you can't ever get to that last thing;you have to keep hashing it over.but if you go to the next page you can see--or actually twopages over--you can see that already sal is taking what hecan get from this language and transposing it into hisexperience of reality. so carlo had earlier--sorry toflip back and forth so much--had

read earlier his poem--this ison 47--to sal. he had been reading poetry.carlo woke up in the morning and heard the vulgarpigeons yakking in the street outside his cell.he saw the sad nightingales nodding on the branches and theyreminded him of his mother. a gray shroud fell over thecity. the mountains,the magnificent rockies that you can see to the west from anypart of town, were papier-mache.the whole universe was crazy

and cockeyed and extremelystrange. so, this is what carlorepresents in his poetry. well, if you look,sal, after witnessing what it means--what their business iswith one another, the way they try to get to thebottom of each other's soul--he looks out, and he sees the worldthrough carlo's eyes. he's been awake all this timelistening: "what were you thinking,sal?" i told them that i was thinkingthey were very amazing maniacs

and that i had spent the wholenight listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of awatch that reached clear to the top of berthoud pass and was yetmade with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in theworld. they smiled.i pointed my finger at them and said, "if you keep this up,you'll both go crazy but let me know what happens as you goalong." i walked out and took a trolleyto my apartment and carlo marx's papier-mache mountains grew redas the great sun rose from the

eastward plains.so, the poetry that is part and parcel of the conversationbetween dean and carlo--carlo's poetry--seeps out of thatbasement room. and there's a real spatialsense here, that it's being generated at the base of theworld, and it goes up and ittransforms these mountains into papier-mache.it makes them in one sense false;there is a falseness to the overlay that carlo gives to sal,and through which he then sees.

there's a falseness,a craftedness, but it's a kind of folkcraftedness. this is not the craftedness ofmodernism. this is papier-mache,a fairly crude folk art. anyone can do it.get your strips of newspaper and paste them up.so, it has a quality that is different from humbert'selaborate world view through which we see or don't seelolita. it's a very different kind ofcrafting, but yet it does

replace reality in a similarway, or it makes demands on reality that push the real back.and so, even though they can never get to the bottom oftheir souls--they can never get, as sal says,that last thing, that's what you can neverhave--even though that's true, it has this world-making power.to what end will that power be used?this is one question i want you to think about as you finishthis novel. what do these figures thinklanguage can be used for?

what's it good for?what can it do for them? what beyond that kind ofeconomics of desire, that accounting?if you look on 107-108, again at the very end of thesection: "i had my home to go to,my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figurethe gain that i knew was in there somewhere too."what are the losses? what are the gains?is it just a representation of an imaginative and desirefuleconomy, or is there some other

thing being produced here?what is the something? what is the someplace?so, in that relation, i'd like you to think about therepresentation of america in the novel.what do you see there when you think about the america they'regiving us, all these figures? so, that's for your reading.in section please bring lolita.i think you're going to

sexual hunger,spend most of your time talkingabout lolita. section for on the roadwill probably be next week

unless your tf wants to bring upsome brief questions about it, but that's all for today.