Beijing Bicycle and a Degree of Futility

I remember the first summer I worked at Starbucks. I had taken time off school to get the job, and by May I had completed my training to become a certified barista. A bonus to having completed training was being able to collect tips for working non-training, real shifts. Suddenly, I had thirty dollars in my hand, cash. I bought a pair of shoes. They were lovely, with a silver-grey strap and a rhinestone ring ornament. And they were 100% mine, my first luxury item purchased as a working citizen. When the shoes disappeared one afternoon, I was heartbroken and angry. I found out later that my cousin had borrowed them to complete her own outfits. Bitch.

There is something about the emotional satisfaction that material items will give a person. To me, those shoes marked that I had accomplished something; their value was far beyond the twelve dollars I used to purchase them. Those shoes were the mental breakdown I had when I chose to take a semester off school, the ten job applications I filled out in December, the half-dozen interviews that were never followed up, and the three months of training I endured after finally being hired at Starbucks.

For protagonist Guei in Beijing Bicycle, this bicycle is one hundred times more valuable than my pair of silver shoes.

The opening scene of Beijing Bicycle sets the tone for the whole story perfectly. Several country boys introduce themselves by name and origin, smiling and laughing, adorably nervous. They are unique individuals trying to find a place in the world with new opportunities. Immediately following this introduction, their manager strips them of their identities and humanity by giving them hair cuts and uniforms. Now, the boys represent the company, not their own interests.

Guei does not give up the bicycle to the bullies.

Four of the initially named boys fade into the background, further emphasizing the harsh class divide as the story focuses in on the protagonist, Guei. The theme of class divide runs through the whole plot as many of the Guei begins the cutthroat dance of furthering their circumstances and is cheated out of opportunities by those above him in economic and social hierarchies.

During the manager's identity-stripping rant, the shrewd business man informs the new employees that, in order to pay for the company-issued bicycles, the company will claim an additional 20% on top of the 50% already taken from each young man's earnings per delivery. Each messenger boy earns only on commission when the pick-up and delivery of packages is complete. The steep cut in earnings breathes gross injustice on its own right, and the commission-based earnings makes a miniature shark tank within the messenger company. Not only is there capitalistic competition between this delivery company and the many in Beijing City, the Manager pits each man against each other within the company.

In his article, "Where Did The Future Go?", Randy Martin categorizes the messenger company's behavior as securitization, debt in the guise of security. Martin refers specifically to the practice of home and car mortgages; for Guei, the bicycle puts him in debt, but it's a debt that secures his job with the company. The bicycle equals work equals money equals the potential for a better life than what he might experienced in the Chinese countryside as a farmer. The messenger company's capitalism more resembles the broken feudalism seen as recent as the sharecroppers in the American South. The wealthy land owner lends land to former black slaves for a percentage of the produce; sometimes that land went right back to the plantation owner after the farmers were cut or cheated out of the land.

This enslavement of the less fortunate is not isolated to a hundred years' past or across the Pacific Ocean. Securitization is what the American economy thrives on, especially in public education. A recent poll by NPR, college graduates were asked simply the subject of their bachelor's degrees. Overwhelmingly, college graduates pursue business or medical degrees on the fundamental of securitization: will this debt or investment get me a job after I've finished? It's the butt of liberal arts majors' jokes, the potential for work post-graduation, but the issue is as real as an empty pantry. Time and money and physical prime are given to the education corporation, but what is the student going to get out of it? Worse, whether or not the student gets a job after graduation, they must continue paying for the bicycle for the rest of their lives.

"A Degree of Futility" by Austin Smith

Works Cited

Beijing Bicycle. Dir. Xiaoshuai Wang. Taiwan Arc Light Films, 2001. DVD.

Bui, Quoctrung. "What's Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 09 May 2014.

Martin, Randy. "Where Did The Future Go?" Class Handout.  

First thoughts on Beijing Bicycle

The opening scene sets the tone for the whole story perfectly. Several country boys introduce themselves by name and origin, smiling and laughing, adorably nervous. They are unique individuals trying to find a place in the world with new opportunities. Immediately following this introduction, their manager strips them of their identities and humanity, having given them hair cuts and uniforms because now the boys represent the company, not their own interests. Four of the named boys fade into the background, further emphasizing the harsh class divide as the story focuses in on the protagonist. 

The theme of class divide runs through the whole plot as many of the characters begin the cutthroat dance of furthering their circumstances. Many characters are cheated out of their opportunities by those higher up than them. 

Thoughts on Capitalism, A Love Story

In Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story, Moore is constantly highlighting the fact that big money corporations are focused on devaluing people in order to accrue profits from consumers. With labor being the largest "obstacle" between the businesses and their profits, I'm wondering when the documentary will stop objectifying people like the banks and business have done.

I'm curious to see if Moore will acknowledge the problem in the education system. How are we going about preparing kids for this apparent future where their work will be devalued?

We're sending them to college.

In order to offshore their profits, corporations need to ensure that there is no one left in the US (where the rights supposedly are) to demand places in the labor force and the livable wages they deserve. They're lucky; they have the base of the "American Dream" to build this culture on. They tell each child, "Hey, you with the face! You know what you need? College! Stay in school! For, like, ever. Get in debt. But that's okay. The more school you get means you're this much more likely to get a better job afterwards, and then you can spend the first few decades of that career paying us back, not spending the money one yourself for your hard-earned efforts. It's gonna be good."

No one wants to be a laborer. No one wants to garden. Let's even take away the rights of those who do clean and care for us by trying to deport them because those are our jobs we don't want to do.

Composer, Medium, and Message

I was in a car with a friend listening to some his favorite old school jazz. He discussed the irony of a happy lilt and melody blended with lyrics about some lovers' suicide pact. The dark side of popular music, he said. I thought about it for a moment and mentioned Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You into the Dark." The line, "If heaven and hell decide that the both are satisfied / And illuminate the "no"s on their vacancy signs / If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks / I'll follow you into the dark." It was an interesting remediation of a very human pain - the longing for connection in a big, dark world.

Professor Wexler implied that even speech itself is a form of media, our speech is a method by which a Composer creates a Message to their audience. If we are to reflect Aristole's triangle of argumentation, this assumption is clearly relevant. The Composer is the Media is the Message. An example I suggested was one's use of a personal Twitter feed. Someone may be more honest or less honest, depending on their relationship to their audience. Another student suggested that this relationship forces larger news corporations like CNN to forge those relationships over social media to remain relevant to their audience. The news is no longer in print, it's in pixels.

Discussed also were to concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy purposes to make the viewer forget the medium or form of delivery of the message. A news station might use a high definition photograph of a "disaster area" for a pathos pull on their audience. They might also attach hotlinks to the Red Cross to express urgency and reality. Hypermediacy forces the audience to mark the media of their message. The professor used the example of a Jackson Polluck painting; the message is subliminal to the method and format of the work itself.

This is a news article that uses hypermedia links to emphasize it's point. The use of hypermedia in everyday texts changes the linear methods of communication that written language has been structured on for centuries. It's rocking the boat of academics as far as what to teach students in the classroom. There is emphasis on "back to basics" using books, grammar, and work books further students' learning.

I think its the millennial responsibility to construct the future curriculum that bonds technology and text.

But the questions remain: Perhaps in future classrooms where we are the teachers, how do we work with the ideas immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation so that each term is understood? How does writing on a blog affect the written text?

Apart from formatting, I don't see much departure from academic writing in blog writing. To effectively communicate one's point of view, it's still necessary to learn the skills of rhetoric and argumentation as well as ensure argumentative credibility with grammatical strength and thorough research. However, there is stronger emphasis on audience because the audience is no longer a single bored teacher reading essays, but the whole of those with access to the internet might take up parts of an argument.

Sacred Places and the Lonely Mountain

Thank you Maya and Sean for being awesome partners in our presentation of "The Mountain of the Lotus and the Fan." The poem itself seems to be a traditional Japanese hymn based on the divinity of Fuji Yama, the never-dying mountain. Mount Fuji is a fount of traditional identity of life and death, which makes it a sacred place, as Maya explained. And Sean concluded that because of the influence the myth has on identity, this creates and shapes Japanese cultural psychology. Great effort, guys. I'm proud of our work!

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For the trickster exercise: I am Scribbles d'Hobbit, the god of craft and contentment. I am willing to sacrifice wealth and power for simplicity and peace. Easily bribed by food and wine.

Myth leaks into the Modern

Queen Elsa and Princess Anna in Frozen

I was preparing an entirely separate post regarding this, but I stumbled upon an idea that tickled my fancy more. In English 495, we were told to find a myth that had hidden itself in modern storytelling, with an emphasis on film and television. My Tumblr dashboard actually brought this modern parallel to my attention: the two sisters in Disney's newest animated film, Frozen, were said to reflect this generation's modern myth, the brothers Thor and Loki in Disney/Marvel's two films based on the comic book franchise. 

Thor and Loki are already myth retold, as myth regenerates for each new audience over time. The original Loki and Thor were part of the Norse pantheon, though they were not siblings like in the Marvel universe. Loki and Thor were often at odds with one another, Loki being the Western epitome of the Trickster figure in mythology.

Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth as Loki and Thor

In the Marvel age (now), Loki is Thor's adopted brother who, at the discovery of the adoption, loses a sense of identity while at the same time discovers his new scope of powers. He is the son of Frost Giants, with blue skin and ability to manipulate ice among other magical abilities. 

This ice ability and identity crisis are similar to the story that Disney Animation Studios decided to tell when they chose to adapt Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fairytale of "The Snow Queen." Like Marvel's Thor, Princess Anna tries multiple times to reconcile a tense relationship with ice-sister Queen Elsa.

In metaphor, it could be said that the ice-sibling represents the isolation of a suppressed identity. 

In Tumblr speak, this parallel calls for a fun costume change!

Art by Brianna Garcia

Revelations

I enjoyed today's Poetry Slam in English 495. I am thoroughly impressed by my classmates' skills with words. We found out that many of us regularly practice the craft of writing poetry, and even those who proclaimed to be amateur showed the most raw talent.

I am glad that the class as a whole took the assignment very seriously and found places within themselves to produce something more than shallow rhyme and rhythm. Jedi Jordan even brought a guitar to sing his lyrical parody poem as a song.

Lauren Bristol's "She Was There" poignantly struck my heart. The poem itself almost reads like a short story, were it not for the breaking off of phrases and the rhythmic meter. In her reading, I felt the most emotion as she read these lines:

          Tick.

          Tock.

          It was almost as if death was tapping his toe, saying

          I

          Am

          Wai-

          Ting.

          If you’re going to be here, hovering over her every breath,

          Don’t be a tool about it.

Maybe it's because this was literally me two months ago in the weeks before my father passed away. Ms. Bristol's choice to break syllables into their own lines to reflect the ticking of a clock was a very strong choice; it emphasizes the helpless battle to stop time, stop Death itself.

And, Lauren, girl, I feel you. Death's a douche.

I made the choice to not give commentary during the reading on the two poems I wrote. I feel like a well-written poem needs no explanation or should leave room enough for the reader to make the poem their own. I really hope that my words spoke for themselves.

I have No Words

I have no words for grief

I have some words for happy:
          Joyous
               Gay
                   Exuberant

But I have no words for...

I have some words for sing:
          Chant
               Trill
                    Croon

But I have no words...

I have some words for hunger
          Starved
               Empty
                     Cavernous

But I have none...
         I have nothing...
                     I am empty without you.

Sea and Shore

The breaker caresses the curve of the sandy shore
He swallows her whole then recedes, only to consume her again
Peaceful, they are together
Two shapes that fit the other
But he wears her away, gutting into her hollows
The oncoming storm

Creative Writing Class Exercise

I. Alliteration and Assonance - 10 words close in sound relation

1. Modest Mouse

2. Cool Cat

3. Dumb Dog

4. Insistent Inquiry

5. Aggravated Assault

6. Quirky work

7. Tacky Jacket

8. Lovely Lace

9. Oncoming Storm

10. Holy Roller

II. Metaphors/similes for life - List of 10 real-life events, but said in a different way
1. Conception - You are the result of the joining of stardust.

2. Birth - The slimy emergence from the dark cave.

3. First word - Her cry for momma was more like a monkey’s screech.

4. First Step - She made her panda’s wobble across the floor.

5. First Day of School - Abandoned for a journey into the big unknown.

6. Driving Lessons - Free as an awkward, fledgling newly kicked from the nest...

7. First Job - indentured servitude

8. Being in Love - head over heels

9. Breaking friendship - I lost my arm or a chunk of my heart.

10. Loss of parent/mentor - I am an empty shell, washed, worn and left on the beach.

III. Lyrics and Musicality - Find a song, a catchy song; re-write the lyrics but stick to the rhythm and meter. Off-topic from the original idea.

Re Write of Ellie Goulding’s “Burn”

“Cake”

When, when I’ve got a sweet tooth craving

I start the oven, and I bring out some sugar for icing

They, they gonna see us from outer space, outer space

Light it up, because we’re going to bake a cake, cake

You get the eggs and the flour and get ready to stir

Milk, salt, and vanilla and some chocolate powder
And it’s easiest with an electric mixer

'Cause we’re baking cake, cake, cake

Yeah we’re baking cake, cake, cake

Don’tcha let it burn, burn, burn, burn

We gonna let it burn, burn, burn, burn

Don’tcha let it burn, burn, burn, burn

We gonna let it burn, burn, burn, burn

A Grief, Observed or Embelished? - John Milton's 23rd Sonnet On His Deceased Wife

Grief is the heaviest void for a heart to bear. The esteemed C. S. Lewis poignantly pens the mourning of his own late wife, “Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the world so difficult to learn?” At the loss of one dearly loved, the one left behind must cope with the world upside down, almost a child again – a child who has to learn to breathe, crawl, and walk all over again. John Milton was no stranger to this burden: before his own death, he had experienced the death of a child, spousal separation, the death of his first wife, the death his son, the loss of his sight, and the death of his second wife. While the sonnet is largely autobiographical, through an exploration of the author’s syntax and uses of metaphor, all of Milton’s grievances and losses are dramatically represented in the fourteen short lines of his twenty-third sonnet on his deceased wife.

For his twenty-third sonnet, John Milton uses the Petrarchan or Italian style sonnet. Babette Deutsch describes in the Poetry Handbook that a sonnet is usually a non-lyrical poem (not meant to be sung), composed at the length of fourteen lines. The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet are called an octave; traditionally, an Italian sonnet’s first octave conceptually introduces a problem to the reader. The last six lines are called a sestet, and, in the sestet, the solution to the problem is found. In historical context, this formula worked best for the sharing of many ideas regarding political turmoil and leadership critique, which, according to Thomas Wheeler’s article in Studies in Philology, Milton was no stranger to. (512) Highly involved with political criticism under the reign of the elected Oliver Cromwell, Milton possesses an inexhaustible repertoire of written publications spanning from apologetic theology to this small, unusually intimate sonnet.

What makes his twenty-third sonnet separate from the rest is the complex emotionality of grief. Instead of introducing some sort of political or theological problem in the first octave, the speaker describes a vision of his “late espoused saint”, “vested all in white”. While many others might summon bumbling paranormal exterminators to rid themselves of ghosts, the speaker of the sonnet articulates desire to be close to his Wife again saying, “I trust to have / Full sight of her in heaven without restraint.” These are two factual autobiographical elements expressed: Milton’s loss of his wife (an event he experiences twice and a half) and the loss of his sight. This complicates poetry’s usual tactic of embellishing the truth. William Riley Parker observes that the sonnet was historically taken literally given Milton’s context of loss; both his first and second wives died due to complications with childbirth. (235) Parker posits the challenge that Milton might not be mourning the loss of one specific wife, but instead this is the voice of a lonely man craving the pure companionship of a beloved woman.

Eva Feder Kittay would name the speaker of the sonnet a man dependent on woman. Kittay posits that creative Man makes Woman the other, and uses her as a metaphor for to define all his life experiences. (70) She becomes “the vehicle for the self-conception and activities of man, [who is] the subject, the topic.” (66) Milton’s sonnet explores the problem of a man’s loneliness after he is separated from his wife by death. Both quatrains in the first octave begin with the speaker’s self “Methought I…” and “Mine”. The apparition of Wife is written as illusory and antagonistic. She is “washed from spot” and “pure as her mind”. The blind speaker says he can visually perceive the “Love, sweetness, goodness” radiating from her twice hidden face: hidden by a veil, and hidden by his recent physical blindness. This blindness may have a third layer as this idyllic visage is based on Milton’s proposal of companionship and marriage, as Thomas Wheeler suggests, “Milton's habitual practice in writing about real people is to present them in idealized forms. He sees in them the embodiment of learning, piety, chastity, wisdom, or whatever.” (512) The sonnet in poetry and Milton in his mind have done what dreams in every mind do: express reality and emotion in its own (and in Milton’s case, dramatic) way through metaphor. After all, poetry does not have any restriction to represent accurate facts. (511)

Most emphatic of the speaker’s loneliness is the closing sestet. As previously mentioned, the goal of the last six lines of Italian sonnet is to propose the solution to the problem built by the first eight lines. Here, again, Milton expresses his grief by upsetting the usual pattern of things. The speaker of the sonnet says, “Her face was veiled…” He is separated from this woman by death, idealistic virtue, his own blindness, and this veil that covers her face. Theordore Ziolkowski explains the history of veils in metaphor: "veils themselves bear no meaning; is is their only function to conceal that which lies behind them." (66) He talks about the biblical story of the Temple curtain, a veil that concealed the Holy of Holies from the unholy masses. Perhaps this same concept Milton reflects in giving the amorphous wife a veil while describing her virtue. His unholy, living state separates him from love, sweetness and goodness.

Eva Kittay claims that "Man identifies that which he wants and desires, or has acquired or fears acquiring, as Woman," even to identifying Woman as "Death itself." (63) This spirit of acquisition is reflected in how the speaker possessively claims his wife "Mine" in the second quatrain. Even choosing to cut off the line "And as such as yet once more I trust to have" before completing the phrase in the next line "Full sight of her" implies acquistion over spousal partnership. Thus, the true subject of the sonnet is not Milton's wife but Milton himself and the void he needs to fill with images of her. A fanciful solution to the problem of separation is brought the sonnet’s first quatrain in an allusion to Heracles’ rescue of Alcetis. If only some hero could unite the sonnet’s speaker to his virtuous, angelic spouse.

The real, pitiful loneliness of the sonnet is embodied in its composition. It is wholly the expression of void, a man who "has nowhere to live but in his mind", says Wheeler, "he has not even the remembrance of an ideal marriage, only the ideal itself which he cannot seize in the midst of his darkness." (514) The closing of the poem is far from the solution to loneliness, it is the underlining-punctuation-emphasizing-bolding-hashtaging of grief.

          "But O as to embrace me she inclined,
          I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."

Excuse me as I lose all semblance of academics but, fuck, damn, and shit. If those last two lines do not reduce you to a primordial mush of emotion and loss, we need to have a talk about pathos. Says William Riley Parker, "The last line, with its syntactical flurry of excitement followed by a dreary march of monosyllables, contains perhaps the most affecting ten words in all of English poetry." (238) This is affect of grief, expressed as simply as possible. If joy and unity is fullness, loss is so much more empty and dark. The dream, the ideal, the sight of virtue in dreams is cut off by the daytime. For one night, one dream, Milton regains figurative vision and the presence of his Wife. Daylight, usually a symbol of joy, fertility, and happiness is condemned for severing this union. Even as the poetic ideal of Wife and Woman is exclaimed for the first part of the sonnet and Milton waxes on about his full experience in loss, this last line, with its single-syllabic tone of defeat is completely full of cold, hard reality.

Works Cited

Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. Fourth ed. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1982. Print.

Kittay, Eva Feder. "Woman as Metaphor." Hypatia Summer 3.2 (1988): 63-86. JTSOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.Print.

Milton, John. "On His Deceased Wife." 100 Best Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 15. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.

Parker, William Riley. "Milton's Last Sonnet." The Review of English Studies July 21.83 (1945): 235-38. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Wheeler, Thomas. "Milton's Twenty-Third Sonnet." Studies in Philology July 58.3 (1961): 510-15. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. "The Veil as Metaphor and as Myth." Religion & Literature Summer 40.2 (2008): 61-81. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

Selected Poem for Poetry Analysis

"On His Deceased Wife"
     By John Milton

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
     Brought to my like Alcestic from the grave,
     Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
     Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint
     Purification in the Old Law did save,
     And such as yet once more I trust to have
     Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
     Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
     Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
     But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
     I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

Transmedia and Accessibility

Ask me three years ago, I would have told you that I disliked the jump into technology and that I mourned the almost certain demise of paper-books. (I worked at Borders, so I was more concerned about my job security, to be honest.) But I'm finally, slowly adapting. Despite my many frustrations with my touch-screen smart phone, I know in my heart that I cannot switch back to a "dumb phone" that cannot play music or run iHeartRadio or Pandora apps.

Still, even as I embrace technology and all its advantageous gadgets and applications, I have questioned what will happen to classic literature and learning. I am the kind of person who loves being in an actual classroom for formal education. I might even use a pen and paper to take notes. On the parallel, I'm the nerd who will Wiki all the answers to all the questions. If I can blend the traditional with technology, where's everyone else?

I found the answer to my question in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a webshow on Youtube.com based on Jane Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice. The story was pulled into the modern era for a modern audience. Not only was Lizzie Bennet a Southern California grad student, but she interacted with her audience "off screen" on Twitter and Tumblr. It was a new kind of story-telling, but it was the same classic story made accessible to today's young women (and men, too).

Though people who watched The Lizzie Bennet Diaries understood that the story was fictional, the pattern of bi-weekly updates and live character interaction on social media pulled that screen away and immersed the audience into the story like no cinema film or television show can do. Transmedia storytelling is still finding its footing in the mainstream. The first prolific Youtube series that went transmedia was the story of LonelyGirl15 back in the days of Myspace.com. The creators of the show didn't tell anyone that the story was fictional, so many real-life viewers believed that Bree (aka LonelyGirl15) was in real danger. Months later, the audience uncovered their plot, and the rest was history.

Storytelling like this creates a new wave of research styles and a new style of critical thinking and discussions. In the case of LonelyGirl15, it was the fans of the show who spent the time to unravel their story, both the fictional plot and the production's deception. In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, fans decided to enter the stage directly by hacking a webpage to avenge the defaming of a character. People got invested, and then they got involved. I'd like to think that this passion and creativity is a gift from technology, finding new ways to be clever and realize that sometimes the box is bigger on the inside.

Currently, the same production company that gave us The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are in the middle of a new show called Emma Approved, based on Austen's novel Emma. I'm looking forward to how this story will unfold.


I meant to post this shortly after the first week of school in relation to technology in the classroom, and then we got "real" assignments.

The Classics are Classics for a Reason

During the poetry seminar on Wednesday, I scoffed that those who make up the Great Western Canon of literature are "old white dudes." I really deserved the fact that my clownish, crass witticism garnered only a giggle from my peers.

However, my words did not spring from falsehood: the classics are nearly all written by men. Only in the recent century have anthropologists and literary experts begun to construct the canon of female writers through the ages. The more stubborn side of my feminism resists wanting to begin to relate to the men of the canon. None of them seem to be young, fabulous women.

Despite opposing genitalia and societal roles, I often find that the same stuff that makes me is often expressed in their poetry, songs, and stories. These honorable gentlemen are part of the classic canon for a reason: they know the stardust that makes the human soul, and they bind it in words and make it visible.

The words that personally rang true for me were from William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud…”

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth is explaining the benefit of escapism. The moment spoken of is the discovery of a field of daffodils - according to the Daffodil Society, to find one daffodil spells misfortune, but to have several means joy and happiness. "[W]ealth", says Wordsworth of the field, "continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way." The sight of dancing daffodils is a joy to be treasured. Which is why, "when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood," Wordsworth escapes to that day with the daffodils. The stresses of every day life can fade away for one moment as the speaker returns to that moment in his own contemplation. 

In the days since my dad passed away, I find myself in that vacant and pensive mood. I'm numbed to feeling and weighed down with urgency and obligation. It's harder and harder to go back to a field of daffodils, a place to recharge and find peace. 

Though over a century and a half, and different life experiences separate me and Mr. Wordsworth, he found the words I want to say - nothing is more precious than a moment to breath and find peace and spend a some time enjoying the daffodils. 

Hello, Multigenre Literacy!

Dear Participants of Spring Semester's English 495, greetings.

I believe we are a blessed generation, living on the edge of the twenty-first century. I do believe it was in this generation that mass usability and accessibility to public internet was born. The internet was adolescent with us; we are the first generation as a whole to really grow up with internet-based media, as bumpy as it was. (No one will miss the AOL dial-up sound. No one.) I see this class as an opportunity to nurture the idea of using the internet as an educational tool. 

My first personal blog was created on 2006 on LiveJournal.com. Though it's nothing more than an archive of the hormonal musings of a fifteen year old, it represents a demographic of people who decided to use the internet as a social sphere. I wasn't just recording my thoughts, I was learning to use internet social media (as opposed to the old school method of writing personal letters) to forge relationships over cyberspace with real people miles apart. 

My first student blog was in high school; I remember that my teacher was still unused to the formatting of the WordPress account where we, the students, were supposed to post forum discussions. While the rest of the class bumbled about right along after her, I had already been basic HTML literate for two years. Since then, I have created at least three blogs just as a student, and I see effective use of the technology maybe two of every three times. It kind of depends on how effectively the teacher can use the blog themselves. 

Other everyday educational technologies like Moodle.edu and the miracle of email are probably the two technologies that education has created and adapted to. I do enjoy the ease of the online class profile and forums, and the almost instant (depending on professors) access to grades. It makes the best part of learning - sharing - as easy as an upload and a click. 

What do you think? Is tech literacy a tool for education, or should we stick to the classic methods? Where do you see edu tech in five years? Ten?

Looking forward to this semester with you,
Rose