ramarca5’s blog

This is the plot of “Count Belisarius” taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius

…written from the viewpoint of the eunuch Eugenius, servant to Belisarius’ wife (but actually based on Procopius’s history), the book portrays Belisarius as a solitary honorable man in a corrupt world, and paints a vivid picture of not only his startling military feats but also the colorful characters and events of his day, such as the savage Hippodrome politics of the Constantinople chariot races, which regularly escalated to open street battles between fans of opposing factions, and the intrigue between the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora.

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Randall Jarrell noted that Muse symbolism permeates Graves’s writing: “All that is finally important to Graves is condensed in the one figure of the Mother-Mistress-Muse, she who creates, nourishes, seduces, destroys; she who saves us—or, as good as saving, destroys us—as long as we love her, write poems to her, submit to her without question, use all our professional, Regimental, masculine qualities in her service. Death is swallowed up in victory, said St. Paul; for Graves Life, Death, everything that exists is swallowed up in the White Goddess (…) Graves explored and reconstructed the White Goddess myth in his book The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. J. M. Cohen noted in his Robert Graves: “The mythology of The White Goddess, though its elements are drawn from a vast field of ancient story and legends, is in its assemblage Graves’s own creation, and conforms to the requirements of his own poetic mind.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=2678

Go to:       Cover Page Introduction Conclusion

• Photographs:
• The main photograph in the header:  © Ramón Martínez Casanova
• Graves´s photographs in the header

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/db/results.php?CISOBOX1=robert+graves&CISOBOX2=photograph&CISOFIELD1=subjea&CISOFIELD2=objecb&CISOOP1=all&CISOOP2=exact&CISOROOT=%2Fww1&CISOSORT=descri|f

http://palatin-project.com/

Adrienne Greenheart photograph in the header:

http://www.6figurecareermanagement.com/personal-stuff/penelope-trunk-meaningful-careers-and-improvisation/

About the author:

-This webpage has got a brief biographical information as well as a link to her works

http://www.adrienneeisen.com/

-This is a blog by the author, under the name of Penelope Trunk, which a social network to help young people manage their careers. Here she also explain the change of her names.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/03/05/my-name-is-not-really-penelope/

About the hypertext:

-This is the link to read “Six Sex Stories”

http://www.adrienneeisen.com/six_sex_scenes/index.htm

Additional information:

- The following links have been used to add extra information about cultural  issues that appear in the stories:

“You Suck, by the Yeastie Girls”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFNIrRAfuV0 and  http://www.lyricsdownload.com/murmurs-you-suck-lyrics.html

“The Reading”, about Andrea Dworkin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin,

and about Henry Miller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Miller

“Em Oy El Xi Fi”, about “Scrabble”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Miller

“Liberation”, to listen to the song “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAsV5-Hv-7U

“Sylvia”, about Sylvia Plath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath

“Kathy Acker”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Acker

“Chanukkah”: http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday7.htm

“Purim”:  http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday9.htm

“Risk”, about the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_%28game%29

I have enjoyed this hypertext. Many of  the stories have their own life and might as well be independent short stories, as in my opinion could be especially the case of  “Janey“, “Bored” “Once” or “What is important“.  The fact that the narration does not have a chronological beginning nor a clear ending makes you feel like going on reading more  when you realise that it is over. The content of the stories, or memories, so close to everyday life, to personal and intimate experiences, bears a logical correspondence with most of the settings that have been listed in the space reference table: many parts of the own house, school or  holiday places. In other occassions the place is not mentioned although we could easily guess the setting. Reading a hypertext implies no linearity and choices made by the reader following the possible paths which are offered by the author. In this sense this narration is a hypertext. But it is also true that it is not as distant from the print form as other hypertexts are. You can easily get it printed and read it the conventional way, in the order you prefer or arranging the pages randomly. I did it actually every time in a different order . I read it two more times once printed. And the feelings I got were different each time because the previous story was a different one each time, and so the next.

For me, reading this story has been like when you are listening to a delightful melody and it comes to and end unexpectedly. Many years ago, my father used to sell records in the town markets. He drove his van loaded with wooden boxes of records  from town to town. On Saturday, when the working week was over,  he unloaded his van piling a couple of  boxes in the sitting room. In the evening I used to browse through each of the boxes containing the records arranged in an order that I could never understand. I picked up one I played it. Then another one. Then another one. You could never know which one would come up next time. Each of the songs I listened to had an influence on the next one. Surprise after surprise and no listening path to follow. And then suddenly, there were no more records. While I was reading the hypertext “Six Sex Scenes” I had the same feeling.

“Stories are too powerful to just make up” (from Janey, Six Sex Scenes)

SAVING ANDY FROM HIMSELF

Reference Places: The middle of the road

We do not know the actual setting of this memory. The only place reference is “the middle of the road”, which has to do with an imaginary disgusting process she would carry out on her own sex.  She imagines this as a result of Andy telling her that practising oral sex with her tastes like stale urine: by undergoing the filthy and revolting process that she describes, Andy won´t be able to distinguish the urine taste that makes oral sex so difficult for him. The problem of the oral sex also appears in “Therapy” and in “You suck, by the Yeastie Girls“

Throughout the 50 stories that make up this hypertext, we hear the voice of the narrator always in the first person. We do not even know her name. There is no plot in the traditional sense, but rather the memories and reflections of the narrator at two different stages in her life. On the one hand, there are the stories/memories that belong to a period when she is living with her family: father, mother and brother. On the other hand, we have the stories/memories corresponding to the time when she´s more or less in her thirties and lives with Andy, her partner. There is no linear argument. The memories do not appear in a chronological order, and morever, they are written either in the present or in the past. That is, the author does not use the present for the adult stories and the past for the others. This way she makes us think that the whole narration is not told from the adult point of view, but that it has been written more like a diary. Some issues appear repeatedly in the stories: suicide, female independence, religion, divorce, psychological therapies, insecurity or sex problems, always from the very personal point of view of the narrator at different ages.

To enter the novella you must click on any of the six photographs that appear as the “first page” of the narration. By doing so, you have access to two of the stories: three photographs lead you to “Therapy” and the other three lead you to “Social Functions”. After that,  the procedure is simple: each of the stories gives you a number of options at the bottom (five, four, three…) which allows access to the rest of the stories or to “Home”.

There is a space reference table where you can find the title of each of the stories and the corresponding places related to them. The order in which they are listed  is the reading path I have followed. I have distinguished between the places that are the actual settings in the story (actual places), and the places which are mentioned or referred to (reference places). By clicking each title you can go to independent posts with further details about space aspects, as well as  a brief summary of each individual story with links to other titles of stories  that may have some kind of relationship.

• Photographs:

• The main photograph in the header:  © Ramón Martínez Casanova
• Graves´s photographs in the header:

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/db/results.php?CISOBOX1=robert+graves&CISOBOX2=photograph&CISOFIELD1=subjea&CISOFIELD2=objecb&CISOOP1=all&CISOOP2=exact&CISOROOT=%2Fww1&CISOSORT=descri|f

http://palatin-project.com/

• Photograph on First Paper page:

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_graves/photo

• Bibliography

Norton Anthology English Literature vol. 2 .  8^th ed. 2006

• URL´s (images)

http://images.google.es/imgres?imgurl=http://i577.photobucket.com/albums/ss215/shaniaMysteryNite/TheWhiteGoddess.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.ourradio.hk/forum/viewthread.php%3Ftid%3D1964%26page%3D3&usg=__GIy7hxDR1l2X6n3yry2K6TdWv-E=&h=475&w=312&sz=39&hl=es&start=7&um=1&tbnid=QvagJocURqMiZM:&tbnh=129&tbnw=85&prev=/images%3Fq%3DThe_White_Goddess%2Bgraves%26hl%3Des%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:es-ES:official%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1

http://everseradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/GoodbyetoallThat.jpg

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c2/c11140.jpg

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x2/x10129.jpg

http://sharetv.org/images/i_claudius_uk-show.jpg

http://www.wga.hu/art/l/lastman/juno_jup.jpg

http://z.about.com/d/ancienthistory/1/0/M/g/2/Odysseusand-thesirensbywaterhouse.jpg

• URL´s (texts)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves

http://www.theoi.com/

http://www.booksfactory.com/writers/graves.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_fiction

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=2678

http://www.ancientgreece.com/s/Main_Page/

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook09.html

http://www.anselm.edu/internet/classics/I,CLAUDIUS/information.html

http://www.jjraymond.com/books/historicalfiction/kingjesus.html

http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/books/IClaudius.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,887225,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/homer/h8o/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Butler_%28novelist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greek_Myths

http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/graves/

http://ogham.lyberty.com/graves.html

http://www.robertgraves.org/society/index.php

http://bartleby.com/120/index3.html

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/i%20claudius%20-%20adaptations%20for%20film%20and%20television/id/4930279

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/10/robert-graves-queer-time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Nicholson

http://www.unc.edu/~ottotwo/partner.html

http://juxtabook.typepad.com/books/2008/11/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robert-graves.html

http://ramarca5.blogs.uv.es/2009/10/29/lawrence-and-the-arabs/

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lawrence-and-the-Arabs/Robert-Graves/e/9781569249895

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Although Robert Graves possesses and extensive production of poetry, to the extent that he considered himself above all a poet, This author wrote  important fiction books based on  cultures of the past, namely the Classical Greece or the Roman Empire,  recreating remarkable episodes of the History, as in the well known and adaptations for film and television “I Claudius” and “Claudius the God“. In some cases,  like “King Jesus” or “I  Claudius“, his interpretations of the official facts of History have caused important disagreements. This author has also famously retold mythological tales,  as in “The Golden Fleece“or  has even fictionalized hypothesys about the authorship of  “The Odyssey” , as he does in “Homer´s Daughter“. ” He also wrote crucial non-fictions books, reference points as far as mythology is concerned, such as “The Greek Myths” or “The White Goddess“.

This  is the link to Robert Graves Archive  Home Page. although not all its links work it is worth visiting and listen to some of the sound archives:

http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/graves/

And here is the link to Robert Graves  Society:       http://www.robertgraves.org/

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In my opinion, reading some of the works by Robert Graves may provide the reader with both a suggestive  and controversial interpretation of History and the stories  and myths from  the past, as for instance is the case of  “King Jesus“,  not only with  astonishing erudition but also with poetry and freedom.  Let´s not forget that he considered himself a poet in the first place. This mixture of poetic drive, imagination and erudition has led many criticts to accuse Graves of not being rigorous in his research before writing some of his historical novels, of jumping to  far-fetched conclusions, but as is expressed by Peter Quennell in an essay about Graves in her book “Casanova in London”, (taken from Robert Graves: The Poetry Foundation,  “..his belief that forgotten events may be recovered by the exercise of intuition, which affords sudden glimpses of truth ‘that would not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning.’ In practice… this sometimes means that the historian first decides what he would like to believe, then looks around for facts to suit his thesis (…) Although [Graves's] facts themselves are usually sound, they do not always support the elaborate conclusions that Graves proceeds to draw from them; two plus two regularly make five and six; and genuine erudition and prophetic imagination conspire to produce some very odd results.

Go to:     Cover Page Introduction

PRO-CHOICE

Actual Places: Home (bedroom) / Abortion clinic

This story moves from home to the abortion clinic, and back home again. She has got pregnant more or less accidentally. We may think that the fact of having a baby is in her plans although in a vague way. The mention of having a baby is also in “Palm Springs“. However, they decide to go to an abortion clinic mainly due to the fact that she´s afraid of Andy leaving her because of the baby. As they are told to come back another day, she has more time to think about it, and her doubts about what to do increase. Eventually she gives in, but warns Andy that this will the last time. Here we can find issues that appeared in.