When I read Shapira's article, I laughed. One of the examples that I saw was the Richmond Public School art teacher painting a picture with his buttocks. I remember that story as clear as day. It just go to show that everything on the web could literally be translated in reality. Everything that we write and post online defines us. Just think of yourself as a politician for a moment, would you want college students angry at you because you wrote on your blog that college students was lazy. Another voting demographic lost.

This also reminds us that Facebook and MySpace does really help with this unprofessionalism. My first thoughts when Dr. Jerz profile surfaced on Facebook were ones of confusion and glee. I didn't worry that pictures of his wild parties would surface when his friends witnessed a glorious kegstand. But for others, I believe that they will have rude awakening.

Professional punishment isn't the only bad thing that could happen to a person. These "trolls" are out there causing financial and emotional problems. What I don't understand what is the thrill for these guys. I remember the Megan Meier case as some powerful force that the internet could have on people.

Do you think we need to, in some way, control the content of the Internet?

Creative writing seems to be an art form that a brave few would dare venture into. According to a "Super Hero" shop, the writer could probably rank next to Superman. Check out this video from MSNBC:

The clock is ticking for me to go out into the real world and knowing proper e-mail etiquette is essential. When I read this webpage, I understood how exactly communication is the key to this fast paced world. One of the examples that really hit home to me was the last example follow the number 10:

A colleague once asked me for help, and then almost immediately sent a follow-up informing me she had solved the problem on her own.

If I hadn't responded so quickly to the first message, I would have saved myself the time I spent writing a long answer to an obsolete question. If I hadn't responded so quickly to the second message, I might not have alienated the person I had been so eager to help.

A simple misunderstanding had caused an enormous rift. And within the professional and acedemic world, the last thing you need is a misunderstanding. These tips seem to go back to the Lewin article. One has to know the rules and stick to them (Even though the technological age encourage some of us to break them). Many people make the most simple mistakes that could cost them there job or there wonderful internship. These skills would definitely improve how, in spite of our comfort, we write properly. Maddie's blog made me understand that people can do a significant amount of damage even if they didn't "want to purposely offend anyone or drop some huge bomb." That usually what happens. I think in order to prevent such travesties, if you are confused on exactly how to word a message...slow down and read out loud. If you are in a rush do it anyway, it would give you less time to re-explain it. I pose this question to you:

Does e-mail really bolster such confusion?

Schackner, Freedom of speech redefined by blogs

Student conduct codes and computer use policies are applicable to blogging, experts say, and it's probably not hard to make a compelling case for why posting a video of your roommate having sex is a bad idea.

I remember when this article first hit the Post-Gazette my freshman year. Other than the lovely picture, the article really hit home about how even a small campus like Seton Hill can gain attention on a global front. We should never forget that our blogs are around for the whole world to see. I remember how some random person had a comment for me and my blog. I've also seen rants on blogs that had the capability of getting people into a lot of trouble. Different bloggers, sane or not, are "co-creators" of the internet, which means their sick ideas influence what make up the information online. I know it is a 1st amendment right to say and write whatever, but as I saw in another blog "your right to swing your fist, ends with my nose."

I want to start by saying I love the New York Times, despite what the recent politicians are saying about it. Reading this article reminds me of the opeining line I read in Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl":

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...

Excessive text messaging and e-mailing is basically turning my generation in to mad, language chopping typist. O.K. I'm guilty of this sometimes, but being unable to separate professional or academic work from social rants could create a state of panic. Don't believe me? There was a section in the article that really stood out to me.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

What! A professor's son did not know why we capitalize the first letter of the sentence. It is a point of simplicity and comfort that we are quickly becoming used to. We are now relying on our technology to think for us in some respects.

I could remember back in middle school how I could not wait to get to a computer to sent an e-mail (I did not have a personal computer until I graduated high school), making sure I did not make a mistake. But one think I noticed was that it took too long if I wrote correctly. So I started to write in the infamous short hand that the article addresses.

The moral of this story...
Teens are lazy. Once they jump into higher education or professional roles, one of two things will happen: A rude awakening or a wake.

There was also an interesting fact at the end of the article. A lot of the teens who write outside of school are black and/or female. Different life experiences could result in different writing experiences, in the print and digital world. One thing good that could come out of the text message era is that everyone now has information at the tip of their fingers, but how it is used is a different story.

Remember the scene when Kane is being shaked down by Getty's for the governor's race. When Kane is telling Susan not to worry about this "gentleman". Getty's response is priceless:

Gentleman? I don't know what a gentleman is?

The fact is the selfishness on Kane is also very ungentlemanlike, but the problem is that he will not identify that there is a problem in the first place. By Kane wanting the world to love him and everything that he does, he is detached from the rest of the planet. In essence, he is already building Xanadu before he had started by isolating himself from reality. William Randolph Hearst (whom the movie is based on) at that time was looked at as detacted from the rest of the population. I watched a documentary about the clash between Hearst and Welles over Citizen Kane. Hearst at that time was known to be the megolomanic monster that Kane has become over time. We can see Kane as a huge comparison to the media/news mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose business seems to be on the matter of power and opinion than fact. Money seems to blind him from the truth that the people around him showed. He was willing to have his son's name dragged through the mud in order to prove that he could be governor.

Do you think that it was hard for Kane to change his ways because of the position that he was in?

Poetry is meant to be heard...

Exhibit A... Howl

Howl and the other poems in the chapbook are in itself a resistence to the norm and the destruction of political correctness before there was even a term called politcal correctness. I was just searching in a Wikipedia article at it stated that Ginsberg "saw the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time". That kind of a message needs to be in your face and over the top. The imagery of course is very compact but what about the structure of the poem itself. In Howl, GInsberg breaks almost every rule in the book by having notoriosly long lines and a saturation of repeated words and punctuation. In Canto II, the repitition of the name Moloch (a demon) shows the evil of society by association.

So does Howl has a message that is beyond the words?

I think so, that is the beauty of reading poetry. Once you see the pattern, you wonder how you could ever miss it.

Of course, there has to be a philosopher that we can follow when we analyze literature. In Maus, the Theodor Adorno method of mimesis could be seen as a magnifying aspect of the the plot. If you don't count the personification then all you can see is an actual veiw on a real aspect of history. Check out Huyssen's quote here:
Spiegelman's project is mimetic approximation not of the events themselves, but of the memories of his parents, and thus a construction of his own "post-memory" (Marianne Hirsch), then this mimesis is one that must remain fractured, frustrated, inhibited, incomplete.

Then there is more to it than the personification to Maus. It is a concentration of a memory of the source of the book (that would be the story of Vladek Spiegelman) and how the author put two and two together and make the connections within the story. In a story like this the question of accuracy in the Holocaust came up. Only direct sources in some of this situations only work, but as we discussed in class, that opportunity is fading away.

How does direct and indirect source affect the truth in a non-fiction?

How do we see metaphors played out in a story will make or break it. Staub notices that an oral tradition in Vladek's home country made it possible for us to see what is going on in Maus. However, without the comic book format, the metaphor will go over our heads. In Maus I, there is a quote of Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human". Staub states that Spiegelman knew what he was doing by making everyone animals after that quote. It was a "straightforward metaphor for the dehumanization of victims that allows genocide to occur". Maybe we are seeing what we should not see about these groups of people via these metaphors.

Does the the races of animals shows the all of the struggles of this story?

The health of a society is always best measured by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.

If that is the case, then the society of journalism is one step closer to hell (no offense). In a world that is so fast placed, we don't appreciate what literature does to improve our culture and society. Unless the books has a brand name attach to it, it will be a cold day in hell for a review or an ad for that book to be published. The title I choose is that public discourse about literature is now a dying beast on the side of the road of culture. Books don't bring too much money and that is why not a lot of people write. In my Writing of Poetry class, we discussed how poor writers (espiecially poets) could end up if they do not find an alternative to writing for a living. In the same sense, literature is losing it's fame and it has gone the way of the black and white television. I do have a question however:

Should we trust Journalism with the hope of reviving literature?

There is a paradox that Dr. Jerz had pointed out to me in my last blog. A black hitchiker is being discrimated by Vladek, who was discrimated by the Nazis. Hate seems to be in a unbreakable cycle that everyone is a part of. Even after the war was over, Vladek talks about the story of Gelber, how he tried to return to his home and was killed not by Nazis but by Poles who lived there. We think that when a war ends and the soldiers are off the battlefield that the hatred stays there, dying a slow death in the battlefield.

But the one thing I think that I noticed about Maus II as opposed to the first book is that the need to resist and the need to survive was highlighted. Vladek recalls the foiled plot to destroy one of the creamatorium in Auschwitz. Both physically and mentally Vladek and Art himself have to resist the urge to become the things that hate them. Spiegelman had written an article called Getting in Touch with My Inner Racist, where he fights those inner demons in a way that I was personally offended, but after reading Maus, I know his approach was a little unorthodox with things.

EL237--Writing About Literature

In this confusing world of literature, we try to decipher when and how an author get his/her point across. In Maus, I see how personification to make certain races of people into a certain animal. With Germans as cats and Jews as mice it made me think of the assumption of the natural order that some people had against the Jewish nation. Like every Holocaust themed literature I read, very few people see Jews as good people. To personify them as mice made the reader sympathize with them because we know that the pigs (Poles) are selfish and greedy, the dogs (Americans) are out of touch on what is going on, and the cats (Germans) are deadly in the world of Maus. In the beginning of book one, Vladek's first line that really hit me was "If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week then you can see what it is, friends". Just looking at the art of the cover, I knew where this book was going. However, I did not expect that it was still at the level of violence as the actual events of the Holocaust. As I started book two, I realized that it should still be regarded as an actual account of a true Holocaust story. Be honest... Do you think that Maus made you pay attention to the story more with the personification or would Spiegelman have done a better job without it?

I don't know what to think about reading Maus. I'll tell you that it will be the first time that I will read a graphic novel in a classroom setting and that's for sure. I've always been told that "comic books" are bad for you and it will "rot your brain". I really don't understand how can a graphic novel cannot be use in the higher echelons of literary criticism and canonization. Sure we have Marvel and DC, but they are in the same column as Harry Potter, popular more than useful for literary criticism. Maus could be the thing that blend in popular devices and old-fashioned literary techniques together.

We could pretty much make the assumption that Jamaica has been a one of the world's melting pots of culture. In this article, Laura Ciolkowski, is stating how both the British and African cultures in Jamaica are colliding in Wide Sargasso Sea for a chance in the spotlight.

The description of how these cultures clash is described in this quote:
Not quite English and not quite "native", Rhys's Creole woman straddles the embattled divide between human and savage, core and periphery, self and other.

Antonette had always had to battle where her loyalties lie, to the mother country (England) or her home (Jamaica). It seems like her very existence is a culture clash. Can she indeed be a model Englishwoman to "expand and defend the English empire" by bearing the sons it needs? I doubt it and so does Ciolkowski. Antonette is what she called "the Hybrid Body", the symbol of the problems of the culture.

Even the novel itself fight for what side in this battle that it is on. Ciolkowski described the typical and most of the time sterotypical view of Jamaica through English eyes. Even though Wide Sargasso Sea is about Jamaica, it was written by a British subject.Nevertheless Rhys steps out of her "God Save The Queen" shell and continue to speak for Antonette, the symbol of the cultures, and a "silent madwoman with a chance to sell her story". There is another quote that I can think of :

Wide Sargasso Sea resists English imperial common sense, mapping out instead the multiple battles over what gets to count as the way things are. That Rhys plays out these battles on the terrain of the English novel, situating her text both beside and against Charlotte Bronte's nineteenth-century canonical narrative of English womanhood, is no surprise; rather, such explicity intertextual struggles have helped critical readers of Rhys's fiction to place Rhys within a postcolonial literary tradition that is specifically interested in rewriting the fictions of English empire.

It was also pointed out in this article that Rhys goes against the grain in this particular mode of postcolonialism. In fact the whole novel is a model of resistance against the empire where the sun never sets. It also fits into the spot of postcolonial opposition, this could be used as a medium to portray resistance at every turn.