The Loss of the Creature

In the beginning Percy is talking about how people see beauty and how most people overlook what they're actually looking at. Percy is exclaiming that places, objects, and what have you lose their gusto but only becuase people don't take everything in.

Is he trying to say that you don't fully enjoy a place unless you're the first one to discover it or no one else can be there? And if the place has been found then you have to experience it in exclusion from everyone else. I understand his point, because it is true you don't get the same emotion or state of aw when someone else is there trying to experience the same thing you're trying to experience.

I don't understad why he uses so many parenthacies, doesn't seem like ther is really a use for them, it should just be a part of the paragraph.

This essay reminds me of the essay Ways of Seeing, they go hand and hand. It talks about how people see things, like experts and laymen or how people are at a certain place changes your view.

Grief and a Headhunter's Rage (Edit)

Rosaldo's writing it easy to follow, clear and straight to the point and definitly with some passion. I can't imagine leaving everything behind and studying a culture and "to a point" living the culture that you're trying to study.

I like when he's talking about the emotion of death, the emotion that he got when Michelle Rosaldo died, ". . . she lost her footing and fell to her death some 65 feet down a sheer precipine into a swollen river below. Immediately on finding her body I became enraged. How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to fall? I tried to cry. I sobbed, but rage blocked the tears." This is amazing because I think people are like this all the time when a loved one is taken. Not only is he experiencing rage it's also selfishness. He describes it when he says "how could you abandon me?" Ultimately though, the reason why we western civilization become enraged is only based on selfish movtives. We are taught at an early age that death happens and the person dying or who is dead has gone to a better place. Unlike the Ilongot's who belief they need to release spirits by taking the head of someone, which is what they were taught through their culture.

Rosaldo experiencing rage gives a great reason as to why the Ilongot's do what they do, it's the rage inside them but based on cultural differences we deal with death in different ways. Death is a cultural issue, depending apon what you've been taught in your early childhood and have wittnesses you'll most likely practice in your adulthood.

Arts of the Contact Zone

Pratss boy learned about power and arbitrariness of money the same way I did, collecting sports cards, mine were hockey but the exact same thing. My phonics came with collecting that aswell trying to sound out the names. That was also the way I interacted with adults through playing the game and being a decent player but also from collecting the cards, I had something to talk about with them.

The Incas had no system of writing, how do you establish something from nothing? I think some of the great writers I guess would be the people who invented writing itself.

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

This essay Nietzsche writing reminds me of a philosophy textbook, deep and metaphorical.

I think he's talking about conditioning, when you're a child and one says this color is red and not blue you think that or if shown a picture then the meaning would be the same as the generations before you.

His philosophical education comes out in this essay, all it really is. Kind of sounds like he thinks the average "man" is an idiot, not sure though. It is confusing and hard to read.

Haunted America

Limerick's writing is very straightforward, there isn't too much emotion. It seems like her writing is of a textbook. I do like the part where she brings to point the reversal role of Native Americans and the Anglo-American. How at first you could look at the situation and give us the aggressor role, the non caring, vindictive, cruel person. Then with the many groups of Indians and how they dealt with they on coming white people and the cruelty they used they then were looked at as the aggressor.

Limerick likes looong sentences, she doesn't break them up with periods but uses a lot of commas and semicolons just like a lot of the other writers.

It's interesting how the American volunteers took both sides of the Indians. Some fought with the army some fought to help with the unfairness towards the Indians. Like now a-days some with the war some against our war involvement.

The comparison of the Vietnam wars is great. I heard a tactic the Vietnamese used against the American armies in terms of guerrilla warfare; an American military party would be progressing in some tall grass and the Vietnamese would throw a rock on the other side of them causing the Americans to react to the sound firing their clips and while reloading the Vietnamese would pop up on the other side. This is also the reason why they changed American weapons, instead of fully automatic, they made switches to change them from single shot to three burst to fully auto.

She gives a great point why she can't express emotion when talking about the cruelty of the Indian/American history on the top of pg 430.

Black Hawk as rebuffed in his expressions of surrender like Japan in WWII with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I guess you can see Limericks standpoint at the end of the the essay, I liked it a lot, very interesting. Most movies you see of that time now they give the Indians the cruel depiction.

States

The essay describes how he can't go to places anymore because of the violence and restrictions placed upon him and people of his ethnic background. How the community has changed and worsened in the passing years. The worsening is kind of like the projects here. They use to be grand and nice places to reside but now they're run down and overcome with violence.

He was kicked out like others as if they lost their identity but only to a point, it's like the old saying "you can take the girl out of the trailer park but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl." I know that's crass and demeaning but it makes the same point.

It's kind of interesting how someone's ideas can supercide any others and how some of the most inhumane acts and take place from them. Being kicked out of your country/town and not being able to talk about who you are or where you can from is inhumane only due to the fact that it does take away someone's histroy, their tryumphs, their stroy. If I'm not mistaken America at one point or does have a law (not sure) that you can't speak any wrongs about the government while in war. Maybe that was a blue law or in the past but same similarity.

Panopticism

Some of the sentences that Foucault say seem like runons for instance page 223 first sentence of the bottom paragraph, "in which, in which, in which" enough with it, I feel like I need a break in there.

I kind of wondering what time period he's talking about in the beginning, guess like he says it's the eighteenth century and about the plague but he kind of jumps back and forth little hard to follow.

I'm questioning his intent/views of his essay, is he a man wanting power such as this, to discipline people or just describing what discipline there is. Is he jealous of other who have the had this power?

What is with the use of number in this essay, why make a list?

He talks about discipline when and in my mind I think discipline as physical. Take Saddam Hussein, he actually killed people, friends, and loved ones just to discipline and to prove a point, and to make everyone else scared of him.

In terms of the American disciplinary system of breaking the law take American History X for example, he did three years for two accounts of man slaughter, and only did three years because his brother didn't testify against him. Is this possible or is it just Hollywood?

Utopia Achieved

I'm guessing the reason why she is trying to convince us that America is a "Utopia" is because it's not like any other country. We don't have a past or the hardships that other countries have endured, we don't have a culture or any tyrants trying to take our world over.

She is saying that everyone came over here to America because it is a new start for everyone, they were all just trying to escape their country's history like Octavio Paz said it.

I don't understand how we can be considered to be an elegant Third World. I don't understand the metaphor.

There is a huge comparison between us and in most other countries, probably all of them. We don't have secrecy in our public affairs especially when those issues deal with people of power and/or celebrities. We publicize it within our cinema and music while other countries conceal their faults and failures.

After reading her essay I can see the point of America being a "Utopia" but what is her standpoint. She stands on both sides saying at times they, meaning America, while a sentence later she'll say we, meaning in America. Whether or not she is trying to prove a point she does point out some good facts. I think the greatest one is the fact that everyone came her to start a new life, America is still very young, there is no culture, the only culture that was here, Native Americans, we killed off or are now on reservations. I guess that is what you do when you find a place were you can start completely over.

Beauty (Re) discovers the male blody (Edit)

The idea behind Bordo's protryal of men in advertisments is unique because she is discussing the same ideas that Berger was getting at. Granted the topics they are both talking about are, I think, at polar opposites (you can't compare classic art and advertisements) but the main idea of how we see things is changing.

After seeing the first two pics/ads all I feel is inadequate. Guess I'm just feeling what women have been feeling forever now.

I really overall didn't like this essay only because of how Bordo wrote it, changing the context of how somethings are said or using some of Berger's writing but only to benefit her own. She tried to bring out the same ideas but she took it from one extreme to the other; when she told us to substitue black and white in the sentence. I also feel that she put way too much of herself in the essay, I really don't care how some ad made her feel inside, seems like at parts it was written by a hormonal, adolencent girl which should have been printed in Cosmo. But maybe the idea behind her essay was to get us to look a ad's differently, maybe she wanted us feel like times are changing and we just need to get use to the idea that men are now looked as sex symbols we just need to discern what can and should be shown to the public.

It was an interesting read especially after reading Berger because I can see some of the same points but overall I discredit Bordo for putting herself into the essay way too much, she definitly made it personal.

Our Secrets

I don't understand yet why she brakes off and talks about biology and military weapons. It doesn't feel like I'm getting any emotion in Griffins writing, very bland and neutral, just documenturing.

In the second full paragraph on pg 317 Griffin talks about the on-going debate of nature vs. nurture. i don't think nature has anything to do with the genetic make up of someone. Everyone makes a choice, what they do or don't do, but your experiences in life influuence you one way or another. I like how she also brings up the fact that we change who we are based on other people, like they saying, "everyone wears a mask."

She talks about her childhood, I'm wondernig if she is trying to compare the strict rules of her childhood to himmler's. Himmler was obviously conditioned in his childhood to judge people by their social class, not by who they are as people. She says reading his diary she has a hard time finding a balance in his opinion, I'm thinking that he would go back and forth because at times he was expressing himself and the other times he must have felt his father over his shoulder and he's write what his father wanted but it might have also been his because of the influences in his childhood had conditioned him to think that way.

I'm now starting to see the passion in her writing, now it's personable as well pg335. This is a very morbid essay, esspecially when she is talking about sadoism (or is masticism), maybe though I only think that way because to do those things is out of the norm. I like her psychological statement that she says, basically she is saying that if you're born into a family with an alcoholic then more than likely you'll be one along with being an abuser; verbally or physically.

pg 340 she talks about being Jewish blood and belonging to the jewish faith. i don't understand how someone can be of Jewish blood if Jewdasim is a religion and Jerusiliam is a city. I can't say I'm part English German and New Jersian, I don't understand.

The compassion he has for the executors is sickening and it's only because he saw them "in action," he had a different picture as to how people would die.

There are so many stories in this essay and so many psychological philosophies and questions behind alll of them its overwhelming. i was still trying to extract all the info and understand Himmler that I can't even concentrate on Leo and his sexuality and his secrets.