Take the Books to Disney World: An Interruption

I regret leaving my mobile phone on the counter this morning, when I should have packed it into my bag. There are no pictures to post. You cannot see Moby Dick having a rage episode on an unsuspeting tourist. You cannot see him getting thown out by security. You cannot see Anxious Pleasures (a Kafka rewrite) posing with the movie poster for the "A Bug's Life" show. These are pictures I will have to get off my other camera when I am back in Virginia. I will post them here, on this post, after I do that.

Tomorrow it's Epcot. I will pack my phone.

Take the Books to Disney World: On the Way to the Magic Kingdom

We're going to the Magic Kingdom, and Heidegger is wearing mouse ears.

On the Way to Language is on the way to Space Mountain. So, Martin Heidegger, what is your relationship to the words, "Space" and "Mountain"? Have you ever considered your relationship to these words before? Do they touch the innermost nexus of your existence? Or what?

Heidegger:

To undergo an experience with something -- be it a thing, a person, or a god [or a mechanical roller coaster all in the dark with whooshing and screaming] -- means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us, and transforms us.

I don't have any good pictures of me helping Heidegger ride Space Mountain, because it is dark in there. I do hereby swear on my own becoming that I held him up high, and he was probably really transformed.

Here is One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, watching the comedy show "The Laughing Floor," based on the movie, "Monsters Inc." If you're not familiar with Marcuse's classic critique of moden society, here's the gist: we're all a bunch of happy, fat, complacent conformists, who just accept everything comfortable and normal, because individuality and freedom is too hard for our enormous middle-class asses. He also believes that waste and destruction are bad. This book was big in the 60's, yes? Are we together now?

He thought the monsters were really two-dimensional and that the jokes were repressive.

He didn't feel right about the dualism of Buzz Lightyear's battle with the Evil Emperor Zurg, either. Good vs. Evil. So reductive. So farcical.

Marcuse went on to say:

"In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal to 'go along' appears neurotic and impotent. [Curse you, Star Command!!!]"

It's just what I've always privately felt about Disney: Not dialectical enough. They should work on that.

Here's Marcuse glowering at the guy who sings in the Carnival of Progress:

Great big beautiful tomorrow, forsooth!

At the Swiss Family Robinson's Tree House, he yearned for a return to simpler times, when people rebelled against the hulls of their ships, got themselves properly shipwrecked, and then lived in trees. When revolution was really possible. And simple machines could change your whole plumbing situation.

On the Way to Language was down with the treehouse life, but I have to say it was a real drag how he wanted to read, read, read every single sign in the whole park. Enough with the words, buddy. We get it.

After one last attempt to cheer up One-Dimensional Man, we stowed him in the stroller and let Dr. Zhivago join the party. Here's Marcuse on Aladdin's Magic Carpet, griping about how pretending to be a prince just plays into the existing imperialist norms. Whatever. Go get spit on by a camel.

Does anyone need to go look up dialectic? No? Alright.

The good Dr. Zhivago was a bundle of energy, right out of the book bag. He fell in love with Cinderella at first sight during the afternoon parade. Then, at Splash Mountain, he had to be pulled down off the roof of The Laughing Place. Here's the angry parent of a child he was taunting, revoking his playtime privileges. Time out, Dr. Zhivago, if you're going to act the fool at Disney World.

Here's Dr. Z on the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Not the five o'clock express through the steppes by any stretch of the imagination, but of course, he still wanted to sit in the front. I can't totally grasp the significance of railroads to the Russian Revolution, but that's probably because at that point in the text I was so beset by eight syllable surnames that I was crying on my sleeve.

Tomorrow, it's a trip to Animal Kingdom for Moby Dick and Anxious Pleasures. Rowr!

Take the Books to Disney World: Kennedy Space Center

After our night of rocketry on Cocoa Beach, we were enthusiastic about going to Kennedy Space Center today. Except, that is, for that dismal damned Kierkegaard book, who stayed home to pout. He said he doesn't like being taken out of context. Well.

At Kennedy Space Center, a non-NASA company has been contracted to make the visitor complex into an amusement-park-like experience. When Benny said, "This is just like Disney World!" I knew that either they had succeeded, or else Benny is getting his nerd on very young.

At first We the Living was a little giddy on all the iconography:

But she took a seat with a friend:

To watch The House of the Seven Gables ride the Space Shuttle simulator:

Speaking of our quiet, colonial friend, The House of the Seven Gables was shy around the living astronauts:

But was chillingly comfortable with astronauts of the past:

So I said, "Let go of that suffocating history, The House of the Seven Gables. You can be free." Free in a Mercury rocket crew capsule. C'mon, everyone climb aboard!

As I Lay Dying kept sidling up to the robots. This one quipped, "How about As I Lay Rusting?" Ha ha!

All three of the books enjoyed the IMAX 3D movies:

However, We the Living just had to point out that the lock on the bathroom stall was very ineffeciently put together, the screw holes skewed, the whole mechanism crooked. Well, NASA? Is this your idea of the pinnacle of man's technological achievement? His hand reaching like a rocket into the void? This crappy bathroom stall lock? Sickeningly unRoarkian. Tsk tsk.

So full of eye-rolling and scorn was she after her trip to the potty that she wouldn't even join the other books on the lunar rover.

I think my guests all learned something, and they definitely all made friends. When even a musty and tremulous book like The House of the Seven Gables can get its spine around an astronaut, certainly Faulkner would have no trouble charming my kids:

Take the Books to Disney World: Fear and Trembling at Cocoa Beach

We are still on our way to Disney World. No one should panic.

Tonight we went to see the Delta IV Rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. We stood on the edge of the ocean at Cocoa Beach to watch it go up. I took along Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and We the Living by Ayn Rand. I thought that Fear and Trembling would really appreciate the way the rocket was subverting the universal for the individual, and of course, the trembling beach beneath us. I knew that We the Living would deeply respect the simultaneous frailty and power of that rocket climbing into space, an expression of human achievement, and another mad swipe at the firmament.


(terrible video uploaded from mobile phone!)

Unfortunately I got excited watching the rocket, and forgot to take either book out of my bag so that they could experience the sublime rumbling, the flash of orange that lit up the ocean, and the cries of fellow rocket nerds: "Happy Birthday, NASA!"

There was a bit of grumbling and a "What's that, a piece of apple core?"

To make up to the books for my gross neglect of their entertainment, I took them instead to the world famous "Ron Jon Surf Shop." It was on our way back to the car, and I thought they might enjoy it?

Here are the books:

And again:

See how the blonde loves literature? We the Living is the short one. Fear and Trembling is taller.

About this surf shop experience, Kierkegaard had the following to say:

"It goes without saying that the tragic hero, like any other man who is not
bereft of speech, can say a few words in his culminating moment, perhaps a few
appropriate words, but the question is how appropriate is it for him to say
them. If the meaning of his life is in an external act, then he has nothing to
say, then everything he says is essentially chatter, by which he only diminishes
his impact, whereas the tragic conventions enjoin him to complete his task in
silence, whether it consists in action or suffering."

I chose that quote for him because I see that as an undergraduate I wrote the word, "HAH!" next to that paragraph in the margin. I must have been anticipating the culminating moment of this particular book, outside the Ron Jon Surf Shop, and Kierkegaard suffering in knightly silence.

Take the Books to Disney World: On the Road without Jack Kerouac

The books had to be up early. We left at 6:30.

Here is The House of the Seven Gables sticking his head out the window, getting some air, letting his jowls go flapping:



It's been years since he felt the wind ruffling his pages.

Here are Anxious Pleasures and The House of Sand and Fog checking out the space coast, from our hotel room in Cocoa Beach:



Zzyzzyva made itself useful making coffee. Bustling around, all purposeful:



All in all the books behaved well on the trip. The Heidegger kept its comments to itself, for now, and Moby Dick gave Hawthorne his space. Now we're going to watch the Delta IV rocket launch. Taking a few books with me. Hope they like it.