I keep getting lost

Maybe I need to print off a copy of the syllabus, but I can never seem to keep track of which book I'm supposed to be reading for my Lit class. So this weekend, I looked up what book I'm supposed to be on by Monday, and have been working on reading everything previous that I haven't read yet.

The books are pretty hard to follow, because they don't exactly follow a linear path, so it's been rather intensive reading. They're making me think however.

For example, Radical Alterity has made me wonder about the nature of cameras and photography, more so since my friend and future roommate, Kellen has been dragging me to the crew team's Regattas of late (see earlier post) and making me what he calls his "sherpa." Really, the job is nothing more than a glorified pack-mule position, but it gets me out of the dorm and near something interesting. Kellen has an enchanting way of talking about anything that interests him that vaguely reminds me of my stepdad. And he explains everything very well, so I've learned more about different SLR settings and modes and different lenses than I probably ever would owning any myself.

My point being, the alterity of Baudrillard has invaded my life and I can no more than look at a camera without pondering its ability to capture a moment, and separate it from what we call the time stream. It's akin to taking a single sentence out of the context of the conversation going on. It makes sense in its own way, but it's also transformed into a separate thing. And as we've talked about in class, who is really taking the picture? The tool the camera or the tool the person (sorry, Kellen, I couldn't help myself and had to throw a jibe in there somewhere).

I learned from my Cinema class that lenses differ from the human eye in that they can isolate and magnify an image, where we could no more make a single object the sole focus of our vision than we could zoom in on the trees across the bay. But these tools allow it, and in doing so, separate us it seems from our humanity, or at least the natural exhibitions of our humanity.

And in The Ticket That Exploded, I see parallels of that. It's a little more disjointed perhaps, and the storytelling involved is completely different, but there remains that sense of otherness. That something we express and accept as normal is merely the surface. Which, admittedly, as a sci-fi cut-up, makes sense.

Burroughs populates his Dreaming with fantastical, homoerotic creations perpetuating what so far has been a world with some kind of dark ulterior motive. Someone or someones are in control and it doesn't seem to be Mr. Lee, who strikes me as being our "good guy," though I don't doubt that archetype is relative in this case.