To be honest I’m enjoying Motherless Brooklyn quite a lot. It could be because it is more of a novel and for that I feel much more interested in the story and the terminology or idea of it does not seem to take over or overwhelm the text. In class we focused on parts that allowed me to see those parts in a way I had not seen them the first time for example, Lionel tics and how he expresses them during writing an author has to get into the mind set to help them create a better and much more realistic story in hopes of attracting the best audience.
As for his tics I found it interesting that he would repeat curses much more frequently and for some reason I feel like that can tie into how he is perceived in society on a daily basis whether he is hearing people use that language toward him or around him and it grabs his attention in a way that he begins to think of a rhyme. The idea of people having a set filter I could not help, but think about when I forget my headphones at home because for some reason not having them means Ill have to pay attention to others without the intention and that in many ways bothers me and i feel these two ideas could in fact be alike since the material item is my filter.
In conclusion I’m hoping to enjoying the rest of the book and find more about Lionel as a character and maybe even research the idea of how the author got his idea for his character in hopes of understanding him to my full potential.
The way he thinks about the language is very different and I never pay that much attention to the language when I speak. But he makes us realize how language can make us do different things, and how important it is in our daily lives. Some of the basic needs in our lives are so important that we don’t even realize it. I do agree some of the things we rely so much that it is hard to live without them.
Ashlie, I like your example of headphones acting as a filter for the things we hear around us. I tend to have this habit of seizing onto random conversations (see: eavesdropping) and not being able to get them out of my head once I start listening. In a manner similar to how Lionel reacts to certain trigger words from the people around him, I jump off a phrase or a sentence I might hear in passing from strangers having a conversation and start jumping from thought to thought like a wordless stream of consciousness. Sometimes I don’t even want to start thinking about certain things but others’ words can trigger the thoughts.