Plays and Video Games

In this weeks Chapter, I was heavily intrigued by the amount of analysis that went into plays and how important the movements on stage where. My favorite play is Death of a Salesman where stage direction and action is very important to convey a message. While thinking about this, I thought about how movement in RPG video games is the same. To be put in a role then to play that role, you have to take the right directions. If you do it wrong, then you mess up in the game. Plays are important to our culture because they bring alive literature in a way that we ourselves can become the roles ourselves. In a way, it's like we're in a play every day!

The B52's - Rock Lobster

We were at the beach... Everyone had matching towels. Under a dock there they saw a rock. But it wasn't a rock. It was a ROCK LOBSTER.

In Margaret Awtood's "True Stories," she tells the reader not to ask for the "true stories." Her setting is a beach where the her feet press into the sand and the prints are soon full of salt water and erased. "The true story was lost" suggests that no stories can really be true any more and are lost to the erosion of time. At the end of the day, the tide always comes in and erases the remains of what happened on the beach. The "true stories" in their purest form are "vicious / and multiple / and untrue." What we have to lean on is the general history of the story and what it meant at the time. Every day we walk among the remains of stories that will never be validated.

Sexton humorously tells the "true story" of Cinderella where she seems to reprimand the other stories for leaving out this one. The difference here is that this "true story" ends happily ever after which would not have been the case.

Flesh and Point

Each of these poems share a common theme of "separation" of bodies and loss. In "They flee from me", Henry Wyatt refers to a lover or mistress who once came to him but does not any longer. In "Song" by Christina Rossetti, she advises her survivor to not cry for her but to remember her, then forget. In "Villanelle" by Marilyn Hacker, she describes how every day, we meet, touch, and talk then separate without understanding why we see so much goodness in simple acts. These poems entice us to think about relationship and how departing from one another is more than it seems. It's one thing to lose a lover, another to depart from a friend, and another from dying and leaving a love behind. But they are linked in separation. If there were no such thing as separation, life and love could possibly go on. But eventually everyone separates, dies away, and come back together to grow anew. I picked up on themes of flesh and how flesh is the conductor for relationships, whether it be sexual or platonic. Flesh lives with us and even separates from us in death. Sometimes I think that separation is necessary for relationships to improve or even new life to grow.

Why is Reading Boring?

Until I reached college, every literature class was the same. Read a text, analyze a text, find a meaning, find the symbolism, who is the author? Maybe I'm a kill joy and I don't mean to be. But all of this is irrelevant to me unless I take something away from the text. I can tell you all about the Scarlet Letter and that it means nothing to me. When it comes to texts, I have no connection with them unless a teacher tells me to make a connection, which they normally don't do in High School. "We're preparing you for college because this is how it's done there." What about the audience? Do they not matter? What about how we feel about it? We might have an idea of what the author was trying to say but unless the teacher sees it that way, we're wrong. The interactions in The Dead remind me of the dead themselves. It was a lot of talking... A lot of story telling. Parties, dancing... Talking, talking, talking... But what I can take away from it is exactly what the author meant. There is death in these every day conversations despite the life happening around Gabriel. I still cannot confidently say I have taken anything from The Dead but I understand what we are supposed to take from it.

Seeking Passage

What makes a good book, according to Jasenda League, is a book that has symbolism. It doesn't matter what you write about or what sort of conflict happens, as long as there is symbolism, a story can be made well.

But sometimes, symbolism isn't always easily found. Whether symbolism is part of a "hidden meaning," symbolism is necessary. For example, communion is an important symbol for he book The Awakening. Instead of saying Edna Pontellier was having issues with her husband she said instead that her husband would leave before he would finish his food. To me, that constitutes symbolism but it isn't invisible. It's only hidden if there is no thought put into the passages.

Seeing the text is not the same as reading into a text. Books shouldn't have to be pulled apart to find meaning. Meaning is here but it requires a little more thought. 

Hidden meanings aren't bad. But perhaps calling them "hidden meanings" is just not suitable. Essentially, it's he same as asking "For what purpose did the author write this book?"

Invasive Thoughts Are Welcome

In high school, my best friend was convinced she had an issue with her mind because she had these reoccurring thoughts that she had no control over. She would have scary thoughts or ideas. Sometimes they were just different in nature but her issues with her thoughts were became so out-of-control that she diagnosed her with a type of OCD and acquired medication to stop the crowding thoughts.

Since I had known my best friend for a while, I felt like there was something wrong with the idea that she self-medicated herself because of ideas she was having. They were never too serious but just things that would come and go and sometimes surprise her. Have you ever had a thought go through your head that surprised you? Maybe you were at a store and you thought "This would be so easy to steal" or you thought "I could just drive this car into a tree". While the most of us would never commit these acts of theft and suicide, the mere thought that we had the ability to frightened us. These thoughts are called invasive thoughts and they are part of human nature.

When Gleick talks about the nature of thoughts, he acknowledges their lack of origin. Perhaps that's why invasive thoughts are so jarring. No one knows where they come from and to think that thoughts of theft could go through are head makes it seem as though our thoughts can control our character. I don't think my best friend ever knew that invasive thoughts were natural and that they really had no precedence over who we are or who we may become.

I remember once that, while cleaning my fish bowl, I looked at my beta Fiero and just thought, "He's so tiny. It would be so easy to just squeeze him." It's a horrible thought and of course I didn't squeeze my fish to death because I loved him, but the idea originated from the thought that his body was small and my body was big. I was the one in control of Fiero's life and I didn't even realize it. I think it's through these invasive thoughts that we can easily see into human nature. It isn't that we are bad but that we recognize that we can do bad. It all depends on what we do with the ideas our thoughts create.

逆来顺受

When I took my first Chinese class, it was very strange to find me on a level I hadn't been on in 20 years. Not only was I learning very basic Chinese, but I was learning different linguistics. My teacher Chen Laoshi was an old woman and every other minute she would talk to us about "in ancient times". She would explain each character. There were some stand alones like 火 (fire), 口 (mouth), 人 (person), 心 (heart), and 山 (mountain). These characters on there own are simple enough. But when paired with another character, they create words. 水满则溢. This proverb says that "water surges only to overflow". 人 (ren or person) is until a house and suggested alone. This symbol means "only". Fire paired with heart means passion and a mountain with a house over it stands for limitation. Being use to how latin/germanic languages work made learning intermediate Chinese even harder and I noticed that even though I am older, it didn't mean my intelligence was above language. There are things that a child understands that I have never even heard of.While being a tutor for KSA, I noticed that sometimes they would have a hard time translating a specific phrase or saying and it wasn't because they didn't know enough english but because there was no words in the English language to translate it to. It baffled me to think that there are more words in the world that I don't even know about and that I may not ever understand since I wasn't attuned to that specific language first. 

Maps

Pages always looked like codes to me. When you let our eyes glaze over a text, you blur out the black blocks of words and he white spaces in between come out like different paths to the end of the page. I've always listened but never really comprehended. Reading for me was like this. My eyes listened and my brain was supposed to understand. But when I wasn't comprehending, my eyes would continue to read the words that were no longer that. I had created a black wall and instead would follow the paths to the end of the page.

If I wasn't reading, what was I doing?

When Manguel talks about how whether or not reading is independent of listening (37). I don't think it is. If you aren't listening to what your eyes are seeing, then all meaning is lost in the text.When I read a book, I don't want to dig through to find symbols or motifs. There should be multiple maps to these symbols... Sort of like how the end of a book is the end of a jouney--- a destination.

My mind is made of maps and I think everyone's mind is that way too. Shouldn't books be the same?

Steam

When I was a kid, I didn't speak English well. It wasn't my native and until I was 10, it wasn't my family vernacular. I had my own language, but without the correct one, I was alone among my English speaking peers. In the hallways of my elementary school, 3rd grade students had up projects that depicted stories with words that were beautifully written. I couldn't read. But, I didn't find them beautiful because of the meaning of the words. My speech teacher called the writing cursive and that it would take a while until I would have the opportunity to learn how. Cursive looked beautiful and with every project, I traced over the swirls and scribbles with my fingers. I thought, maybe if I can remember the way a swirl was written, I could draw it later.

I couldn't write. But I could make it look like I could.

Reading didn't mean anything to me. It's hard to enjoy a book when you don't understand it. We had no books written in our vernacular at home, so instead I drew words. Put together, they had no meaning, but to me, they looked beautiful and that's all that mattered. My parents had a large shower with glass walls all around. I would wait for the steam to fog up the glass then, with a finger dipped in shampoo, I would draw swirls on the glass. To anyone, a child was being silly. But to me, I was writing a story. The shampoo would keep the steam from covering up my words so I could look at them until I decided it was time to leave the water.

I didn't understand then, but I had a real jealousy for those who could write and read. Two things I didn't think I ever cared about, I desired more than anything. My mom looked at my scribbles and all she said was, "What is this?"

"It's cursive." But mom just laughed.

I never broke reading and writing apart. I always associated words by how they looked and what they're meaning was. It was the only possible way to do it at that time. Manguel explains a difference between "pure-sensation" and "perception". While one was an involuntary act of seeing, the other was a voluntary act of understanding. The importance of these two things was that "it identified for the first time, in the act of perceiving, a gradation of conscious action that proceeds from "seeing" to "deciphering" to "reading" (34).

Is that what I was doing? I thought I was just being ridiculous.

After learning how to read and write, I can't say reading is still the most meaningful, but now, I can understand and I can take part in something where I am not alone anymore. I hope that reading can make my writing better and with great writing, steam will never cover it.