Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Something I had to write for class...

After perusing my old stories and poetry, I realized that most of my work is of a highly personal nature. I’ve been a major proponent of journaling for most of my life, and I am always pushing friends and family to use writing as a tool for solving their problems, calming their fears, and when facing obstacles or moral dilemmas. However, I have been a bit lackadaisical in such practices lately. Therefore, instead of compiling a series of snippets and personal bests in an effort to present you with my thoughts and feelings regarding my generation, I decided to write something new that contains the information about which I feel most passionate. That being stated, I must add that it is impossible to disclose my feelings toward the idea of being of a species known as “Generation X” without reflecting somewhat on a variety of other aspects born from the world’s twentieth century.

I was reared in a staunchly conservative, multi-generational family. Of course, we weren’t like the Ewings of Dallas, although the previous sentence may have that tone. We never had our Miss Ellie living in the same house with our Bobby and Pam, JR and Sue Ellen (although I did have an aunt who got drunk about once a year and fell down the stairs). Instead, I was imbued with reverence and respect for the men and women who paved the way for me, and my grandparents, great aunts and uncles were all regular and repeated fixtures in my life. From birth, I was surrounded by strong personalities and people who had seen the best and the worst that the eighty years before my birth had to offer.

Given the fact that I arrived on the tail-end of the Gen X-ers coupled with my birth order status as the youngest of three children, each evenly spaced by five years, it would be most of my childhood and adolescence before I could find a zone of comfort. For most of my life, I was a dreamer, mostly because the rich fantasy land I so easily escaped to was one hundred times better than the reality of my early years. I suppose I can give my gratitude (or blame) to the media for the list of obsessive, irrational fears that would plague me well into my adulthood.

Prior to the onset of adolescence, I watched a network movie-of-the-week called The Day After, which detailed the chilling events of a nuclear attack on the United States (at the time, a very real possibility) and the disturbing results such an event had on the characters. Following the program, I remember the adults discussing the show and mentioning our close proximity to Barksdale Air Force Base and how we would be near the top of the list for such an attack were it ever to occur. I was terrified. For years following, every time a plane flew low enough for me to hear, I was sure it was a missile arriving to irradiate us all.

My childhood was also a period in which sensational television was born, and future talk-show pirate, Geraldo Rivera, was one of its sires. I remember Al Capone’s vault being unveiled, the specials about the most notorious murder sprees in history (a future trip to southern California was ruined with my speculations of certainty that Charles Manson and his followers would escape prison and come after me), and the Rivera special on the prevalence of devil worship in America. Shortly after viewing the program, Halloween arrived, and the local news broadcast that a threat had been called in that a blond-haired, blue-eyed child would be abducted that night for ritualistic purposes. I met the description, and trick-or-treating was ruined for my youth.

Finally, being in an area I would later learn was one of the first major test markets for cable television (Shreveport? Seriously?!), we were a family with thirty channels before most of the rest of the nation had much more than ABC, NBC, and CBS (Fox was not yet heard of). Along with MTV that actually showed videos and HBO that showed movies all day, we also had news that aired on multiple stations on a regular basis. It was the early 1980s and national reports were flooding the screen with footage of men and women who were being stricken with a rapidly spreading, as-yet-unnamed disease. Scenes aired of patients painfully wasting away in their hospital beds, but the aspect that stood out to me at my age was what I perceived as bruises all over their faces and their extremities (I now know these were actually lesions). Young and impressionable, ample time would dissolve into summer, and I remember the disease finally being given a name by the news networks, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and the surgeon general telling the nation that the disease was transmitted to people via blood (the aspect of sexual relativity, IV drug use, and blood transfusions had yet to be stressed). Brief speculation aired that if it was carried in blood, then perhaps mosquitoes could infect people. I remember being sick with worry every time I came home with bug bites and saw even the hint of a bruise on my shins from rolling around in the grass outside. It was not until much later, well into my teen years, that watchdog groups would began to push for parents to talk to their children about the disturbing imagery in prime time television. However, for me, it wasn’t sexually explicit material or graphic violence that had a profound effect on my childhood. It was the news and its projections of the turbulently changing reality. I learned to worry about adult matters at far too early an age, and I believe that I was robbed of many aspects of the innocence of childhood, the childhood I’d heard stories about from my sister (the oldest of the three of us), my parents’ childhoods, and their parents before them. I could see that life was clearly different, and I was a bit jealous.

After high school, I was determined to write. Up to that point, I had taken all the necessary and required paths, played along by the rules that had been set, made the grades, joined the clubs, excelled, but all I really ever wanted to do with my life was to be a writer. Being the baby in a long line of conservatives, my wish was not to be granted – at least, not in the way I had always envisioned.

I went to college. I majored in Public Relations, then Psychology, then English. I began taking upper level classes in which I read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Kate Chopin, and I continued to pester my father with my dreams of working as a novelist. At the turn of the century, I turned twenty-one, bugged my dad one more time, and I was suddenly riddled with shock. He gave in. I had the spring and the summer to leave school. I was told that I could write, see how things worked, and if I hadn’t published or at least completed a substantial amount by fall, I was to be back in school. The next two months were blissful. Then, the unthinkable. An early morning phone call. An urgent message to come home. My father died ten days later.

The loss of a parent is a major stressor to anyone. Suddenly, at age twenty-one, just as I had begun to realize my dreams and achieve my goals, I was told that it was time to grow up, go back to school, get a job, marry, have 2.5 children, and build up a 401K. I decided to do the opposite.

A discussion of all that occurred throughout the ensuing five years is something that could occupy a work the size of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Suffice to say that I tasted every forbidden fruit from the tree (and some that had already fallen to the ground and begun to rot) in the garden of nocturnal delights. It wasn’t until the age of twenty-six that I finally took my family’s advice. I decided to grow up, get a job, go back to school, eventually settle down to marry, maybe adopt some kids, and build up that 401K (the latter three items on the list, beginning with the whole marriage deal, have yet to come to fruition). Despite my determination and dedicated work ethics, each and every step felt like five miles up a steep hill with six feet of snow (barefoot, of course). However, when my ten year high school reunion arrived, I saw for the first time that I was not the only one who had spent several years lost, but I was one of the few who had come to the other side. Many times, I speculate that I was structured for my struggles by the unintentional efforts of my parents and grandparents and great aunts and uncles. In trying to make my future easier, they had raised me without the necessary wings to soar.

My parents were baby boomers, members of the biggest population explosion we know from modern times. My grandparents were the patriots of our world’s most massive wars. My great uncles and aunts were children of the depression. Just as my grandfather encouraged my father to enlist and serve in the Vietnam Conflict because that was his “duty to his country,” my grandfather had been taught by his parents to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” My parents eventually met and settled down, had a family, lost their idealistic notions of flower power, and struggled to raise us, their children, so that we would never face the struggles of their youth, nor of their parents’ youths, nor of anyone who had come before.

We were sent to the best schools, sheltered from the horrors that aired on the nightly news, urged to play fair, study hard, make good grades, go to college, and do things the way that they had done them. Unfortunately, the world in the days of the Generation X childhood and adolescence was different. It was suddenly a world of mass shootings in public schools that required security guards and metal detectors at the doors of our schools. It was a world of over-the-counter medications tainted with poison, which led to tamper-proof packaging and childproof caps. It was a world of danger and bewilderment, a world our parents had never known. In their efforts to make our lives as simple as possible, they had forgotten to teach us the basic survival and life skills that they had known, the skills they were taught by the people who had been taught by the people who had needed to use them on a daily basis. I don’t blame my parents. In fact, I’m grateful to have experienced everything that has shaped me into the man I am today.

However, I often look around at my generational cohorts, my equivalents, the bad apples that spoil our bunch, and I am disgusted. I have associates who are currently working on their second divorce and others who are working on their second jail sentence. I see an ocean of their children who are now being raised to call their grandparents “Mom” and “Dad” because they refuse to render responsible care. I see apathy and disdain, hands out demanding more, and a million lost souls with whom I once played He-Man and watched Scooby-Doo and rode bikes and spent the night and shared my dreams and hopes for such a bright future. It reminds me of something I heard in high school, we were the first generation had been told that we would not do as well as our parents. Instead of fighting to prove that idea wrong, here we are meeting and surpassing that prediction in record-setting time.

Maybe I see sides of my generation that are specific only to my life and my world, but I bet a lot of other 1979-ers see things the same way. Maybe I’m able to write this and see this and analyze this and, ultimately, accept this because I woke up from the possibility of a similar fate. Regardless, maybe because of the way the world turns, but more likely maybe because of my own perception of it, I choose to take my parents’ advice and to take things even further. I believe I can have the job and the spouse and the kids and the money and still realize every other dream I dreamt, every wish I wished, every hope I hoped.

In a way, I had to X myself from the suppositions and predictions for the fate of Generation X in order to be a bigger and better part of what will be the generation of next…

New Historical Criticism

New Historical Criticism is a field of literary scholarship which relies on the idea that it is not so much the actual events that shape history as it is an individual’s perception of those events. Followers of this particular form of criticism believe that it is the writers and the documenters of news and ideas that shape the realities of anyone who will later study these historical accounts. With the proliferation of multiple cable news networks and the capabilities offered by the World Wide Web, one can marvel at the idea of New Historical Criticism, acknowledging that there is, in fact, some merit in following this particular mode of thinking.

In the age of the internet and twenty-four hour media coverage, it is not necessarily the news, but the events the media gatekeepers choose to air and the tone and content projected for the viewing public that shape our thoughts and attitudes towards what is occurring in the world today. By acknowledging the sets of circumstances of today as what they will offer as fodder for historical researchers of tomorrow, one can only believe that this is just as things always have been. The universal themes of human nature portrayed by the actor’s of Shakespeare’s day have not changed. Instead, the modes of delivery have become more diverse and plentiful for the Age of Information. There seems little doubt that the generation of the twenty-first century may view a day such as September 11, 2001 through what the broadcast news opted to film and the pages of eyewitness accounts that were chosen for publication, achieving a totally different understanding than those who lived and experienced the day for themselves. Not implying bias, New Historical Criticism suggests that there is (and always has been) a degree of definite subjectivity in the hearts of those creating any type of documentation, be it fiction or their version of reality.

Then, Marxist Criticism

With its basis in the ideologies of Communism, the eponymously dubbed “Marxist Criticism” is a specific subset of historical criticism that views various forms of artistic achievement for a litany of reasons that have little or nothing to do with artistic merit or creative achievement. Marxist criticisms refuse to dispense any reverence for work released with the intent to merely entertain, and Marxists pay particular note to such pursuits most specifically in the world of literature. Marxists, like the man whose work as an economist founded the school of political thought and gave this brand of literary criticism a name, view literature in praise of its ability to symbolize the vast chasms that exist between the haves and the have-nots in the socioeconomic systems of the world.

Where many present day critics and bibliophiles might view the works of Donna Tartt, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, or Jay McInerney as post-modern masterpieces of exemplary brilliance, Marxists would view these authors and their works as vessels of the Communist movement, beacons of honor to analyze and critique for their attention to the idea of economics as the foundation for everything else there is in the world. Although Marxists would undoubtedly praise the aforementioned writers for their ability to sell copy, it would be their characters and their ability to say so much between the lines of their text. Furthermore, Marxist criticism would care not about these men and women and their power of exposing a microscopic magnification of the harsh realities of modern life to the world in innovative and interesting words. Instead, Marxists would wonder what the writers plan to do about it with the subject matter once it has been exposed.

Deconstruction Deconstruced

Deconstruction is a form of literary criticism that I think is really just a whole lot of BS. Don't know anything about it? Think back to the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton thing and the way President Clinton responded during all the hearings, the way he was able to take the accusing questioners around and around in circles....("it would depend on what you mean by the word 'the'," just something I remember). I was not a fan of the President of the United States waxing rhetorically and I'm not a fan of this particular criticism method, here's what I submitted:


Deconstruction is an example of a critical strategy of literary analysis that deserves every bit of the negative connotation its very name implies. The technique suggests the complete demolition and denigration of an artist’s creation in order to find some variety of underlying messages that may not have been intended during the scribe’s construction of his or her work. With complete disregard for plot, characterization, setting, or any of the multiple literary devices implemented by the author, deconstruction seeks to establish that one or more hidden meanings motivated the written words. Furthermore, the asserted claims of a deconstructive critic can only be proven once the structure of an original work is completely broken down, debased, and made devoid of all intended meaning in favor of incongruous and inane ideas.

Although there are a myriad circumstances and factors that encompass the writing process and the creation and assembly of any work, the utilization of deconstruction on any piece of art concentrates too heavily on these factors as the possible inspirations that motivated the author’s voice. Such analysis is not only of possible detriment to a masterpiece, but also of complete disrespect to the talent and style of the writer. There are many in the literary world who may tout the advantages and positive attributes of deconstruction, but many more believe the strategy to be excessive, fatuous, and even irrational, with little or no basis in logic, tried and true academics, or other types of scholarly criticism.

A Rose for Edmund

It can be difficult to appreciate the ideas of love and romance from the perspective of twenty-first century living. As members of a society driven to distraction by the rumors of the relationship make-ups and break-ups between celebrities and our number one source of entertainment, television, bombarded viewers with images of men and women competing with each other for the hands and hearts of the rich and the eligible, it can seem daunting to attempt an understanding comparison to simpler types of love from hundreds of years ago. For many in the time of 2010, thoughts of courtship and wooing have gone out the window in favor of the urgent, easily accessed concept of downloadable love. Whether it is a testament to the eternal exuberance of human emotion or just another example of the impatience of men throughout history, one could easily view the poem “Song” from Edmund Waller as proof that the urgency and compulsive neediness of love was present even in the seventeenth century, and that there is a definitive separation in comprehension and communication between the sexes. Doing so, however, would hinge on someone taking the poem from more than only its most literal, face value. In order to truly appreciate the depth of language and Waller’s imaginative use of symbolism, one must look below the surface of his words that begin with insistence upon the rose.

Because the work hails from the year 1645, it is easy for one to assume that the poetic protagonist of “Song,” its narrator, is a man (although one could likely argue that phrases such as “suffer her self to be desired/And not blush so to be admired” (Waller 14-15) lead modern day readers to speculate as to whether a female is expressing these words for what will be an unrequited response, obviously evoked in the imagery articulated by the voice of the narrator) in love. From the opening lines, the urgency in the voice of the poet is both apparent and compelling. The reader is immediately forced to agree with everything the poet passionately implores just as he or she may also begin to encourage the female recipient to follow through on the poet’s request. The poet voices his most private thoughts on the matter of the woman to a rose, hoping that in sending this rose to the object of his desire, she will instantly swoon and, in turn, favorably comply with his desire to begin a romantic entanglement. At once, the rose could easily be interpreted as the poet’s creative take on a love letter, a proposition, a declaration.

In order to appreciate the profundity of Waller’s creativity, one must first ascertain that there is an understanding that the rose is to serve as linguistic interpreter between the opposite sexes, as if their own interpretation through language alone is impossible. In essence, the rose hears the man’s words, understands, and is to bequeath itself to the object of desire. In simply appearing as itself to the woman, the message will be deciphered as per the wishes of the poet. Waller is insinuating that the woman will understand the beauty of the rose better than she would the literacy in the passion of the man’s verbose tenacity. Furthermore, Waller proposes that the man feels he can only be understood by the rose and that the rose is the perfect, central symbol of a variety of ideas in the context of the poem. With the use of such symbolism, many critics believe that Waller has taken his work to a higher degree, bringing brilliance to “a poem which, taken superficially, is a piece of deft and charming vers de societe” (Brooks 249). In many ways, Waller suggests that there exists a great divide between the sexes and that men and women not only speak two separate languages, but also play by vastly different rules.

In the eighth edition of Literature for Composition: Reading and Writing Arguments About Essays, Stories, Poems, and Plays, editors Sylvan Banet, William Burto, and William E. Cain encourage attention to the use of symbolism in Waller’s work, stating that “a poem about the transience of a rose might compel the reader to feel that the transience of female beauty is the larger theme even though it is never explicitly stated” (540). Although the editors make a valid point, one can also contend that the very use of the transience of beauty in general is also a mechanism to encode the poet’s underlying sense of urgency that the female respond in a positive manner, accept the poet’s advances, and move forward with him before her bloom begins to turn from full-blossoming beauty. Like a rose that has charmed the world with its beauty for many days, Waller sees the woman in possible, comparable terms. He suggests his love will soon find that she is losing color and grace and wilting to a brown that is past its prime “to have her graces spied” (Waller 7).

Like the rose, the woman is the poet’s vision of everything that is appealing and alluring in the opposite sex. In speaking to the rose of his desire in delivering the message of his love, the poet realizes that “when I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be” (Waller 4-5). Also like the rose, the object of the poet’s affection is quickly on her way to full bloom, a state that will endure only for a short period. The poet stresses to the rose that they must seize the moment, take full advantage of their youth and beauty as “How small a part of time they share” (Waller 20). In further comparison to the rose, the poet sees that the woman, in turning from a bud to a bloom will fade in such short time that “Small is the worth/Of beauty from the light retired” (Waller 6-7).

The rose is a messenger, a conveyer of a message that only it can symbolize for full interpretation by the woman, and the poet realizes this, speaking to the rose in that urgency so prevalent and powerful in the voice and actions of the young and the virile. Only a poet who, caught in the pragmatics and now-outdated belief in the contrary dynamics in understanding between men and women, could contrive of such a genius means of transmitting the deepest of his soul to another human being. Only a poet could assume that the way the woman will interpret the gesture of the rose is as a gift to be the equivalent of his deep and abiding love for her. Only a brilliant use of language and symbolism and the urgency of love’s requisition could proffer a sense of understanding and agreement with the plight of a young man yearning to learn that he is, in fact, destined for a long-lasting relationship with the one woman he views as this most “lovely rose” that is “so wondrous sweet and fair” (Waller 1, 20).

Works Cited:

Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain, eds. Literature for Composition:
Reading and Writing Arguments About Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.

Brooks, Cleanth. Understanding Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960.
Waller, Edmund. “Song.” Literature for Composition: Reading and Writing Arguments About
Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.

A Modest Proposal for the Mystery of Sonnet 146

It is interesting in itself to note that William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 contains a single line of meter that is one of literary history’s greatest unsolved mysteries. Although there are a variety of minor theories to explain this matter, there are two exceptionally well-founded ideas for the speculation and debate that has ensued between critics and scholars for hundreds of years. First, the second line of the sonnet opens with “My sinful earth,” appearing to be an accidental repetition of the exact same three words which closed the opening line above. Second, when noting this line in its entire published format, academics cannot help but note that the usual, established meter of Shakespeare’s dependable and expected iambic pentameter has blatantly vanished, the tone otherwise destroyed. Widely attributed to have simply been a typographical misprint on the part of the publisher, scholars have offered years of popular speculation as to what words, which would better fit the general scheme of the rest of this work, were probably scrawled in the great playwright’s original quill pen. Although suggestions such as “Fooled by,” “Leagued with,” and “Rebuke” are all excellent possibilities that fit not just the meter but also the message, it seems that “Thrall to” is the most widely accepted proposition. However, when one looks at Sonnet 146 not only to analyze its form but also in question of its matter of subject, one could also speculate that the words “My sinful earth” appear just as they were written, intentionally laid upon the page to further drive the message Shakespeare attempted to convey in this one great example of everything that each of his other sonnets is not.

Reading the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets in its entirety and accepting that these creations were published without their author’s consent and much to his chagrin, one realizes that he or she is actually reading words of value that were likely never intended for consumption or criticism of the hoi polloi. Many of these sonnets are written in a deeply personal, often-times yearning tone for love and beauty. In fact, there are examples in which the poet could be justifiably described as being enslaved by such entrapping accoutrements. Contrast this to Sonnet 146 where the reader visualizes a tone of intense reflection and somber reverence to something other than seasons of the heart.

Although many of the sonnets are historically acknowledged to have been dispersed and distributed among Shakespeare’s friends and associates, one might ascertain that it was only through the unauthorized publication of the work that the world at large was given a glimpse into the poet’s innermost thoughts and feelings, his intentionally discrete motivations and desires. Each of the sonnets imbues emotions of love and desire in the hearts and guts of anyone drinking the words from the page. Several offer examples of comparisons between what Shakespeare found attractive in people and what he found moving in the wonder of the natural world. However, Sonnet 146 is strikingly dissimilar to the plotted format of comparisons of female beauty to the awe-inspiring seasonal changes, or the infinite other examples in which the man pays reverence to that which appeals most at the surface level of human nature. Sonnet 146 exists as a realization, a meditation, and a prayer. It is a sudden, startling decision to question whether all else that has previously offered motivation may actually be truly superfluous and inconsequential in the bigger and broader questions of the goodness of his human soul. Sonnet 146 is Shakespeare’s hope for a pathway to possible redemption.

Here, in contrast to the other one hundred fifty-three entries, Shakespeare has not optioned to marvel at the libidinous and provoking guile of a woman who moves him to write about such enslavements, nor has he sought to inspire reciprocation from an object of his affection. Instead, the writer is addressing that which lives at his most holy epicenter. The epiphany of his life is that which he laments, realizing it ought to be his greatest and most significant motivation of all. In Sonnet 146, Shakespeare concludes that nothing else can really matter, nor can he ever justify any sense of worthiness for himself if not for finding inner goodness and spiritual well being. One might argue that Sonnet 146 is a chicken soup sonnet for Shakespeare’s soul.

There appears to be little criticism or scholarly analysis to dispute what Shakespeare’s intentions were in the meat of this particular sonnet, and there also appears to be little evidence to refute that it bears overwhelming dissimilarities to the litany of other examples offered by the poet and playwright. However, the major controversy and debate that swells over a reading of these fourteen lines of mostly iambic pentameter is in the shape and form and rhythm of the poem in itself.

Accepting that most can agree on the mood and the message of the work, then one can really take a very deeply investigative approach to looking at another end of the spectrum of the great mystery over the opening of the second line in those three brief words: “My sinful earth.” The great debate exists because the main idea that has been generally accepted through years of academia is that the original publisher erred in the printing of this work by mistakenly reprinting the three word phrase twice. The ideas that have ebbed and flowed since have been over what words were originally intended by the man who wrote the work sometime before the close of the sixteenth century. Of course, that the theory of a misprint has been generally accepted is of no great surprise as the iambic pentameter that form the remaining twelve lines of this and the entirety of his other works is completely absent, causing the overall form of the poem to subsequently be displaced. However, one could question whether or not that three word phrase that closes the opening line of poetry only to open the line that follows was intentionally put upon the page. Perhaps Shakespeare intended not only to break free from the shackles that contained him in his meanderings through love and vanity and reverence for the deception of appearances but also to further exemplify his lament in the sudden, unexpected fracture of his known style of writing.

Naturally, anyone reviewing any anti-New Historical Criticism historical criticism such as this one could very well argue that the idea makes as little sense as finding the answer to this speculated point through deconstruction of Sonnet 146; however, the idea may definitely make sense when relating this particular sonnet to the many other examples of glaring contrast that readers have to lay by its side. The world will likely never know, beyond a shadow of any reasonable doubt, just what specific phrase Shakespeare intended to open the second line of a masterpiece such as Sonnet 146, but maybe the debate matters not. Furthermore, by the estimations of the man who wrote the poem in the effort of conveying a process of thought quite unlike any of the other poems, it may not really matter what words appear at the surface of Shakespeare’s “sinful earth”, only the meaning at the heart of his “Poor soul.”

Just as Shakespeare was a man of many words, he was also a man who observed and understood and found universal themes to which centuries of men and women have been able to relate. Therefore, perhaps, one must wonder whether or not such a debate would have pleased the man in the end. Sonnet 146 explicitly warns that only the worms are “inheritors of this excess” and that it is the love and truth and wisdom and goodness on the inside that matters most because “death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

Fine Arts Discussion Board - Had Some Positive Comments On This...

Just as there are no known boundaries to artistic interpretation for the creators of the world, one may speculate that there is also no finite number of critical interpretations to every piece brought forth for display. The affinity one reviewer feels for the work of James Cameron in his latest blockbuster may be lost on the lover of independent cinema longing for the latest low-budget release starring Chloe Sevigny. The brilliance in the pages of Ian McEwan’s body of work may be impenetrable to an avid reader of Dean Koontz. Furthermore, the chart-topping music of Kanye West could be absolute drivel to a lifetime lover of The Rolling Stones. In the gigantic melting pot of individualism that is the planet Earth, we are gifted with as many types of representation as there are people born every day.

In studying art and its effect on citizens of the world, one must realize that the significance of any work relies on its interpretation from the masses and the general allure of art in any format is rooted in an individual’s personal reaction to it, seeing it as an event rather than an object. It is in this reaction that art – be it visual, lyrical, theatrical, poetic, or any other known or unknown medium -- is able to exist as something which makes our world not only more habitable, but by far also much more interesting.

In Tony Kushner’s brilliant masterpiece, Angels in America, the Valium-addicted Harper Pitt speculates on whether a man in her hallucination is truly a figment of her imagination, or her drug-addled mind’s convoluted byproduct representation of someone she has met at some point before: “I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before, and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn't be able to make anything up that wasn't there to start with, that didn't enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions….[so] when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.” Harper’s soliloquy, which occurs during a pivotal scene that shows her dissatisfaction with life and her character’s deepest emotional turmoil, opens the doors for all sorts of debate on art, creation, and the subject of originality.

According to the Bible, God was creator of the artist, the original artist, the artist formally known as “Our Father.” He created man in his own image, and he sculpted an entire world of something totally out of nothing, but was this creation something to be habitable and more interesting or was this the manifestation of his interpretation of something else? Artists of the world follow in the footsteps of their own great creator by emitting countless works of beauty, and it is unlikely that any creative endeavor is wholly inspired, planned, and brought to fruition without an artist’s speculation on what effect its subject and style will have on others and with a barrage of incidental personal aspects from the artist’s own life. Despite the magnificence that lies in the body of the world of art, one can only wonder: Are these the interpretations of a habitable and interesting world portrayed by the artist, or is it the work of an artist that makes the world a more habitable and more interesting place to live?

Writing Hiatus

This is ridiculous!

I'm always on everyone else's back to keep their journal, to take some time for them to write every day, to write about their problems, their fears, and their joys, but I have really been lazy in keeping up with my blog for some time now.

I think I need a few entries added, so I'm going to submit some of the writing I've been doing for my classes this semester.

Let's see if there are any comments in favor of or totally against this.

Too Much

Study group met today.

I look at the girls, the single mothers, and I wonder how they do it.

Chasing kids with fevers and bumps and bruises and still finding the time to read, study, and submit.

What's funny is I see them looking back at me, and I realize that they wonder how I'm doing it (refer to post from yesterday).

I came home and looked in the mirror and I wondered how I was doing it myself.

What's the first law of thermodynamics? Energy can never be created nor destroyed, only converted? Something like that.

I think it's time I convert some of my energy... or maybe just re-direct it in a better and more worthwhile direction. The good thing about this situation is I know exactly what I need to do.

Spring 2010

One Month Since My Last Post?
Well, not a month, but close enough.
Why?

...NSU Student Work-Study Position: Tuesdays 9-130, Thursdays 9-2
Vitamins Plus: Tuesdays 5-9, Thursdays 2-9, Saturdays 845-5
Anthropology 2020 - 3 Hour Credits
Biology 1160 - Medical Terminology - 2 Hour Credits
Biology 2230 - Human Physiology - 3 Hour Credits
Biology 2231 - Human Physiology Lab - 1 Hour Credit
Biology 2240 - Human Genetics - 3 Hour Credits
Enlish 1020 - 3 Hour Credits
Fine Arts 1040 - 3 Hour Credits
Nursing 2160 - Culture and Ethics - 2 Hour Credits
A Dog
Multiple Other Responsibilities
The TEAS test (the 30% component to get me into NSU's clinical) - February 26th
Study Group - Wednesdays - 1030 - Close

... that's why.