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he's an english major
Like everyone else I have been doing my best to avoid blogging about the horrific murders. I've been tempted any number of times. But when I saw the following comment, I knew I could resist no longer.
from here we read, regarding the individual who did the shooting:
Beware delusional
imagery
“The problem with all of this is he’s delusional, so
we’re not sure what his sense of reality is,” says Scott Allen, police
psychologist for the Metro-Dade Police Department in Florida. “It’s all coming
from his innermost thoughts, which are very chaotic.”
And he warns: “He was an English major — it might be, for all I know, something allegorical. We don’t have any way to know the meaning.” [end article excerpt]
Yes, English majors. Though probably the allegory wouldn't have to do with Shakespeare. We do, however, know about one course the murderer did take.
English 3984: Special Studies: Contemporary Horror
Instructor: Stevens
It used to be that horror films came out at a prescribed time: October. But now it seems as if every week a new film invades the multiplex. We are consuming horror on an unprecedented scale. But the rules have changed. Until recent years, lead characters could be counted on to survive the invasion of zombies/ homicidal maniacs/ vampires. But this margin of safety no longer exists; horror has become a masochistic pleasure. How do these texts construct us as spectators? How does identity affect our readings of these works? What do they say about our current societal fears? In order to answer these questions, we'll watch films such as Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and we'll read The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, considered the first gothic horror novel; William Beckford's Vathel, a forgotten gem that tells the Faustian myth from an Eastern perspective; some tales by Poe, Lovecraft, King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dean Koontz. We will also read Patricia Cornwell's semi-nonfiction book on Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, and one book of criticism: Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover. And finally, we will read one graphic novel, From Hell by Alan Moore, one of the most popular and accomplished writers in the medium. There will be two papers, a midterm and a final as well as a fear journal in which students will write narratives about their personal fears and catalogue their interactions with the texts we encounter. WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.
By Swifty | April 20, 2007 in Current Affairs | Permalink
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In order to answer these questions, we'll watch films such as Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and we'll read The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, considered the first gothic horror novel; William Beckford's Vathel, a forgotten gem that tells the Faustian myth from an Eastern perspective; some tales by Poe, Lovecraft, King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dean Koontz. We will also read Patricia Cornwell's semi-nonfiction book on Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, and one book of criticism: Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover.
Curriculum for Anti-Khrist College! And really, lie-terature has always been about deception, half-truths, meaningless eloquence: even Plato realized dat. A Causal relation between ChoSpree and his gothic-schtick lit? Es po-seeblay. But ChoSpree, however instrumentally effective, was a bit too crass for say EAPian sensibilities, don't ya think? (think Biff and Bunny in the Pit and the Pendulum.........)
Posted by: Pozo | Apr 20, 2007 1:49:18 PM
I'm sure there are many more of these dramatic isolated murders and suicides, but there has today been reported the NASA employee (Houston) who took a hostage and killed him, wounded another. A week or 10 days ago this lawyer jumped out of the Empire State Building, with a pedestrian finding a piece of leg with a sock on it. It surely will only increase, won't it, because there's so much speed, and there is more often getting things to top speed by now, where they are more likely to explode, than they are slowing down. At least I think that's right, because I think people are becoming afraid to slow down or aren't being allowed to more than previously, but I don't know if this is right.
Posted by: patrick | Apr 20, 2007 7:53:59 PM
I should know better, given this inauspicious start -- but, all right, you can "resist no longer" the urge to make a comment -- so, having spoken, what are you trying to say? Or is this a meta-comment on "we have no way to know the meaning"?
As my own protest against the over-focus on this killing and its interpretation, I'm going to pedantically question one little bit in the course summary that you've quoted at length: Vathek (not Vathel) hardly tells the Faustian myth, unless mass murder for the purpose of gaining power is Faustian, or tells it from an Eastern perspective, unless Orientalism equates to "an Eastern perspective".
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 21, 2007 11:33:42 AM
I thought that Scott Allen's comments (he's the police psychologist quoted above) were hilarious. Also, one can feel the wind of discourse shift a little bit when a course like this, attended by the killer, is not made that big a deal of. I mean I've heard some noises in the press about video games, but only a few raised eyebrows on the course, which the killer did enroll in.
As far as the meaning goes, it proves once again that Job was right:
Job 9:
22: It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
23: When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.
24: The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges -- if it is not he, who then is it?
Posted by: Swifty | Apr 21, 2007 11:54:37 AM
errata: the 'he' from the Job excerpt refers to God.
Posted by: Swifty | Apr 21, 2007 11:55:46 AM
""""When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent."""
Eggzactlee! JHVH = satan. (thus Cho was merely following orders). HP knew dat.
Posted by: Pozo | Apr 21, 2007 12:26:39 PM
I admit 'allegorical' from a police psychologist is hilarious--I can't get beyond that into which allegories and English courses it might be.
Pozo--can you spell out JHVH and HP--I'm sure it's not Hewlett-Packard, but some of us are low-class and uneducated.
Posted by: patrick | Apr 21, 2007 12:37:01 PM
Herr PJ-- you fail to recognize JHVH???? Think big old hebrew, maker of heaven and earth, etc. Tradition suggests that we plebes are not to utter His entire sacred Name, out of respect: like a five points goomba's respect for Don Caponay, ah wager.
HP was a bit obscure--and Hewlett Packard gear's not the worst---but actually, what do they say, anaphoric. See above-- HP as in Lovecraft, baybe. Phunn ghouly pulp in the tradition of EAP and not as philistinish as some Lit. snoots might think.
Posted by: Pozo | Apr 21, 2007 2:59:45 PM
Thanks, Herr Pozo--I never had seen it abbreviated...Yeah, I never have read Lovecraft, but found that he's a big deal once I looked around these blogs. Will answer you elsewhere about Vonnegut, but had not been snobbish about him either, because I really don't know why I've never read him, but haven't read 'Moby Dick', either, which seems somehow inexcusable. So have checked latter out of library to shove my 'preening asshole' through...I swear to Jesus Fucking Christ, some of these bloggers don't have one whit of humour...get their feelings hurt just like you'd come up to them and told them their Mama had a Madonna/Whore Complex all by herself.
Posted by: patrick | Apr 21, 2007 5:52:25 PM
Brevity is the soul of clit, er wit; raht PJ?
Get this: Cho-ology, following the tradition of TrenchCoatism (Columbine as important as say any cunt fart du jour from Sappho League lit. bidness), should be ranked as a rather grim techno-realist code. At least a few of the people who Cho chose to decorate the hallowed halls with prolly did not deserve that fate. But rilly, some did. You can imagine the cheap little floozies in Cho-boy's sights, and without sinking into some JW Gacy like glee, well, get over it. And compared to a typical bloody night in Baghdad or Khartoum or a hundred other shitholes of the world somewhat meaningless.
Posted by: Pozo | Apr 21, 2007 8:05:52 PM
It's interesting to see the connections being made and the meanings being teased out of these connections...
But it'll also be useful to distinguish between the contemporary horror featured in the course, and the violence displayed in the Eastern films cited over and over again in the media (Old Boy etc).
In the former, the horror comes from an 'other' that seeks to torment or terrorise... in the latter (as if there was 1 general type of Asian movie), on a number of occassions it is the protagonist himself/herself who is portrayed as being justified in spilling blood literally.
Posted by: Ian | Apr 22, 2007 12:31:56 AM
There's an old Dragnet episode where the police ossifer played by Jack Webb busts some El Lay hepcat-criminal literatteurs reading Baudelaire, beats, etc. Webb, noir Plato, at least considered the possibility that a decadent "literary" syntax was symptomatic of pathology to various degrees, and might have a causal relation to Krime...
Posted by: Pozo | Apr 22, 2007 12:14:21 PM
From Kleinfeld's Writing Course Exercise in the illustrious and ignoble Paper of Record today:
'And that haunted face.
Classmates recall some teasing and bullying over his taciturn nature. The few times he was required to speak for a class assignment, students mocked his poor English and deep-throated voice.
And so he chose invisibility. Neighbors would spot him shooting baskets by himself. When they said hello, he ignored them, as if he were not there. “Like he had a broken heart,” said Abdul Shash, a next-door neighbor.'
You wouldn't see any of this had he not committed suicide as well. Therefore, his artifacts, which would find many buyers just as Gaycee's in-house sketches did (fetching some $150,000 at auction as I recall) if he had ended up alive on Death Row or whatever the place is for the criminally insane, will also be impounded if they can find all of them. They'd be bound to be worth a lot more than just videos which remind one of Patty Hearst's induction into the Symbionese Liberation Army; and where is she now? Well, no money in the artifacts which would have been a 'window into the mind of a killer', because he fortunately dispensed with himself; if he'd preserved himself and we got all sorts of cases with Cho crying about 'how awful it was what I done', he'd have been even more hoggish than he was already, spending gobs of taxpayer money and eyeballs bought by tabloid TeeVee.
No, as it is we have what is more like a natural disaster, a veritable tsunami which has to be more short-lived in the chat rooms than it would have been otherwise. The 'feeling sorry for him' crud won't have nearly as long a shelf life as would have imprisonment, grand jury, trials, beatings by the more sensitive prison inmates, and high-end Talking Head psychologists on the TeeVee. Too bad. No McVeigh-style countdowns for the vagrants on this one, so one can be grateful for small favours.
Wow! Kids made fun of somebody! Incredible! Never happens except in mean capitalist countries, I bet, because it's built into the system...
Because, the fact is that Cho took a part of the mystery with him that we'll never know--and now he is just another story from The Naked City.
Posted by: patrick preening asshole | Apr 22, 2007 1:55:25 PM
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 23, 2007 10:57:11 AM
At least a few of the people who Cho chose to decorate the hallowed halls with prolly did not deserve that fate. But rilly, some did...
CHO! We hardly knew ye, invoker of the Big Maybe.
Posted by: Celine | Oct 3, 2007 12:11:34 PM
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