Killing Us Softly

In the video we saw Jean Kilbourne talk about how the media is portraying women. Her assesment in ways is correct, the subliminal messaging being put on young girls about how they should look can effect their lifestyle. However she completely misses the fact that women "supposed" to be skinny has been around since ancient times and has been a status in our culture forever. We cannot trace the origins of these effects in just this time period. She instantly assumes that the advertisement is causing the genetically honed NEED to be perfect. Of course the argument can be made of who decides what perfect really is. Is it the population that decides? Or one individual? But that is a different topic entirely.

She brings up the issue of abuse against women that has been brought on by advertisements. She states that showing men in more powerful positions and as more agressive. However, we all know younger men are pumped full of testosterone which increases violent activity. This is not advertisement which is causing people to become more violent, but a natural reaction of men. Once again this has been around for hundreds of years and she is trying to make an insignificant connection to advertisements. Most of these advertisements with women are portraying women's products. Why would a man want to read about a product he will never need?

Some of these connections made are far-reaching at best and can be counted out. This is only one person's opinion. Every scientifical discovery ever made has to be backed by numerous sources and repeated again and again.

I am the messenger.

I have been assigned to the book "I am the Messenger" by Mark Zusak. I have since finished the book but will attempt to not give anything away. This book is an extremely easy read with simple vocabulary and an easy linear plot to follow. The book follows a 19 year old boy named Ed Kennedy. It starts with him breaking up a robbery and then receiving a card with three adresses on it. He begins to find that these adresses are real places in which people need his help, and so he begins to help people all over his town. Ranging from getting some shoes to helping a women from her husband.

In our lit circle, we found that Ed reminds us quite a lot of Holden. Not so much that he hates everyone and complains about everything, but more the fact that he doesn't have very many outside connections with friends and family. He has only three friends and his dog the Doorman. He is a 19 year old who wrote his age as being 22 to be able to drive cabs for his job. He realizes in the book that he's probably never going to amount to anything and he lives with that. However we find as the book progresses that he has a purpose.

Choice novels

So we have been introduced to the idea that we will have a choice novel to read and think about. However, my classmates and I have been led astray by our leader, for the "choices" of books are among a predetermined list that must include our decision. Therefore in essence we are not really choosing which books we read but being told we have to read a specific book from the predestined books. I am not so much angry at the choice of books we get because they are fairly decent looking books, no, I am angry at the misleading that has been put onto us by giving us the "choice".

Persepolis

And so I begin my first graphic novel. I must say going into this I assumed that the pictures would merely slow down my reading and that I would be unable to focus on the plot and details that are happening in the book. But I find that the pictures do not bog me down as expected, but rather they make me read faster. However, this increased speed is beginning to make me wonder if I am missing some of the key factors of the story due to just skipping over them.

I almost prefer reading graphic novels the more I read into Persepolis. It feels as if I do not have to think about what the writer is trying to actually say to us and I can see what they mean. With this graphic novel I could merely look at the picture and still understand the concept of what the author is saying.

Monologue

For this monologue I will be taking the voice of Zero Punctuation. He is a video game reviewer who swears (i will not include that) and creates random metaphors and similes to show how much he dislikes almost every game he reviews. Some of the language that follows is still slightly vulgar and do not think that I actually think this way for I am merely copying his voice. Enjoy

So recently after years of listening to you half-wits out there going on about Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens being one of the best books ever I decided to review it, actually more realistically is that Academic Decathlon decided to leave the burning pile of dog crap in a bag on our front porch so I had to read it. This book was supposedly written about how London and Paris were in ways parallel or something during the French Revolution, of course this was told to me later because the actual book just switches scenes back and forth between each city and we are supposed to assume there's a reason to his mental ramblings. For the first two segments or "Chapters" of this book the reader is literally sitting around with their fingers up their butts wondering when the writer is going to get off his bong and start making sense. For it seems that the writer wants to make sure you know every insignificant character's entire family history and their life story, taking two pages to talk about the man who came in, said "message" and then walked back out of the darn door. Then you never see that character again in the god forsaken book. Now it only gets interesting in the third "chapter" when the French Revolution finally gets rolling and starts to involve the characters a little bit more then just fleeting glances. I don't want to give away the book but the true part I liked was probably only the last 10 pages or so. Otherwise the rest of the book follows my previous description as a burning bag of dog crap.

And so you historic book lovers you can keep your Dickens crap to yourselves.

The Lavender Ladies

When Holden decides to go to the Lavender Room Bar in the hotel he runs into three young ladies lounging around looking for movie stars to walk in. When Holden arrives at the bar he wants to try and order an alcholic drink but the waiter denies him without ID. This makes Holden a little upset at the turn of events. Then he starts eyeing a bunch of girls sitting in a booth a little ways from him. He decides that he's going to go dance with the blonde girl because the others were just out of "hunger". When he actually gets up to dance with her however he soon hates her for the way she acts and thinks. Once again Holden is following the path of bipolarism that his character constantly breeches on. This is a very confusing time for the reader because he makes us wonder why he got up to dance with them in the first place. Then when he finds out that the girls are merely there because they saw a movie star there recently, he jokes one of them how she just missed the movie star walking by behind her and then thinks that that was such a mean thing to do.

This once again brings about the question, "what is wrong with Holden?". We see that he decides to go to the bar to dance and drink yet when he gets there he hates the band and hates why he even went. Then he decides to dance with girls and hates every minute. He is able to torture people with his words and chooses to do so, yet he is sorry for how mean he is to them after the fact. "What is wrong with Holden?"

Catching Catcher Fever

I am much farther into the book then I was in my last post and yet I still find that the Holden's overall character has not changed much at all. When Holden went into the city to stay in a hotel he decided that he would go down to the club. But just like him what he thought was a great idea, when he got there he just talked about how much he hated the place and how he was surrounded by phonies and all that. He sees three girls sitting near him and he decides he wants to dance with them, and yet as soon as he gets near them he hates them. It seems as if noone is up to his level, as if he is superior in one form or another to every single person he sees or meets. And at the club when Lillian came up to talk to him he lied his way away from her after saying how she was kind of nice.

Later when he got back to the hotel, the elevator guy offered him a prostitute and he decieded that it would be a good idea to get one. When she got to his room however he decided against the whole thing and just talked to her. That scene reminded me of the movie Moulin Rouge, when Ewan Mcgregor just talked to Nicole Kidman even though she was a "whore" (apoligies for language and or bad feelings to anyone). And when the man came back to demand that Holden pay more he just tried to fight him after saying that he was one of the biggest wimps in the world. I am trying to decide whether Holden has some sort of mental "handicap" that stops him from 1. creating relationships 2. allowing people to see him for who he really is, or 3. hating everything and everyone around him for almost no apparent reasons.