Annemily's Blog

Most of the characters we have met so far are either members of an elite and secret boys club (Win Everett, Laurence Parmenter, George de Mohrenschildt,T. J. Mackey) or one of Lee’s male friends. So far, the women in Libra tend to be playing traditional and supportive roles (love interest, mother, daughter). The exception to this is Dr. Braunfels. Dr. Braunfels seems pretty cool. She is some sort of spy boss who speaks a ton of languages. When Lee tells her that all he really wants is to defect to Russia, she stays focused on what she needs while keeping Lee calm: “What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thoughts of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs” (111).  Even though Dr. Braunfels acts really professionally, the narrator describes her completely differently: “She has a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive” (111). This negative im...

In Maryland, the social center is the cookhouse. Tom Weylin rarely enters it and according to Dana “sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure” (94). I think Dana’s place in the 1800s can be traced pretty well by her comfort in the cookhouse. When she first enters the cookhouse (in “The Fall”), Dana is uncomfortably out of place: Supper was corn meal mush. The cook saw that I was looking at it instead of eating it, and she misread my expression. "That’s not enough?” she asked. “Oh, it’s plenty!” I held my bowl protectively, fearful that she might give me more of the stuff. “Thank you.” (73) Dana doesn’t yet know that the cook is Sarah. She doesn’t feel comfortable saying that she doesn’t want the food. Sh e is terse and polite. Dana doesn’t know how to cook in the 19th century and spends most of the re st of “The Fall” learning from Sarah. By “The Fight,” Dana is much more comfortable...

Readers don’t know much about Valencia, but they do know that she eats candy. Early in the book, when Valencia visits Billy in the veterans’ hospital, the first proper description of her focuses on her eating habits “She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar” (107). Later in that scene readers are notified that “Billy’s fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way” (110). Then when Billy gets on the plane that later crashes, “Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul Mound Bar and waving bye-bye” (154). The specificity of the types of candy is what made these passages stand out to me but I’m not sure why Vonnegut includes them. All three candies are made by large corporations (Mars and Hershey’s). They are all still popular and well-known candies today. They are emblems of the American culture of decadent and unifor...

Today in class we talked about how women in Mumbo Jumbo are treated as less than fully developed characters. This especially bothered me in the scene where the mothers of school children confront “Safecracker” Gould. It went by pretty quickly so here’s the whole scene for reference: “Just as LaBas and Herman and their assistants, the 6 unidentified men, and T Malice reach the door, it opens and in walk some proletariat Black women and their little children. The little children point to Hubert “Safecracker” Gould, author of a children’s anthology, 1 time carpetbagger, now “radical education expert” and former charter member of the Knights Templar known by this esteemed body as “the Caucasian blackamor.”             That’s him, that’s the man, mommy, a pigtailed little girl cries, pointing out Hubert “Safecracker” Gould. He took our homework and hung around the school playground, taking down everything we said on a recorder. ...

In describing Coalhouses’s Model T, Doctorow repeatedly mentions the custom pantasote top. When we first meet Coalhouse the narrator mentions the top: “His car shone. The brightwork gleamed. There was a glass windshield and a custom pantasote top” (155). When his car is vandalized by the firemen “the custom pantasote top was slashed to ribbons” (180). When Conklin repairs the car, the end result is “a shining black Model T Ford with a custom pantasote roof” (295). We talked about how the car is a symbol of wealth and status and so the mention of the custom top (a fancy addition) at the end of so many descriptions of the car reminds us of that. But what actually is a pantasote top? When the car is being repaired “The Pantasote Company delivered a top” so from the book we know that it’s a brand name top (295). I also googled pantasote and it appears to be both the name of a company and the name of the particular material the company used to make car tops. ...