Beth Harrington
features
Child Birthing and the Parental Experience
As someone whose reaction to the idea of having a child is a tepid "maybe I could adopt or become a foster parent -- that way if they turn out bad I can blame it on the biological parents," I approach literature on childbirth and maternity with a blend of skepticism and curiosity. I am eager to find my choice not to reproduce vindicated and yet wonder what it might mean to be converted. Truth be told, consciously choosing not to have a child can leave one feeling excluded, like an outlaw even in contemporary society. How do you get your boyfriend to propose if you can’t use your biological clock as an excuse? What to say to those nagging relatives? Such was the mindset that informed me as I began reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth. According to editor Jessica Powers, it is the first anthology of its type, which is rather surprising given the prevalence of birth and parenting literature. What transpires is a journey that aims to invite the reader into one of the most crucial experiences of human life, yet at its conclusion leaves the disbelieving reader with more questions and reservations than answers about the passage to parenthood.
In terms of its structure, the book contains twenty-nine stories, plus a brief introduction and conclusion, at a mere two hundred twenty-eight pages long. Thus, these personal accounts average less than eight pages per story. Length does not necessarily correlate with quality and some of the shortest pieces in this collection are striking, while some of the longer pieces seem unfocused. They simply tell the story of a pregnancy and birth and lack a specific perspective or argument needed to distinguish themselves. Reading this collection is oddly similar to the experience of working as staff on a maternity ward. The reader is taken along for birth after birth yet the stories usually end when the infant is taken home from the hospital.
In relation to content, first and foremost, it becomes clear that the contributors to Labor Pains and Birth Stories are a fairly homogeneous group. They are middleclass and in stable relationships; for the most part, their pregnancies appear to be expected (according to the American Pregnancy Association nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned*). Granted, there is one story written by a single mother who is expecting her second child while trying to disentangle herself from an abusive relationship. Another is about a mother living in the Upper East Side struggling to support her daughter whose biracial father is reluctant to contribute to the child’s upbringing while he attempts to pursue an art career. However, descriptions of shelling out twenty thousand for medical treatments for a birth mother in the event of a possible adoption and a couple who spend the days leading up to their child’s birth strolling the beach and watching movies evidence that these authors live in relative economic comfort and privilege.
The contributors are even more drawn together by their preference for alternative, New Age birthing methods. This in itself seems indicative of their socioeconomic status. (One has to wonder how many welfare mothers have access to such diverse treatments or even the resources to gain education about them.) Deliveries are frequently presided over by midwives as opposed to obstetricians at birthing centers or even at home instead of hospitals. The mothers use guided meditation, relaxation tapes, and “hypnobirthing” to help them through labors. There is even one case in which nipple stimulation (known to release the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin) is enlisted to bring on contractions.
Mothers who do not partake of alternative medicine during labor seem to feel compelled to justify their need for modern-day medical care. In her essay, "Don’t Even Bother: The Case Against Childbirth Preparation," Kelly Cunningham-Cousineau responds with nothing but insults to women who claim that childbirth was easy for them: “You are so full of shit. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and my kid is not going to play with your kids, you evil, Stepford-wife pods!” She qualifies her difficult labor and reliance on an epidural by informing the reader of her typically high levels of endurance: “I skied in minus-fifteen-degree weather until my nose was frostbitten. I drank a frat boy under the table in a shot contest. I am total chick macho.” She later informs us that “some of the women I know who have had the easiest labors are the biggest wusses with anything else.” Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service? The long and short of it all is that I am dubious that Labor Pains and Birth Stories depicts the average birth experience of the ordinary woman -- at least in an industrialized nation. What is more, if you are a mother who wants to have an epidural in the event that you go into labor before your elective Caesarean-section is performed at a teaching hospital, this is probably not the book for you.
Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book. They are generally reserved only for extreme situations such as that of twins born to a surrogate mother twelve weeks premature and a woman with a malformed uterus. One father goes so far as to label the elective Caesarian “a distortion for the self-pampering many.” Putting aside whether major abdominal surgery can actually be qualified as a self-indulgence, his viewpoint serves as a springboard for some of the controversies that reading this book may trigger. To start with, why are so many of these women determined to give birth sans medical intervention, forsaking in particular the relief of modern-day pain medication?
Natural childbirth instructor Frederica Mathewes-Green addresses the issue in her essay "Granddaddy’s Obstetrics," coincidentally in relation to the high rate of Caesarean deliveries, saying “the female body is designed to give birth, and we all are descended from a long line of birthgiving women.” Fair enough, but we are also descended from a long line of cave dwellers and that does not stop most people, mothers or not, from appreciating the comforts of a house inlaid with bricks or a stucco apartment complex. Additionally, the women who give birth in their homes or in birthing centers staffed by midwives are fully aware that should complications arise they are a mere ambulance ride away from an emergency Caesarean section or induced labor. Such is a far cry from the African mothers referenced in "The Zooming Birth of Jett" who may give birth a dozen times and hope only to live through the experience and for their babies to survive.
There is also the question of whether infants who are the product of natural childbirths actually fare better in the long-term as children and adults than babies born under more standard conditions. If the answer is yes (and even if it is, there is always the possibility that mothers who elect such methods may be more invested in becoming parents and feel more positively about motherhood in general -- causation is not correlation as the old adage states) then the issue of childbirth practices becomes akin to the debate that surrounds abortion rights. To what extent should a mother be expected to sacrifice of her own body for the good of her unborn (or being born) child? While it seems reasonable to expect that parents will make sacrifices for their children and that for women, whose bodies produce these babies, the sacrifices may be physiological, should a woman be expected to endure any amount of discomfort to ensure the most optimal experience for her infant, even if they occur at great cost to her? Can a mother who chooses to "self-indulge" during the birthing process recoup whatever losses her decision about birth incurs with the ones that she makes after the birth? Looking at it from a different view, if an infant’s first moments do majorly impact his or her life development, then what of infant who -- for all their parents’ efforts -- is born blue with the umbilical cord around its neck and must be rushed to another room for oxygen, or premature babies who must spend weeks in neonatal care separated from their mothers? Are we to assume that these children will suffer from some degree of post-traumatic distress or interpersonal difficulty that will follow them throughout their lives?
The women in the book do not ever cite definitive scientific studies showing that birthing outside of the standard hospital-setting ultimately leads to happier, more successful children in the long run. In fact, the reasons most women give for selecting a midwife over an obstetrician have to do with their expectations that the former will give them more individual attention than the latter and focus on their needs as a whole rather than simply their pregnancy. The women who opt for homebirths, in particular, do so because it feels more comfortable for them and thus they believe newborns will benefit in turn. Given the rationale that these birthing experiences are for the benefit of the mothers who request them, is it fair for society (and the contributors of this anthology) to judge these women more favorably than a woman who utilizes the various medical technologies for her own comfort?
It would be easy to conclude an investigation of such topics with a cliché about how women should not judge other women’s choices regarding motherhood or that ultimately a woman should obey her doctor’s counsel. However, I wonder if there is something else going on in all of this meticulous planning and determination to endure that has to do with what the writers of these compositions mostly gloss over. In the era of Dr. Phil and a few decades after John Bradshaw’s books about Toxic Parents, none of these expectant mothers and fathers expresses any notable doubts or misgivings about their ability to care for and nurture a child into adulthood. Occasionally, a contributor will make reference to the knowledge that the anxiety over keeping a child safe is no less immediate after they are born. “We are not out of the woods yet,” Pierre Laroche’s wife remarks in an essay titled, incidentally, "Out of the Woods," but on the whole there is very little discussion of “becoming a parent” -- as the subtitle states -- beyond caring for the needs of an infant. At no point is there any discussion of how these families will juggle raising their children with career responsibilities -- though again, this could be a class issue on the part of the authors. None of these contributors explore grievances with their own parents in juxtaposition to how they shape their confidence in and ability to be a good mother or father. The assumption seems to be that once the baby comes out, as long as it is properly bonded with in the postpartum stages, everything will be okay.
Thus, one cannot help but wonder if the determination of these parents to craft the optimal birth plan represents a test of metaphysical proportions for them. Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them. The alternative to a happy, healthy childhood for their posterity is more unbearable for parents than even the longest, most difficult labor without analgesics. Yet the skeptic in me still finds myself wondering if these parents are not focusing too much of their attention on the wrong moments. Whatever experiential gifts these parents have the capacity to give their children at birth represent only the beginning of their life stories.
After reading this book review, I found it very interesting to find a book review about child birth because it’s a topic that interests me. Even though I am only seventeen and I don’t plan to have kids until I’m about twenty seven or older, once I have my life settled down, I am scared of giving birth. All the pain and complications a mother has to go through really freak me out. I love kids and want to have at least two when I grow up, but I just wish I could skip the giving birth scene. I may sound like a coward by saying this but really it scares me. Maybe as I grow up and learn about it by reading books like this one, which gives advice and answer many questions, I can look at giving birth from another perspective, “Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth.” I often do ask myself is it easier to be a man or a women? “Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service?”
I didn’t like the fact that, “Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book.” I was born through caesarian section. It wasn’t because I had to but my mom chose to. As the book says the mother should sacrifice, “Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them.” I find this statement incorrect, for having a child through natural birth is not a sacrifice it is just complicating yourself and putting your child at risk when you don’t have to. My mom had her first child through natural birth and her arm got stuck coming out and now she can’t turn her wrist. I was born through the c-section and I came out perfectly, my mother didn’t have to go through any pain and now days she does sacrifices for me and a lot. Why put your child at risk and complicate yourself when we have the advances in technology to make everything so much easier. Choosing to suffer doesn’t show your braveness, but the ignorance of the people.
Towards the end of the book review I wasnt to pleased with the book as I started out, while reading the first paragraphs.
miércoles, 28 de octubre de 2009
Slideshow Article
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/25/travel/20091025-villa-slideshow_index.html
This feature article is based on travel. It picks a a town in Colombia, Villa de Leyva and exposes it to the public. Since it is a feature article and not and informative article it doesn’t use the inverted pyrymid, for all the information is as important. There is no highlight or important point. I find the organization in this article scattered around, there is no specific order. There is an opening statement but no ending statement, “A carriage takes tourists across the plaza of Villa de Leyva.” I think the author should end with a stronger statement, that concludes the article.
This article is very creative. I like the way the author uses the slides with pictures and some text. It really caught my attention and I found it less boring , than regular articles. Eventhough it was entertaining, I felt the author didn’t get his point across. First of all what was his purpose? He talked about Villa de Leyva and things that you can do and go on in that town, but what does he want us to do with this information? I feel like the author throws out information, without connecting it or explaining it. After reading the article I was like and so what?
The idea of the pictures and slideshow is great, but I feel he has to further develop his ideas. If he wants to talk about colonial Colombia then be more specific and give more information so the reader can infer his point.
This feature article is based on travel. It picks a a town in Colombia, Villa de Leyva and exposes it to the public. Since it is a feature article and not and informative article it doesn’t use the inverted pyrymid, for all the information is as important. There is no highlight or important point. I find the organization in this article scattered around, there is no specific order. There is an opening statement but no ending statement, “A carriage takes tourists across the plaza of Villa de Leyva.” I think the author should end with a stronger statement, that concludes the article.
This article is very creative. I like the way the author uses the slides with pictures and some text. It really caught my attention and I found it less boring , than regular articles. Eventhough it was entertaining, I felt the author didn’t get his point across. First of all what was his purpose? He talked about Villa de Leyva and things that you can do and go on in that town, but what does he want us to do with this information? I feel like the author throws out information, without connecting it or explaining it. After reading the article I was like and so what?
The idea of the pictures and slideshow is great, but I feel he has to further develop his ideas. If he wants to talk about colonial Colombia then be more specific and give more information so the reader can infer his point.
Editing Blog-Passive To Active
Reading my blog I found some examples of passive voice.
Examples:
1. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed.
Active: The author begins by talking about public Libraries and their importance, next he introduces the La Loma Library, the Library who is now suffering from the robbery.
2. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t.
Active: While watching football, one thinks that helmets and pads are enough protection, but they aren’t.
3. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims.
Active: It continues with text from another blog, that thanks all the people who support the victims.
4. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid.
Active: Committing this crime takes someone plain stupid.
Examples:
1. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed.
Active: The author begins by talking about public Libraries and their importance, next he introduces the La Loma Library, the Library who is now suffering from the robbery.
2. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t.
Active: While watching football, one thinks that helmets and pads are enough protection, but they aren’t.
3. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims.
Active: It continues with text from another blog, that thanks all the people who support the victims.
4. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid.
Active: Committing this crime takes someone plain stupid.
Passive Voice Exercises
1. - Fill the blanks with the appropriate form f the verb
Example:
Swedish __________ in Sweden
(Speak)
Swedish is spoken in Sweden
• A coat was left in this classroom day before yesterday
(Leave)
• More than 2000 certificates ___were given_____ by the school last December
(Give)
• The house we used to live in ___was bought______ by our aunt last month.
(Buy)
• America _was discovered__________ by Christopher Columbus in 1492
(Discover)
• The southern Plaza Hotel ___is owned_____ by the same family since 1950
(Own)
• Several people at my office _were fired_______ since I started working here
(Fire)
• Most of Mr. Morgan’s best books __were translated_______ into Spanish.
(Translate)
• A lot of old buildings in the city ____are torn down_____ these days, aren’t they?
(Tear down)
• Mail ______is delivered_____ tomorrow, will it?
(Deliver)
• Most letters ____are typed_____ these days.
(Type)
Example:
Swedish __________ in Sweden
(Speak)
Swedish is spoken in Sweden
• A coat was left in this classroom day before yesterday
(Leave)
• More than 2000 certificates ___were given_____ by the school last December
(Give)
• The house we used to live in ___was bought______ by our aunt last month.
(Buy)
• America _was discovered__________ by Christopher Columbus in 1492
(Discover)
• The southern Plaza Hotel ___is owned_____ by the same family since 1950
(Own)
• Several people at my office _were fired_______ since I started working here
(Fire)
• Most of Mr. Morgan’s best books __were translated_______ into Spanish.
(Translate)
• A lot of old buildings in the city ____are torn down_____ these days, aren’t they?
(Tear down)
• Mail ______is delivered_____ tomorrow, will it?
(Deliver)
• Most letters ____are typed_____ these days.
(Type)
martes, 27 de octubre de 2009
No Word Other Than Evil To Explain This...
Colombia: Solidarity With Hiperbarrio After Library Robbery
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 @ 18:54 UTC
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Languages: Spanish
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Excerpt
After a robbery of the La Loma Library in Medellín, Colombia, the home of the Hiperbarrio citizen media project, an outpouring of support and solidarity was sent from around the world.
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This post is also available in:
Français: Colombie: solidarité avec Hiperbarrio après le cambriolage de la bibliothèque
Español: Solidaridad con Hiperbarrio tras el hurto en la biblioteca
Historically, libraries have been characterized as spaces for the free access to knowledge in the fields of literature, art, and culture, as well as becoming gathering places for the community. In this spirit, two years ago the Public Pilot Library of Medellín, Colombia at the La Loma site welcomed the participants of Hiperbarrio [es], one of the initial Rising Voices projects, where citizen journalism workshops have been taking place.
Photo of La Loma Library by Convergentes and used with permission. Click on photo to see a larger version of photo.
It is noteworthy that this library was created more than 50 years ago, as an initiative of the residents of La Loma, and throughout its service to the community it has offered classes in literature, painting, and music. The importance of its social role was described by Rezwan at the Rising Voices blog, who notes that that librarian's responsibility goes beyond the simple lending of books.
It is with those reasons that there were united voices of indignation surrounding the events that took place on October 13, which is described by @blueandtanit:
Ladrones robaron el equipo administrativo con información de La Loma, caja menor y El nica de Hiperbarrio en un asalto a la bpp de La Loma.
Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.
The director of Hiperbarrio, Álvaro Ramírez described his reaction upon hearing the news. He writes about the consequences of the robbery in his blog Ojo al Texto [es]:
Estoy un poco aturdido. Me concentro y trato de visualizar la modesta y hermosa Biblioteca de La Loma, sus estantes, las mesas y las sillas donde niños y grandes se sientan a diario a leer, a consultar libros, y a conversar.
Alcanzo a imaginar los computadores apagados y en la noche. Un par de intrusos llegan y logran penetrar por el techo. Entran con linternas y comienzan a sacar cosas
(…)
A la mañana siguiente llegan Gabriel Jaime y los otros empleados y encuentran el desastre. Un robo consumado. Un asalto a la comunidad de La Loma y un golpe duro para la Biblioteca Pública Piloto que ha venido dotando, con gran voluntad y paciencia a la filial más antigua de su extendida red de bibliotecas públicas: es decir gratuitas y abiertas para que todos podamos acceder a sus servicios.
(…)
Pienso en el daño que eso representa. En las personas que se van a perjudicar por no poder acceder gratis a los computadores.
I am a bit stunned. I concentrate and try to visualize the modest and beautiful La Loma Library, its shelves, the tables and chairs where children and adults sit to read on a daily basis, to read books, and to talk.
I am able to imagine the computers turned off at night. A couple of intruders arrive and are able to enter through the roof. They enter with flashlights and start to take things.
(…)
The next morning, (the library's coordinator) Gabriel Jaime and other employees arrive and find the disaster. A completed robbery. An assault on the community of La Loma and a hard blow for the Public Pilot Library, which has been providing, with a strong will and patience to the oldest branch in the extended network of public libraries: free and open services so that everyone can access its services.
(…)
I think about the damage that this represents. In the people that will be hurt and will not be able to have free access to computers.
Photo of La Loma library by blueandtanit and used under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to see a larger version of the photo.
News of the robbery soon spread throughout different online networks, and the community also received notes from those who expressed their solidarity during the incident, showing that there is a strong network across the internet. For example, from Chile, Enzo Abbagliati sent a message of support on his blog Cadaunadas [es] after reading the post written by Ramírez:
Cadaunadas varias veces ha sido espacio para la alegría que desde una barriada de Medellín hemos recibido cotidianamente quienes creemos en las bibliotecas públicas como espacio de equidad y construcción de sociedades más democráticas. Reproduzco ahora una triste nota publicada por Álvaro Ramírez en ConVerGentes, quien desde el aturdimiento inicial nos avisa que han robado en la Biblioteca de La Loma. En Chile, en nuestras bibliotecas públicas, a veces sufrimos la misma suerte, la misma frustrante suerte.
¡Animo, amigos de La Loma! Sé que la comunidad estará con ustedes.
On many occasions, (the blog) Cadaunadas has been a space for daily joy received from a neighborhood in Medellín for those of us who believe in public libraries as a place for equality and the building of more democratic societies. I am now republishing the sad news written by Álvaro Ramírez from ConVerGentes, who tells us of the stunning news about the robbery of the La Loma Library. In Chile, our public libraries sometimes suffers the same luck, the same frustrating luck.
Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.
Locally, the Colombian digital magazine Equinoxio [es] became one of the first sites to publish news about the acts of vandalism and wrote about the efforts to investigate the crime:
El director de la biblioteca se reunió con las autoridades y con efectivos de la Policía Nacional a fin de coordinar esfuerzos para recuperar los bienes que se llevaron los asaltantes y capturar a los responsables.
The library's director met with authorities and officers from the National Police to coordinate efforts to recuperate the items taken by the burglars and to capture those responsible.
Fortunately, the Golden Nicca prize was recovered, as it was found nearby, but the other objects remain missing. A member of Hiperbarrio, Catalina Urquijo of the blog $ujetate (Unknown II) [es] thanked those who sent messages through the different social networking sites:
Ofrecemos nuestros más sinceros agradecimientos a todos aquellos que nos acompañaron por diversos sitios de la red dándonos su apoyo tanto cuando creímos que nos habían robado el nica como ahora.
We would like to offer our most sincere gratitude to all those who have accompanied us through various online sites giving us their support, especially when we thought that they had stolen the Nicca (prize).
Finally, Libary Coordinator Gabriel Vanegas of the blog Esas Voces que Nos Llegan [es] summarizes the shock in which, as a public employee, he had to find out about the incident:
Duele ver la ignorancia de quienes perpetúan este delito contra el patrimonio de la comunidad, pero preocupa pensar en quienes dieron la orden de hacerlo y quienes sabiendo y viendo que se hacia no procedieron de manera correcta y oportuna ante las autoridades.
It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.
I found this Feature Article very interesting and creative. It uses many references and quoted information from many sources. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed. Instead of retelling what happened he used an outside source to quote what had happened, “Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.” Then he uses Alvaro Ramirez to talk about the consequences of this robbery and how the users where going to suffer. The author continues even exposing information written from Chile, “Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.” This is from a blog who wants to cheer the La Loma community. Then he cites the magazine Equinox, which wrote on article about this event in their magazine. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims. Finally the author ends his article with the opinion of a public employee who was really hurt by this, “It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.”
I couldn’t agree more with this employer. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid. Why would they rob a place where people are educated and helped out, so they can succeed. My only thought I have is evilness because those thief’s if they wanted could have gotten so much resources to improve their education and succeed. Those who knew about it and did nothing, will be paying for the consequences because now there are not enough supplies for them to take advantage of. They were robbed the tools to succeed and the one who knew didn’t fight for them, they just gave to the thief’s in their hands. How can someone be so wicked to do such act?
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 @ 18:54 UTC
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Excerpt
After a robbery of the La Loma Library in Medellín, Colombia, the home of the Hiperbarrio citizen media project, an outpouring of support and solidarity was sent from around the world.
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This post is also available in:
Français: Colombie: solidarité avec Hiperbarrio après le cambriolage de la bibliothèque
Español: Solidaridad con Hiperbarrio tras el hurto en la biblioteca
Historically, libraries have been characterized as spaces for the free access to knowledge in the fields of literature, art, and culture, as well as becoming gathering places for the community. In this spirit, two years ago the Public Pilot Library of Medellín, Colombia at the La Loma site welcomed the participants of Hiperbarrio [es], one of the initial Rising Voices projects, where citizen journalism workshops have been taking place.
Photo of La Loma Library by Convergentes and used with permission. Click on photo to see a larger version of photo.
It is noteworthy that this library was created more than 50 years ago, as an initiative of the residents of La Loma, and throughout its service to the community it has offered classes in literature, painting, and music. The importance of its social role was described by Rezwan at the Rising Voices blog, who notes that that librarian's responsibility goes beyond the simple lending of books.
It is with those reasons that there were united voices of indignation surrounding the events that took place on October 13, which is described by @blueandtanit:
Ladrones robaron el equipo administrativo con información de La Loma, caja menor y El nica de Hiperbarrio en un asalto a la bpp de La Loma.
Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.
The director of Hiperbarrio, Álvaro Ramírez described his reaction upon hearing the news. He writes about the consequences of the robbery in his blog Ojo al Texto [es]:
Estoy un poco aturdido. Me concentro y trato de visualizar la modesta y hermosa Biblioteca de La Loma, sus estantes, las mesas y las sillas donde niños y grandes se sientan a diario a leer, a consultar libros, y a conversar.
Alcanzo a imaginar los computadores apagados y en la noche. Un par de intrusos llegan y logran penetrar por el techo. Entran con linternas y comienzan a sacar cosas
(…)
A la mañana siguiente llegan Gabriel Jaime y los otros empleados y encuentran el desastre. Un robo consumado. Un asalto a la comunidad de La Loma y un golpe duro para la Biblioteca Pública Piloto que ha venido dotando, con gran voluntad y paciencia a la filial más antigua de su extendida red de bibliotecas públicas: es decir gratuitas y abiertas para que todos podamos acceder a sus servicios.
(…)
Pienso en el daño que eso representa. En las personas que se van a perjudicar por no poder acceder gratis a los computadores.
I am a bit stunned. I concentrate and try to visualize the modest and beautiful La Loma Library, its shelves, the tables and chairs where children and adults sit to read on a daily basis, to read books, and to talk.
I am able to imagine the computers turned off at night. A couple of intruders arrive and are able to enter through the roof. They enter with flashlights and start to take things.
(…)
The next morning, (the library's coordinator) Gabriel Jaime and other employees arrive and find the disaster. A completed robbery. An assault on the community of La Loma and a hard blow for the Public Pilot Library, which has been providing, with a strong will and patience to the oldest branch in the extended network of public libraries: free and open services so that everyone can access its services.
(…)
I think about the damage that this represents. In the people that will be hurt and will not be able to have free access to computers.
Photo of La Loma library by blueandtanit and used under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to see a larger version of the photo.
News of the robbery soon spread throughout different online networks, and the community also received notes from those who expressed their solidarity during the incident, showing that there is a strong network across the internet. For example, from Chile, Enzo Abbagliati sent a message of support on his blog Cadaunadas [es] after reading the post written by Ramírez:
Cadaunadas varias veces ha sido espacio para la alegría que desde una barriada de Medellín hemos recibido cotidianamente quienes creemos en las bibliotecas públicas como espacio de equidad y construcción de sociedades más democráticas. Reproduzco ahora una triste nota publicada por Álvaro Ramírez en ConVerGentes, quien desde el aturdimiento inicial nos avisa que han robado en la Biblioteca de La Loma. En Chile, en nuestras bibliotecas públicas, a veces sufrimos la misma suerte, la misma frustrante suerte.
¡Animo, amigos de La Loma! Sé que la comunidad estará con ustedes.
On many occasions, (the blog) Cadaunadas has been a space for daily joy received from a neighborhood in Medellín for those of us who believe in public libraries as a place for equality and the building of more democratic societies. I am now republishing the sad news written by Álvaro Ramírez from ConVerGentes, who tells us of the stunning news about the robbery of the La Loma Library. In Chile, our public libraries sometimes suffers the same luck, the same frustrating luck.
Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.
Locally, the Colombian digital magazine Equinoxio [es] became one of the first sites to publish news about the acts of vandalism and wrote about the efforts to investigate the crime:
El director de la biblioteca se reunió con las autoridades y con efectivos de la Policía Nacional a fin de coordinar esfuerzos para recuperar los bienes que se llevaron los asaltantes y capturar a los responsables.
The library's director met with authorities and officers from the National Police to coordinate efforts to recuperate the items taken by the burglars and to capture those responsible.
Fortunately, the Golden Nicca prize was recovered, as it was found nearby, but the other objects remain missing. A member of Hiperbarrio, Catalina Urquijo of the blog $ujetate (Unknown II) [es] thanked those who sent messages through the different social networking sites:
Ofrecemos nuestros más sinceros agradecimientos a todos aquellos que nos acompañaron por diversos sitios de la red dándonos su apoyo tanto cuando creímos que nos habían robado el nica como ahora.
We would like to offer our most sincere gratitude to all those who have accompanied us through various online sites giving us their support, especially when we thought that they had stolen the Nicca (prize).
Finally, Libary Coordinator Gabriel Vanegas of the blog Esas Voces que Nos Llegan [es] summarizes the shock in which, as a public employee, he had to find out about the incident:
Duele ver la ignorancia de quienes perpetúan este delito contra el patrimonio de la comunidad, pero preocupa pensar en quienes dieron la orden de hacerlo y quienes sabiendo y viendo que se hacia no procedieron de manera correcta y oportuna ante las autoridades.
It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.
I found this Feature Article very interesting and creative. It uses many references and quoted information from many sources. The author began off by talking about public Libraries and their importance, then he introduced the La Loma Library which is the one who was robbed. Instead of retelling what happened he used an outside source to quote what had happened, “Thieves stole the administrative equipment with information of the La Loma library, petty cash, and the Nica (prize) during a robbery of the bpp (public library) of La Loma.” Then he uses Alvaro Ramirez to talk about the consequences of this robbery and how the users where going to suffer. The author continues even exposing information written from Chile, “Cheer up, friends from La Loma! Know that the community stands with you.” This is from a blog who wants to cheer the La Loma community. Then he cites the magazine Equinox, which wrote on article about this event in their magazine. It continues with text from another blog thanking all the people who supported the victims. Finally the author ends his article with the opinion of a public employee who was really hurt by this, “It hurts to see the ignorance from those that committed this crime against the community's patrimony, and it also is worrisome to think about those who gave the order to do it and those who knew about it, who did not do the right thing and go to the authorities.”
I couldn’t agree more with this employer. Those who committed the crime are plain stupid. Why would they rob a place where people are educated and helped out, so they can succeed. My only thought I have is evilness because those thief’s if they wanted could have gotten so much resources to improve their education and succeed. Those who knew about it and did nothing, will be paying for the consequences because now there are not enough supplies for them to take advantage of. They were robbed the tools to succeed and the one who knew didn’t fight for them, they just gave to the thief’s in their hands. How can someone be so wicked to do such act?
"Every play: collision, collision, collision"
One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, “I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No, no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’ ”
They picked him up. “We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it,” Turley went on. “I started puking everywhere. I couldn’t stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.”
Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.
“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail this“Then, there was the time when I got knocked unconscious. That was in St. Louis, in 2003. My wife said that I was out a minute or two on the field. But I was gone for about four hours after that. It was the last play of the third quarter. We were playing the Packers. I got hit in the back of the head. I saw it on film a little while afterward. I was running downfield, made a block on a guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was chasing the play, a little guy, a defensive back, and he jumped over me as I was coming up, and he kneed me right in the back of the head. Boom!
“They sat me down on the bench. I remember Marshall Faulk coming up and joking with me, because he knew that I was messed up. That’s what happens in the N.F.L: ‘Oooh. You got effed up. Oooh.’ The trainer came up to me and said, ‘Kyle, let’s take you to the locker room.’ I remember looking up at a clock, and there was only a minute and a half left in the game—and I had no idea that much time had elapsed. I showered and took all my gear off. I was sitting at my locker. I don’t remember anything. When I came back, after being hospitalized, the guys were joking with me because Georgia Frontiere”—then the team’s owner—“came in the locker room, and they said I was butt-ass naked and I gave her a big hug. They were dying laughing, and I was, like, ‘Are you serious? I did that?’
“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you’re coming off an injury you’re frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad that this happened to me that I’m overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”
After reading this article, I was surprised how much physical damage football can cause. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t. In this article it gives examples of football players who done crazy things like kill themselves, because they have gone crazy after hitting themselves so many times in the head blocking their opponent. Here are some examples, “Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head.” How hard have they been hit in the head? Apparently way to hard!
What would make them do such insane act? They have literary lost their mind, “But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.” What I ask myself is how can you have so much fun hurting yourself? Then knowing you are hurt want to continue playing? Toward the end of this article it talks about how greedy the coaches are. They just want to win no matter what. It seems like they have no heart. After having a serious head injury this is what happened due to the coaches desire to win, putting winning as a priority before health, “I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”
They picked him up. “We went out in the parking lot, and I just lost it,” Turley went on. “I started puking everywhere. I couldn’t stop. I got in the car, still puking. My wife, she was really scared, because I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. We get to the emergency room. I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.”
Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.
“Lately, I’ve tried to break it down,” Turley said. “I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail this“Then, there was the time when I got knocked unconscious. That was in St. Louis, in 2003. My wife said that I was out a minute or two on the field. But I was gone for about four hours after that. It was the last play of the third quarter. We were playing the Packers. I got hit in the back of the head. I saw it on film a little while afterward. I was running downfield, made a block on a guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was chasing the play, a little guy, a defensive back, and he jumped over me as I was coming up, and he kneed me right in the back of the head. Boom!
“They sat me down on the bench. I remember Marshall Faulk coming up and joking with me, because he knew that I was messed up. That’s what happens in the N.F.L: ‘Oooh. You got effed up. Oooh.’ The trainer came up to me and said, ‘Kyle, let’s take you to the locker room.’ I remember looking up at a clock, and there was only a minute and a half left in the game—and I had no idea that much time had elapsed. I showered and took all my gear off. I was sitting at my locker. I don’t remember anything. When I came back, after being hospitalized, the guys were joking with me because Georgia Frontiere”—then the team’s owner—“came in the locker room, and they said I was butt-ass naked and I gave her a big hug. They were dying laughing, and I was, like, ‘Are you serious? I did that?’
“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting. But when you’re coming off an injury you’re frustrated. I wanted to play the next game. I was just so mad that this happened to me that I’m overdoing it. I was just going after guys in practice. I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”
After reading this article, I was surprised how much physical damage football can cause. As you watch it, you think the helmets and pads are enough protection but they aren’t. In this article it gives examples of football players who done crazy things like kill themselves, because they have gone crazy after hitting themselves so many times in the head blocking their opponent. Here are some examples, “Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head.” How hard have they been hit in the head? Apparently way to hard!
What would make them do such insane act? They have literary lost their mind, “But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.” What I ask myself is how can you have so much fun hurting yourself? Then knowing you are hurt want to continue playing? Toward the end of this article it talks about how greedy the coaches are. They just want to win no matter what. It seems like they have no heart. After having a serious head injury this is what happened due to the coaches desire to win, putting winning as a priority before health, “I was really trying to use my head more, because I was so frustrated, and the coaches on the sidelines are, like, ‘Yeah. We’re going to win this game. He’s going to lead the team.’ That’s football. You’re told either that you’re hurt or that you’re injured. There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”
Dream Pattern And Cathexis
As I read in Chapter Five about typical dreams, my dream pattern is not that of a typical dream. Through typical dreams you can interpret somewhat of someone dream, but you always need the background information about this person in order to fully interpret the dream. Typical dreams as said by Freud , “A peculiar interest attaches to these typical dreams, because, no matter who dreams them, they presumably all derive from the same sources, so that they would seem to be particularly fitted to provide us with information as to the sources of dreams.” These typical dreams have general meanings coming from a common place, therefore making it easier to interpret the dream. My dream pattern is far more complex, if you didnt have my background information you wouldnt be able to interpret it correctly.
Lately, I have dreamed of events that I wish for to happen. Since I lived all my life with my mom and in 9th grade I came to live in another country with my dad, I usually tend to dream of my mom a lot. She has become a symbol in my dreams constantly coming up. I have dreamed of her dying but expressed no sorrow, as Freud says this is because, “This is the case in the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier (chapter IV). The dream does not mean that she desires the death of her little nephew; as we have learned, it merely conceals the wish to see a certain beloved person again after a long separation.” Along with this I have dreamed of getting accepted into University of Miami. In my fifteen list University choices there are many who are better than University of Miami. I have Princeton and Stanford, so why am I not dreaming of getting accepted into those? I believe it all has to do with my mom. Since my mom lives in Miami, University of Miami is the only University that if I get accepted I can once again live with her. I am in my dream fulfilling my dream of living with her, due to the fact I had so many great memories with her and I truly miss her. I look forward to someday living with her again and my best option is by getting accepted to UM.
This pattern is a great example of cathexis. Cathexis is , “the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object) Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge." Dreaming of events related to my mom, means most of my energy is put in to these dreams, which are wishes. These dreams help me fulfill the idea of being with my mom instead of repressing them, yet I hope one day they become reality.
Lately, I have dreamed of events that I wish for to happen. Since I lived all my life with my mom and in 9th grade I came to live in another country with my dad, I usually tend to dream of my mom a lot. She has become a symbol in my dreams constantly coming up. I have dreamed of her dying but expressed no sorrow, as Freud says this is because, “This is the case in the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier (chapter IV). The dream does not mean that she desires the death of her little nephew; as we have learned, it merely conceals the wish to see a certain beloved person again after a long separation.” Along with this I have dreamed of getting accepted into University of Miami. In my fifteen list University choices there are many who are better than University of Miami. I have Princeton and Stanford, so why am I not dreaming of getting accepted into those? I believe it all has to do with my mom. Since my mom lives in Miami, University of Miami is the only University that if I get accepted I can once again live with her. I am in my dream fulfilling my dream of living with her, due to the fact I had so many great memories with her and I truly miss her. I look forward to someday living with her again and my best option is by getting accepted to UM.
This pattern is a great example of cathexis. Cathexis is , “the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object) Freud thought of cathexis as a psychic analog of an electrical charge." Dreaming of events related to my mom, means most of my energy is put in to these dreams, which are wishes. These dreams help me fulfill the idea of being with my mom instead of repressing them, yet I hope one day they become reality.
Interpreting My Dream
When interpreting a dream we have to take into consideration as Freud states,
“If the day has brought us two or more experiences which are worthy to evoke a dream, the dream will blend the allusion of both into a single whole: it obeys a compulsion to make them into a single whole
The source of a dream may be:
(a) A recent and psychologically significant event which is directly represented in the dream. *
(b) Several recent and significant events, which are combined by the dream in a single whole. *(2)
(c) One or more recent and significant events, which are represented in the dream-content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferent event. *(3)
(d) A subjectively significant experience (recollection, train of thought), which is constantly represented in the dream by allusion to a recent but indifferent impression. *(4)”
Recently I had a dream that I was walking to school. As I walked to guys approached me and tried to steal my money and my iphone. I entered a panic scene, but I wasn’t going to let them rob me. So I ran as fast as I could into the street and almost got hit by a car, but in my dream my point was not to get robbed. As I ran through the puddles, because it was raining I got all soaked up, I felt my feet were damp and cold. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and then I woke up.
This dream can be interpreted as, since I always walk to school and never before have I gotten robbed, I have a big fear of getting rob. Every day as I walk to school I always look around me and walk really fast. Also it has wish fulfillment in it because, since I have never gotten robbed and I don’t ever want to, running away and getting away with not getting rob is a wish fulfilled in my dream. When I woke up I realized, I had forgotten to wear socks therefore my feet were cold and I had an uncomfortable feeling. This stimulus made me dream that I was running through rain and my feet were damp and cold. This stimulus which made me feel uncomfortable was also the reason, why I woke up.
“If the day has brought us two or more experiences which are worthy to evoke a dream, the dream will blend the allusion of both into a single whole: it obeys a compulsion to make them into a single whole
The source of a dream may be:
(a) A recent and psychologically significant event which is directly represented in the dream. *
(b) Several recent and significant events, which are combined by the dream in a single whole. *(2)
(c) One or more recent and significant events, which are represented in the dream-content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferent event. *(3)
(d) A subjectively significant experience (recollection, train of thought), which is constantly represented in the dream by allusion to a recent but indifferent impression. *(4)”
Recently I had a dream that I was walking to school. As I walked to guys approached me and tried to steal my money and my iphone. I entered a panic scene, but I wasn’t going to let them rob me. So I ran as fast as I could into the street and almost got hit by a car, but in my dream my point was not to get robbed. As I ran through the puddles, because it was raining I got all soaked up, I felt my feet were damp and cold. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and then I woke up.
This dream can be interpreted as, since I always walk to school and never before have I gotten robbed, I have a big fear of getting rob. Every day as I walk to school I always look around me and walk really fast. Also it has wish fulfillment in it because, since I have never gotten robbed and I don’t ever want to, running away and getting away with not getting rob is a wish fulfilled in my dream. When I woke up I realized, I had forgotten to wear socks therefore my feet were cold and I had an uncomfortable feeling. This stimulus made me dream that I was running through rain and my feet were damp and cold. This stimulus which made me feel uncomfortable was also the reason, why I woke up.
domingo, 25 de octubre de 2009
New Words
“The cinerary urn is appropriate also in connection with the sensation of an increasingly salty taste, which I know will compel me to wake.”
Compel: force somebody to do something
“The manner in which the dream represents the act of quenching the thirst is manifold, and is specified in accordance with some recent recollection.”
Quenching: to suppress or calm
Manifold: Many and varied; of many kinds; multiple
“The same sort of lethargy-dream was dreamed by a young colleague of mine, who appears to share my propensity for sleep.”
Lethargy: deficient in alertness or activity, abnormal drowsiness
Propensity: tendency
“On the way back they passed a signpost which pointed to the Hameau.”
Hameau: village
Compel: force somebody to do something
“The manner in which the dream represents the act of quenching the thirst is manifold, and is specified in accordance with some recent recollection.”
Quenching: to suppress or calm
Manifold: Many and varied; of many kinds; multiple
“The same sort of lethargy-dream was dreamed by a young colleague of mine, who appears to share my propensity for sleep.”
Lethargy: deficient in alertness or activity, abnormal drowsiness
Propensity: tendency
“On the way back they passed a signpost which pointed to the Hameau.”
Hameau: village
The Magic In A Baby
Baby Faces
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
It is the No. 1 train, late-morning rush. We are all wearing our subway masks, everything from studied fatigue to careful blankness. A well-dressed woman enters the car at 72nd Street and sits on the bench across from where I’m standing. Her mask is particularly guarded, utilitarian. A minute passes. I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could. There is a baby crinkling with pleasure in a stroller across the aisle.
This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves. Very few people are immune to the power, the openness of a baby’s unconstructed glance. It stares without rudeness, smiles without solicitation, and somehow it reaches the unconstructed human that remains inside most of us. We get to step outside all the workaday rules of human contact. We get to make faces in public.
The woman got off the train at 42nd Street. As she stood up, I watched her face close like the shutting of a pocketbook. She had been googling the baby — it seems like the only right word — but she had been doing so in a private, shared eye-space, just the two of them. Never mind that we were all watching. That’s another magic in a baby’s glance. It’s so exclusive, and yet so open. You feel thoroughly regarded, utterly looked at and enclosed. In a very short time, that baby would begin finding the constraints, the natural shuttering, that mean growing up. But that morning, it was that woman’s job to keep the lines of communication open.
I caught her glance while she was making baby faces. It was unintentional. It caught me smack in the head, as if I were the baby. I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another? I think about that whenever I take the subway now, inwardly, behind my 1-train mask.
I found this article ver fascinating. The author analyzes something as simple as a baby in a subway. He points out facts we don’t take the time to look at. For example he explains the contrast between a baby and an ordinary adult riding the subway. He starts of by saying, “This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves.” A baby transforms us and makes us loose sens of reality. WE do things we wouldn’t do if it wasn’t for that baby, “I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could.” Here he describes the moms actions toward the baby, just because it is a baby it is acceptable but what if it weren’t, would she be socially allowed to behave that way? A baby justifies many behaviors, which would seem ridiculous if there was no baby on the scene. We can truly be ourselves when we use a baby as an excuse. It also exposes natural behaviors many hide because of what others might think or do, “I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another?”
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
It is the No. 1 train, late-morning rush. We are all wearing our subway masks, everything from studied fatigue to careful blankness. A well-dressed woman enters the car at 72nd Street and sits on the bench across from where I’m standing. Her mask is particularly guarded, utilitarian. A minute passes. I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could. There is a baby crinkling with pleasure in a stroller across the aisle.
This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves. Very few people are immune to the power, the openness of a baby’s unconstructed glance. It stares without rudeness, smiles without solicitation, and somehow it reaches the unconstructed human that remains inside most of us. We get to step outside all the workaday rules of human contact. We get to make faces in public.
The woman got off the train at 42nd Street. As she stood up, I watched her face close like the shutting of a pocketbook. She had been googling the baby — it seems like the only right word — but she had been doing so in a private, shared eye-space, just the two of them. Never mind that we were all watching. That’s another magic in a baby’s glance. It’s so exclusive, and yet so open. You feel thoroughly regarded, utterly looked at and enclosed. In a very short time, that baby would begin finding the constraints, the natural shuttering, that mean growing up. But that morning, it was that woman’s job to keep the lines of communication open.
I caught her glance while she was making baby faces. It was unintentional. It caught me smack in the head, as if I were the baby. I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another? I think about that whenever I take the subway now, inwardly, behind my 1-train mask.
I found this article ver fascinating. The author analyzes something as simple as a baby in a subway. He points out facts we don’t take the time to look at. For example he explains the contrast between a baby and an ordinary adult riding the subway. He starts of by saying, “This is the magical thing about babies on the subway. They carry the antidote to adulthood. The careful decorum we construct for ourselves — grown-up civilian riders of the underground train — simply dissolves.” A baby transforms us and makes us loose sens of reality. WE do things we wouldn’t do if it wasn’t for that baby, “I look down, and she’s ecstatic, puffing her cheeks, smiling riotously, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them wide. She would be gurgling and cooing if she could.” Here he describes the moms actions toward the baby, just because it is a baby it is acceptable but what if it weren’t, would she be socially allowed to behave that way? A baby justifies many behaviors, which would seem ridiculous if there was no baby on the scene. We can truly be ourselves when we use a baby as an excuse. It also exposes natural behaviors many hide because of what others might think or do, “I almost made a baby face back at her. And what if I had? What if it had spread down the car, all the adults making baby faces at one another?”
The News
October 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad
By FRANK RICH
FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine.”
Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.
Or such are the received lessons of this tale.
Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.
It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.
It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.
“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.
In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.
Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.
As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.
Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”
None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.
There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.
That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)
Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day — “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.
The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ’em eat fame.
If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.
This article talks about how we believe everything we see on the news, without questioning anything. It is true many of us just believe it just because it is in CNN or Fox and so on. But have you ever stopped to think these companies have bias and not everything this say may be true. Just because they are news companies doesn’t mean they give us accurate information.
The example of the boy who the parents used to make a espactacle. This sent a hot air ballon and said their 6 year old boy was in it, “But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.” The news basically make up the story some facts may be correct. But in order to make it interesting and attention dragging they might trow some misleading information.
As the local sheriff explained, no one stopped to ask themselves how this ballon could carry a six year old boy. “They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax.” For the ballon to be floating with this kid inside is impossible for the weight of the boy would drag it down, but since the news said it many thought omg hes in there! “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources.” Due to the lack of individualism and thinking for onesslef there were thousands of dollars wasted on this scene. The sad part is someone may have not been saved who really needed all this crew, because of all the attention this scene acquired.
Therefore instead of believing the twisted reality with it touches of fiction one must evaluate the situation for one self, not let others think for you. Not everything you hear is true,“Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking.” We have a huge misconception about the news. WE give them more credebility than they deserve.
Op-Ed Columnist
In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad
By FRANK RICH
FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine.”
Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.
Or such are the received lessons of this tale.
Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.
It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.
It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.
“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.
In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.
Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.
As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.
Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”
None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.
There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.
That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)
Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day — “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.
The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ’em eat fame.
If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.
This article talks about how we believe everything we see on the news, without questioning anything. It is true many of us just believe it just because it is in CNN or Fox and so on. But have you ever stopped to think these companies have bias and not everything this say may be true. Just because they are news companies doesn’t mean they give us accurate information.
The example of the boy who the parents used to make a espactacle. This sent a hot air ballon and said their 6 year old boy was in it, “But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.” The news basically make up the story some facts may be correct. But in order to make it interesting and attention dragging they might trow some misleading information.
As the local sheriff explained, no one stopped to ask themselves how this ballon could carry a six year old boy. “They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax.” For the ballon to be floating with this kid inside is impossible for the weight of the boy would drag it down, but since the news said it many thought omg hes in there! “The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources.” Due to the lack of individualism and thinking for onesslef there were thousands of dollars wasted on this scene. The sad part is someone may have not been saved who really needed all this crew, because of all the attention this scene acquired.
Therefore instead of believing the twisted reality with it touches of fiction one must evaluate the situation for one self, not let others think for you. Not everything you hear is true,“Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking.” We have a huge misconception about the news. WE give them more credebility than they deserve.
miércoles, 21 de octubre de 2009
Giving Meaning To Your Dreams: Interpreting.
In Chapter Two Freud talks about interpreting dreams. When we try and interpret our own dreams, it is like trying to give the dream a meaning,“for to interpret a dream is to specify its meaning, to replace it by something which takes its position in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value.” We connect it to our daily life and try to give that dream an important role. Interpreting dreams depend on us, on how much farther we want to interpret the dream or not. As Freud states, “I could still spend much time upon it; I could draw further explanations from it, and discuss further problems which it seems to propound. I can even perceive the points from which further mental associations might be traced; but such considerations as are always involved in every dream of one's own prevent me from interpreting it farther.” Interpreting ones dream is like interpreting a quote, one chooses to go as far as he or she wants.
Once my mom had a dream that me and my sister were in a forest and that my sister got kidnapped. Two weeks later it was the trip to the Amazon, so my mom interpreted the dream as a warning that something bad was going to happen. She really didn’t want us to go, but she let us go and told us over and over again to be careful. Nothing bad happened to my sister, yet she did get home sick and cried the night we slept out in the forest. As Freud says, “they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.” So what was the meaning of that dream? Was my mom’s interpretation good enough? Could she have gone farther? What was that “thought-process”?
All dreams have a meaning and we are in charge of giving them one. Dreams are very important and deserve to be looked at, “If the method of dream- interpretation here indicated is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of a disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe.” Dreams are far more complex than as Freud says “a disintegrated cerebral activity. Dreaming is a “psychic” activity.
Once my mom had a dream that me and my sister were in a forest and that my sister got kidnapped. Two weeks later it was the trip to the Amazon, so my mom interpreted the dream as a warning that something bad was going to happen. She really didn’t want us to go, but she let us go and told us over and over again to be careful. Nothing bad happened to my sister, yet she did get home sick and cried the night we slept out in the forest. As Freud says, “they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.” So what was the meaning of that dream? Was my mom’s interpretation good enough? Could she have gone farther? What was that “thought-process”?
All dreams have a meaning and we are in charge of giving them one. Dreams are very important and deserve to be looked at, “If the method of dream- interpretation here indicated is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of a disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe.” Dreams are far more complex than as Freud says “a disintegrated cerebral activity. Dreaming is a “psychic” activity.
martes, 20 de octubre de 2009
A Story That Truly Touched My Heart!
October 13, 2009, 9:00 pm
The Distance Between
By Lee Kelley
Courtesy of Lee Kelley The author in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006.In retrospect, my 11 months and two weeks in Ramadi, Iraq, felt stretched to their absolute fullest length across the continuum of time. Now I recall them in thousands of digital photographs or by the folded flag in a wooden case here, in my living room, some three years later. I have made major changes both personally and professionally since getting home, and it is kind of strange now to look at that person in the photos. Hard to think about what was really going on behind my own eyes, my phony smile.
Looking back, I still I cannot explain why my experience of war did not include being physically injured, or taking another human life. I also cannot explain why my year in Iraq brought the deepest anguish and loss I had experienced so far in my 35 years. Why was it so bad? Suffice it to say that halfway through my tour, I lost my mom to breast cancer and my seven-year marriage absolutely fell apart.
I didn’t allow myself to grieve or complain at the time. I had work to do, soldiers that depended on me, and I guess I was afraid to let those flood gates loose. Instead, I inventoried all of those swirling emotions, performed an internal recon and secured them in a mental footlocker to be dealt with at a later date. For the rest of my tour, the footlocker strained to hold it all in. I made it home in the summer of 2006 and the life I came home to felt utterly different than the one I had left. I was granted full custody of my two young children, and I was also promoted to captain and given a company command. I opened up the footlocker and started to rebuild.
Courtesy of Lee Kelley On vacation in Tybee Island, Ga.Because I am unwilling to leave the kids again, I ended a promising military career and created a new path for myself. Specifically, I started my own writing company, and I’ve been going strong for two years now (more about that in a later post). I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.
But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom. I’m not sure what I would have done without the unconditional love and support of my family and friends. That, truly, has made all the difference.
Now my days are filled with the unending complexity and welcome challenge of raising two creative, energetic, and intelligent kids who know of no other way to live than to rise each day with the subconscious desire to find the boundaries of their little worlds and lean up against them. O.K. … they find the boundaries and then jump back and forth across them whenever I’m not watching!
Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter. I’ve been to Iraq, and for my little family once will just have to be enough. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you.
First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.
This op-ed really touched me. It was full of pathos. I could tell the author wrote it straight from his heart, “I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter.” I can just picture this scene and it makes me smile. The tone I would say is caring. He talks about how important his kids are for him and how he wouldn’t trade anything for them, “Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you. First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.” Throughout the article he shows all the love he has for his kids and what a great parent he is. He portrays himself as a responsible and great dad.
The way he narrates the story is very attention dragging. He uses tautology to emphasize all the hardships he had to overcome, “I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.”
I love the way he gives such a positive optimistic mood even though he starts of talking about war and death. He then goes on saying, “But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom.” He faces change as an obstacle that helped him and shaped who he is today. If I was him I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. He set his priorities balanced them out and combined it appropriately with time. This is not an easy task to do.
Final Destination
Towards the end of the book Parsell falls in love for the first time with this “boy”. His name is Paul. While reading I asked myself if Parsell became gay because of all the rape he had gone through did it really affect him?
I find it ironic how towards the end of the book he is separated from Paul because they fall in love. Why do they separate boyfriends and not gang member who sexually abuse other criminals, “You mean because we spend a lot of time together, but don’t get into trouble-that were a problem” Maybe this is where the problem comes in they don’t want to see anybody happy, for they enjoy seeing others suffering.
At the very end we can see how Parsell has been dramatically changed. He is a total different person and this experience in jail, really affected him in an optimistic way. In one of the last pages Parsell states, “I didn’t want to mess up again, like I had before.” Now he recognizes his mistake and shows he has learned from them, he doesn’t want to repeat it again. Also I was amazed when he said, “I thought about the old timers I met at Riverside, the ones who were doing life on the installment plan, and drinking paint thinner and Mountain Dew. I was not going to become one of them.” He has it clear he is much better than that, and I going to do whatever it takes to not fall into that world again.
This is a very interesting memoir at first I was bored reading it, but as I continued I realized it wasn’t the same old jail story. Parsell has a way of making it unique, by sharing every single experience he had to go through, you almost feel like you are living it. In some parts I even got goose bumps. Yet, Parsell did more than just writing this book I researched his biography and it’s quite interesting take a look…
“T.J. Parsell is a writer and human rights activist dedicated to ending sexual abuse against men, women, and children in all forms of detention. He is currently President-elect of Stop Prisoner Rape and serves as a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Parsell has testified before numerous government bodies and was instrumental in passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first ever federal legislation to address this issue. He lives in Sag Harbor, NY.”
I find it ironic how towards the end of the book he is separated from Paul because they fall in love. Why do they separate boyfriends and not gang member who sexually abuse other criminals, “You mean because we spend a lot of time together, but don’t get into trouble-that were a problem” Maybe this is where the problem comes in they don’t want to see anybody happy, for they enjoy seeing others suffering.
At the very end we can see how Parsell has been dramatically changed. He is a total different person and this experience in jail, really affected him in an optimistic way. In one of the last pages Parsell states, “I didn’t want to mess up again, like I had before.” Now he recognizes his mistake and shows he has learned from them, he doesn’t want to repeat it again. Also I was amazed when he said, “I thought about the old timers I met at Riverside, the ones who were doing life on the installment plan, and drinking paint thinner and Mountain Dew. I was not going to become one of them.” He has it clear he is much better than that, and I going to do whatever it takes to not fall into that world again.
This is a very interesting memoir at first I was bored reading it, but as I continued I realized it wasn’t the same old jail story. Parsell has a way of making it unique, by sharing every single experience he had to go through, you almost feel like you are living it. In some parts I even got goose bumps. Yet, Parsell did more than just writing this book I researched his biography and it’s quite interesting take a look…
“T.J. Parsell is a writer and human rights activist dedicated to ending sexual abuse against men, women, and children in all forms of detention. He is currently President-elect of Stop Prisoner Rape and serves as a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Parsell has testified before numerous government bodies and was instrumental in passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first ever federal legislation to address this issue. He lives in Sag Harbor, NY.”
lunes, 19 de octubre de 2009
Why Fish?
Have you ever wondered why the book is called fish? Is it because he is trapped in prison like a fish in an aquarium or maybe is it because he is different from the rest? Finally I could answer this question, “You motherfuckers are going to get the floor wet, I must have looked puzzled. He means you are dripping wet, fresh out of the tank.” Here we can infer that “fish” is a synonym of a first-timer or new arrival in prison slang. This is shown through various scenes of the book, “I responded, smiling like a fish.”
It is shocking to read about all the sexual abuse going on in the prison. Specially the fish which are the easiest targets. I would have never imagined that in such a controlled, full of guards prison there can be such crimes going on. I mean crimes going on in a jail, how ironic.
As I read the book I could conclude that in prisons, the boundaries between gay and straight men disappear, they begin to see sex as a necessity. They don’t consider having sex with another man gay, but a simple need. The question is how can these sexual offenders not be prosecuted? How can such behavior be allowed? Why is it punished outside of a jail, yet permitted once in jail?
I was stunned by when they describe his first night, “four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would “own” him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered).” How can a human being watch another do this and not do anything about it? What are the guards there for? Isnt it their job to have everything under control.
It is shocking to read about all the sexual abuse going on in the prison. Specially the fish which are the easiest targets. I would have never imagined that in such a controlled, full of guards prison there can be such crimes going on. I mean crimes going on in a jail, how ironic.
As I read the book I could conclude that in prisons, the boundaries between gay and straight men disappear, they begin to see sex as a necessity. They don’t consider having sex with another man gay, but a simple need. The question is how can these sexual offenders not be prosecuted? How can such behavior be allowed? Why is it punished outside of a jail, yet permitted once in jail?
I was stunned by when they describe his first night, “four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would “own” him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered).” How can a human being watch another do this and not do anything about it? What are the guards there for? Isnt it their job to have everything under control.
Vocabulary
“What did you rob?” A fotomat I said.
Fotomat: was a once widespread retail chain of photo development drive-thru kiosks located in shopping center parking lots.
“He opened the dayroom door and once more bellowed, Scandalous!”
Bellowed: a very loud utterance (like the sound of an animal)
“That boy is half a bug, and his thorazine must be running low.”
Thorazine: a drug (trade name Thorazine) derived from phenothiazine that has antipsychotic effects and is used as a sedative and tranquilizer.
“She worked the streets for me, Chet Bosted.”
Boasted: To speak of with excessive pride
“His walk was what inmates called cattin”
Cattin: short for catwalk
“Even if a cop or a shop owner shoots one of the criminals, the other guys involved are charged with murder, the rationale being that if you weren’t committing the felony, no one would have died.”
Felony: One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor
Fotomat: was a once widespread retail chain of photo development drive-thru kiosks located in shopping center parking lots.
“He opened the dayroom door and once more bellowed, Scandalous!”
Bellowed: a very loud utterance (like the sound of an animal)
“That boy is half a bug, and his thorazine must be running low.”
Thorazine: a drug (trade name Thorazine) derived from phenothiazine that has antipsychotic effects and is used as a sedative and tranquilizer.
“She worked the streets for me, Chet Bosted.”
Boasted: To speak of with excessive pride
“His walk was what inmates called cattin”
Cattin: short for catwalk
“Even if a cop or a shop owner shoots one of the criminals, the other guys involved are charged with murder, the rationale being that if you weren’t committing the felony, no one would have died.”
Felony: One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor
jueves, 15 de octubre de 2009
"Await Your Reply"
October 2009
Michael Schaub
fiction
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
“An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity,” writes Dan Chaon in his new novel.
Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases -- Which isn’t necessarily you, of course.
But maybe it is. “Identity” is a tricky word, with different connotations, different levels of meaning, but in the age of the Internet, these details -- user names, search histories, social networking profiles -- might as well be you. Maybe we give up more than we know; maybe we’re less now than we used to think we are. Maybe not. But when we talk about “identity theft,” we might be talking about more than we know. It’s hard to speak or write about how the Internet has changed art, has changed culture, the way we define identity. And when someone tries to talk about it, you should, generally speaking, run.
But there are exceptions, and one of them is this: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon’s novel about identity in every sense of the word. It’s the first great novel about the Internet; it’s one of the best books of any kind I’ve ever read about identity on any level. It is brilliant and it is essential; it should be required reading not only for anyone who uses the Internet, but for anyone who cares about contemporary American fiction.
Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.
All of them become embroiled in issues of identity. Schuyler goes to work with his biological father, an identity thief in rural Michigan. Lattimore’s lover is engaged in a vague moneymaking scheme that she knows little about, but suspects it involves fraud. Schuyler goes to Canada to try to find his brother, who has changed his name and his appearance a number of times, sometimes even using his brother’s identity.
Await Your Reply starts off with incredible tension -- the first pages describe Schuyler being driven to a hospital, his severed hand on ice in a cooler -- and it increases from there. There are close calls, bad omens, frightening encounters with strangers, suspicious instant messages. But for all the suspense, the characters in this novel -- lovingly, accurately, realistically rendered -- are at the forefront. This is a suspense novel in the same sense that Lolita is a romance novel; it’s brilliant in the terms of the genre, but the description is insufficient to describe how breathtaking it is on its own. It’s not a book that’s easy to put down -- I finished reading it, perhaps unwisely, late at night, looking up only to suspiciously glance at the monitor of my computer, glowing ominously on my desk. When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites. It’s that kind of suspense novel. Every single part of it works.
Chaon is one of the best writers of fiction in America, and this is, by far, his best work yet. No living American author is as good at describing the Midwest and the people who call it their home -- which isn’t to say that this is a Midwestern novel, necessarily; it’s an absolutely universal work. But Chaon, a Nebraska native who now lives in Ohio, understands the landscape and the people of the American Midwest more than any author I can remember. Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.
Chaon also does an amazing job with writing about the Internet itself, particularly in one tense scene where a young man logging on to his computer gets an unintelligible, ominous instant message from a stranger. It’s one of the most frightening moments of the novel, though there’s no explicit threat, no danger immediately spelled out. There’s only the sense of danger, but it’s hard to imagine any other author setting the mood as effectively and perfectly as Chaon does.
As flawlessly as Chaon renders the characters in this novel, you end up with a sense of unknowing, of wondering whether you know these people at all. And that is, perhaps, the point. The epigraph of the first part of the novel comes from Anna Akhmatova:
“I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone’s dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else’s mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.”
Maybe we already know our potential for good and for evil, and maybe we are capable of seeing our own reflections, in mirrors, sure, but in other people as well. Chaon seems to suggest we might not have earned that kind of certainty about or identities. We sometimes say, when sick or confused or depressed, that we don’t feel like ourselves. The characters in this book don’t feel like themselves, or they do, but they don’t know what to do with that feeling. They don’t know who they are. Maybe none of us does.
I can’t think of very many contemporary American authors who have tackled as ambitious concepts as Chaon does in this book, and who have done so without making a single false step. The spare brilliance of Chaon’s prose, and his uncanny skill at creating unique and uniquely American characters, calls to mind writers like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Mary Robison. But with this novel, Chaon has surpassed them all. Await Your Reply is a perfect novel, and it is an American masterpiece. We needed this book.
In this book review the author talks about mostly the common place of the book. The common place is internet users, having so many advances in technology most of the world uses the internet daily, “When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites.” If you are an internet user you are exposed to all this dangers, the internet is full of thieves and strangers. You can be in touch with the world, just a click away. By using this commonplace the reader might become more intrigued, because it has to deal with his daily life and could help him out. The author uses sympathy to gain readers attention.
This is a very well written book review for it is clear. It uses proper vocabulary making it easy and enjoyable to read. It uses a lot of vividness while describing sections of the book, “Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.” From just reading this quote the reader can decide if they will like the book. It gives straitghout information, not hiding anything and giving the reader a taste of what the book will be like.
The Midwest is very important symbol for the author so much that the author of the book review uses personification to emphasize this significance, “Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.” By simply inductive logic, we can infer that the book is going to talk about all the dangers of the internet.
The author does a great job with rhetoric, making this book review reflect captivating interesting book it is. I even got the urge to read it, for I am an internet maniac and I live on the internet. I should be aware of all the dangers out there before it’s too late.
Michael Schaub
fiction
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
“An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity,” writes Dan Chaon in his new novel.
Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases -- Which isn’t necessarily you, of course.
But maybe it is. “Identity” is a tricky word, with different connotations, different levels of meaning, but in the age of the Internet, these details -- user names, search histories, social networking profiles -- might as well be you. Maybe we give up more than we know; maybe we’re less now than we used to think we are. Maybe not. But when we talk about “identity theft,” we might be talking about more than we know. It’s hard to speak or write about how the Internet has changed art, has changed culture, the way we define identity. And when someone tries to talk about it, you should, generally speaking, run.
But there are exceptions, and one of them is this: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon’s novel about identity in every sense of the word. It’s the first great novel about the Internet; it’s one of the best books of any kind I’ve ever read about identity on any level. It is brilliant and it is essential; it should be required reading not only for anyone who uses the Internet, but for anyone who cares about contemporary American fiction.
Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.
All of them become embroiled in issues of identity. Schuyler goes to work with his biological father, an identity thief in rural Michigan. Lattimore’s lover is engaged in a vague moneymaking scheme that she knows little about, but suspects it involves fraud. Schuyler goes to Canada to try to find his brother, who has changed his name and his appearance a number of times, sometimes even using his brother’s identity.
Await Your Reply starts off with incredible tension -- the first pages describe Schuyler being driven to a hospital, his severed hand on ice in a cooler -- and it increases from there. There are close calls, bad omens, frightening encounters with strangers, suspicious instant messages. But for all the suspense, the characters in this novel -- lovingly, accurately, realistically rendered -- are at the forefront. This is a suspense novel in the same sense that Lolita is a romance novel; it’s brilliant in the terms of the genre, but the description is insufficient to describe how breathtaking it is on its own. It’s not a book that’s easy to put down -- I finished reading it, perhaps unwisely, late at night, looking up only to suspiciously glance at the monitor of my computer, glowing ominously on my desk. When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites. It’s that kind of suspense novel. Every single part of it works.
Chaon is one of the best writers of fiction in America, and this is, by far, his best work yet. No living American author is as good at describing the Midwest and the people who call it their home -- which isn’t to say that this is a Midwestern novel, necessarily; it’s an absolutely universal work. But Chaon, a Nebraska native who now lives in Ohio, understands the landscape and the people of the American Midwest more than any author I can remember. Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.
Chaon also does an amazing job with writing about the Internet itself, particularly in one tense scene where a young man logging on to his computer gets an unintelligible, ominous instant message from a stranger. It’s one of the most frightening moments of the novel, though there’s no explicit threat, no danger immediately spelled out. There’s only the sense of danger, but it’s hard to imagine any other author setting the mood as effectively and perfectly as Chaon does.
As flawlessly as Chaon renders the characters in this novel, you end up with a sense of unknowing, of wondering whether you know these people at all. And that is, perhaps, the point. The epigraph of the first part of the novel comes from Anna Akhmatova:
“I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone’s dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else’s mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.”
Maybe we already know our potential for good and for evil, and maybe we are capable of seeing our own reflections, in mirrors, sure, but in other people as well. Chaon seems to suggest we might not have earned that kind of certainty about or identities. We sometimes say, when sick or confused or depressed, that we don’t feel like ourselves. The characters in this book don’t feel like themselves, or they do, but they don’t know what to do with that feeling. They don’t know who they are. Maybe none of us does.
I can’t think of very many contemporary American authors who have tackled as ambitious concepts as Chaon does in this book, and who have done so without making a single false step. The spare brilliance of Chaon’s prose, and his uncanny skill at creating unique and uniquely American characters, calls to mind writers like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Mary Robison. But with this novel, Chaon has surpassed them all. Await Your Reply is a perfect novel, and it is an American masterpiece. We needed this book.
In this book review the author talks about mostly the common place of the book. The common place is internet users, having so many advances in technology most of the world uses the internet daily, “When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites.” If you are an internet user you are exposed to all this dangers, the internet is full of thieves and strangers. You can be in touch with the world, just a click away. By using this commonplace the reader might become more intrigued, because it has to deal with his daily life and could help him out. The author uses sympathy to gain readers attention.
This is a very well written book review for it is clear. It uses proper vocabulary making it easy and enjoyable to read. It uses a lot of vividness while describing sections of the book, “Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.” From just reading this quote the reader can decide if they will like the book. It gives straitghout information, not hiding anything and giving the reader a taste of what the book will be like.
The Midwest is very important symbol for the author so much that the author of the book review uses personification to emphasize this significance, “Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.” By simply inductive logic, we can infer that the book is going to talk about all the dangers of the internet.
The author does a great job with rhetoric, making this book review reflect captivating interesting book it is. I even got the urge to read it, for I am an internet maniac and I live on the internet. I should be aware of all the dangers out there before it’s too late.
“The Art Of Defying Death”
October 14, 2009, 9:25 pm
The Art of Defying Death
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
On a misty spring night in 2005, I approached my apartment, on a tony block on the Upper West Side facing the Hudson. I felt relaxed and calm. Earlier that day I had attended a yoga workshop with a guru from India, then completed a writing assignment for a health and spirituality magazine about, as it happened, instinct — or antar-jñana, inner knowledge. I opened the outer door to my vestibule, then crossed through its inner door and into my lobby, leaving my back to the entrance. I got a prickly feeling, I don’t know why. I turned. There I saw, pushing open the inner door, an ink-black, gloved hand, exaggeratedly large, controlled and deliberate. It charged toward me. It was trailed by a body, the picture of death.
It is difficult for me to render the horror of the image of that man entering my building lobby that night, so great is the disparity between its emotional charge for me now and the stereotypical, almost comical picture he presented. He was a figment from a nightmare. I guessed his height and weight at 6’3” and 230 pounds, with the physicality of a boxer. The cops later told me that was right. His clothes were dark and innocuous — clean black jeans, black sneakers, a midnight-blue hoodie — as if chosen to leave no
When I was attacked, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga.
impression whatsoever. In contrast, on his face was a neoprene thermal ski mask, the type that tents in front to create a ridge and thus evokes to most anyone who’s heard of him Darth Vader. I later discovered while searching on Google that this type of mask is favored by shoppers also enamored of vigilante-style military clothing and toy AK-47s — in other words it is meant to provoke a reaction. Of the figure’s actual face I saw only slit-shaped, yellowed eyes and a broad, acned, coal-black forehead.
This image seared in my mind, and somehow, thinking without thinking, I reminded myself to keep hold of it. Yoga’s mental training, it is said, enables the yogi to “act at once… not stopping to think.” I felt superhuman, unburdened by the back-and-forth of everyday deliberation, in possession of ekagra — single-pointed — concentration.
In a half-second, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga. I remembered the feeling of command — of flexibility and control. I remembered the words of a writer on instinct I’d cited in the article I’d just written, Malcolm Gladwell: “Take charge of the first two seconds.” And I remembered a women’s self-defense course I took in college 20 years before, and practice we’d done screaming with every bit of might in our bodies. This was a physical scream, performed with the same degree of exertion that, as it happened, we held our yoga poses.
But in truth, unfortunately, I was not so formidable as I’d have liked. The man’s weight was more than twice mine. My heightened awareness, my attuned and trained amanaskata — intellectual clarity — was sufficiently developed to give me merely the certainty that this man could, and would, kill me. Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.
Then, that palm became a fist, and met my face. I heard a loud crack. I was unconscious.
I came to consciousness on the ground. The man was lunging toward me with fists. None of my knowledge left me. He intended to kill me. I remembered a dream I’d had once in which I’d been in an elevator that was plunging to the ground, its cable severed. In the dream, I held my breath and clenched everywhere, and then stared, hard, at the ceiling. I willed the elevator to stop plummeting, and it did. The dream felt mystical, more like a vision — a premonition, perhaps. Now, I created the same sensation in my body as when I stopped the elevator. And I executed the scream.
What happened to me next in that lobby seemed no less numinous an experience than the single pointed mind-state described by the adepts as Samadhi. This is sometimes characterized as “pure awareness.” The thrill of it is said to be a manifestation of spiritual, mental and physical harmony — which may be why the medievals called yoga “the art of defying death.” Tennyson described Samadhi as “the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.” I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.
I was bloodied, my cheekbone was broken, and I was in a state of shock. Eventually the cops, and a friend, came, and I learned that an attacker by this same description had sent another woman for an extended hospital stay, with multiple broken ribs and other injuries. She’d taken longer before she screamed, they said. The cops not-so-helpfully also explained that the man was “an animal,” his motive violence. He’d been stalking women of a certain physical type.
They never caught him. I moved out from that apartment, and moved on, but suffered significant emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
I do believe that yoga, and other things, gave me the mental clarity that saved my life in that moment. And I also believe that my training helped me survive in other ways, in the aftermath.
That night, I finally got to bed around 5 a.m., my friend bunkered on my sofa. I survived, I thought, over and over, lying in bed. But when I closed my eyes, I saw three things in succession that drove home to me how nearly I hadn’t: the ink-black hand on the door, the neoprene ski mask, and my face in the mirror bruised, cut and bloodied. I opened my eyes and watched the sky turn rosy pink. I closed them, and saw the same three images.
This pattern continued, with lessening frequency, for month upon month. They were a natural, limbic response, I learned later: flashbacks. Flashbacks, like the Samadhi described by Tennyson, exist outside the realm of language and cognition. This, say trauma therapists, explains why survivors often manifest unresolved memories of trauma in non-verbal ways — for instance as inexplicable pains in the body or through a dissociative escape reflex. Samadhi is mimicked in “moments of spiritual or material emergency,” wrote Geraldine Coster, an influential British yogi and psychotherapist, in 1944. Contemporary therapists have noted a tendency for survivors to enter that state of “pure awareness” so celebrated by the yogis during, and then repeatedly after, a trauma. This, they say, can become a bad habit. I learned this when, eventually, I did go in for counseling for P.T.S.D.
This paradox has been acknowledged elsewhere. A “survivor who used dissociation to cope with terror” may eventually learn to use a “trance capability” towards otherwise enriching ends, allows Judith Herman, a pioneer psychologist in the study of trauma, in her seminal book “Trauma and Recovery.”
Before I sought the wisdom of the professionals, though, I did jury-rig my own program for managing those flashbacks, using techniques of “mental mastery,” as it were, that I’d learned in yoga. For instance, I tried to recast the images playing in my head, sometimes imagining they were moving around physically to different parts of my brain. I also inserted into the sequence of flashbacks the image of the man’s miraculous turning and fleeing, and my mystical feeling of omnipotence in that moment.
My therapist later gave these methods a stamp of approval. Being able to re-conceive the meaning of an assault to one of empowerment versus self-blame proves a deciding factor in overcoming trauma. “You didn’t almost get yourself killed,” she said to me. “You saved your life.” Recreating a narrative also helps a survivor overcome a fragmenting of memory that is typical in trauma. “It is difficult to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time,” writes Herman, “to retain all the pieces and to fit them together.” The sufferer struggles to reconnect disjointed visceral and rational memories of the trauma. Healing, writes Herman, “involves the active exercise of imagination and fantasy.” The psychologist Mary Harvey includes in her seven-point checklist for the resolution of trauma simply to gain “authority” over the memories.
Perhaps every survivor overcomes trauma differently, and at a different speed. My flashbacks continued. Nightmares catapulting me directly back to that horrific episode lasted for years. The dreams were often a feeling, of prickly dread, or they were more literal, about being trailed on a dark street or ambushed in an enclosed space.
I charted my recovery through the evolution of those dreams. Eventually that feeling of palpable terror subsided. Once, around the time it did, the black figure appeared as a comical-looking, blob-like character in a black body-costume; he was like one of those actors dressed as a piece of licorice in a movie trailer. I told him he could remain in my dream as long as he stayed in the background and didn’t hurt me. He agreed.
In a dream several months later, the man with the mask was sitting in my hallway waiting for me to come home, holding the mask in his hand. At first when I saw him, I was scared, but when I saw his face I also saw that he was human. He told me he was struggling with guilt over having hurt someone. I tried to imagine if I could forgive him.
The author of this article, used a dramatic tone throughout his article, “Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.” We can see how he uses tone, to make the story so interesting. It is a story full of suspense and emotions. As I read it I even got goose bumps, I was truly dragged in the story, and felt like if I was living it.
The author’s purpose is to tell a story about a girl who saved her own life, with the use of yoga. You may ask yourself how can yoga save someone’s life? Yet it did, “I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.” Through her control of mental power she was her own savoir. When she talks about a dream, it was basically the same situation of saving her own life, yet in a dream. The elevator was falling straight towards the ground, for the cords loosened, and with her metal power she stopped it from falling. It sounds too magical to but true, yet there is no fiction to it, it happened to her in a dream and then in real life.
I do believe in metal power, and am aware that very few people can attain this level of superiority. I admire them for that. She used this powerful tool for something positive, which saved her own life, “You didn’t almost get yourself killed, she said to me. You saved your life.”
The Art of Defying Death
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
On a misty spring night in 2005, I approached my apartment, on a tony block on the Upper West Side facing the Hudson. I felt relaxed and calm. Earlier that day I had attended a yoga workshop with a guru from India, then completed a writing assignment for a health and spirituality magazine about, as it happened, instinct — or antar-jñana, inner knowledge. I opened the outer door to my vestibule, then crossed through its inner door and into my lobby, leaving my back to the entrance. I got a prickly feeling, I don’t know why. I turned. There I saw, pushing open the inner door, an ink-black, gloved hand, exaggeratedly large, controlled and deliberate. It charged toward me. It was trailed by a body, the picture of death.
It is difficult for me to render the horror of the image of that man entering my building lobby that night, so great is the disparity between its emotional charge for me now and the stereotypical, almost comical picture he presented. He was a figment from a nightmare. I guessed his height and weight at 6’3” and 230 pounds, with the physicality of a boxer. The cops later told me that was right. His clothes were dark and innocuous — clean black jeans, black sneakers, a midnight-blue hoodie — as if chosen to leave no
When I was attacked, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga.
impression whatsoever. In contrast, on his face was a neoprene thermal ski mask, the type that tents in front to create a ridge and thus evokes to most anyone who’s heard of him Darth Vader. I later discovered while searching on Google that this type of mask is favored by shoppers also enamored of vigilante-style military clothing and toy AK-47s — in other words it is meant to provoke a reaction. Of the figure’s actual face I saw only slit-shaped, yellowed eyes and a broad, acned, coal-black forehead.
This image seared in my mind, and somehow, thinking without thinking, I reminded myself to keep hold of it. Yoga’s mental training, it is said, enables the yogi to “act at once… not stopping to think.” I felt superhuman, unburdened by the back-and-forth of everyday deliberation, in possession of ekagra — single-pointed — concentration.
In a half-second, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga. I remembered the feeling of command — of flexibility and control. I remembered the words of a writer on instinct I’d cited in the article I’d just written, Malcolm Gladwell: “Take charge of the first two seconds.” And I remembered a women’s self-defense course I took in college 20 years before, and practice we’d done screaming with every bit of might in our bodies. This was a physical scream, performed with the same degree of exertion that, as it happened, we held our yoga poses.
But in truth, unfortunately, I was not so formidable as I’d have liked. The man’s weight was more than twice mine. My heightened awareness, my attuned and trained amanaskata — intellectual clarity — was sufficiently developed to give me merely the certainty that this man could, and would, kill me. Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.
Then, that palm became a fist, and met my face. I heard a loud crack. I was unconscious.
I came to consciousness on the ground. The man was lunging toward me with fists. None of my knowledge left me. He intended to kill me. I remembered a dream I’d had once in which I’d been in an elevator that was plunging to the ground, its cable severed. In the dream, I held my breath and clenched everywhere, and then stared, hard, at the ceiling. I willed the elevator to stop plummeting, and it did. The dream felt mystical, more like a vision — a premonition, perhaps. Now, I created the same sensation in my body as when I stopped the elevator. And I executed the scream.
What happened to me next in that lobby seemed no less numinous an experience than the single pointed mind-state described by the adepts as Samadhi. This is sometimes characterized as “pure awareness.” The thrill of it is said to be a manifestation of spiritual, mental and physical harmony — which may be why the medievals called yoga “the art of defying death.” Tennyson described Samadhi as “the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.” I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.
I was bloodied, my cheekbone was broken, and I was in a state of shock. Eventually the cops, and a friend, came, and I learned that an attacker by this same description had sent another woman for an extended hospital stay, with multiple broken ribs and other injuries. She’d taken longer before she screamed, they said. The cops not-so-helpfully also explained that the man was “an animal,” his motive violence. He’d been stalking women of a certain physical type.
They never caught him. I moved out from that apartment, and moved on, but suffered significant emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.
I do believe that yoga, and other things, gave me the mental clarity that saved my life in that moment. And I also believe that my training helped me survive in other ways, in the aftermath.
That night, I finally got to bed around 5 a.m., my friend bunkered on my sofa. I survived, I thought, over and over, lying in bed. But when I closed my eyes, I saw three things in succession that drove home to me how nearly I hadn’t: the ink-black hand on the door, the neoprene ski mask, and my face in the mirror bruised, cut and bloodied. I opened my eyes and watched the sky turn rosy pink. I closed them, and saw the same three images.
This pattern continued, with lessening frequency, for month upon month. They were a natural, limbic response, I learned later: flashbacks. Flashbacks, like the Samadhi described by Tennyson, exist outside the realm of language and cognition. This, say trauma therapists, explains why survivors often manifest unresolved memories of trauma in non-verbal ways — for instance as inexplicable pains in the body or through a dissociative escape reflex. Samadhi is mimicked in “moments of spiritual or material emergency,” wrote Geraldine Coster, an influential British yogi and psychotherapist, in 1944. Contemporary therapists have noted a tendency for survivors to enter that state of “pure awareness” so celebrated by the yogis during, and then repeatedly after, a trauma. This, they say, can become a bad habit. I learned this when, eventually, I did go in for counseling for P.T.S.D.
This paradox has been acknowledged elsewhere. A “survivor who used dissociation to cope with terror” may eventually learn to use a “trance capability” towards otherwise enriching ends, allows Judith Herman, a pioneer psychologist in the study of trauma, in her seminal book “Trauma and Recovery.”
Before I sought the wisdom of the professionals, though, I did jury-rig my own program for managing those flashbacks, using techniques of “mental mastery,” as it were, that I’d learned in yoga. For instance, I tried to recast the images playing in my head, sometimes imagining they were moving around physically to different parts of my brain. I also inserted into the sequence of flashbacks the image of the man’s miraculous turning and fleeing, and my mystical feeling of omnipotence in that moment.
My therapist later gave these methods a stamp of approval. Being able to re-conceive the meaning of an assault to one of empowerment versus self-blame proves a deciding factor in overcoming trauma. “You didn’t almost get yourself killed,” she said to me. “You saved your life.” Recreating a narrative also helps a survivor overcome a fragmenting of memory that is typical in trauma. “It is difficult to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time,” writes Herman, “to retain all the pieces and to fit them together.” The sufferer struggles to reconnect disjointed visceral and rational memories of the trauma. Healing, writes Herman, “involves the active exercise of imagination and fantasy.” The psychologist Mary Harvey includes in her seven-point checklist for the resolution of trauma simply to gain “authority” over the memories.
Perhaps every survivor overcomes trauma differently, and at a different speed. My flashbacks continued. Nightmares catapulting me directly back to that horrific episode lasted for years. The dreams were often a feeling, of prickly dread, or they were more literal, about being trailed on a dark street or ambushed in an enclosed space.
I charted my recovery through the evolution of those dreams. Eventually that feeling of palpable terror subsided. Once, around the time it did, the black figure appeared as a comical-looking, blob-like character in a black body-costume; he was like one of those actors dressed as a piece of licorice in a movie trailer. I told him he could remain in my dream as long as he stayed in the background and didn’t hurt me. He agreed.
In a dream several months later, the man with the mask was sitting in my hallway waiting for me to come home, holding the mask in his hand. At first when I saw him, I was scared, but when I saw his face I also saw that he was human. He told me he was struggling with guilt over having hurt someone. I tried to imagine if I could forgive him.
The author of this article, used a dramatic tone throughout his article, “Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.” We can see how he uses tone, to make the story so interesting. It is a story full of suspense and emotions. As I read it I even got goose bumps, I was truly dragged in the story, and felt like if I was living it.
The author’s purpose is to tell a story about a girl who saved her own life, with the use of yoga. You may ask yourself how can yoga save someone’s life? Yet it did, “I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.” Through her control of mental power she was her own savoir. When she talks about a dream, it was basically the same situation of saving her own life, yet in a dream. The elevator was falling straight towards the ground, for the cords loosened, and with her metal power she stopped it from falling. It sounds too magical to but true, yet there is no fiction to it, it happened to her in a dream and then in real life.
I do believe in metal power, and am aware that very few people can attain this level of superiority. I admire them for that. She used this powerful tool for something positive, which saved her own life, “You didn’t almost get yourself killed, she said to me. You saved your life.”
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