(When I Walk in the Club) All Eyes On Me

Already in the first 28 pages, I have an idea of what Mrs. Dalloway will be like as a novel.  Virginia Woolf's distinct style uses abundant description and intrusive narrator that, at first, I found to be bothersome, but on the second reading have come to really enjoy.  Though there isn't a huge vigorous plot, there's enough of a story, or character background, that keeps interest and drives what plot there is, along.

I'm not entirely sure how to explain the sensation I had, having just completed the night's reading, but it is one of giddiness, awe, or excitement.  It seems silly saying that because there has barely been any action, but the second I finished the reading assignment, I jumped to my computer to put some thoughts down (that hopefully I recorded fast enough and with enough coherence to be interesting to others).

I find the character of Septimus to be enthralling.  The odd things he thinks or does create such a queer disposition, and I wish more of the book was from his thoughts.  It was very comical to read how Septimus thought everyone was staring at him and that he was trying to find his purpose in life, or I love that while Septimus is sitting next to his wife, the voice of the nursemaid "rasped his spine deliciously (21)." That's just such an odd thing to read!  Or how he wants his wife to shut up so he can think and "get away from people." I really hope he shows up more throughout the novel!

I think the way Woolf switches from Septimus to Lucrezia to Maisie Johnson to Mrs. Carrie Dempster to Mr. Bentely is delicious, and she does so in such a smooth yet clear transition that I can't help but admire her work.  It must have been such a bizarre thing to read when it was published, and I greatly admire Woolf's innovation as well as her success in carrying it out.  Aside from the interesting royal car scene and the quirky airplane-spelling-toffee part, a segment I thoroughly enjoyed was Maisie Johnson's description of her view of Septimus and Lucrezia on the bench in the park:

"...the young woman [Lucrezia] seeming foreign, the man [Septimus] looking queer so that should she [Maisie] be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent's Park on a fine summer's morning fifty years ago ... and now how queer it was, this couple she had asked the way of, and the girl started and jerked her hand, and the man -- he seemed awfully odd ... (25-26)"

Not only do we get a taste of Woolf's eloquent writing style in this passage, but we also get a painted picture of Lucrezia and Septimus and their oddness -- a picture that you can see clearly: a couple sitting in a park on a bench on a warm June morning with birds singing and green grass and pretty flowers, that on closer inspection seems to be two extremely bizarre people.  We also get the innocent and outsider point of view of Maisie, who like so many other people mentioned so far, may just be a temporary observer of the scene that Woolf used to describe an otherwise simple and insipid episode.  Getting a view of Lucrezia and Septimus that wasn't from Lucrezia's sorrowful aspect or Septimus' detached one, really brought life to that fleeting and probably inconsequential scene.  Woolf was all about character development in the essay we read, so I'm glad to see that she is certainly not hypocritical and delves deeply into all the temporary characters she introduces.

Next Stop: Bizarre Station

In Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, the narrator Howie talks about the most everyday objects and actions, but with so much detail that it provokes a lot of thinking about routines and items we easily dismiss as trivial (such as shoelace tying, or plastic bags).  The things he thinks and does in both the present and the past, are recorded into a short "novella" of the most peculiar yet fascinating string of ideas.

Whether it's Howie talking about how he can't pee when other men are near him in urinals, or his philosophy on brushing tongues as well as teeth, he manages to arrive at that idea from a series of other almost-random thoughts, that are still, oddly, connected.  Almost like a train from Champaign to Chicago.  Looking at a small town and then at the bursting city of Chicago many miles away, there's almost no reasonable connection; but, taken stop by stop, the way from Champaign to Chicago really isn't that complicated.   I feel like that's what Baker really accomplished overall in his novel in so many different aspects.  An escalator ride really isn't complicated,  but when you factor in all the thoughts that go through your head, or the many people riding up it and what their individual stories are, it can go from being a dull, quotidian factor of life, to having an international feeling, or  spanning over decades of thoughts and experiences.  Similarly, we don't spare a thought about tying our shoes, yet how many hands the shoelace has gone through, and where the material was constructed, and over which sea it travelled, and so much more, can be a captivating thought if we only had the interest and time to spend analyzing all the amazing things that we take for granted in our daily lives.  However, now I'm starting to sound like Baker himself, and this isn't even a footnote, so I'll end with the digression.  By reading and experiencing another person's no-shame thought processes, I felt relieved by the fact that I'm not the only one that has a very strange train of thought that speeds around quickly and stops at peculiar stations.  For example, I sometimes come up with nicknames for friends.  My thought process was as follows:

Nolan --> Nol --> Knoll --> Hill, so his name became Hill.
Berl --> Pearl --> Oyster --> Ocean
Newman --> Paul Newman --> Cool Hand Luke --> Eggs (the egg scene in that movie is very memorable!)

etc.  Taken step by step, like Nicholson Baker does in his verbose footnotes that jump around from idea to idea, the names are understandable (if not their purpose, but their derivation).  Maybe that's why I associated so much with his writing style and found the novel very entertaining.
The Mezzanine had me chuckling quite often, especially in the prolix footnotes (especially when talking about footnotes in the footnotes, or Howie's envisioning sheep as workers sent out to put him to sleep (FAVORITE PART), or his discussion of bathroom etiquette).  Baker/his character Howie wrote about many things that would be considered private or awkward for conversation, let alone published, but he wrote about them in a way that makes them comic and almost acceptable, and I was captivated by his enthusiasm.

Anyways, these were my thoughts on the The Mezzanine, can't wait for more in-class discussion!

OH also, a question for the male population: do guys actually say "oop" instead of "oops" when they're with other males, or was this just an 80s thing...?