I'm obviously the worst student of all time because I posted comments and STILL forgot to write a blog yesterday. I figure I might as well do it now.
As I was reading Vas I was thinking about the word 'opera' in the title. I was thinking it might refer to all the different aspects of production that went into the book. What's somewhat unique about opera as an art form is the way it incorporates many arts and crafts into its production. It takes the base art form of singing, and uses drama, acting, the orchestra and even set design to enhance it. It seems like the book is doing the same thing by taking the base art of writing and enhancing it with the drawings, diagrams, typefaces and different page layouts. In that way it's taken the idea of an opera, in the sense of many art forms coming together, and put it on a two dimensional piece of paper. This kind of gives a double meaning to the subtitle, "An Opera in Flatland", where flatland also refers to the pages of the book.
In other news, I really like the stream of consciousness aspect to the book that comes across through square's side thoughts. I thought it was intriguing when we brought up James Joyce in class and I looked up Finnegan's Wake on Wikipedia. Here's an a quote from that article:
John Bishop opened his introduction to Finnegans Wake in 1999 with these less-than-encouraging words: "There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is 'about' anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, 'readable'.I haven't tried to read it, but I would imagine it's like we talked about in class, where you imagine everything that's packed into Vas just written down on a page (except maybe even worse). The way Vas does it though I think maybe more accurately reflects how different levels of thoughts are always in our minds. Even as I write this I have other things in the back of my mind that I'm not focusing on, like what time I'm going to have dinner and whether I should go ahead and call my friend about it in a few minutes, and I could imagine that line of thought sort of printed out alongside this paragraph in a different font, sort of reflecting how it's occurring simultaneously but on a different level of focus.
