These first few chapters of Doctorow's Ragtime... well. Erm. Phew. That about sums it up for me. The story hops around quickly enough to give you whiplash, and characters appear and disappear as soon as you remember what they had been up to last time. To be honest, I thought that Houdini had been killed off as soon as he was introduced in that whole "buried alive" act. I'm not sure if that means I'm extremely pessimistic or that I've been reading too much Game of Thrones. But what I really want to get at is all of the lengths that we're going to to avoid discussing the extremely explicit actions that some characters want to delve in to.
Now, I'm not saying that this would be a good way to spend an entire class period. Or even a bit of one. It would end with a lot of blushing and giggling and awkward glances for everyone. But that's just it, isn't it? We can't talk about sex at school. Or at least in an English class. It's alright in a health class, but why? Is it simply because they sterilize it so much that it's literally just body parts doing something? In English, sex is detailed, characters, people are connected to their... "parts." People can be held responsible for their actions instead of just being diagrams on paper. But these are characters!
Okay, fine maybe in this case we don't really want to imagine this portrayal of Emma Goldman going down on this portrayal of Evelyn Nesbit, and that's understandable, but we avoid the subject entirely. Honestly, a decent amount of last night's reading is discussed in our peripheral vision. Something along the lines of "Evelyn starts slumming, Emma Goldman talks, Houdini escapes from jail, ohbythewayThawwaveshisschlongaround, and Mother finds a baby buried alive." How about them slums though, huh?
You should've been in 4th period today--we spent most of the class talking about Evelyn and Emma (and Younger Brother in--and out--of the closet), as well as a range of theories about how Doctorow seems to be (maybe) sexualizing family relations as well. In your section we focused on Houdini and Thaw in chap. 5 instead. But yeah--the breakneck pace, esp. at this point in the novel, means that not (nearly) everything gets discussed in every class. It can be an overwhelming book to plan a discussion for, sometimes.
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