THE BOOK

I’m not exactly sure how I feel about The 42^nd Parallel. While I do think it is very engaging and daring to an extent, I also feel like it tries too hard (or maybe it’s just over my head). As we’ve talked about in class, the randomness of his different sections, in particular the “newsreel”, have a way to either draw the reader in or to frustrate them enough to quit.

. . .

For the sake of huge profits NOW corporations forget that people have to have money to buy the products they are producing. Paying people, a wage that insures that they have money beyond just what they need to pay rent, food, and utilities means they can buy clothes they don’t necessarily need, impulsively buy Twenty Shades of Grey at the checkout stand, go to the movies, and buy that latest thingamagig.

The first two pages is some of the greatest prose I’ve ever laid eyes on.

THE BOOK (cont.)

I love historical and political writings, which is one reason I was very excited to read this book after googling it when I saw it on our schedule. Yet, given the way Dos Passos lays out this story, I’m lost at times to what he might be conveying. And after talking about his political alignment and knowing what is happening around that time and what is about to happen, I’m somewhat disappointed he couldn’t have taken a more straightforward approach.

. . .

I was duped by all of the praise it has received from critics and writers. Sometimes it’s hard to go back in experimental fiction, toward its infancy and simply not have the patience that it requires.

His stylistic ambition and the breadth of his writing are what prompt me to call him an artist, rather than simply a novelist–a fine distinction on its own, but the appellation “artist” implies that he melded principles and techniques from different artforms to produce a new kind of novel.

THE BOOK (cont.)

 However, I’m curios and somewhat excited to see how the book ends. I have a sneaking suspicion though that without reading the entire trilogy I won’t really get the entire story and the message that Dos Passos is conveying (if he even is). The character development in the story so far has been interesting, but there isn’t that character-reader bond you find in most novels, which I’m assuming is goal, but it does make it hard to connect with the text.

. . .

The most effective way to approach history, this book shows, is through a time’s language.

When I first discovered in Star Trek, as a young pup, that they didn’t use money anymore it was an intriguing concept to think about; an evolutionary thought.

Watching these characters succeed and fail was actually inspiring to me. They are all hard working people trying to find their place in this world.

I remember when I felt that way. I was naive enough to feel that I could do everything. I didn’t have to choose.

Explanation & Goal of this post.

My goal for this post was to insert random texts from reviews I found from goodreads.com on The 42^nd Parallel (this is the sections under the ellipsis). The overall goal was to hopefully imitate Dos Passos’s “Newsreels”. While I know these inserts aren’t real news headlines or updates, but I still thought the randomness of the texts could provide a similar confusion to what it is like reading his book. I was also hoping to show how the layout of this post shows a pattern (similarly to Dos Passos) within the randomness of it all.  “The Book” sections of this post are my real thoughts so far on this reading. I wanted these sections to imitate the storyline parts of his characters in the book. Again, this is not a direct imitation as far as context, but I was hoping it could imitate the layout and format of the book.  I’m not sure if this post really made sense or not, but reading the reviews and creating this was a lot of fun. (just hopefully it came across well).