Too Much Awareness

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-welch-mammograms-20101020,0,2961910.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Fcommentary+%28L.A.+Times+-+Commentary%29

I chose this op-ed article because I have similar feelings to the writer. Also it is a great example of what these articles should be. It has a very specific opinion. One that most might not agree with, but an opinion nonetheless.

Writing is Like...

To me writing is like swimming. You have to work hard and train everyday but eventually you'll get stronger. Also even when you put it all down in front of you, like swimming your best at a meet, there is still a lot to learn. Then you have to go back and practice more and fix the mistakes you made, until eventually you get better. Also even like the best swimmers still have things to learn, so do the best writers.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

The non-fiction book I chose to read was Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, which consisted of 28 short essays on different parts of his life. It was one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I have ever read. Sedaris has always been known for his wit. He writes in and uncomplicated style and explores seemingly simple ideas, but his stories have a lot of meaning. The book as a whole flowed very well; the separate essays held together and painted a full picture of his life. Because the stories were in a chronological order, I was never really confused as to what part of his life I was currently immersed in. Yes, I said immersed. Sedaris really knows how to put you in his shoes, whether they are those of a fifth-grader with a lisp and a penchant for mischief or those of a speed-head looking for his next fix. Throughout the book I felt connected to Sedaris and was, despite it sounding cheesy, scared when he was scared and happy when he was happy.

My favorite essay in the book was called “12 Moments in the Life of the Artist”, which oddly enough chronicles twelve events in Sedaris’s life as a mediocre artist before he became a writer. The essay begins with Sedaris taking up painting because he was jealous of the attention his sister was getting as an aspiring painter. However, as he started in on the profession, many of the tasks proved to be much more difficult than he had imagined them to be. He continues to pursue art in college and finds himself still lacking in the talent department, so he transfers colleges and tries to start over, but soon finds himself skipping class to get high with his roommate. Eventually he drops out. Moving back home to Raleigh he discovers Crystal Meth and conceptual art. My favorite line in the book comes from this section when he writes, “Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.” Sedaris goes on to explain how his new friends, who also shared a love of conceptual art, and slightly more than habitual drug use, shun him for selling out to a museum reception, the collapse of their collaborative performance art piece, and his dealer’s admission to a treatment center in Georgia. What is wonderful about Sedaris’s writing is that throughout these descriptions of tragedy and heartbreak he is able to keep the reader laughing.  Sedaris’s story continues with his explanation of the horrible depression that follows a speed user’s continual highs. The last moment of the twelve captures the newly sober Sedaris attending a piece of performance art. As things usually are in situations such as this, the art is not nearly as interesting or profound as it would have been if he were high. Instead of going right back to find a new dealer he uses this as a chance to change his life and walks away from drugs and art altogether. This was my favorite essay because I loved the way Sedaris described the effects of such drugs on one’s life: they always seems like a wonderful and beautiful idea before and while high, but as soon as you’re sober you realize what a mess of your life they have made.

Reading a five page essay by Sedaris is a great lesson on how to tell a story, build a character, mix tragedy and comedy, and inspire a reader’s response. 

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a tough read. Mainly in that it contained vocabulary that, to a child of the new millennium, are foreign despite being part of his spoken language. No doubt, the language is antiquated, but one still has to understand the vocabulary in order to read the piece. So I set off on the arduous journey through the eighteenth century upper class, highly educated, vernacular. Once I managed the vocabulary as best I could, her points became quite clear. In essence, she blames the condition of eighteenth century women on men and their actions throughout the past.

According to Wollstonecraft the main culprit in women’s less than desirable condition is an inadequate education system. Lack of education, unlike with men, leaves most women, except for the very fortunate or self taught, in the dark, especially on the principles of reason. Wollstonecraft’s makes the argument that reason should be the primary goal of all humans. Women are not taught to reason. Girls are taught not to think, but to act in such a way that they need never think. Women are taught to look beautiful and act beautiful so that men will marry them and take care of them for the rest of their lives.  I really found this interesting considering I live in a time where some women are choosing to forgo marriage in favor of leading the rest of their life as a single, independent women. Also, as a man in this generation, I don’t see why one would deny women the chance to be educated. Women should receive the same schooling as men. Given that men and women are different in many ways, equal education will promote broader ideas to improve society.

One of my favorite parts of this essay was her comparison of uneducated women to soldiers. Wollstonecraft makes the point that women and soldiers share some of the same characteristics. Both are taught to follow orders, so to speak. Both are expected to be subservient. An army is only as strong as its soldiers are blindly obedient. Wollstonecraft also points out that women are bound by their appearance. Women are taught to be pretty and coy. Soldiers are taught to stand up straight and push out their chests. They are told to parade around full of pomp and vigor. They are not, however, allowed to think.

I also find it interesting that Wollstonecraft makes the point that, if we leave women uneducated, marriages will fail. Put simply, since the woman has been taught only to please she will do such. The husband will be happy at first but then become accustomed to her and become bored, thus leaving the woman bitter and the man searching for another. In essence Wollstonecraft is saying that a thinking woman makes a better wife. I had a harder time with this part of the argument. Many families seem to get along fairly well with an uneducated mother and a full-time working father. I don’t know that similar educational backgrounds are the key to marital bliss. 

Wollstonecraft was clearly writing her essay for learned men of her generation. I found the reading difficult and boring at times. I know that it’s an essay of argument with points and counter points, but it was hard to identify them because the language was so challenging and drawn out. 

Homo Sapiens Sapiens Googlous

Is Google making us stupid? I do not know for sure, but I do know, that just as Guy Billout says in his article it is changing the way that we as a people think. I have been realizing, just as he does, that this is the way I now think. I search for quick snippets of information on a topic and then as soon as I find them I move on to the next one. I am essentially a hunter-gatherer of the current generation. I have stopped reading longer more engrossing books, in favor of shorter books or stories that essentially explore only one idea and move at the pace of the Internet I have now become accustomed to. Often when I sit down to read a novel, I find myself distracted by an idea it proposes within minutes of beginning to read. This makes it hard to continue to read, so I put the book down and continue to think on the idea while I walk away to go towards some other task. It is usually not the case that I do not like the book, just that I am, in my own way, making the reading process more like that of the Internet: I read a little, stop, and go on to something new.

I also find it genuinely intriguing that he brings up Frederick Winslow Taylor and how he reshaped the way we work so well that we still use it today. The only problem I see with this reshaping of the working community done so long ago is that it was meant only to improve efficiency of the work being done, and by doing this has made the working man into a machine. Why did he not, instead, improve the efficiency and happiness of the workers at the same time? Give them time to relax and reflect, while also making it part of the norm, so they don’t end up rushing through work to get to the next break. Don’t ask me exactly how I propose this to work, because I have not a clue, but think for a moment. Don’t studies often show that workers who like their job are, in effect, more efficient? We cannot lose the human to the machine.

Another thing that disturbed me is the whole Sci-Fi idea that Google aims to put a search engine in our brain. Google’s design is appealing because it mirrors neural circuitry. Yet, the human brain also contains an emotional center without which, we would be a race of automatons. Think of what this would do to schooling. If we don’t have to learn anymore, but simply think of what we want to know and there it is, are we really anything more than a carbon based computer? What then becomes of knowledge, just something for those not affluent enough to afford this piece of hardware? Think of the class boundaries that would form, it would be monstrous. A whole new species would be born, think—Homo Sapiens Sapiens Googlous.

However, despite all that disturbed me with Google’s ambitions, I did like the way he ended the article with the reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessy. If humans become so automated that computers have more human characteristics than we do, is that not a truly sad world?

Skunk Dreams

I will start off this entry by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Louise Erdrich’s Skunk Dreams. I found her writing to be very complex with its layers of drawn out descriptions of all she encountered. It is not difficult to read in terms of sentence structure or thought process; it just tends to leave you in a maze of descriptive words if you are not paying attention. Although, it was these descriptions that led me to enjoy the piece even more. I found it a perfect example of how a good writer can truly transport you to the land he or she is describing.

I liked her willingness to see dreams as sorts of omens for dealings in the “real” world. The dream she had while staying in the Valley City motel was what originally caught my attention. I found it odd that she dreamed of an actual place, which she later encountered in her waking life. Most of the dreams I have are more symbolic and less bluntly “real”. If I were to have this dream, it would be a metaphor: the elk would represent something beautiful from which I was cut off by a thin, almost permeable, barrier. I also found it enjoyable how her dream brought me back to a scene from one of my favorite movies of all time, Princess Mononoke. It was curious to me how the scene from this movie was almost exactly the same as the dream Erdrich experienced. It invoked a great sense of déjà vu, which seemed to persist with me throughout this reading. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it as much as I did.

This feeling of déjà vu was brought back to my mind when she was living in New Hampshire and happened upon the same fence as she saw in her dreams. I thought it was interesting that it was a large hunting ground with animals imported from all over the country, but it felt like she described it was without judgment. Then when she describes her desire to cross the boundary and enter the land, I love how she references the writings of Adam Phillips. His ideas on desire seem to be very true to me. I loved how he stated that dreams are often a place where boundaries have been removed entirely. We can often do things in dreams that we normally wouldn’t be able to do in real life, such as fly or breath underwater. I do think it was interesting that he left out the point that she implied: very often the dreams we remember are dreams where our desires were left unfulfilled by the obnoxious twang of an alarm clock or the gentle breaking of the sun through our window.

Other interesting things:

• I’m not really sure what she means, but I like where she writes “every inch of the ground turned over more than once”
• Her description of fertile land in the West being measured in inches (mostly because it’s so true).
• The description of her desire to cross the fence being like poachers lust, but only wanting to smell the air

The Talk of the Town Indeed...

For this post i will focus mainly on the first article of the two in the New Yorker series. That's not to say that Susan Sontag's article is any less pertinent, i just had a lot more going on in my mind while reading the first one by Adam Gopnik.

Obviously this article covers a very touchy subject in our country today. Not only is that the topic of school/campus shootings, but also just gun control in general. I really liked that Gopnik pointed out one of the main reasons things like these horrible shootings happen is that many of the people we give guns to are seriously mentally ill. I also liked that he stated that the so called "heartfelt" speeches made afterword are completely unneeded. Sure they might help people cope with the things that happened a little easier, but isn't that what psychologists are for? The governors main responsibility should not be helping the people cope with what happened, but to make sure that terrible things like this never happen again.

Also, Gopnik points out that the US has done little to nothing on this front; whereas in nations across Europe, when things like this happen, new policies are immediately put into place to combat the events that lead to madmen gaining access to weapons. He points out that after a school shooting in Dunblane, British gun laws were tightened even more than before (and before they were still more strict than the current US gun laws). Since then there have been significantly less incidents including gun violence on campus. So what is his point? I think it is kind of obvious here. The US is not doing enough to prevent insane, psychopathic killers from getting their hands on guns (and i don't use the words insane and psychopathic lightly here, because if you think about it, someone who sits down and premeditates a mass killing of innocent civilians on a college campus is obviously totally screwed up in the head).

However, one thing i don't agree with him on is the total banning of handguns. If you think about it, yes the handgun does help someone easily conceal a weapon and shoot more rounds out than that of a hunting rifle. One thing he doesn't mention though, is that someone could have just as easily modified an assault rife, which can be found at most any Gander Mountain, to be fully automatic and outfitted himself with many extra magazines and done just as much if not much more damage. So i don't really agree with him that banning the firearms altogether is the answer. Make them very difficult to get, but not impossible for men with clean mental history and no intention to kill.