Initial Response: Haunted America

I like this essay a lot, but I am really sick of reading about the Native American/white settler conflicts...I mean it's taught in every single class, especially anthropology...American anthropologists never get sick of talking about it. I've heard every angle, I' ve actually read pieces on the Modoc war specifically. Frankly, I get it.

This essay was a little more interesting, or at least, like a few others I've seen, gives a better perspective of what was happening as a whole. I've had a few clashes with one anthropology professor in particular who really likes to make whites at the time look like insane bloodthirsty animals and the Indians back then as the noble, understood, but softly yielding to their harsh fate kind of Saints. Ridiculous. Basically some really horrible things happened on both sides due to larger mis-interpretations, cultural flaws, a general failure to "get along" and the numbers/firearms determined the winners. Also, if you're going to champion the cause..sure let's learn from the past, but what about current Native Rights battles? Write about that...something we actually can change. Sign a petition for the Native Claims Settlement Act, support the cause, man!

One thing I do really like is the short, simple style with the obvious comparisons, no hidden messages really. I've always felt that "unbiased" is impossible...enthnocentrism is present in every single thought you have and always in some way will be. Those universal truths may be out there, but because our perception of them is not guaranteeably a "universal perception" it won't happen...but considering that, relatively, this piece was unbiased. That sounds stupid really as I re-read that, I'm just saying the writer did a better job than most people at obtaining an entire view, but my judgment of that is based on my own ethnocentrism...so screw it. Nevermind, but I felt good reading it...didn't feel like I was getting a pitch really, until the end a little bit. Oh, and like the rest, it was too long. Are writers writing shit so long to discourage people from reading it who might otherwise have absorbed the idea and moved on, but instead got bored...to purposely keep it esoteric by making essays like dungeons you have to maneuvre?

I'm not sure if every Indian war would fall under his patterns, but a few I could think of have the same consistent themes....all that really tells me is that you're dealing with the same two cultures interacting though, and the writer doesn't really draw much further from that so you're kind of like "well, that was nice....what's your point?"

He does get into the mindset and the miscommunications, and all the difficulties that come together to make horrible atrocities happen. It reminds me of a Steinbeck chapter from Grapes of Wrath where he's talking about "the machine" as a metaphor for the bank, or really any large group of people, and how their ideas get misconstrued amongst themselves as the unit as a whole makes decisions, and groups of good or at least alright people end up doing bad things, in that case foreclosing on people, upsetting and abandoning the economy as a whole to make sure they (the banks) are okay.

Initial Response: Panopticism?

Wow, I've heard such good things about Foucault, I've read some of his other stuff that was recommended to me...his writing about how we shouldn't be obsessed with authors and their works should be static and unattached to the author's name...it was really intriguing. After analyzing his actual writing style and structure though, it's kind of annoying. He's really literal, there's no personal feeling in the writing whatsoever, just sort of a dry narrative, and it's so drawn out. I guess that's the really cool thing to do, use lots of obscure references, big words, crazy sentences that require a dictionary to get through, and slowly tie in a bunch of different points. It could have been summed up, I think, with a basic overview of the panopticon, the belief system that goes with it, and how that belief system is present in prisons, churches, schools, hospitals, quarantines, police systems and other crap. I mean that's all I really got from it that he was saying, plus 4,000 extra words.
At some points it kind of sounds like paranoia, the similarities are a bit too much of a stretch to really buy his point, also. I'm not really sure what else to say about it...it's wordy, a good point I thought originally...but now I kind of think he's just a tad bit silly and a lot of a talker. He's verbose, I guess, which sucks because he's so monotone...I can't imagine how boring the lectures he would give are.

Initial Response: Beauty (Re)Discovers the Male Body

Well to start: it'd be nice if authors left jokes out of essays. It feels like you're reading a magazine, and they're typically not very funny (well I guess that's debatable, I don't think they're funny thouh).
I enjoy the topic, not the writing style. It seems like you're reading an interesting topic being kicked around in the head of a ditzie blonde stereotype. However, it is easier to read and pay attention to than many of the other pieces. I think it's because of her lack of use of esoteric jargon and rigic, old-school "trying to sound brilliant" crap. It's nice to have some straightforward writing. I think that sums up my main writing philosophy. Probably because I'm so tired of pretentious debater's and philosophy major's semantics. Their trademark nasally tones come to mind when red "intrinsic entropy playig a suitable parody to one f nature's many paradigms."
I have to disagree on one not-so-relevant part of the essay. Inbasic classes like Physical Anthropology 101 we covered male mating displays in hominids and other species closely related to humans. She assumes because she doesn't know about it, or it isn't mainstream knowledge, that no one is talking about it.
Again with this essay, too many generalizations. People want hard answers, I guess. Statistics are the only other option (apparently?). It's disconcerting.
Yeah the parenthetical substitute "blacks or whites" on 177 is ridiulous. It's like saying "try adding not to the sentence and see the change."
I'm not sure what sort of change she is pushing for or what her major point is. If it's that we need more naked or sexually represented males in our culture, culture will take care of that. Kind of pointless to point it out.
As for the Calvin Klein part it would be more interesting for me to discuss Klein's marketing genius (I mean they're still the same briefs they used to be, but he realy did change things). And the ads were controversial, I remember hearing a lot about them at the time, but they somehow did play to both heterosexual and homosexual males. The subtle joke part the homosexuals get when watching it was very interesting. I mean they don't overtly play to heterosexual males, I doubt they were like "yeah wow he looks good." They probably noticed female's reactions to the ads and realized it might be a good idea to make the switch.
It is good that people can look at the male body as sensuous and overtly sexual nowadays. I remember Elaine from Seinfeld saying, "the male body is utilitarian, it's like a jeep." Kind of an understatement of the male body's potential, but still a very common belief. However, I'm still not really sure why she write so much about it.
The fragrance ad clip was hilarious. I emailed it to a few friends. Delightful.
This essay certainly goes on, I think authors are embarrassed in front of their colleagues to publish anything under 20 pages, or maybe it's pressure from their publisher...I don't know, they should focus on just getting their point across, done.
Then she references too much damn pop culture and again I feel like I'm reading something in Cosmo...this probably was originally published in a magazine. At least it's pretty good for a magazine article.
She does a poor job in her "cultural perspective" part, very thinly hiding that it's from her perspective of culture and then back to the main topic. Then she sort of slowly meanders over to the topic of African Americans, which could probably have been saved for a seperate essay, but why not throw it in I guess.
I really zoned out most of it past that, the essay ended with me sighing and shaking my head..maybe I have too short of an attention span.
Also, I had no clue until I read this that there is such a thing as a gay theorist? What does a gay theorist do? Theories of impact/origin/change in homosexual subgroups? I want that job.
In conclusion, this essay made me want to go to a gay bar tonight...that's about it.

Initial Response: Utopia Achieved

"America ducks the question of origins..."
I've been reading Lies my Teacher Told Me. I've learned from that book that America affectivelyl defines its history with a few bullshit lines about how great things were. I disagree when he says we have no past and no founding truth; we have one, it's just a distorted one (some notion similar to: George Washington and some other rich white guys were just sick of all the oppression so they decided to make their own slave state to stop the evil British fascists and love freedom forever).
That said, I hate generalizations, and this guy uses about 10 per sentenece. So many I wonder if he has the audacity to sum up te universe in a paragraph like so many ridiculous philosophers. I hate this lack of focus on individuals, ignoring the exceptions, because as people liks this often say: "there are always exceptions to the rule." A strange phrase, because it is used to ignore something because it is constant, omnipresent, as the phrase itself claims. Why ignore something that is always there? Either way, these people steer themselves off topic by summarizing cultures, histories, events, governments, and people in one sentence. These people are idiots <--irony.
Maybe its sa cultuar dissimilarity, but I find it hard to accept his point. How is it remotely possible for America to have a "zero culture"? We go to shops, Wal-Marts, whatever. There is culture there. Sterilized, corporate culture is still culture. To say we have no culture is a great insult.
I think he's doing more of a persuasive essay here, because he rarely speaks of any of contrary points and only briefly acknowledges them.
One part, early in the book, page 111 I think...when he says Americans negated colonialism, shows a slighted understanding of American history, which is rife with colonialism.
Also, when they say Why America was created was because we wanted to escape from history" is a little ridiculous, and my friends often accuse me of being too abstract. There's no psychoanalysis necessary to figure out why they made America. It's a large "unclaimed" (save the locals) area full of natural resources. That's keeping in mind largely Maslo's heirerarchy.
I chuckled when he said Europe owns surrealism. They can have it. He's right about one thing, if he's to exemplify the collective thought of Europe, they are outdated in their thinking. But I won't say that because I loathe such generalizations (I believe I mentioned that).
I do like the little bit about statistics, but that doesn't do much to redeem the piece.
One clue to why this piece sucked, may be when he dates the piece to the Reagan administration era, when people may have actually believed this crap about America (probably even more likely for a non-America to fall for it).
I got so bored in the middle of the essay I breezed through like three pages without realizing what I was reading. Then it ended...thankfully.

Initial Response: Grief and a Headhunter's Rage

I like all the anthropological terms. I immediately recognize this is not a typical anthropological research paper, but more ofa n essay. The author takes free reign to make some conclusions about the society through a blatantly ettic perspective, labeling himself anthropologist (ethnographer, whatever) and his subjct: the headhunter. I prefer more integrated responses, like Franz Boas said: "To understand a culture one must live one, thus, we will only be able to fully understand the culture of our own upbringing, and some might still argue not even fully this culture. How, then, should I view a colleague's writing of antoher culture but as one culture, foreign, presented through the distorted lens of another culture, my own...describing to me what I most likely feel myself toward that culture. A culture of people, who, undoubtedly, are looking back at us."
I probably got the end of that quote wrong, it seemed to end more smoothly, but the point is basically not to tell me what an American trained in the discipline of anthropology thinks about headhunting. He does a better job later of getting a more emic perspective. I wish he'd focus more on some of the linguistic aspects of the Ilongot, which he seems to know a lot about.
What simple and circuitous thinking these people have: Kill people because death makes you sad. It's like suicide, that mentality of complete self-destruction.
This is certainly more of an essay. Also, I hate titular lines (pg 589, par. 2) in essays, movies, pretty much anything. I realize very well I'm a biased, ethnocentric person, and culture anthropology adheres strictly to the tenet of cultural relativism.
Anyway, the murder-solves grief mentality reminds me of the mentality of early Middle-Eastern tribes where when a member of the tribe was killed, the tribe would retaliate by killing a member of the offense-committing tribe. A member... not the person in specific who killed the member of the victim tribe. As both tribes were of this same mentality, they would continue to retaliate to each other in this way endlessly. These were the same people Muhammed converted, and in this essay, too, the people consider Christianity as an alternative to their murderous ways. It's hard for me to realize that religion also prevents murder, but in some cases it's true..
The part where they can't watch the tape of the celebration is sick when you think about it. The people miss murder, not just murder, decapitation, they look back on the days when they used to kill random people as good times.
The author later shows relative unbiasedness, which is good, he makes little attempt to cover for the Ilongots.
I've heard enthnogaphers havea difficult time with the Phillipines because of the island-structure and repeated invasions, lack of written history, it's hard to understand the many different types of cultures living within a relatively small area. I, however, picture planes dropping anthropologists off over little ocean islands, parachuting into little villages with their notebooks and corn cobb pipes, guffawing and jotting down notes about the "primitives." Theodore Roosevelt considered himself an anthropologist, he liked to lead charges against third world countrie's denizens.
The reference to his thrilling book was almost entirely too enticing...
This is a good example of how any culture's goal, no matter how insane, is made acceptable, simply because they all participate. How crazy is it to cut off people's heads? How crazy is it to study the people who do and then write about it?
I like the quote "cultural force of emotions"
The end of this essay was confusing though, the 'summary" I figured would have more to do with grief or headhunters than enthnographers. He should've made it more clear he was going to try to point out a flaw in the way the field work is done and titled the essay "The Ethnographer, the Headhunter, and the Grief." Kind of a lion, witch, wardrobe sort of thing.
I can almost understand this change from the eerie, visceral murder-based society; now suddenly coping with a murderless society.
"the failure to perform rituals can create anxiety. " One cuture imposes a rule on another culture, the epitome of ethnocentrism. The stronger culture says, "kill and we kill you," "pray and we kill you."
I like when he brings himself into the writing, admitting clearly he is not writing a typical piece, preserving his street cred. Also, there's a major change in the feel and tone of the essay after he does bring himself into it. It seems like that starts the ball rolling. I also enjoy how much anthropologists, as much as other disciplines probably, end up studying each other more than man.
Methods are necessary, but I wish there was some way to overcome this tendency to become too inverted. "the twin vices of ignorance and insensitivity." I personalize with a lot of his descriptions, indicating that he may be a better writer than many anthropologists.
I think that, as the classic "stages of grief" indicate, these Ilongots are not really focusing on any of the other emotions, just the "rage."
I also, as he says on 594, disagree with this bullshit and anti-individual mentality of "basic human nature" denying the incredibly large scope of recorded human behavior."
Strange at midway through he tries to reclaim his piece as an anthropological paper..right before he makes the genius move of trying to bore the hell out of people with terms that I don't even recognize and I'm majoring in th field. He quotes some of his colleagues no one cares about...and then the confusing summary.
Oh, also, holy shit these people actually just go out in the forest and wait for some stranger to come along, decapitate them, and then they feel really good? Wow...

Initial Response: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

I'd already read this piece, but it was a while ago so I decided to re-read it anyway. I'm a fan of Neitzsche, I've read most of his work I think. It's hard to write about someone who you like, it'd be kind of pointless if I was just like, yeah, I agree with him.
One thing everyone notes about Neitzsche, noted in the autor information ere even, is his friendship/role-dance with Wagner and his religious upbringing opposed to the turn he took against religion.
In debate in high school I once quoted Nietzsche (I should've known better to quote anyone), my ribal retaliated stating that Nietzsche was an archetype of the rebellious teenager who happened to be a genius. It made me look bad in debate.
People often misinterpret Nietzsche in that way, (there are a lot of other ways they mis-interpret him, though, for instance Hitler looked up to Nietzsche, that doesn't make Nietzsche bad, though). A lot of his ideas are fairly basic, rooted in cultures of prehistory. Especially in his Ubermensch theory, he sort of denies the value or positive aspects of society's change.
A lot of this, I think, stems from his cultural background. He tends, in his formal writing, not to present his entire thought process, making himself appear to deny or inadequately attempt a holistic approach.
The obviouscontradiction, one of my least favorite aspects of Nietzsche, and all of those "knowledge is pointless" writers, even Plato, is that they are denouncing something that they claim to have, touring around, giving lectures on it even.
His upbringing (Mid-late 1800s Germany), kind of a seedy place in time, also definitely affected his writing, but I won't really go into that.
A counter philosophy, or thought, is that philosophy should start with analyzation of the self before moving outward, which is not, that I knwo of, present in Nietzsche's work. He always seems to view himself as the only person who can move in and out of the cave (Plato's metaphor) and uses this ability to go harvest great knowledge then come in and complain to the people still standing around idly inside the cave.
However, the man is a genius with a lot of insightful writing.
People who are his fans, also, usually view Nietzsche as some sort of "really together guy" who has it all figured out, but almost everything I can see in his writing would say that he's sort of a neurotic, embittered, and later in his life, painfully tortured man (when his eyesight failed and he wasn't able to partake in his beloved sport of reading). He's also often pushing the reader away. Seeming to insult the reader, causing the reader to either want to elevate themselves to his level, or deny his writing entirely. Still, most of it is written in such a high-handed way, he's denying passive readers, or people who just can't read and are probably kind of idiots, he's immediately denying them from his writing.
I just got interrupted, I'll write more later.

Initial Response: Our Secret

I don't usually like it when they title essays, books, movies, or stories about one thing they talk about or one little part of the whole, but I like the title of this one. To take some from what we talked about in class, she uses a lot of obvious comtrasts when going back and forth between the italicized parts and the "story." The isolated quotes by I think Schreber? The pedagogue, I believe a doctor, who had the fucked up views about raising children. Those quotes anyway, do a really good job of villainizing the character, who probably was just a horrible guy, I didn't really get a chance to look into it.
This piece shows how slowly and steadily the country, at least the German nationalists, went insane and led the country to insanity, one of the worst atrocities of man, certainly the most clearly remembered and recorded one of our time.
I like this quote, also, "...the nature of the material world frustrates our efforst to remain free of the suffereing of other." A lot of parts of this are truly disturbing. I like that she recognizes that their childhoods were probably a part of their insanity, there are a number of things that led to the Nazi party's interest in genocide, so there's no one answer to the question "What could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death?"
The first World War and its horrors, the Germans seem almost like they're looking for their old sense of pride...they're paranoid, thinking Jews control all of these secret police organizations and economies. The linguistic aspects of relating Judas to Judaism.
I like how she sweeps into the comparison of her own father the racist, pictures him as lonely, in a dark room, with complex emotions he can't articulate or himself understand. Then his blind rage and retiring into an expent "fog," maybe symbolizing that he himself is "spent."
The essay dulls down a bit as she talks about photographs, as she herself said Himmler isn't a very solid, defined person, but sort of a collage of opinions with little relation to each other, I don't get the feeling while reading the piece that I'm getting to know Himmler any better.
I really pity these poor repressed people of this time and country, their childhood sounds horrible, their careers disgusting, and their deaths seem like the only brightspot (I've read some other stuff about Nazi leaders).
The missile metaphor is a bit of a stretch, but she does do a good job of keeping these various stories and metaphors tied together, even tying it into her own lie and the similar conditions of 1950's America, possibly relating McCarthy to Himmler on 332 (not a far off comparison).
I think she's pretty on target when she asks if the Doctor was actually afraid of children. I think the Nazis were just terribly afraid, pathetic people beaten into this condition by repression of themselves, denying themselves. They hated themselves because they feared themselves, hence Himmler's dismissal of all the physical qualities he himself had, and the (creepy) admiration of the physical aspects of people he probably envied as a child, being something of a "runt."
The bitterness of their parents at the humiliation, loss of life, social status, economic power, and culture from the outcome of World War I plays a part, also. Germany was made to feel isolated, as though no one was on their side, and Europe certainly wasn't. Europe had a clear anti-German agenda from 1918 to World War II, a poor political move that resulted in an unstable country.
The story from the woman who survived the holocaust, about way before when the little boy gets surrounded and made fun of for being Jewish, this is a good example of the neglect the situation received. There were a lot of signs that Germany was going insane at the time, hindsight is 20/20, but still it would seem obvious that their sense of nationalism was beginning to go overboard, their racism and eugenecist theories were gaining popularity, they were re-militarizing, and a major political party change occurs so there's a crazy, passionate, angry new leader. It seems like it was kind of obvious they were setting up a psychotic regime/war machine.
The middle is disturbing and dry, the most interestingpart, I think is when Himmler lacks the courage to escape, breaking down and telling the guards who he is. Maybe it was some part of a conscience in him coming out, maybe he wanted to die, to kill himself, an excuse to drive himself to swallow that pill. Maybe I'm incredibly bitter, I'm only of half-Jewish descent, and it's through my father's side, not my mother's, so technically by birth a gentile, this doesn't slant my opinion whatsoever...it would seem only fitting if it were a black homosexual who was the one who stripped him and saw his exposed scrawny body that he was so ashamed of before he swallowed that pill. He almost had to have known it would go down that way.
I wonder if it was pride or shame that caused them to commit suicide. With the Japanese, I'd say pride, but the Germans I think shame.

Initial Response: Ways of Seeing

This essay is great. Probably my favorite so far. All of the reading, but especially this, has made me really want to take a linguistics class. I’m going to take one for my degree anyway, but the part where you read the words and think about the assumptions you automatically make when looking at a photograph or picture or whatever being presented “as art.” This really does change the opinion of people, I’m sure. For instance, I typically have immediate disdain for visual art, so when I hear someone say “look at this piece of art” I immediately subconsciously put on my most pessimistic glasses and give their so-called art a look. I don’t try to hide the fact that I have disdain for art, but I’m just an example of someone perceiving something with a (possibly cultural says the cultural anthropologist in me) built-in bias.. This also really reminds me of some existential riders like J.D. who wrote “The Politics of Experience” where they talk about object a perceiving object a through a perception be it clean or distorted and trying to come to some mutual conclusion through this possibly distorted perception of one another. This stuff really seems to go nowhere, but I enjoy the philosophical paradoxes. Also he keep sit short in this essay, he’s one of those only ones who kept the essay at the length of the point he’s making and ended it. I love how he added all the pictures throughout the essay about seeing. I didn’t even notice until about halfway through, then I realized id been ignoring all the pictures and went back to look at all of them.
Few people also, I believe, truly take into consideration the differences in our perception or the assumptions we makea bout each others perception on a daily basis, in every conversation, I’m glad people had to read this for this class because this information is really vital in beginning to understand other people or cultures. Ethnocentric behavior mindset or behavior is really hard to overcome, essays like this and other research on basic and perceived differences are one good way to help you vercomet his and achieve a truly relative perspective (kind of like a cultural anthropologist’s nirvana). Reading and re-reading these sort of essays helps to drill it into your head, but it’s really an impossible goal.
Edit:
I also enjoy the part about the way we perceive art, write about it, and things are "mystified", I prefer the term distorted, but maybe that's not what he meant. He's very esoteric in his feelings and thoughts aboout a painting (which really didn't interest me).

Initial Response: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I like the style of writing, she doesn’t really seem to waste any time. I wish I had heard of this piece before, I really like it. It’s very sad, she doesn’t even need to use must descriptive narrative to make it sad. The situations and stories are so strange and horrible they make the emotion apparent. In that way she’s almost more of a historian than a writer. She simply records the truth without must writing style or tact, and although she has an obvious slant or bias, it’s a moral one.
It’s hard to imagine that someone would own someone else’s own child and refuse to sell the child to them. Everything is, as I’ve learned, culturally-based. By that, I mean, if you live in a culture where such things are commonplace, you will not object, and thus atrocities can be made commonplace by necessity of culture, althought there are few cultures where this is necessay. I suppose it was the economic dependency of the time. The south, from what I’ve read, had over-expanded, over-imported slaves, become lazy and far too dependent on free manual labor, and had no option but to abandon their lives or continue to commit social injustice. This does not justify it, but does explain it for the most part. The bright spots in the stories are almost heart-warming, whatever that means.
Like in Aesop’s fables, the morals are made clear through the actions of the characters and the outcomes. The first story is the saddest, and in saying that my least favorite and most favorite. Like a movie you love but hate the ending.
The slave’s New Years day is also a very sad little story. These parts of our history must be faced by the people, because they are so hard to face. In my social problems class, we’re reading lies my teacher told me, what I learned from this book is largely appalling, but is the simple truth of our history. People have argued with me that we should not teach this to people as it doesn’t promote nationalistm. I’ve said we should live in a country that deserves nationalism.
This is off-topic.
The troubles of girlhood story is probably my least favorite, a little strange and pointless.

Initial Response: Achievement of Desire

Same problem with generalizations as the other essays. So many people seem to think that their experience is representative of some whole and by examining their own lives they can find some sort of system of grading or classifying every other life. It’s obviously not that simple.
Is this what we’re supposed to do for a personal essay? I’d feel strange talking about myself so much when there’s so much to learn from external sources, but I guess I’ll try to relate this to myself.
I went to school at Borah High School here in Boise, and Garfield High School while I lived in Portland. Now both of these are fine American schools, but both are, for their area, the “troubled schools.” Troubled with low tests scores, drop out and pregnancy rates, fights, and such. A suburbanite’s nightmare. At both schools i had a lot of Mexican-american peers, I saw a lot of them put forth so much effort at something that was so easy for the white kids. I’ve thought about the stark contrast between their home life and school. I’ve seen Mexican immigrants here have their young children translate for them. It must be strange. The young child with a knowledge their parents don’t have. The parent pacified by this as their child learns and is allowed into a new world in a way they never will be because we can change their kids to be enough like us that it’s okay. But they, the parents of those kids, will always be outsiders.
Back to the essay at hand:
He seems to like to think of himself as a man with tact. The part where he discusses the silence between him and his mother reminds me of an episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete, where they discuss the mid-early teenage rift that grows between children and their parents. An awkward area where the child doesn’t know whether or not they can agree with or support their parents anymore, maybe they don’t know how to explain that they’ve changed, or been changed by the things they experienced at school.
Another motive he doesn’t cover for his “scholarship student’s” desire to achieve is escapism. Whatever the books and learning represent, they are an escape from where he was or is.
I wish he would talk about his mother and father’s stories more, they honestly seems a lot more interesting than his. It is sad when his mother gets demoted from her job with the governor over such a ridiculous mistake, but the father’s story is especially sad. I have a theory that people become broken like colts until theyre okay with the mediocrity of their lives. You can almost see this happening to his father, when he stops speaking of being an engineer.
For some reason when I read the part about losing his diploma and his father finding it, I pictured the father actually just taking it. I mean who loses a diploma? Especially the academic-obsessed.
I’m on page 576 and I keep zoning out. He’s just been reiterating the same crap for the last two pages. It’s like he’s trying to find the point he’s going to make by rambling and hoping something comes up. I definitely don’t like the essay. These guys need to look into the concept of brevity.
His writing style is pretty bland. His paragraphs though are aimless. I don’t even really see the point in his dividing it into three sections, because they all seem to cover the same

Initial Resposne; Houdini's Box

Feeling like I'm criticizing all the essays, maybe it's the essay format I don't like, but there are quite a few essays I enjoy, especially Aldous Huxley and Nietszche. The Nietsche essay in here is good. I don't see the difference really between essays and short stories. At the beginning of one of the essays or maybe the author bio, I can't remember which one, they said "short-story styled essay. Initial response: "what?" Speaking of initial responses, I'm not even actually finished with Houdini's Box...hold on...okay, done.
The intro anecdote is awesome. It reminds me of Dostoyevsky's little play dramas where characters seem to be obvious symbols but in the end there's no clear message.
Maybe they're saying...nevermind.
I like this essay, actually. I didn't halfway through, I read it too fast, too much caffeinne from work (I work at Moxie Java).
I like over-analyzation. If you look at mancala, just like he initially looks at hide-and-seek, you could find some deep meaning in the mathematical, but 'chaotic' movement of the stones controlled by some unknown hand.
Edit:
This part I wrote as I read through a second time. I guess he's just trying to relate to Houdini's concept of escape with the initial story about the girl, but through the "psycho-lese" as I call it, "Freud-talk" maybe...his link between the two is not too obvious, maybe he doesn't even have one. I'm not sure.
I like the concept of "personal religion," the way he phrases it. Saying Houdini's idol or god was the performances he did, not himself.
Sttrange when he notes that Houdini's performances were literally death-defying. I picture Houdini flipping off the grim reaper and running away.
Typically over-psycho-analyitically he reads too much into the metamorphasis, a neat trick that almost instantly comes to mind when thinking of accessible "magic tricks", at least for me. The person swap comes to my mind and it seems like the person would obviously be his wife because most people would probably think Houdini's crazy, and as they said this was the trick that made him famous, so he wouldn't have much credibility to work with.
There may be some unconcious sexual thing working around in the brain when watching him tie up his wife, but analyzing a random crowd of people from the past watching a show seems pointless.
Sidenote: re-reading my writing, try to avoid quotes.
This part about myths and their origins is really good, I applied it to a few different popular myths and found it true except for soem of the Hawaiian and japanese myths.
Houdini's quotes are probably the best part of the essay, which leads me to believe Houdini is one of those peoplle who makes anything about them, even written about them, seem interesting. The best quote, my favorite anyway, is "Eventually, one sinks slowly into the habits of the country in which one lies, and I know my work suffers."
I hardly trust historical texts and biographies, it seems like if you dig through someone's life or the past and present pieces ou can make them into anything you want. Hellen Keller was a socialist but no one knows it.
So you have to knowt he author, its hard to meet the author, so you have to read their work, maybe even their bio? But who writes an author's bio? Probably friends, colleagues, who can hardly be trusted. Oh, and this essay is way too long. He chose the topic well, but it unravels really slowly.

Initial Response: In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

Didn't think I'd havemuch to say about this essay, but I looked into it a bit. I can't really say that I like it, personally, but it is an affective style. I think it's all the generalizations used. I've always been of the opinion that a generalization weakens any argument. Almost any collective description of any people is flawed...I say almost, but actually every single one I've ever seen is. You just can't define the situation of a gender, a race, and a hundred year period that easily.

I did, however, learn a bit. We all know, or assume to know that slavery is horrible and strange, but sometimes these things really strike you and weigh you down for a bit. I didn't really like how much she focused on Phyllis Wheatley, who, as it turns out, isn't particularly interesting, but her life story is fairly average for a slave. It's strange to think that her name, like most of those people, wasn't even their own, or even a representation of their own culture. Phyllis was apparently the name of the ship they sent her here on and Wheatley was her ownter's last name.

Initial response: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

I've got a lot of bad things to say about this piece. Geertz is an old-school anthropologist...the kind that should be obsolete. He wants to sit around and take notes on a culture like an olympic judge and then hold up his score. There's a hundred possible reasons the Balinese originally distanced themselves from him, but I'd put my money on the fact that he distanced himself in his approach to the culture. It's almost nerve-wracking when he briefly notes all of his other studies on the Balinese, which are probably far more interesting, before returning to the subject of cock-fighting. Cock-fighting isn't even specific to the Balinese culture.

Also, he's really not funny. I feel like, at the end, I don't know anything about the Balinese. I feel like I just read some fairly "sophisticated" piece of obsolete anthro-trash. I'll write more later.

Entering into the Serpent

Difficult to follow...I enjoy it in the same way as the other one, learning about the change of a culture. The contrast between the beliefs presented and my own views as shapped by my culture and experience are huge, though.

Stranger in the Village

This was my favorite of the essays. Baldwin's simple writing, simple concept really display people's fear of the unknown. The "custom" of buying African people to convert them is truly bizarre.

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

I had to re-read some parts of this essay. I found a few parts interesting. The merging of two languages is something I'm fascinated in. Reading this definitely inspired me to sign up for a class in anthropological linguistics if BSU offers on. I'm also planning on taking Spanish next year. I had no clue there were so many dialects and branches of Spanish just here in the US.

Eductation of Henry Adams

I enjoyed the preface more than the rest of the essay, but I've read some Rosseau before and really enjoyed it so maybe it was just the quote that won me over. The text is kind of dry seeming, but I thought the author kind of passionate in his distaste for formal education. The author also comes across as cynical, speaking with a lot of vague negative generalizations about people.

I really enjoyed the style of writing, although it was sometimes a little wordy. The ideas were presented and immediately an example or some form of evidence backing them up followed. The distaste for mediocrity is very apparent in his describing of the main character in the first part, especially describing his writing (maybe he was insecure about his writing or unhappy with the person he was in college).

I enjoyed each entry tying in the political themes. It was difficult to really understand Adams's thoughts on education. It seemed like he was saying education isn't possible.