Gots to gets me some education.

1. What skills have you learned in this class and how might you apply them to writing in your career or future college courses?

I now know how to blog! I came into this class a primitive caveman spending my days hunting and gathering but now I am an expert at putting my silly and/or offensive opinions all over the intrawebz! After doing these blogs I feel like I have a pretty good idea of how all of the assorted internet media I have enjoyed over the years is created.

2. How have the readings in the class affected you?

Bartleby got me interested in a 17th century murder mystery that I knew nothing about. I have read Moby Dick once and listened to two different audio versions and I always found Melville's writing style super interesting. 

White Noise annoyed me to a point I thought was unimaginable and I some how held it together and didn't build an armored bulldozer and rampage through town square. I would suggest anyone who questions their mental well being threshold give it a try. You should probably have a handler near by to keep you from doing harm to yourself or others. I don't think I will be reading any DeLillo in the near future.

Oh boy Swift's A Modest Proposal was a laugh riot. Easily the most interesting of all the required readings for this course. I couldn't help but think of the awesome Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man while reading it. Could Jonathan Swift have been an alien invader from a distant galaxy trying to convince primitive humans to offer up their delicious children to the invaders? I think so. 

3. How have you met the learning outcomes for the class (which can be found on the syllabus)?

I think the standout on the syllabus is "interpret and analyze text" I really had to read over and/or listen to things multiple times and pick out all the things I thought stood out as having significant meaning.

4. How has your writing or your writing process changed?

I didn't change my process much. I took way more notes on the materiel that I wasn't as interested in. I have like three full pages of notes on White Noise. Knowing ahead of time what is coming at you was very nice. I could just look at the next weeks assignments and see what kind of questions I would have to be answering and take lots of information down I thought might come in handy.

5. What were your challenges in the class?  How were you able to overcome them?

I have always been pretty good at doing things I didn't want to do especially if I was paying to do them. I am not a big fan of reading. I like to be moving around and doing things and I always found it hard to drive and turn pages at the same time. An easy way to combat this is with Audiobooks. Boy howdy do I like audiobooks I just put it on my MP3 player and hop on my bike and take off on a trail somewhere. 


Here is a link to Audible. It is a very nice source of all things Audio. It isn't just Audiobooks you can also find neato stuff like interviews and ye olde tyme radio shows.

You have twenty seconds to comply.

This was my first online class. I must say I was surprised with the amount of interaction with other students. I have never made a blog before this class. I found myself checking to see if any of my fellow students had commented on my post frequently. I am always curious what other folk think of my assorted ramblings.

I have commented before on how I miss the classroom setting in certain aspects of the essay revision process. With the blog system setup it could easily be implemented into the class. Everyone could submit a rough draft and another student could be assigned to post their assessment of the essay. In the classroom setting I always dreaded looking over another person’s paper because I am a fan of being super critical. Even though I didn’t like doing it I feel it was something that improved my own writing. When I was judging someone else’s work it made my own mistakes more noticeable.

One of the biggest perks of the online setting is time; you have so much time to complete each assignment. As long as you are capable of self-motivating you shouldn’t have any problem completing each assignment. In the classroom setting I was always finding myself twiddling my thumbs when we were given class time to work on certain essays; I much prefer writing alone with music playing than in a classroom surrounded by murmurs, shuffling and assorted noises of humanoids.

Easily my favorite thing about this class was the blog. I found it fun and interesting and I could see myself actually creating one as a hobby.  It made this class seem less about English and more about internet communication. I am taking one other all online course this semester and it was far more removed and more of a list of things to do and date they need to be finished type of course. Needless to say it was boring and seemed like a chore, there was zero interaction with other students. I believe I learned a thing or two from it but I could just as easily learn that way by going to the library. The interactivity of this class opened my eyes to the possibility of what online courses can be. I very much enjoyed it and hope any online only course I take in the future can compare.

Exciting video about interacting with technology!

Literary Daredevil!

Revision? What is that? I turned my essay into the online tutor on Thursday but alas I haven’t got it back yet.  Looks like I will have to stare this bad boy down and hope I didn’t screw up any of the simple little things. I feel pretty good about the essay as it stands. When I turn things in for revision I mostly just want to make sure I haven’t screwed up the MLA formatting or citations.

The best part of revision is I don’t need to check the source materiel anymore. I didn’t have to sift through the pretentious writing of DeLillo because I am busy sifting through the pretentious writing of Cason. I like to go with my original thoughts and opinions while writing. I can go back and check after I am finished and wonder how exactly I thought of something that either didn’t exist or was such a small and nearly unnoticeable part that left a big impact on my thoughts while trying to make sense of a specific theme in a book or essay.

Reading over my essay multiple times causes me to pull paragraphs out and shuffle them around like a carnival shell game. This causes my connecting sentences to not work so I usually have to change those around or create an entirely new one. One thing that I do that I believe helps quite a bit is I skip the outline entirely and when I think I have finished the essay I go back and create an outline while looking at the current lay of the essay. If anything doesn’t fit or is out of place it practically glows on my reverse outline. 

Moloch the terrifying owl god, tells all about reverse outlines! 

#11 It's all in the title.

The book White Noise by Don DeLillo is filled with noise. Background noise is the most important character throughout each chapter. The book begins with humming engines and distant chatter of returning students and ends with blaring horns, the sound of hard plastic wheels on concrete and panicked women from a distant balcony.  All of these sounds are only possibly where there is life. The characters make several mentions to death being an endless stream of noise. The noise throughout is an important reminder to the characters that they are still alive and the world will continue to live without them. If the dialog was removed and only the background noises described in this book remained it would still be easily recognizable by anyone who had read it. The noises are described with more detail and care than any of the environments or physical appearances. Noise is the meaning and the purpose of this writing.

Do you know the definition of "Noise"?

#10 What noise?

 I wanted to comment on Tom Leclair’s Closing the Loop because I enjoyed how he routinely compared DeLillo’s White Noise to piles of garbage but I am leaning more towards John Duvall’s ridiculously long titled The (Super) Marketplace Of Images: Television As Unmediated Mediation In DeLillo’s White Noise. Mainly because he focuses strongly on my favorite character from White Noise, yeah you guessed it TV!

Duvall mentions the TV as a character and how it buts in on several conversations and how the Mink character speaks primarily in Quotes from the TV (448-449). The majority of this essay focuses on Murray and how creepy and horrible he is. He is the little devil on Jack’s shoulder and Jack is a dimwitted idiot who can’t see through his incredibly thin disguise. Duvall wrote this essay in the mid or early 90’s he mentions the Gulf War and the L.A. riots. He connects the television coverage of these events to DeLillo’s thoughts on media coverage throughout White Noise.

I thought the article did a good job of pointing out motifs and language of White Noise. I could easily find something to use on the essay from either of those points of view.  I already thought of the TV as a character when I read White Noise this article points out many of the times this theme appears in the book.

                                                                 WORKS CITED

  Duvall, John N. The (SUPER)MARKETPLACE OF IMAGES: TELEVISION AS INMEDIATED MEDIATION IN DeLILLO'S WHITE NOISE. White Noise. New York City: Penguin Group, 1998. 432-55. Print.

Number 9! White Noise or Audible Groans!

                                                  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Brady_Bunch_full_cast_1973.JPG

                                            Huh…… White Noise?

                    No need to worry about spoilers; I will only be commenting on part one and two.

Part one is separated into 20 chapters consisting mostly mundane day to day life stuff, some character descriptions and quirks. Nothing resembling a plot happens in part 1. It is all set up until part 2. DeLillo does a pretty good job of fleshing out characters; Every time Murray makes an appearance my stomach turns. You must be a good writer if you can make someone reading your book physically ill. I find most of the other characters less disgusting. The Narrator and main character is Jack Gadney. Jack is a Hitler Expert, has three children from two previous marriages. He is currently married to Babette a sugar-free gum addict, with sporadic memory loss and three children of her own. So Jack and Babette are exactly like Mike and Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch! Except Jack has two daughters and one son and Babette has two sons and one daughter.  I guess this means that creep Murray is Alice. Only two of Jack’s children live with him and Babette, Steffie and Heinrich. Steffie appears to get upset when a plane crash happens on the TV while the rest of the crew cheers and guffaws; she wears a green tinted golf visor all the time. Heinrich is an annoying creepy balding fourteen year old, He is pen pals with a psycho killer he has phone calls with mysterious folk about incest and babbles on for pages about whether rain is wet or not. Bee is Jack’s 12 year old daughter, she doesn’t spend much time in the book because she is busy being a globetrotting crime fighter. Babette’s three children are Eugene, Denise and Wilder.  Eugene is in Australia, Australia was really popular in the 80’s. Denise is the resident girl detective; she is always snooping around and trying to figure out what kind of drugs her mom is hopped up on. Wilder is either a half-wit mute or a baby I haven’t figured it out yet, his shining achievement is he is too big to ride in the shopping buggy and he can cry for 24 hours straight. The only other character worth mentioning is Murray. I don’t even know where to start with this horrible abomination, he works at the same college as Jack, he doesn’t like cities because cities are full of hot sex, he likes to sniff things, he lives in a slummy boarding house because he enjoys human misery, he doesn’t seem to understand personal space. This guy is a grade A creep. In a way the TV is a character in part 1; at several points something said on the TV seems to add to a conversation that the other characters are having. I could swear TV is talking about Bee when it says “The creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet” (DeLillo 95).

Part two or the thing with three names! Heinrich is on the roof being a weirdo and spots the cloud of smoke. The radio informs them to evacuate the town and get to the safe zone. The cloud of smoke with an identity crisis chases the family across snowy roadways until they get to the emergency shelter. At the shelter Babette reads stupid tabloid papers for almost four solid pages of the book. Jack hangs out with Jehovah’s witnesses and learns what crazy people think about the end of the world. Heinrich does a stand-up comedy routine and the rest of the crew sleeps. But be warned you aren’t getting out of part two without a little cameo by Murray! Here we see Murray in his natural habitat a parking lot propositioning prostitutes in a van. This is the first time I have encountered ipecac in written word form.  The next day they are told the cloud is a heading right for them. The family receives complimentary dust masks and then they follow some hillbillies through a snowy forest. Jack and company arrive in Iron City and hang out in a Dojo (Karate was also big in the 80’s).  

This book is interesting so far. There are a few big criticisms I have. Is it really necessary for two characters to argue over who should die first for over a page on two separate occasions? Just because the author has the uncanny ability to mimic the kind of argument an annoying teenager would come up with doesn’t mean he should. I have never thought about college professors sitting around and talking about shitting, pissing and James Dean until now! I don’t know how much of this stuff will come up later in the story but it seems like excessive amounts of nonsensical filler. I don’t relate to any of the characters. The author has some strange obsession with shopping malls, grocery and hardware stores and describes them very vividly. I have no idea what this story is about so far. My only guess is it’s about mid-life crisis and the assorted horrors of parenting.

I am a fan of audiobooks I find that sometimes I hear something that I missed when I read through.

Big number 8! The middle!

What has been my biggest challenge in the class so far?

This is the first time I have taken an online class, I kind of miss peer reviews of my essays. I can take them to the learning center or the online writing tutor and that is neat and all but I do miss having someone I see at least once a week nervously telling me how bad or good my essay is. I think that helped me improve quite a bit.

What has been my biggest success?

Everytime someone leaves a nice comment on my blog. Whenever I start writing something I try and think of a way to make people smile while they are reading it. So whenever I get a nice comment from someone who enjoyed my post it feels like a big success to me.

How have the readings in the class affected me?

I am a huge fan of Moby Dick and I was pretty excited to read another Herman Melville story, boy was I surprised. Bartleby the Scrivener was beautifully written and had the poetic wording I expected from Melville, but it was a boring snoozefest of an uninteresting story. I did not like it one bit. The second reading A Modest Proposal was something I had heard of before but this was the first time I ever read it. I found it super funny. I find it hard to believe that this kind of morbid humor existed almost four hundred years ago. I am not sure if I agree with Swifts politics but he sounds like a fun guy to have at a party.

How is literary analysis different from other types of writing I have done in college?

Literary analysis sounds easy. I have silly opinions about all kinds of things. the message or meaning I can get out of a specific reading is so different than anyone else it seems like I would have an infinite well of knowledge to pull from while writing an analysis. But the hard part for me is I tend to worry about whether or not my opinion will be understood. I don’t think understanding is the point, but I almost always soften up my idea because I fear that it might be too out there.

What are my goals for the second half of the session?  What do I hope to improve or accomplish?

Easy question my goal is to win. I hope to feel much better about my next essay the first two I felt kind of meh about. I want to finish essay number three and think to myself, Yeah that is a good essay. 

post #7 or The joyful beginnings of yet another essay.

             Jonathan Swift’s attitude towards the state of Ireland as a whole is made very clear in A Modest Proposal. He insults the poor, the wealthy, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the English. The writing is meant to enrage the vast majority of Ireland and hopefully inspire a reaction out of them. The poor need to make some attempt to improve their station and the wealthy need to attempt to improve the current state of their lands and country. Swift was trying to hold a mirror up to the Irish populace and show them just how ugly they had become.

Here is a link to some early 18th century Ireland alleged history. It isn't easy to understand exactly what was going on in a different country 400 years ago so Click me!

#6 Golly Mr. Swift

                                  

                                      Response to Swift

The exploding population of the impoverished in 18^th century Ireland caused many to search for answers; one of the more popular proposals was made by Dr. Jonathan Swift. Passing by begging mothers flanked by a half dozen children was a sight all too common. Seeing such misery could negatively alter the mood of any passing lord. Thankfully Dr. Swift was a man of vision and came up with a solution that would be beneficial to all involved. The impoverished masses could become useful providers of goods, in the form of their young delicious babies. Swift saw human offspring as a useful untapped resource. The primary usefulness as delicacy for those with refined palates, second the fine soft leather could be used for exquisite gloves and boots. This would improve the station of the impoverished by providing a steady income to fertile women and preventing their mistreatment out of fear of harming their stock.

Swift’s suggestion despite being very persuasive is most certainly not meant to be taken seriously. He is trying to compare the treatment of the impoverished to that of livestock. His goal is to rub the land owners' noses in the inhumane way they treat their fellow man. Seeing the absurdist comparison of treating humans as livestock could potentially cause the lords to think a bit deeper about how they should treat other people.

His suggestion is very logical. He has many examples of this kind of solution being used by others in the past. A long list of potential positives outcomes are clearly outlined, and the only thing that truly stands in the way of this being a very persuasive proposal is morality. The example of the man from the island Formosa (now known as Taiwan) telling the story of how when young people were executed their meat was sold as a delicacy, is both an example and an insult. Comparing lords in Ireland to savages in a far east pacific island was probably very effective at a time when xenophobia was still very much alive.

If you have been persuaded by Dr. Swifts proposal you might find the following link on proper preparation of human meat useful.

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/butcher.html

Rhetorical Analysis.

This advertisement is super effective. The tone is similar to an action movie. It uses amazing lightning effects and intense music to catch the viewers’ attention. The narrator speaks with the confidence of a man who has survived in the wilderness and fought off many packs of wolves and at least fifteen sasquatches. Any skepticism about the knife is quickly dismissed as the first thing you see is a tree getting stabbed. I have no idea what 420 molecular steel is but it sounds pretty extreme.  The perks of the knife alone seem too good to be true. Before you can get over how amazing the knife is the grizzled narrator lets you know it has a compass built in to the handle, so you will never be lost as long as you keep this beast at your side. At this point the viewer is probably putting a loan out against their home so they can afford this monster; the narrator seems to sense this and quickly lets you know that it is only ten dollars.

The message this commercial is trying to get across is more of a question. ”do you want to survive?” This should appeal to the majority of people. It takes great pains to show you all the ways this knife can help you pick a fight with nature, and come out the other side with air in your lungs. The reaction expected was for every human that has a desire to keep on living to pick up their phone and order several dozen of these knives, insuring the future of mankind.

ROUGH DRAFT!

                              Here is my rough draft. I need to beef it up a bit and work on the conclusion but any harsh criticisms would be greatly appreciated. 

                                                             Bartleby the inner demon

                        Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener is the story of lawyer who hires an employee that refuses to work after a few days. The lawyer feels pity for the man and has a difficult time letting him go. It can be said that the narrator from Bartleby the Scrivener isn’t trying to get rid of an unruly employee but trying to get rid of his own grim outlook of the future. Bartleby’s refusal to continue working and unwillingness to change is a reflection of how the narrator feels about his station in life. His attempts to rid himself of Bartleby is actually his inner struggle with depression and monotony. Bartleby is a thought, a thought so peculiar that the narrator is unsure why he has had it.

                        The thoughts that run through the heads of men vary wildly. Sometimes the thoughts that run through an individual’s mind can vary just as much. Indecision  can be described as a man’s thoughts struggling against eachother. Thoughts can have character, they can appear from nowhere, a thought can lay dormant and arise only when the mind is in the perfect position. It is not hard to see Bartleby the character as Bartleby the thought. The narrator struggles with this thought and believes there may be truth in it. The thought is small yet poignant, it catches the narrator off guard. He did not want to have this thought but after it occurs it is difficult to forget.

                        While the narrator describes himself as an elderly man Bartleby is said to be young. The first appearance of Bartleby is described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”(15). This could be because the feeling of monotony and meaninglessness is a new idea that has crept into the mind of the narrator. The narrator claims to have a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best (4). This says that recently his work is proving more trouble than it is worth. The first time Bartleby says “I would prefer not to” The narrator describes performing a task that leads one to believe it has been done many times before (18). This is Bartleby the thought coming forth for the first time, the narrator questioning what he does for a living. The disbelief in what the narrator has just heard is his own denial of the thought that he has just had. He tries to deny the fact that that thought has even crossed his mind and reflects on it. He tries to purge the idea as nonsense but dwells on the question he has no answer for. Would the narrator prefer not to continue the job he had chosen many years ago? A job he chose for its lack of stress and relative reclusiveness. He chose a job where he could be alone with his thoughts.

                        Most people have struggled with a thought at some point in their life. The thought of how things could have been different had they chosen a different path or how things could be different tomorrow if they change right now. The narrator is struggling with the thought of why. Why does he continue to write these documents that the majority of people will see as worthless after a short period of time, papers that most won’t understand or ever see at all? Barleby’s appeareance happens at point in the narrators life when he has taken on more of a work load than he his used to. The frustration of being buried under paperwork causes him to wonder about the nature of the documents he is toiling over. This happens only after a few days of working hard and seeing little improvement. The young, silent and lonely image he has conjured to help him get through the new workload soon turns into a roadblock that causes him to stop and wonder about how sad and lonely his life would be if he had to continue to work like this. He feels as if he has been trapped in a brick building with no human contact and bent over a desk. At first this thought only haunts the narrator when he is at his place of work. “As yet I had never of my personal knowledge known him to be outside of my office” (23). As he is out enjoying himself and living his life outside of his work, Bartleby waits in the corner of his office for him to return.

                        Why is it the narrator has so much trouble getting rid of this idea? He lets it out and tells others about it to get their opinion on it and presumably so he can see the absurdity of it.

             

Bartleby more than a little luny

                                        See page for author [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

                             “"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut with a grin”(22).

• This passage pretty much summed up exactly how I feel about the Bartleby character, I could hear this quote every time the story focused heavily on Bartleby's actions. The twelve year old errand boy Ginger Nut has a better grasp on the mental capacities of the grim Bartleby than the narrator. The other characters are well defined and lively, a stark contrast to the lifeless titular scrivener. While the descriptions of the other characters lead one to believe they are also a bit looney, their eccentric qualities pale in comparison to the growing malaise of Bartleby. The story begins with a humorous and lively tone and spirals into despair and darkness after the appearance of Bartleby. Bartleby is a leach that sucks the life and joy out of the complacent narrator. The depressing demeanor of Bartleby is as infectous as his catchphrase “prefer”. As the other men begin to unconsciously quote him while performing their daily tasks the color of their character begins to melt away and the only focus is of the charitable narrator’s inability to deal with this negative force that has invaded his life. The narrator who tries in several ways to help this miserable character, seems to realize that there is clearly something wrong with this man but can’t understand that his mind works in such a vastly different way than his own. Bartleby sees futility in copying the documents that will surely end up at the position he once held at the dead letters department. The narrator realizes this connection after Bartleby has taken his own life and finally understands that Bartleby refused to alter his position because in his mind he was fully aware of where he would end up.

  
  

  

  By Moses King (King's handbook of New York City, 2nd ed. 1893) [Public domain], via    Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Learning more about Herman Melville and the time he lived in can help understand quite a bit about Bartleby the Scrivener. This link is a pretty in depth look at the life and works of Melville.
                       http://www.melville.org/
  
  
  

  If you were wondering about the Colt and Adams characters that the narrator mentions in the story give the following link a click. It is a very interesting tale of a notorious murder that happened several years before Bartleby the Scrivener was published.

  
  
  
  
          The Corpse in the Shipping Crate
  
  

The joy of explosions, explaining summary vs. analysis

                                     By U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Aaron Peterson. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Many of the best things in life involve explosions. Some even say Life itself was caused by an explosion. When a violent reaction happens between certain chemicals heat, noise and pressure is released. When driving a car a steady stream of explosions is creating the mechanical force that pushes the vehicle forward. A summary of an explosion is a pretty dull affair. There was a deafening boom and a blinding light a forceful wave of heat could be felt rushing by. But analyzing an explosion can be extremely fascinating. There is no question that an explosion happened but there are numerous questions around why the explosion happened. Was it a natural occurrence? Was it an accident? Was it intentional? What caused it? Who caused it? Where did it start?  The possibilities are nearly endless.

When asked to summarize something, all that is required is a person’s memory of a specific event or thing. If a group of people were to describe the same explosion odds are the descriptions will all be pretty similar, the main differences will be perspective. If the same group were asked to scrutinize the explosion the likelihood of getting a similar answer is greatly reduced. Investigation, speculation and reflection of the event are not required for a summary. Searching for the reason behind an event could lead down many varying paths; the primary difference between which path is taken depends entirely on the searcher.

 If your fancy has been tickled and you would like to read more about explosions, give this link a click. http://www.groundzerofx.com/explosions.htm

By NASA (NASA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

By The High Fin Sperm Whale (Self-taken photo) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

           

Blog Post #1 (Creative name isn't it.)

What does Nabokov think makes a good reader? Do you agree? What do you believe are the characteristics of a good reader? Do you consider yourself a good reader?

                What makes a good reader? This is not a question I have asked or given a moment of thought to. I know how to decipher the text on the page and I understand most of the stories I have read. Nabokov has tried to answer this question in “Good Readers and Good Writers”. He has a list of ten definitions that he asked students to choose four of.  The four definitions he suggests have to do with memory, imagination, artistic sense and a dictionary.  

                I can understand how a dictionary and good memory might come in handy, but do you need an imagination or artistic sense to be a good reader? Artistic sense is such a wide and varied thing from person to person. Knowing what you like and what you don’t is what I think of when I hear ‘artistic sense’. Maybe I should look it up in the required good reader dictionary. On the other hand imagination is something I always thought of as the ability to materialize things from nothing. Nabokov uses the word ‘enchanter’ to describe a good writer. If a reader has a good imagination would this make them a conjurer with the ability to release whatever enchantment the writer has laid down on the pages?  

                I really don’t consider myself a good reader. I am not swimming in a pile of books at the moment, I don’t have a library card and I haven’t read many of the books considered classics. But according to Nabokov I have all the right stuff except for that pesky dictionary.

Introductory Video