Website Reflection Post

Okay, so!

I was trotting away with Dreamweaver, trying my best to mold a mess of code into something actually pleasing to the eye. After a full afternoon cram session in the library, I noticed that all of my saves hadn't been copying everything over onto my M:\ drive. For some reason the folder had been carrying over, but nothing inside of it. This is when I learned that my NetDisk had decided at some point during the day that I was no longer allowed to save anything on to or take anything off of it. It just kept saying, "Access Denied." Kathleen worked to help me out, but we weren't able to recover anything. Bummer!

Once I dried my tears (woe!) I started building up my Google Site. As far as jumping into the actual content of my site, I found Google to be accommodating. I was able to doodle some pictures and toss em right up and write my blurb right underneath -- simple as that! One benefit of working in the library all day on Wednesday was being able to look through a plethora of scholarly Great Gatsby books they had available. A collection of essays on The Great Gatsby, a book of Interpretations, a companion reader to The Great Gatsby and best of all, a book of Fitzgerald's personal journal during the last eight years of his life. This really kicked me into fully realizing my website, as a satirical/humorous and most importantly, fictional addition to Fitzgerald's journal. I took the idea of looking at the narrative of The Great Gatsby through the eyes of the other main characters a little bit further and supposed that they drew their own interpretations of each other within Fitzgerald's journal. Underneath each picture, I wrote (and am still writing!) a blurb for each character using the awesome books I found as sources.

One thing that has surprised me during the process of building this website is how few internet sources I have implemented so far. Aside from a picture of Fitzgerald himself, I am using blurbs from a website called "Shmoop" (a sort of cliff notes site) to help provide broad and simple summaries of each character to build off of into a more in-depth idea of them.

I'm going to cut this a little short since I am still writing feverishly on the site! I'll toss a link here incase anyone wants to check out this work in progress.

http://sites.google.com/site/thegreateveryoneelsesite/home

"and there is a good day to write in a blog."

"The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue" is a story from Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven that really sticks with me as one of his more abstract writings -- not necessarily in content but in the way that it was described. It's always impressive when an author knows exactly which pieces to pick out of a setting so to expertly portray an envrionment to the reader. You get this impression from the very first line, standing apart from the rest, "Somebody forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA." From the onset, the reader understands the feeling of a laid-back setting; no one is strung up on missing charcoal or who's to blame.

The way the story jumps; from piano-playing to lying beneath a picnic table, to a funny note on the ground and a mother speaking profoundly to her child -- the effect being that it reads more similarly to a scrapbook than a narrative. Beyond this, there are abstract and poetic phrases inserted arbitrarily into the context that cause the reader to spend time on some lines more than others; "That Skin with the long hair leaning against the pine tree, yes, that one," (148) and shortly after, "Neither has the words to describe this but they know how to dance, yes, they know how to dance." (148) It's as if the author is working to convince the reader of something, or that a second voice is interjecting to but more practically impressing the significance of certain images. Consider the difference between reading simply, "but they know how to dance," versus "but they know how to dance, yes, they know how to dance," and one can begin to more closely understand the author's mindset and motivation. It's as though the story is forcing the reader to more heavily on their own imagination than the concrete words written within. Perhaps then, the reason that this story sticks with me is because thinking of it conjures up my own visual ideas on what took place, almost like they are my own memories. I could say it's due to Alexie being a skillful writer, but really, I blame the BIA.

Imagine Keeping a Surprise Party from Jack Bauer

While reading about the heavy thought put toward torture scenes depicted in 24, I couldn't help but constantly apply the same thoughts to how torture has been depicted in video games. Most notably, the popular Metal Gear Solid series has depicted two lengthy torture scenes within its four canon installments. The man being tortured is often put through gruesome tactics including, but not limited to; physical detainment, a black bag fastened over his head, excessive electrocution, gunshots to several parts of the body (including an eye) -- the player is forced not only to watch the torture occur, but even to participate. By society's standards, this is undoubtedly graphic, but nothing too excessive considering we watch protagonist Jack Bauer carry out torturous techniques on a regular basis. What is the difference in watching a video game protagonist utilize similar techniques? The difference in this case, is that the player isn't the torturer, but the tortured.

Both halves of the torture scene depicted in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater are here and here. Note that both clips are distinctly uncomfortable to watch and even include some graphic violence. It is also important to note that the man with the bag over his head (Big Boss) is the character whom players take control of throughout a majority of the game. He is currently being tortured so to give up information not only on who sent him (the U.S. Government) but why (to prevent nuclear warfare.) The people torturing him are unquestionably the antagonists in the narrative and the player is forced to watch them cripple the hero while they are unable to do anything to prevent it, save for rapidly tapping a button to maintain some of Big Boss' "Stamina." This scene was on my mind while I was reading Michael Brendan Dougherty's "What Would Jack Bauer Do?" and you can imagine my reaction when seeing some of the support for torture he quotes during the article. One quote from Stephen Moore was eerily comparable when he said, "'He should run the CIA [...] I love this guy. I wish it were real life. . . . This guy knows how to interrogate guys. He takes them in, shoots them in the leg, ‘Tell me where the bomb is..." Big Boss is also shot in the leg during interrogation, but would Stephen say the same thing about his torturers were he to watch both of the clips above?

A major point that Stephen Moore pulls out of the sources he quotes during his essay is how people are able to stand behind Jack Bauer's tactics because he is on our side, but more importantly, because it is all fictionalized. He ends his essay with the powerful line, "As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting." Following that logic, if people play as a fictional character carrying out torture as a means for the greater good, it would only become more riveting, right?

Not exactly. Enter again, video games. The online juggernaut World of Warcraft released its second expansion (an add-on to a current game, featuring more quests for the players to work through and more land to explore) last winter titled "Wrath of the Lich King." One of the first quests new players were able to take on included using what was essentially a cow brand to torture enemy soldiers into giving up plans for an attack. Regarding this, society's response was not as forgiving. Enraged video game developer, Richard Bartle, crawled out from the 1980s to speak out against World of Warcraft's controversial new quest;

"I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that, [...] When I signed up to play [World of Warcraft] I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting."

This raises an important question. Moore points out how many people are willing to stand behind Jack Bauer's tactics due to two important factors -- One: that they are safely within the realm of fiction and two: because Bauer himself is considered patriotic. Perhaps a third factor should be considered: that we viewers are able to stomach Bauer's tactics because they are his, not ours. Bauer is the one who shoulders the moral repercussions of stripping away a terrorist's basic human rights, not the public viewing audience. As soon as we are thrust into a fictional narrative where we are the ones seeking information, a line somewhere has been crossed and it is no longer some character's moral obligations that are under question, but our own. Moore quotes Ben Shapiro: "If torturing a particular terrorist is useful—if we engage in the complicated calculus that tells us that the benefits outweigh the harms—torture is not only justified, it is morally right.” If that is so, then why is there so much moral conflict in all of torture's nuances?

The Trick is to Pick a Nick Limerick

Tom Buchanan is as rich as a king,

But his little brain can't think of one thing,

And it really just shows,

When you break someone's nose,

That cheap shots are all you can bring.

I think if there is one thing that everyone who has ever read The Great Gatsby can agree on, it is this: Tom Buchanan is a total prick. I don't want to speak for other people, but I'm pretty sure that many of us have at one point thought up a mental image of Tom that is not unlike the above picture. It's a credit to Fitzgerald and a discredit to Tom that, within the first few pages of meeting his character, you already feel like you've known him for a long time. After reading the prompts for our blog posts, I couldn't help but start wondering how different the book would be if we had followed the perspective of Tom and not Nick.

If I really start to think about it, I imagine thousands of people reading the first ten pages of "The Great Tom" and putting it down in disgust (though I steadfastly believe that is what the title would become). For the sake of comparing and contrasting; consider Nick and what his main focuses are throughout the novel. He is freshly moved into West Egg, so that he is as unfamiliar with his surroundings as any new reader is; he hears a plethora of different rumors about this enigmatic Mr. Gatsby and he is sucked into fostering a dramatic reunion. Of course the narrative continues on, but it is mostly as a means to conclude each of these focuses (albeit grimly). The onlooker can see that Nick is a mostly level-headed newcomer who is unraveling several different mysteries along with the reader, remaining cautious and curious throughout most of it -- two emotions that the reader can certainly relate to during the course of the novel.

What are two emotions the reader would relate to in Tom? Arrogance and idiocy? Honestly, I have tried to imagine several different ways his character traits or dialogue could be slightly altered to make him more sympathetic; for example, what if we switched catchphrases? Tom can start calling everyone "old sport" and later in the book, Jay Gatsby can be the one to mock him for it. This has double effectiveness in making Tom more relatable and even villainizing Gatsby. But no, "old sport" in combination with Tom's cocky attitude somehow makes him even less likable. If, by chance, some magical author was able to make Tom sympathetic and actually endear the reader towards him, there are main, unchangeable plot points in the book that would lose his audience repeatedly. Can you imagine? "Hey, Tom is a pretty cool guy! He is fit and healthy and really knows what he's talking about from that book he read about race in the United States. Oh hey, he is cheating on his wife. Oh hey, he punched a woman in the face."

You couldn't make the reader feel more separated from the protagonist at that point.

Maybe I am missing something. Can anyone think of a way to make "The Great Tom" as alluring and fun to read as The Great Gatsby?

Moderately Wild Website

I've been kicking around a few ideas for the website. There are plenty of topics in this course that are interesting enough to base research off of, but the difficulty is trying to narrow in on what I would want the website to accomplish. In any case, my main focus is something I can throw up some sketches with or design around -- since I'm not taking a studio art class this semester, I'm anxious to try and get some creative gears turning like that.

My first idea was to design some small examples of re-written books for children, detailing actual accounts of "The Frontier." If I did end up working on this, I think it would almost have to be satirical, rather than an honest-to-goodness proposal for explaining away historical untruths to children. Either way, I would conduct some research on a handful of significant events from history and try to bring their lesser known truths up to the surface. As far as actually implementing these into a website, I think it would be fun to have caricatures have historical figures kind of leading you around the site and interacting with each other, or commenting on the content themselves. A lot of room for self-aware humor from historical characters, or re-imaginings of how they would act today, etc.

Another idea, which might not be as focused (so I probably need to keep brainstorming on it) would be to do some character profiles on the differences between historical figures, their personas and the ways they've been reinterpreted over time. This would be a much more typical scholarly approach to a website. I would be as if I were continuing my Annie Oakley post, but expanding it to cover other historical figures like Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull. I am really interested in the differences between Bill Cody the man and husband, Buffalo Bill the traveling entertainer and the legend of Buffalo Bill as seen from outside glass cases in museums; so it would be fun to break those down and examine them. There's not as much obvious room for artistic input on this idea though, which is kind of a bummer.

So yeah! I definitely need to put some more thought into it, but this is where my head is at so far.

Quick Note

For the unacquainted, this smiley face above is Talib Kweli (pronounced Tal-ib kwah-lee), a hip-hop artist out of Brooklyn (or as he calls himself, "BKMC"). It's hard not to respect Kweli for the heavy themes and messages he can work into his music; generally fitting educated thoughts on poverty, racism, corruption, economy and superstardom in his music, while keeping it relatable to the common man. While growing up, his mother was an English professor, his father a Sociology professor and his brother in law school -- come on, the guy was surrounded by scholarly thought on this stuff.

That said, I was listening to his song "I Try" (featuring Mary J. Blige) and a specific verse jumped out to me: (which has some explicit language, just as a heads up!)

"I try to navigate the treacherous waters of America's ghettos that set up the slaughterers; but there's more of us, although we speak in different languages, we're all pretty familiar with what anger is; Young and dangerous, trick a strangle is, Get up on some gangsta shit; Guns to bang ya wit', And we put it on records to entertain ya wit'"

A prominent goal of Kweli's music is to expose the difference between rappers who sell the "gangster" image and the actual tragedies that real gangsters/crime causes -- he constantly argues that neither fictional gangsters nor real gangsters should be glorified by any stretch of the imagination ("You busy screaming 'gangsta, gangsta,' all that talk is trite; you already lost the fight if you don't know the cost of life"). It occurs to me that there are similarities, then, between the idolatry of gangsters and the reverence of fronteirsman. Both groups have images that blow up big enough to overshadow their unfortunate truths and both are streamlined and marketed for mass consumption.

In a similar way that Patricia Nelson Limerick and Dickenson et. al have worked hard to impact upon us the truth behind the image of "The Frontier" and the dangers of regarding Buffalo Bill as an American hero, Talib Kweli is working to expose the truth behind the "gangster rap" genre and the real harm that can come from elevating gangsters to pop culture icons.

I might be way off base here, but it's an interesting thought to consider nonetheless!

Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

You know you're about to get into some deep, scholarly thought when the writer opens with a Cookie Monster quote. Slightly related; while I found the readings this week to be incredibly interesting, I had a lot of trouble coming up with what I actually had to say about them. I knew I couldn't just write, "This week I learned that Annie Oakley was a badass," and click "Post Entry," so I snuck into the only place I hadn't clicked on in Oakley's website; the Teacher's Guide. Out of the huge list of prompts, "Annie Oakley in the audience," jumped out instantly. How would Annie Oakley respond to how people have translated her image over time? (If I were showing the many re-imaginings to her in person, this is the point in the presentation where I would put on my bullet proof vest.)

A quick Google search will bring up dozens of Annie Oakley interpretations (dare I say, tributes?) ranging from halloween costumes, to broadway productions, to stuffed bears. (confirmed only by the badge donning Sitting Bull's nickname for Oakley, "Little Sure Shot") I chose to condense and focus heavily on a couple of examples, rather than briefly catalogue a plethora of search results. The two examples I selected are depicted above.

On the far left we have Mrs. Oakley herself, strong-willed, highly skilled, self-respecting sharpshooter extraordinaire. Instead of dolling out the same handful of facts commonly associated with her name, here is my favorite fact about her, taken from the PBS website's timeline; "...upon meeting famed inventor Thomas Edison, she has a request of her own: she wants to know if he can design an electric gun. Edison says he will consider it." How cool is that? Not only that she would think to suggest it, but that Edison would actually consider it?

Beside her are two characters from the video game series, "Wild ARMs;" a series of adventures based in a heavily romanticized version of the wild west. There are many familiar elements depicted in the games, such as vast stretches of desert, horses, saloons, and of course, Annie Oakley homages. The middle character, Virginia Westwood, is the main character from the third Wild ARMs entry in the series. The game's narrative places her as a young traveling girl, displaying a masterful control over firearms. Often throughout the game, Virginia is forced to prove that her skill can live up to the reputation that precedes her, often drawing in crowds during the display. Even more interesting is that halfway through the story, another young gunslinging girl is introduced

in the character of Maya Schrodinger, who inspires a fierce competitive spark between herself and Virginia -- this closely relates to the rivalry between Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, the 15-year old sensation who took Oakley's place in Buffalo Bill's show for almost three years.

The far right character up above is named Rebecca Streisand; the pivotal Annie Oakley homage in the fifth Wild ARMs release of the series; this hit the shelves five years after the game Virginia Westwood lead, and as you can see, a lot has changed since then. In the story, Rebecca is credited as a gunslinging prodigy, though her character is significantly weaker-willed than the no-nonsense Virginia. At this point, Rebecca's similarities to Oakley can be disregarded as a weakly maintained tradition of the series. Though the contrast between these two characters does bring to light yet another important similarity between the actual Oakley and Virginia; in that they are both fully clothed. Again referring to the PBS timeline, it states; "...in contrast to the behavior of the more risqué female players, Oakley dresses conservatively and lets her rifle do the talking," a trait that is certainly crucial to the strong image of Oakley. The only kind of powder she might have had on her face was GUN POWDER, am I right? High-five.

Needless to say, Annie Oakley is a larger-than-life character who will certainly continue to be reinvented as time goes on; whether these future reincarnations will continue to be incredibly similar or, you know, wear pink short shorts is a mystery for future generations to solve.

...has it really taken me twenty-two years to notice the racial implications of Speedy Gonzales? A Mexican mouse that runs incredibly fast and wears a comically large sombrero? Is that racist, or no? Am I asking this question fifty years later than everyone else?

I probably am – but then again, according to the facts Mike Davis brings up in his book Magical Urbanism, fifty years ago the US Census was hardly even counting Hispanics and Latinos into the population. Wish-washing on whether or not “Mexicans were a ‘race’” (Davis, 11) and even switching to some ridiculous revisions (“Persons of Spanish Mother Tongue” and “Spanish Surname”). Why don’t we just toss in, “Persons Inclined to Maybe Sometimes Refer to Mexico In Certain Situations” and call it day? If there’s one thing I picked up in the selected readings from Davis’ book, it’s the struggle that Hispanic and Latino people face in working to improve their social recognition and regard. From being wholly unacknowledged; to forcibly lumped into one large group of the same (“Caught in a no-man’s-land between ascriptive systems of race and ethnicity…” (Davis, 17) to being a part in the growing wave of the future (“The result, he confidently predicts, will be a new hegemonic global culture: ‘a Pan-American twenty-first century” (Davis, 23).

Reading the excerpt from Gloria Anzaldùa’s Borderlands La Frontera makes the first ten pages of Davis’ second chapter seem even more comical. Can you imagine trying to explain to the Census Bureau in 1930 what a “mestiza” is? I’m a little doubtful that they would have added, “cosmic race” (Anzaldua, 99) as a check box on the census. Perhaps it is such a laughable idea because it’s this same rigid, categorical structure that Anzaldua speaks out against in her book when she writes, “Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically.” This concept seems to be a difficult one for the White-American psyche in general; as I recently learned from Patricia Limerick’s criticism on Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, America was entirely founded on an “Us versus Them” mentality. There were no Anglo-Pioneers asking each other, “Wow, this land is nice, I wonder if those Native folk would be okay with us building a cozy cot by the trees over here. Let me go ask them. Do I have anything in my teeth? No? Okay, thanks,” so on that hand, it is not surprising that Hispanic and Latino peoples meet resistance, and that Mestizas fight an overwhelming inner turmoil.

This brings me back to my main point: Speedy Gonzales. As I said, this week’s readings made me consider the racial depths of Speedy Gonzales (certainly not during a time when my mind wandered while doing homework.) Consider if you will, that Speedy Gonzales is a character created by White-Americans, marketed for White-Americans and birthed from Mexican culture and stereotypes. Do you see what I’m getting at? Gonzales is both American and Mexican, he is our “cosmic race” mouse and chief cartoon mestiza representative. I knew it. Read between the lines, people! "¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!” he cries out to White-America, challenging them to acknowledge and empathize with their fellow man, “¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!"

Philosopher Cage Match!

"There is not tabula rasa" is a small and peculiar statement toward the end of Frederick Jackson Turner's essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." It is nearly a fragment of a sentence that, if focused on too heavily, can start to seem out of place in the overarching theme of the essay. Here, Turner has written an entire essay detailing the creation of a country and forging of its frontier;

"...the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative

government; into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization,"

and yet, after pages and pages, he considers it important to note that there is no fresh start. In which context he means this does not seem immediately obvious. I suspect that there are several different ways to read the idea. Is it that expansionism has spread so far that America herself is no longer "tabula rasa"? Maybe that the discovery of "free land" is, after America, no longer a possibility? Or perhaps in part of what Turner wrote, he is saying that expansionism itself is so reactionary to its "bondage of the past" that it was never an entirely clean slate to begin with.

Whether or not the latter interpretation was actually his intention, it's what really made the essay pop out for me. I began rereading what he wrote with the idea in mind that truly fresh starts in the frontier were a slightly less common experience than I had previously assumed. Shortly after writing about "tabula rasa," Turner goes on to say, "the inherited ways of doing things are also there;" enforcing the idea that, in part, the new beginning is still based on anscestral custom. Turner even appears to suggest that, to a degree, colonists are not creating America, but adapting to it, "The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions." Then what was a clean slate during the time Turner writes about?

From what I understand, the newest, freshest experience of development was the edge of the frontier, however brief. Turner writes, "For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant" and fortifies that statement with much of the essay recounting new experiences colonists had during their voyage west; be it with native Indians, dependancy on natural resources or even the spread of religion. All in all, I believe there's a snooty Philosophical debate hidden within here somewhere, arguing whether or not the act of expansionism itself can be "tabula rasa" if pre-determined factors were the motivation for it.

SIDE NOTE: There was another part of the essay that seemed out of place to me, but really characterizes Turner. About halfway through, after he has laid out some base knowledge for the rest of the essay, he writes:

"Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for."

I thought this was almost the most interesting part of the essay. (Sorry, Freddy!) Was it "all [he had] time for" because he didn't want to stagnate the flow of the book as early as Chapter I? Was he trying to squeeze this writing in between lunch breaks?

Any guesses?

3 And 1/2 Facts

1. I'm a Graphic Design Major.

2. I work in commercial painting.

3. I've stayed in Canada, Guatemala and Japan for extended periods of time.

4. Those donuts made me hungry.

5. But they were delicious.