Italia

Another character has popped in on the scene, and his name is Arthur Lomb, an Italian boy. He's the only other white guy in the school besides Dylan, and so early on Dylan recognized the dangers in allowing himself to become friends with Arthur; two white guys together would attract much more attention than alone. But Dylan was reading comic books in the library and Arthur, standing nearby, commented on the art in it.

Arthur is very studious. He would be out of place anywhere other than a school or some office. He and Dylan are only in middle school, but Arthur can challenge Dylan on intellect. He came from a private school, and he keeps telling Dylan over and over that the only important things were grades, because they would decide where Dylan would go to high school next year, and of course they should aim for the best. He even instructs Dylan to butter up to his science teacher in order to get a recommendation for the best high school, and at this point I finalized my decision that Arthur was just a snob.

Dynamic Duo

Now I know who the other main character of the novel is. His name is Mingus Rude, and he moves in to the neighborhood.

Rachel, Dylan's mother, kinda pushes Dylan to be friends with Mingus and tells him that the two of them will be best friends. She couldn't be more right.

But now is a good time to do a character study on the two of them.

Dylan is quiet and thoughtful. He doesn't say much, doesn't explore much, and he's very non-confrontational. He'll play with the other kids mostly because he has nothing else to do, his mother is determined he grow up on the streets as a true Brooklyn kid like her. He doesn't seem to notice the stillness of his life, but is rather content to be doing the same thing day after day. He cowers before bullies, lets them take what they want, do what they want to him, knowing that if he doesn't prostrate himself before them they'll keep beating him up. He's independent, reads a lot, and is very intelligent, but not very brave or curious.

Mingus has a sort of obsession with titles and comic books. He loves the idea of leaving him mark on things, being remembered. He knows all of the comic books and admires the heroes, wants to be more like them. He smokes weed stolen from his father (his mother left), and tries to act cool all the time. He has a habit of giving everybody ridiculous nicknames on the spot, and generally wanders around and does his own thing. He's very self-sufficient, and unlike Dylan, people don't seem to mess with him. He loves looking at the graffiti and writing left on walls and such, the nicknames people wrote on everything, decoding the nicknames. He has his own tag, "DOSE", that he starts to write too. He's very calm and chilled out all of the time.

Passage

This entire book thus far, a certain amount of attention is paid to the activities of Dylan's father, and the film he's making. It's said constantly that there is so little of a change from frame to frame, that neither Dylan nor him mother understand Abraham's obsession with it, but he thinks the stillness is part of it, the slow changes he makes to the film.  I find this rather symbolic, relating to the passage of time in the novel. It seems slow, because nothing much is changing, and yet it's all flowing together.

I also found out that Dylan is the white boy. He doesn't seem to be discriminated against too much, though, because he's always playing games on the street with a ton of boys from the neighborhood. I'm guessing this is set in a more contemporary time.

Mild Confusion

Thus far in the book, which is not far since I'm only a few chapters in, it's still been hard to figure Dylan out. He's the main character, he shouldn't be so confusing, right? Dylan is much more intellectual than any other child I've met; he's very analytical and seems to understand everything going on around him very acutely. The way he thinks, he seems to believe that all of the other kids around him understand the same things as him. I'm not sure if this is a flaw in the writing, or an intentional characteristic of Dylan.

It's also mentioned that everybody in the neighborhood Dylan lives in is either black or Puerto Rican, but it's never said what Dylan is. The short introduction to the book says that it's about a black kid and a white kid in Brooklyn, but I'm not sure which one Dylan is.  This will probably become apparent later, but it's just confusing now.

The time changing also makes the story hard to follow.  Instead of saying how much time has passed, Dylan expresses the change through landmarks, especially his progression through grades in elementary school. It all seems to blur together, and not much seems to really be changing.

Short Intro to a Long Book

(( Sorry about how long it took me to get these up; I have inconsistent access to internet at home, so I wrote the blogs and was hoping to be able to type them up sooner. ))

I found the first chapter really confusing. Opening with a chapter about "Two girls... the girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut." I was uncertain in this part whether it was a dream or not reality or if it was, in fact, real. Later I learned it was reality, because it was mentioned that the girls, Ana and Thea, moved away.

This is also the chapter in which the main character, Dylan Ebdus, appears. He's unusually bright for his age, a mere 6 years old. Not much is said about his mother, but his father is an artist who's working on making a film. His father use to paint, and Dylan's house is filled with nude portraits of his mother, questionable with a young child in the house.