Soles immaculata sempiterna animi!

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Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:36:32 -0500

makemestfu: Relatable Post? Word

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:30:52 -0400

makemestfu:

Relatable Post?

Word

lizdexia: jamieali: A lovely story about Romney/Ryan. This is...

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:14:45 -0400

lizdexia:

jamieali:

A lovely story about Romney/Ryan.

This is the best, most concise explanation of the past four years ever.

jestcomedy: This Chris Brown Album Review Doesn’t Hold Back Or...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:11:46 -0400

jestcomedy:

This Chris Brown Album Review Doesn’t Hold Back

Or maybe “NO STARS EVER” is a good thing?

comedycentral: Seven years ago, Steve Carell left The Daily...

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:54:00 -0400

comedycentral:

Seven years ago, Steve Carell left The Daily Show, and no one’s really heard much from him since. Well, last night, he stopped by the show and revealed to Jon Stewart that he’s actually become quite a prolific author.

Click the gif to watch the interview.

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Mon, 21 May 2012 01:07:04 -0400

Persepolis 2

Tue, 08 May 2012 03:13:13 -0400

In Persepolis, Marjane’s live becomes very turbulent at times, causing her and her family to experience a great deal of culture shock. For example, in the story “The Pill,” Marji is lying in bed and talking with her friend Julie, and the subject of sex comes up. As Julie describes “Oh, you’re the pure, timid, innocent virgin who does her homework. I’m not like that. I’ve been having sex for five years. I’ve already slept with eighteen guys: Fabrice, Olivier, Laurent, Luc, Jean-Marc, another Laurent, Sebastien…(p. 182).” Marji thinks to herself “I was shocked. In my country, even when you had sex before marriage, you hid it (p. 182).” In the comic, Marji’s face when she hears Julie talk about having already slept with eighteen guys is a look of complete shock. Marji begins to see the world differently after this

Another point where a character experiences culture shock is in the story “The Horse,” when Marji’s mom comes to visit from Iran for the first time in a year and a half. By this time, Marji is living in a new place, and her mom comes to stay with her for a few weeks. When they arrive at Marji’s for the first time, her mom sees that she is the only girl living with eight other men. This predicament is shocking to her mother, who becomes even more shocked when Marji tells her “Don’t worry Mom! They’re all homosexuals (p. 201).” As Marji explains to us “I had told her that to reassure her and I think that, despite the shock, she was appeased (p. 201).” This shows how different Marji views the world now because she is living in a more Western culture while in Europe, and it differs significantly from the one she came from in Iran. Marji’s mom practically jumps out of her seat when she hears this because she comes from such a more conservative and sheltered culture in Iran.

Another example where Marji experiences culture shock is when she is with her new boyfriend Enrique. He takes her to an “Anarchist Party.” She envisions it being like the battles of her childhood in Iran. The comic image shows her mind imagining people burning flags and throwing rocks and explosives and revolting against the government. But when it comes to the “Anarchist Party,” she is very disappointed to see that it’s nothing like what she expected. Instead they play tag, hide-and-seek, and volleyball, and sing songs around a campfire. At the beginning, Marji says “What a disappointment… my enthusiasm was quickly replaced by a feeling of disgust and profound contempt (p. 210).” Marji says that initially her love for Enrique suffered a devastating blow at the sight of this, but as the night comes to a close and they are all surrounding the campfire singing songs, she says “The sausages and the music were good… I was in love again (p. 210).” Marji’s emotions may have been determined by being a hormonal teenager, but they were also affected by the fact that she still has yet to fully adjust to the new culture she’s living in. There may never come a time when Marji becomes fully adjusted to this culture because everything that she believes in was ingrained in her way of life when she was a young girl in Iran.

Persepolis 1

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:57:51 -0400

In “Persepolis”, Satrapi makes good use of the comics, particularly when she shows Marji thinking to herself. For example, after Marji visits her Uncle Anoosh in prison, then learns later that he was executed for being labeled a Russian spy, she is lying in bed and God comes to visit her. Before he can really say anything, Marji screams at him to get out and she never wants to see him again. After this, she is shown floating in space among the stars and galaxies, thinking “And I was so lost, without any bearings… What could be worse than that? (p. 71)” Satrapi shows Marji lost in space without any sense of what is going on in her life. She is confused, scared, and feels very isolated from others.

Another part of the book where Satrapi uses the comics to express something with more depth than only words could do is in “The Party,” when “Black Friday” has resulted in the deaths of many civilian protestors. She opens with “After Black Friday, there was one massacre after another. Many people were killed (p. 40).” The first comic she uses is an image of more than forty faces of dead people from the massacres. They are lined up in rows and columns, and we are unable to distinguish one from another, or if some are female or male. This shows that the dead people were so unimportant to the shah and his rule. The people were just a mass of nameless face after nameless face, and if they stood in the way of his authority, they became worthless to him.

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Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:08:10 -0400

The Elephant Vanishes 3

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:20:03 -0400

I believe that Murakami is a post-modern writer because he writes with such commitment to lack of clarity in many of his stories. For example, the story “Sleep,” where he writes a story about a woman who goes weeks on end without sleeping at all. But he doesn’t feel the need to end the story with any specific event that will conclude the character’s journey. Instead, the reader is left confused and wondering about what is happening to the character and what will happen to her in the future. This style of writing can be very frustrating to some readers, while others will get pleasure out of its weird visions.

In the story, the main character becomes an insomniac after having a terrifying nightmare. For some reason, she doesn’t seek a doctor’s advice because she says “So I didn’t see a doctor, and I didn’t say anything to my parents of friends, because I knew that that was exactly what they would tell me to do (p. 74).” The fact that Murakami would write a character like this shows his dedication to keeping the story interesting.

A very interesting turn in the story comes when she has a nightmare about a man standing at the foot of her bed. She is terrified, but is unable to scream or move, and when she awakes, she is so startled that she’s unable to go back to sleep. She decides to have a glass of brandy and read a book she had read a while back, which becomes a habit night after night when she is still unable to sleep. As this continues on, she chooses not to tell anyone, even her husband, and instead takes the nighttime as her personal time. She reads her books, drinks her brandy, and occasionally goes out to buy chocolate, which she hadn’t really eaten since before she was married. Every night, she lies awake until her husband falls asleep, and sneaks out. “After ten minutes of lying near him, I would get out of bed. I would go to the living room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide over my tongue….My days became just as regulated (p. 95.).”

At the end of the story, the woman has driven her car to a dark road to rest, and two men begin rocking her car back and forth, which frightens her. She has slowly been drifting out of reality because of the insomnia that has plagued her for weeks. Throughout the whole story, she believed that she was maintaining her sanity despite her problem, until she finally breaks down at the end. “I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over (p. 109).” She has lost her sanity, although it’s hard to distinguish the meaning of the two men. Murakami has left the story very much open to the readers opinions and beliefs, and leaves no doubt that the story can be interpreted in many different ways.

World Lit: The Elephant Vanishes Post #2

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:43:56 -0400

World Lit: The Elephant Vanishes Post #2:

chase-this:

In “The Elephant Vanishes,” Murakami focuses on matters such as destruction, and confusion. He concentrates on these matters to emphasize the mid life problems and rough times people, normally in there late 20’s and early 30s, experience and struggle with.

The short story “Sleep”…

The Elephant Vanishes 2

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:07:30 -0400

In “The Elephant Vanishes,” Murakami often writes his stories around characters that are trapped in their own minds and are disconnected with the outside world. For example, in the story “Sleep,” the main character is suffering from an extreme case of insomnia, already not have slept for seventeen days by the time the story starts. She describes how she hasn’t told anyone about her problem, even her husband and son. She says “Neither my husband nor my son has noticed that I’m not sleeping. And I haven’t mentioned it to them. I don’t want to be told to see a doctor. I know it wouldn’t do any good. I just know. Like before. This is something I have to deal with myself (p.76).” A normal person would clearly see a doctor and most likely tell their spouse, which makes it interesting that Murakami shows her behaving so bizarrely.

Another story in which the main character is follows a strange mental process is in “The Kangaroo Communique,” where the character writes a response letter to a customer complaining to the company he works for. He describes how he was thinking about kangaroos and that it gave him the urge to write the letter. He says “Thirty-six intricate procedural steps, followed one by one in just the right order, led me from the kangaroos to you- that’s it. To attempt to explain each and every one of these steps would surely try your powers of comprehension, but more than that, I doubt I can even remember them all (p. 53).” The main character obviously doesn’t realize just how weird that is that he’s writing this letter. He even goes as far as to record his letter on tape and wait outside the woman’s door that he was trying to reach, a woman he has never met nor been in contact with before.

A third time where Murakami writes about a character trapped in their thoughts is in “TV People,” where the main character sits in his house one day when people barge in and start setting up a television set while not a word is said between anyone. The character sees the TV people a number of times throughout the story, but doesn’t really understand who they are. Near the end of the story, one of the TV people finally says to him “Shame about your wife (p. 214),” which confuses the main character. He repeats the saying in his head and thinks “I can’t grasp the context. Cause had effect by the tail and is about to swallow it whole.” He begins to think that his wife has left him and isn’t coming home, which scares him because although he realizes they weren’t the perfect couple, but they were always able to talk things out. The “TV people” are in his head, and they have blinded him from the truth of what was going on in the real world right before his eyes, which seemed that he and his wife were slowly disconnecting from each other, until it reached a tipping point.

The Elephant Vanishes 1

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:45:46 -0400

The quote that stood out most to me was the man’s observation at the end of the Bakery Attack story, in which he says “Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my bat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water’s calm surface reflected the blue of the sky… I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged (p. 49).”

In the story, the man had been having a vision where he was sitting in a boat, and a volcano was rising up underneath him. I felt like this represented the pressures he was feeling from a curse that he believed was upon him. Several times throughout the story, he observes how each time he looks down, the volcano has risen higher. Finally he and his wife hold up a McDonald’s in order to break the curse over them, which seems to work. While he and his wife are eating the burgers they get, he observes how the volcano has gone away. It’s as if the pressure has been lifted that he felt from the curse upon him, and he recognizes that. At this point, I felt that he was in a dream, because he just described how he and his wife took 30 Big Macs from McDonalds because they were so hungry. But either way, he finally feels at ease with his situation, and is able to stretch out his legs and be at peace with his life.

World Lit: Woman at Point Zero Post #2

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:27:46 -0400

World Lit: Woman at Point Zero Post #2:

chase-this:

Firdaus gives up trying to become a respectable woman and returns to prostitution because she feels more powerful and more in control of her own life. She realizes she would rather have power than be respected.

Firdaus leaves her life as a prostitute to work in an office as an assistant…

Woman at Point Zero 2

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:14:59 -0400

In the novel “Woman at Point Zero,” Firdaus goes through many experiences that she believes are “rebirths,” which she eventually realizes were just illusions. From one place to another, Firdaus experiences endless suffering that grows to define her as a person. On numerous occasions, she is treated as nothing more than a body as man after man comes into her life, only to engage her sexually and leave. There are a few instances in which she is abandoned by people who had come into her life and given her hope that she had found someone like her in the world. Another time, she meets a woman named Sharifa, who turns her into a prostitute. Being that this has happened after Firdaus was abandoned yet again, she feels an overwhelming sense of purpose. She says “when I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror I realized that now I was being born again with a new body, smooth and tender as a rose petal. My clothes were no longer rough and dirty, but soft and clean. The house shone with cleanliness. Even the air was clean. I breathed deeply to fill my lungs with this pure air (p. 57).”

Another instance in which Firdaus goes through a form of rebirth is when she begins to develop her sense of self-worth. She has learned the role that money plays in the world she inhibits, and understands how she can determine her own price as a prostitute. She begins to turn down men who approach her with money, insisting that she won’t go home with them. When asked why, she replies “Because there are plenty of men and I want to choose with whom to go (p. 73).” She had turned him down because she says he had dirty fingernails, whereas she prefers clean ones. I feel like this is bittersweet for Firdaus, who has gained more self-esteem and pride than she has ever had in her life. She has arrived at a sort of paradox: sell her body for sex in order to feel empowered and good about herself.

The most definitive moment of Firdaus’ life occurs when she loved a man named Ibrahim, but she discovered that he was just like every other man she had ever met- a liar. She says “Now I was aware of the reality, of the truth… Now there was no room for illusions. A successful prostitute was better than a misled saint. All women are victims of deception. Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low (p. 94).” She has finally arrived at a truth, that all men are the same. Although some are just plain evil on the surface, some deceived her and made her believe that they were good people when in fact they weren’t. She comes to realize that these men are the worse of the two. They deceive and entice others with a false image of goodness, an idea that drives Firdaus to lose all hope in the world. This grows to define her entire experience on earth, a world without hope, while she is completely robbed of the good life she deserved.

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Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:49:45 -0400

"“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is..."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:36:59 -0400

“

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

”

Woman at Point Zero 1

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:10:14 -0400

In “Woman at Point Zero”, the quote that stood out to me the most was when Firdaus was explaining a time when she was crying in the middle of a dark night, alone, and emotionally helpless. A teacher approaches her, and they have a conversation that is short but powerful for the both of them. I was unsure whether Firdaus felt a great comfort with the teacher, Iqbal, or if she was simply reaching out to the nearest person with desperation. Either way, she explains the moment that her hand and Iqbal’s meet. She says “It was a feeling that made my body tremble with a deep distant pleasure, more distant than the age of my remembered life, deeper than the consciousness I had carried with me throughout. I could feel it somewhere, like a part of my being which had been born with me when I was born, but had not grown with m when I had grown, like a part of my being that I had once known, but left behind when I was born (p.30).”

I felt this quote was important because at this point in the story, we have yet to see Firdaus in a more vulnerable state of mind. She feels so desperate because she has lost sense of true inner pleasure from the heart and soul. She recognizes the connection between herself and Iqbal at the moment when their hands touch, and describes the feeling that felt distant, like it was born within her but she had forgotten it along the way. I feel like this is true of many people in the world today, which is why I think it’s so important. Everyone knows someone who had a promising future at one point, but whose time passed without finding success. The reason behind the fading out isn’t the person failed at something in their job or achieving a goal. Everyone fails at one point or another, and often multiple times at the same thing, but with persistence they can learn to apply learned knowledge from those experiences in order to eventually succeed. The ones who fail are the ones who lost themselves along the way to their success. What’s the point of achieving your goal if you have lost who you are in the process?

derss: Fur Sure.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:32:03 -0500

derss:

Fur Sure.

Nervous Conditions 3

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:30:39 -0500

Throughout the novel Nervous Conditions, the concept of individual versus society plagues Tambu’s mind as she searches for the answers to a meaningful life. From a young age, she has had a desire to be more than what society has planned for her. In the world she lives in, women are supposed to be cooks and housewives whose main purpose is to serve her husband and the family as a whole. The household revolves around the husband, and the wife is treated almost as a second-class citizen. Tambu sees how the social structure of this society has done this to her own family, as her mother and aunt are forced to essentially be professional housewives. One important point where Tambu notices how society has them placed is when she and Nyasha are waiting while Babamukuru speaks to the school headmaster. “The headmaster, seeing us standing there, naturally began to talk about us. This made Nyasha indignant, because she did not like being referred to in the third person in her presence: she said it made her feel like an object (p. 101).”

Another important point in Tambu’s life comes when she speaks to Maiguru about the fact that she earned her Master’s Degree. Tambu says she was “emboldened” by the thought of this. Maiguru admits that many people believed she went to England only to look after Babamukuru because that was her place in the world, and Tambu notices the transition of emotion on Maiguru’s face. “The lower half of her face, and only the lower half, because it did not quite reach the eyes, set itself into sullen lines of discontent. She bent over her books to hide them, and to prove that she was not unhappy at all she made a chuckling sound, I think she thought gaily, but sounding pained (p. 103).” Tambu also learns that Maiguru doesn’t make any money because she gave up a more individual lifestyle to be a caretaker of her husband and children. Tambu adds “Personally, I thought it was a great shame that Maiguru had been deprived of the opportunity to make the most of herself, even if she had accepted that deprivation. I was all for people being given opportunities (p. 103).” This knowledge changes Tambu, and she begins to realize the full extent of the obstacles that separate her from the grand life she envisions for herself.

The wedding that is set to take place between Tambu’s parents is upsetting to her, even though she admits she isn’t sure why. I think it might be because it was suggested, or even more so insisted upon, by Babamukuru. Maybe Tambu sees how her parents were living life on their own terms before they were married, and now the popular view of society that people in a relationship should get married is overpowering the more individual lifestyle that they currently lead. Tambu’s parents had been “living in sin” and needed to get out of that way. Tambu observes that “It worked like a predatory vacuum, drawing the incautious into itself and never letting them out. And now Babamukuru was saying that this was where my parents were, which meant myself and my sisters too (p. 153).” Tambu feels that pre-designated lifestyles are carved out for people, and she seems to resent that. She believes in people having the freedom and the ability to choose for themselves, regardless of what they “should” do according to society. People have to follow their own path, which I think Tambu believes will eventually lead to an individual’s self-realization, empowering them to explore all the possibilities that they desire in life.