English Rants and Random Facts @englishrantsandrandomfacts - Tumblr Blog

Exploring Politics through Art

I’m sure we’ve all been in the position where we felt like we were living the life of our favorite character on television. Maybe, you dream about being Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy or possibly someone more carefree like Frank Gallagher from ShowTime’s sitcom Shameless. Either way, there are moments where you feel immersed in the story shown on the television screen.

Yet, while those characters seem interesting on screen, they do very little to enhance our larger understandings of the world around us. (Perhaps, you disagree. That’s okay, I like arguments.) While I sometimes find myself in the rabbit hole of a Netflix binge, after watching hours upon hours of tv, I feel very disconnected from the world around me.

Huyhn’s adaptation of Nam Le’s “The Boat” offers a similar structure to a television show. (I must note: I had my features set to auto-scroll). Yet, a major difference between this interactive comic, as some would call it, and a television show, is the fact that the comic offers a commentary on the political climate of the years 1975-1995. While that time frame may seem like a far distant past (because some of us may not have been born yet), the issues around refugee emigration are still a pressing issue in today’s society. Le’s comic is especially effective in conveying its message due to its ability to immerse the audience into the storyline. The sounds and graphics used to tell the story were as effective as the methods used in Grey’s Anatomy.

What is particularly interesting about this interactive comic is the way in which motion and sound are used to create a movie-like book that takes us through Mai’s journey. Huyhn’s ability to create a platform that allows for an audience to sit back and relax while pondering prevalent social issues seems to be something that would be very effective for reaching the current college audience. The ways in which sound and images are used tell the story as effectively as the words do.

Next time you think about a Netflix binge, maybe you should tune into Huyhn’s The Boat.

The question I will leave you with is: Why aren’t there more interactive comics about social issues circulating in our current social climate?

Wouldn’t this medium be effective in furthering education about our generation’s concern with the issues around immigration, education, climate change, ect.?

The voice of change belongs to all of us, always.

#politics theboat read justice change comic

that-bookworm-guy

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ― Mortimer J. Adler

All in all...

March 13th, 2014, author Teju Cole published A Piece of the Wall on Twitter in hopes of starting a conversation on the issues surrounding immigration across the Mexican-American boarder.

In theory, using Twitter as a distribution platform is brilliant; however, reality rarely meets our expectations. While Cole argues that “[the Twitter] audience deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the paper crowd,” I find it hard to take anything seriously on a platform that actively promotes the following (And just be thankful I only found a nonsensical post. They get pretty bad):

On the other hand, while I want to be hyper-critical of the informal air around the piece on twitter, it’s hard to ignore that the shitposts and ads (as seen below) provide an interesting juxtaposition with the heavy immigration issues:

Come on, Mandy. Criminal Minds is about serial killers. It’s almost impossible not to get dark and morbid. But seriously, I started chastising myself for being interested in this ad when Cole’s essay was looming above with the line, “You have come to quite a different view of the afterlife.” Can you say “irony”?

To me, the above tweet was an eerie echo of Los Desaparecidos: those that were taken by their governments, tortured, and assumed killed during the Dirty War in Argentina. Los desconocidos, as seen in Cole’s essay, were exiled from opportunity by a government using military-like actions, a WALL. (Sidebar: if you’re interested in learning more about los desaparecidos, you should check out this play.) I had a very visceral reaction to that tweet, which I wasn’t expecting. It was the the conciseness of Cole’s wording (which was slightly dictated by Twitter’s character limit) that triggered this sea of over-whelming emotions.

While Twitter allows for us to access stories faster, evokes emotional responses (which may not always be good, per say), and connects us to powerful movements via the web, it’s hard to ignore the lack of longevity of stories on this platform. There’s a reason things “Trend” instead of last. We have to keep refreshing because there’s always a new story that is BIGGER, bloodier, and better than the last. Information gets packed down and lost in the waves.

I mean, here we are three years after Cole posted his essay on immigration to Twitter, and we’re dealing with a President that openly campaigned for the WALL. Maybe it’s time for a call to action?

#immigration #twitter #tweets #trump #los desaparecidos #los desconocidos #Mexican boarder #boarders #teju cole #a piece of the wall #another brick in the wall #criminal minds #mandy patinkin #@dril #information for foreigners #trending #news #something to think about

polcry

hello yes this is a reminder to back up whatever the hell you’re working on right now bc you never know what shit the universe will throw at you at any given moment my friend

“No beauty is really a beauty”

as Jennifer Egan’s, “Black Box”, reminds us.

In this spy-thriller, Egan gives us a portrait of a highly capable human being. It is not clear as to why this woman, this human being, is responsible for carrying out various dangerous, horrifying acts, but, supposedly, it is for love of country or, maybe, the looming expectation of her to submit to society’s will.

“Human beings are superhuman.”

This, as Egan wrote, unequivocally includes the woman. She is able to submit body and mind as a tool for using the patriarchy against itself. Too often the narrator’s imminent, incessant presence allowed the reader to feel as though the woman didn’t truly have as much say in her actions, but, by the time she ends up as a mangled heap on a boat, it dawns on you that somehow the narrator was able to downplay her bullet to the shoulder. It made me feel uneasy that I allowed myself to distance the woman from her courageous actions.

Egan chose Twitter as her story platform, and I would tend to agree that Twitter not only unlocks a familiarity for social media users, but it provided succinct, poignant statements of the woman’s endless duties that were sure to elicit a response from readers. The platform provided a sense of connection for the audience while the 140 character-limit format kept us on our toes, demanding more context.

In the portrait laid out by the narrator, the “beauty” must be, essentially, a vulnerable, submissive, simpleminded husk of a human. These characteristics, that appeal to the Designated Mates, definitely do not define the woman who took a bullet, hijacked a boat, and reminds herself that she isn’t being paid for it.

She was indeed “irresistible and invisible.” She was able to seamlessly appear as though she was barely able to comprehend the situation, yet, in the end, she succeeded in retrieving vital information for the American government.

This beauty wasn’t a “beauty” at all. She was never the docile, feeble doe the patriarchy asked her to be. She did what they couldn’t, and she won.

Tweet by tweet, Egan connected Twitter users to her message. They had the ability to engage with the text while holding her story in their hands, on their screen. As the tweets filtered in one by one, it seemed real enough as though it could be happening live. It humanized the situation, and it made it relevant to us. We got a more intimate view of this woman through our connection to our technology.

#feminism #patriarchy #black box #technology #beauty

Unfriend Hypertext

The narrator is not your friend. This has been ingrained in me since I was introduced to Edgar Allen Poe’s unreliable narrators.

Then in high school, I was taught never to relate to characters, but to read critically and actively.

Today I read a hypertext, My Body, in which I was forced to suspend active reading and buddy up to the narrator.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with hypertexts, they’re basically online stories with links throughout them. You click on a link and it transports you somewhere else (If you were born in the 90’s, ask your parents about them.).

The first thing that has to go out the window when trying to read one of these things is any concept of linear plot. Because the links in hypertexts can take you anywhere and still have to make sense, it’s hard to determine beginning and end, let alone rising action, climax, falling action.

Asking “what’s going to happen?” becomes meaningless because events don’t cause other events.

They are merely mentioned in vignettes never to be mentioned again. Gone is the ability to read actively, to make predictions.

The narrator in My Body fell off her bike and broke her arm when she turned around to taunt her siblings. As an active reader, I want to know why she is telling us that. Is the bike a symbol? Did this event change her life? Who knows. To the reader, the event could mean anything or nothing.

With no context to make critical and active reading worthwhile, or even possible, My Body tries to create meaning by getting the reader to identify with the narrator. The narrator talks about climbing trees and jumping off from a little too high up when she was a child. Hey, same. Then she says she also jumped off her house a few times. WHOA! DID THIS CHILD HAVE SOME DESIRE FOR SELF HARM? WHERE THE HECK WERE HER PARENTS?

The narrator is clearly trying to normalize something that is not normal by connecting to my experiences, by trying to befriend me and then using my trust for her own benefit.

Would you keep a friend like that?

True xx

Some days will not be as productive as others. Accept this, move on and keep working hard.

Before we reach success, we must understand it. (via fightostudy)

survivemedschool

When you spend half the night studying biochemistry and they tell you to come take the test next week, the only thing left to do is drink coffee and eat donuts :/

quotemadness

We all have souls of different ages.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (via quotemadness)

sleepin

The Death of the English Major

“Oh, you’re majoring in English.. What do you want to do with that?”

I believe I get this question more frequently than say my friends in the Engineering Department. People assume that anyone who majors in English is going to become a teacher, since that is the only future job prospects for an English major, right?

Whenever I’m asked this question, I smile and reply “.. well I’d like to become a doctor.” They then look at me like I’m a rare breed of some animal they have never encountered in the zoo of “common” major college students.

English majors who fall deeply in love with the beauty of the prose in our favorite novels do deserved to be looked at like odd unknown animals since we are a dying breed after all. But, we aren’t the only ones. British Writer Toby Lit believes “the human race is no longer sufficiently bored with life to be distracted by an art form as boring as the novel.” With all the endless possibilities for immersive entertainment, individuals today feel no need to turn inward for entertainment.

One would think that reading stories of old romance and a time before technology would excite our minds inwardly beyond our dull lives of “diligent online research and persistent emailing” that no writer “would want to write about for more than a sentence.”

But, I guess the painful reality is that we simply aren’t bored enough today or fascinated enough by the beauty of the words in a novel to actually read rather than merely scan a page. As more people uptake this scanning approach, people are failing to truly experience a text and losing their ability to even read grammatically dense prose. For these readers, “the exact sequence of sounds, the precise inflection of grammar-these things will seem prissy.”

This explains why people look at me with utter confusion as I try to explain the joy I find while reading a beautiful string of words. And, if you’ve made it this far in the blog post, you’re probably another one of us rare breed readers in the modern age.

I deeply fear the extreme effort of deceleration that will be needed in the future to neurologically access the slow-flowing sense of time required to read. Want to know my advice? Keep reading now.. even if you have to push yourself to do so before you lose the ability altogether.

-Nicole Thompson