A Single Faithfulness

Our mind runs on contradiction:

I will agree to disagree

Perhaps not

Pause not

But as explained in line 399,” something can be true and untrue at the same time.” This antithetical statement explains how it’s all a matter of ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Take it as hand eye coordination for example. My dad lacks this sixth sense, therefore, when it comes to driving and changing the song on the radio, you can hear my mother’s scream all the way from the other side of the road. Reading and writing forces you to do the exact same thing. While close reading The Tempest, I have to focus on Prospero’s tone when it comes to his brother, while at the same decoding the island. It’s almost as if you had a multiple choice for interpreting.

a)      There’s something in charge and I wanna get straight with it.

b)      There’s something in charge and it means me no good and I wanna get the fuck out of here.

c)      There’s nothing and everything going on.

I don’t know about you, but when reading for example an essay, I choose option C . When it doubt think about the “essayist’s gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map, but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found.” As a reader be open minded! When it doubt, we are alive! We tend to create our own little reality that makes us see what we want  to see and experience what we want to feel. This is why a real story isn’t exactly the official story, but rather my version of the official story.

The Line of Beauty

Finally Shields touched on my favorite topic of all times: reality. Not only is this one of the most controversial subject amongst social media, but it also plays with the role of the word “reality” TV because honestly just how real is real? I guess you can start by saying that shows such as American Idol are real enough for a contestant to commit suicide in front of the judge’s house, and personal enough to reveal the horrific scenes of plastic surgery ending up in the hands of psychologists. But it gets worse. We know something is up with America when more votes are cast on reality TV than the ones cast for the nations president Barack Obama. As Kate Salter, author of The Guardian might say, “ Something about communication, and the fact that he is a stranger, makes them very open.” Individuals such as those willing to cast in these TV shows just want to open out to everyone. Nothing to hide (cameras make sure of this). An interview of one of the girls in The Bachelor is nothing more than a confession, a memoir of feelings and secrets she doesn’t mind communicating to the millions of viewers.

On the other hand, drifting away from television and entering writing, I must agree with the guy who said short-stories are the ones we all love because they manage to “cut to the chase”. Personally as a writer I get stressed out and sweating when I am assigned to write about a topic I want to say so much about, yet find myself limited in space. I will probably stop whining right now because I can’t imagine how Kimball must be feeling about writing biographies on POSTCARDS! Talk about cutting to the chase! But we all hate that feeling while reading a long story about depression and  then looking back and asking yourself what the hell was I looking for again? Kimball manages to do what few writers achieve, “ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book- what everyone else does not say in a whole book.”

Erasing the Line

 David Shields continues to blur the line that separates fiction and non-fiction, and quizzes the reader into questioning himself when it comes to reality. In chapter g 208, called specifically to “blur” ones interpretation, I stumbled across one of the most interesting points that makes complete sense.  “He”, or in this case whoever he plagiarized from (LOL), explains that once we classify a novel, memoir, or even a Hollywood movie it becomes like “ coloring inside the lines.” I could not agree more with X person because it turns into a tendency to expect a specific structure once you know the category it falls in. If I go in to watch a movie based on a Nicholas Spark novel it better be making my eyes tear the first 30 minutes of the movie, and if it doesn’t then it just becomes a huge disappointment. On the other hand, if I had no idea the plot of the film, the audience it targets, nor the director, then it will probably be journey from the beginning to the credits.

Skipping onto chapter h, which focuses on the “Now”, a short yet reflective phrase is stated in 242. “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any” (82).  We experience paintings, novels, and movies that come focus their works on real people, or as we’ve all been attracted to everything that says “based on a true story.” It almost as if we find it the most intriguing thing when something actually happened and it’s not made up. But why do we tend to experience these emotions if we live in real events 24/7 on our own personal lives? What makes it so mystical about a real story? Something to think about…

Chapter I captures the same idea in part 252. The speaker invites his documentary nominees up on stage because they share a common ground when it comes to non-fiction, but this only happens because we live in a fictitious world. We live in a world where our reality has already been used up to a point where it loses its reality and these producers are now forced to create a new one. It sounds confusing but that’s exactly what Shields is trying to do. Blur.

Audio Commentary

Listening to my audio commentary I realized that even though I tried to fix my thesis it was still in passive voice, therefore, making it longer than it should be. Another thing you pointed out was the fact that I was being too general in certain phrases such as “typical up-bringing of girls.” The ‘typical’ in the sentence may be controversial in the sense that I can’t assume all girls are raised the same way in order to prove my point. Also, in my word choice I decided to use the word ”dominated”, which I understand is a word that contradicts my thesis and what the series is trying to show. You suggested that I use “oppressive world” and this way women are seen not in a weakening stance, but rather a reality that is kept silent.

My conclusion was in fact rushed in the way that was I was saying was truly important and I just left it unfinished. I could have gone more from the specific to the general in order to talk about the true implications of lexicon in the feminine world.

Away with the Old, Bring in the New

Both Reality Hunger and Futuristic Manifesto are based on independent literary and artistic views, and express an urgent need for the development of literature genres and human perspective. The Futuristic Manifesto , as stated with its name, is a time traveling journey that starts from the epoch of mythology  and furthers on into modernization. Marinetti finally leaves the ages of god and goddesses to the time where man is born, and his tone can only reveal one thing, and that is the simple fact that he was tired of a setback in society and yearned something more realistic, “Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholds of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives.” He travels to the time of the guillotine and the “cruel Queen” of absolute power, all the way to the era of industrialization with the dirty ditch and factories, “Oh maternal ditch, half full of muddy water…a factory gutter!”  

The originality of this manifesto is that it creates a motive behind their travels and ends up in the holy bible. Marinetti was now wise, he had all the experience in the world and therefore, he was ready to create a testament to speed up change in the world. On the other hand, Reality Hunger wants to change rather than reject a past that has managed to break “larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ in to the world.” He relies on an artistic movement that looks to blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, almost as if Inception was Shield’s final testament. 

Britain takes the Challenge

After establishing the true influence of the English language on a global level, let’s focus on how the British Empire was able to establish its tongue in India. During this time period, Britain’s English represented an empire capable enough to establish itself into nothing less than a country with over a thousand million people: India. And this time, not only was population a problem, but English was now competing with 200 other tongues spoken by the people as well. What dazzles me is the way this foreign potency was “accepted” even though it was basically obligated. Their manipulation of power led a humongous country such as India to be linguistically influenced to the point where rebellions are driven by posters in English and advertisement ads are also subtitled in this very same language. With this phenomenon the English language was enriched immeasurably no matter if it was seen with a sense of pride, shame, or corruption of one’s culture. English had made its way and it was bound to stay.

This demonstrates the influence an empire poses over a “conquered” country. One that was indirectly forced to speak an idiom that went against its beliefs and religion, but it became crucial to the development of their economy and industry. The question becomes, why are descriptivist’s so concerned about the standardization of a language where change is inevitable? Listen to a native from India speak English and notice their extreme accent and burrowed words from their native tongues. I believe it is almost natural for this to happen and I do not consider it a corruption of English, but rather an adaptation.

The Adventure of English. Dir. Nigel Wattis. Perf. Amanda Root and David Gwillim. LWT, 2003. Youtube. 19 Sept. 2011. Web. 30 Jan. 2013.

Destruction or Immortality?

It all began in the late 17^th century with the Age of Reason, when our language found itself caught in massive political turmoil inside the walls of Britain. Not only had the king fled to Oxford College, but civil war was crumbling the walls of an empire. One strong enough to impose a language that merged cultures, created neologisms, burrowed lexicography from Latin, and at the same time standardized its usage with dictionaries.

John Locke wrote an essay titled “Human Understanding”, in which he introduces the idea that with a better use of language the end of disputes would be reachable. In other words, he believed that if they all agreed upon the definition of words it would only mean one thing: peace. I won’t dare to say I disagree with his rational idealism because after all isn’t racial discrimination, one issue most countries hope to eliminate, based mainly on the usage of insulting words? We give it our own definition. Rap songs written and sung by African American’s are bombarded with the word “nigga”, usually meaningless in between themselves, but when used by others to describe them it is extremely racist and insulting. BANNED. I will agree that language is a “master of life”, as expressed by Locke, and at the same time should not be a “vicious abundance of phrases” (John Locke, The Adventure of English).

While Newton was changing the meaning of words according to his studies, Jonathan Swift expressed concern about the rapid change of our language. He questioned a writer’s ability to write with creativity and enthusiasm while knowing that in a couple of centuries the future generations to follow won’t be able to understand it. They were starting to clip vowels and abbreviate words such as “pos” for positive and “mob” for Latin vulgus. Instead he found “purity” when it came to Greek and Latin. His theory stated that these two languages had survived because they hadn’t changed. But is this true in 2013? Is Latin popular amongst my generation? I will have to agree to disagree with Mr. Swift.  English on the other hand, has been changing faster than we can control it, and as far as I know it is the number one language in the whole world. Sure enough it is a newborn compared to others, but will its constant malleable usage destroy it or make it immortal?

The Adventure of English. Dir. Nigel Wattis. Perf. Amanda Root and David Gwillim. LWT, 2003. Youtube. 19 Sept. 2011. Web. 28 Jan. 2013.