Middlesex+Book+3+journal+8

__**Middlesex: Middesex**__ __2. One sentence__
 * Calliope tells her mother about her day with her new friend, "omitting only the kissing lessons. Form the beginning, I was aware that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn't tell my mother, but I wouldn't have been able to articulate it." (265). this brings up all of the most controversial topics in middlesex that we have been waiting to fully delve into until we were further along in the book.
 * Calliope highlights gender and relationship stereotypes because she feels that kissing a girl is wrong. it makes us wonder what makes us attracted to others, you could support nature or biology because Cal is in fact a boy, but this is also contradicted by Calliope concluding, "I didn't connect this feeling to sex. I didn't know sex existed."
 * this is the beginning of Calliope's sexual awakening, which could last until she finds out she is a man and becomes Cal.
 * it is reminiscent of Desdemona feeling that her relationship with Lefty was wrong, which is past vs present, young vs old, and circle imagery. Cal narrates, "In one pool of light, an old woman crosses herself and prays, while in the other a seven-year old girl is also praying, praying for forgiveness, because it was clear to me that i was responsible. It was what i did...what Lefty saw...And I am promising never to do anything like that again" (266-7).
 * this continues to highlight the pressure we feel from gender stereotypes.

__5. my reaction to an idea__
 * I think that Lefty's progression to death is really interesting. it is very much "the curious cast of Benjamin Button" which i referenced before along with l and D's relationship becoming more like brother and sister.
 * "the hard disk of his memory slowly began to be erased, beginning with the most recent information and working backward... chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back" (267)
 * "In his mind Lefty Stephanides grew younger and younger while in actuality he continued to age" (267)
 * "Desdemona would see a moment of clarity in her husbands eyes, as if he were playing along too, pretending to relive his life in the past so as not to face the present" (268)
 * "he made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband's mind could lead to only one place, back to the days when he wasn't her husband but her brother" (268)
 * "In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who'd been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the fragments of his self away" (269)
 * the diction is fascinatingly scientific yet philosophical...like the egg metaphor (are they real theories?)
 * CIRCLE!!!

__7. term of theory__
 * throughout chapter there is marking of male and female voice...increasingly male with stereotypically masculine imagery
 * also throughout the chapter there is fate vs science...usually a snit bit of science in an otherwise touchy feelly, and therefore feminine, subject
 * 262, talks of Lefty's stroke and then, "His pupils contract. we remain at the curb, in its dust and leaf matter"
 * 262-3, "Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality tat survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more"

__Chaplinesque papou pg 261__ means comedic, in reference to Charles Chaplin an english film director. Calliope though that her grandfather was funny, despite his silence and fancy shoes and slick hair which make him appear refined. Cal says, "His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement...And yet he was not stiff at all but playful, even comedic" http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chaplinesque

__Sappho poems 269 (and previously)__ Female Greek poet born in Lesbos. Lesbian comes from her island of birth, considered a great poet, up with socrates in intellectual grandeur. interesting that Lefty focuses on the work of a Greek who pushed social boundaries and would have been thought different and in the wrong for who she loved and was attracted to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho