Books & Other Fetish Objects

I remember back when I was growing up and it was a big deal if you had a hard cover book versus a paperback one. Now it seems that hard cover books are in the same category as paperback books. In today’s society, it’s all about books you can read on a Nook or articles that can be found online. In the first paragraph of James Gleick’s article Books and Other Fetish Objects, he describes how he “got a thrill […] when the librarian brought him the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton.”  The way he described himself reacting towards this hard copy reading, is the same way people react when they achieve a new reading on their Nook. Personally, I prefer reading things that are in a hard copy form. If I have to read something that is online, I will print it out and read it that way. Otherwise, I get distracted and end up doing everything but reading the article.

The way our society is going, there is always something new being put out on the market. And if not’s something new, there’s something being tweaked and added onto the next big technological device. Pretty soon, libraries and book stores will be a thing of the past. In my hometown, there was a Border’s that was going out of business and selling their entire inventory for dirt cheap prices. I can only imagine it is because of the new reading devices that people can use now. The only way people will have books in their homes is if they have had them for years—before the digital takeover.

Wikkity Wikkity Wack

The first time I started using Wikipedia was in the 9^th grade for my science fair project. I was getting all of this information thinking that it came from a legit source. Unfortunately, when I got my paper back, my teacher had written that my information had to come from 9 different reliable sources, not the same one (back then I didn’t really know the difference). Needless to say, I was a little confused but as the years went by I understood why teachers don’t want their students to use Wikipedia. This article pretty much confirms everything that they ever thought about this website. In the first paragraph of the piece it says that “Ewan MacDonald posted a single sentence about the station at 11 PM, local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people.”  Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. Also in the article, it says that “anyone with internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one.” To test out this theory, one time last semester in my English 1102 class, we went to Wikipedia and searched for KSU. We then edited the article to make it say that the university had one of the best football programs in Georgia. Forty-eight hours later, it had been corrected. All this to say, when I research, I use Wikipedia to get me started. Then, once I have some background information, I then go to more reliable databases such as Galileo.

Pygmalion: Act 3

I really enjoyed reading Act 3! It was entertaining and made me laugh as well as do a little thinking. I think that Shaw did a really good job of drawing the reader in with all of the events that took place within a period of six months. In the act, I really enjoyed reading the scene between Mrs. Higgins and her son as well as Colonel Pickering. I thought that this was a classic example of “mothers know best”. Throughout the last few lines of the scene, both Higgins and Pickering were rambling on and on about how Eliza was making such good progress and that she is starting to become a lady with each new lesson. All the while, Mrs. Higgins is saying that they are pretty much excited for the idea of Eliza turning into a lady. In one of her lines, she says “you certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll” (65). Not only did this line make me laugh, but it also made me think a little bit. This metaphor does a great job of putting the excitement of Higgins and Pickering in perspective for me. They truly are like little kids playing with a new toy; trying ever so hard to do what they tell it to do. And that’s exactly what Eliza is doing; acting as a puppet for these two men.  However, these two upper class men can’t see that they are being blinded by their own fantasies. And when Mrs. Higgins tries to tell them this, they just brush her off and leave her alone in her study. This brings forth her outburst at the end of the scene screaming “men! Men!! Men!!” (68).

Pygmalion: Act 1

In the first act of Pygmalion, I found myself laughing at all of the sly and not so sly comments that were made by Higgins, the note taker. For example, on page 16, he asks a bystander that was giving him issues if he had realized that it was no longer raining. Without any further knowledge, I could tell that the note taker was going to be a feisty one. Just by this comment alone, I could tell that he does not let just anyone talk to him any kind of way. He seems like the kind of person that would recall all of his prior information just to prove the point that he is right. After the rain has stopped and the flower girl is still standing around, he says that he can pass this “creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days” off as a “duchess at an ambassador’s garden party” (18). When I read this part, my immediate thoughts that I had to write down in the margins of my book were that Higgins is a harsh and sarcastic man.

Another thing that I noticed in the first act alone is that the flower girl is a very sneaky one. While reading, she kind of reminded me of the homeless women on the streets of Italy. My senior year in high school, I was fortunate enough to travel to Italy for Spring Break. One of the things my teachers warned us about was to not talk to or make any type of contact with people who approached you on the street begging for money. They are con artists and will appear that they are helpless. This reminded me of the flower girl because while she was attempting to sell her flowers to random patrons, she would tell one person that she had change for a certain amount of money, but then she would change her story when she saw another person with a different amount.

I've never read Pygmalion before, but I can tell it's going to be good.

George Orwell, "Politics & the English Language"

In Orwell’s essay, he states that “a man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.” This statement alone began to set the tone of how I thought the rest of the essay was going to go. Not only did reading this essay make me feel inadequate about my writing, but it also made me think. It made me wonder if I really did these types of things he was describing in my own essays.

At the beginning of the essay, Orwell gives examples of passages “that literature various of the mental vices that we now suffer.” He then goes on to explain what is wrong with each of the passages. For example, he specifies for the fourth passage that “the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.” I feel that Orwell’s opinions and criticisms are very ruthless in this essay. However, even though he is harsh, his essay made me wonder if I do these things in my writing and even worse, scares me to continue doing so. As I continued reading through the essay, all I kept thinking about was which one of these have I done in my essays and how many times have I done them?

Although I think that Mr. Orwell was harsh in his essay, I do feel that it was necessary. Not everyone can be the nice guy and tell every person that their writing is great with the exception of a few grammatical errors. Someone has to be the big bad wolf and blow a couple of dreams away in order to get the good writers back to reality.

Wuthering Heights: Feminist Criticism

In today’s reading I learned a lot about what people, more specifically, what females think about how they are viewed as writers in today’s society. For example, French feminists believe “that the structure of language is phallocentric: it privileges the phallus and, more generally, masculinity by associating them with things and values more appreciated by the (masculine-dominated) culture (452).” In other words, I think that this means the French feel like they are competing to gain the respect of all of their readers in a world that is basically geared toward the male’s likes and dislikes.

When I thought about this particular passage, it kind of reminded me of today’s society. In some cultures, women are still expected to stay at home and cook, clean, and if needed, take care of the kids. I believe that today’s world is still mainly a “masculine-dominated culture.” Generally, people aren’t looking for females to be bold enough to come outside of their comfort zone and write a book. Of course, you do have exceptions like Oprah and other powerful women like herself; but for the most part people are still in the mentality that women shouldn’t stand up for themselves, shouldn’t be able to have much of an education because all they are going to be doing is staying at home keeping everything in order. And to be honest, I loathe this mentality. If someone ever comes up to me and tells me that all I’m going to be is a housewife, I can go from happy go-lucky Shanelle, to angry-serious Shanelle in 2.5 seconds. I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that in some cultures, women are still expected to do that. But, I am not here to judge at all; that’s not my job. This is just simply my opinion.

Wuthering Heights: Cultural Criticism

I thought today’s reading was very interesting. One thing that caught my attention was the first few paragraphs. They described how when people typically think of the word “culture” they think of “high culture (411).” It then goes on to explain that “cultural critics want to make the term refer to popular, folk, urban, and mass (mass-produced, -disseminated, -mediated, and –consumed) culture, as well as to that culture we associate with the so-called classics (411).”

The next paragraph states that “Raymond Williams […] suggested that ‘art and culture are ordinary’; he did so not to ‘pull art down’ but rather to point out that there is ‘creativity in all our living… We create our human worlds as we have thought of art being created’ (Revolution 37).” This part basically means to me that culture depends on how you look at things; at how you perceive things in life. Someone who grew up in the slums could have a completely different perception on a certain book than someone who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth. These two completely different people, however, must come together to exchange what they think about that book and figure out what the author was really trying to say, and not put their own spin onto things. This is what cultural critics have to do. “They seek to understand the social contexts in which a given text was written, and under what condition it was—and is—produced, disseminated, read, and used (412).” Yes, cultural critics like reading and writing and learning about topics they’re interested in, but at the same time, they force themselves to critique other people’s ideas and works that aren’t interested in the same things that they are. Think about it. Wouldn’t you get bored looking at the same type of stuff all day, every day? I know I would.