Assignment for Wednesday 9/24

I really enjoyed talking about how texts work in conversation with each other. I thought that the different pieces of Ralph Waldo Emersons essay, Self Reliance, really were easy to connect to the pieces we have or are studying. For example, in the essay he says, "accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of you contemporaries, the connection of events." This immediatley made me think of the monkey king from the story American Born Chinese. The monkey king will not accept to just be a monkey, he wants to be human, he wants to be more. Because of his foolishness, he spends an eternity underneath a pile of rocks (500 years to be exact). I think this need to want to be something other than yourself is also explained by the quote, "imitation is suicide." If you spend all your time trying to be like other people, you loose the real sight of yourself. I think that this happens everyday, for people in middle school and highschool or really anywhere that are trying to fit in. It seems to me that you want to be more like the person that is kind of shunning you. I think its dumb, where would this world be if everyone was the same? It'd be boring and unrealistic. So why is there the need to constantley be the most popular, and in order to do that, put everyone else down on your way to the top. I personally beleive this social norm is embedded into our culture. Emerson also says, "to be great is to be misunderstood". It seems to me that the ones that are trying so hard to be someone else, are the ones that are clearly misunderstood, and they are the great ones. People need to realize that to be yourself is to be great.

American Born Chinese

I found this book to be kind of interesting and I must say so far that I enjoy reading this book ALOT more than I enjoyed reading McClouds book about comics. I like the fact that this book is more dialouge, and actually telling a story compared to McClouds (which I felt like was more comparable with a historical novel than something you would read to tell a story). The part of the book that I liked so far was the panel about the king monkey, who no longer wanted to be a monkey anymore. I thought it was interesting how the author kind of incorporated God into it (the creator of the monkey who tries to explain to him that, he was born a monkey and a monkey he shall be). I thought it was funny how the monkey tried to escape, and not only peed on the pillars which later turned out to be his creators fingers, but he also carved his name into one of them. The book shows how the monkey flew past the planets and stars, past the universe, and pass the boundries of reality itself and he still couldn't escape the reach of his creator. I also liked the fact that when the monkey disobeyed, the creator punished him and basically buried him underneath a bunch of rocks for some rediculous amount of time, 500 years or something like that. All in all I would definatley have to say that my opinion of this book so far is very good, and I look forward to finishing it.

bell hooks lecture 9/17

This lecture defiantly gave me alot to talk about. I've taken alot of woman's studies courses here at Western and have a very strong opinion about most of the issues that bell hooks talks about in her speech. Take for example, the movie Smoke, where the director made the thief be a young black kid. That is complete bs. I completely agree with what hooks said about teaching in her classes and having students not want to hear this stuff, they don't want to believe that racism is still out there so prevalent in our society still today. I for one am appalled, I like to think that we have changed as a society instead of just me as a person (not that I've changed into being unracist, but I was born in a different generation so I was taught NOT to be racist in the first place), but in reality it hasn't come that far and events like this prove that everyday. I cannot believe that a director would do that, especially a director who is also a minority (I believe he was Korean from the picture we saw). It seems to me that whites suppress all other races and instead of joining together to fight racism, all the other races just turn on one another. Movies do influence our society and our culture, and she is right when she says that the people that make the movie do have conscious manipulation of what the viewers see. And they use it to their advantage which is bull. I don't know, I could go on forever about feminism and living in a dominated white patriarchal society (I really liked her use of the word white supremacy capitalist patriarchy because she tackles ALL the issues in one word) but I'm going to stop here.

American Gothic

I chose the very first picture we discussed as a class, "American Gothic." I chose this one because I believe it showed a number of the points Bang was trying to get across. Take for example, the man's head in the picture. He has a very smooth, round head which makes us feel stable and calm. But this feeling is kind of thrown off when we look down and see that he has a very pointy, sharp pitch fork in his hand. Also take for example, the house in the background. It comes to a point at the very middle which makes us feel scared. I also noticed the background of the picture is like a pale blue sky. As Bang says, we feel safer looking at light backgrounds instead of dark, because we can see well in the daylight and poorly at night. Lastly, I noticed the relationship of the couple in the picture. The man seems to be staring directly into our eyes, and the woman will not make eye contact with the picture. From the looks of it, they seem unhappy and I would definitely say that the man is the leader while the woman is the follower in the relationship.

"What are multimodality, multisemiotics, and multiliteracies?"

I found this article very interesting and very confusing. Maybe it's just me, but I am not a fan of big words. Especially words with the prefix, multi, because it just means many, which sometimes complicates things even more. I did however find the article very thought provoking. I think its really interesting how people learn under different circumstances. Some people are visual learners, some audio, some just like to take notes 24/7, and some are a combination of both. I think its really important for teachers to incorporate each style of learning into their teaching. I also think its very important for students to attempt to understand each style of learning, and take a step back and look outside the box.

In Class Writing Assignment 9/10

What are real books?

I think that the definition of real is hard to explain. What is real to me, might not seem real to you. When talking about books, I think all books are books. Just because a book might be fiction or non fiction, or a graphic novel, does not make it any less real than the next book. I think that it is good to have the different types of books for the different types of learners. I'm not going to lie, I do think that graphic novels are more difficult to read and fully understand, but thats because I enjoy reading the actual text out of a book and I am not a visual learner. Therefore making novels like the one we are reading more difficult for me, but maybe not the next person. However, even though they are more difficult for me, I think its very important to have various kinds of novels. I think that no matter the learning type, the novel that you might not prefer, might actually be the book that enables you to think outside the box.