English

I read part of a book called The Status Seekers by Vance Packard. I say that I only read part because that is about all I could read. The writing was so dry and the subject matter so boring that I do not see how this book was a best seller in the 50s and I especially do not see how it could be interesting to anyone except social analysts. I also felt like a lot of the information was something I already knew. Even if it was new in the 50s. I think this shows how writing has changed over the years and that people have lost attention spans and are interested in different things.

Question 1

People have been getting portraits made of themselves since there was a means to do so, but the reasons to do so were different in the beginning. Before the eighteenth century, people who had portraits of themselves made had to fork over a lot of money and time and effort. They had to sit still long enough that someone would be able to paint them which could often take very long. For this reason most all of the people getting portraits done had some social importance or high status. So the reason to get one done is to show how important you are and to make sure there is visual record of your existence. Technology has made this process easier and cheaper so now people of any status can take a picture of themselves.

Question 2

This week I read an article called The Top 10 Reasons to Vote for McCain. http://www.zencollegelife.com/2008/10/09/top-10-reasons-to-vote-for-john-mccain/

The writer for this article says he could not find any serious support for John McCain so he kind of wrote a spoof. I was reading this knowing that it was supposed to be funny and realized that there was kind of a tone of sarcasm. I thought this was interesting because I had a hard time reading it in a serious tone. So even though the words used are not different from serious words, the way they are phrased and put together can’t help but convey the sense of sarcasm.

This week I Google searched and read a short essay on the life of Adolf Hitler. You can read this if you want at: http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/adolf-hitler.shtml

I thought the essay was for the most part interesting as I do anything from the holocaust period, but it was poorly written. I thought the first and second paragraphs had a lot of short choppy sentences. This is probably because the author was trying to be as brief as possible but in any case it sort of took away from the story. I was concentrating more on how awkward the statements were instead of the content.

The Flivver King by: Upton Sinclair is a fictional double story. One about Henry Ford and the other about one of his workers; Abner Shutt. Throughout the whole book Sinclair writes a chapter or two from the eyes of Henry Ford and then switches to write a chapter or two from the eyes of Abner or one of his family members. For the ending, however, he switches it up and starts alternating every paragraph. I noticed that this really gave a sense of suspense and sort of made you feel like something big was going to happen which is very appropriate because it does. I just thought this technique for the double story was very effective and definitely got across the feeling I think he wanted to convey.

I regret to inform you that I don’t necessarily have a question this week. In past weeks what I’ve been doing is making observations about something I’m reading and then thinking of a question to lead to the observation. Well this week I couldn’t really think of a question, but here’s my observation. I have been reading Amusing the Million by John F. Kasson (JFK haha). It is a book about Coney Island, in short. My observation is that when he was writing about the experience of the amusement park he uses very colorful language such as “Luna represented a kind of architectural “Little Egypt,” deliciously sensuous, voluptuously Oriental, enticingly dynamic.” But when writing about mostly anything else in the book his language was more plain. I really thought this was a useful tool and really gave different feelings with the different languages used. So i hope this satisfies the requirements of the assignment, even though there’s no “question”.

This week I read Section 2 of Is Religion Dangerous by Keith Ward. As I was reading, it became increasingly apparent to me that I was not exactly absorbing any of the information. After going over the same paragraph multiple times I realized that maybe the reason is because the language is something I’m not used to. This is probably because Ward is British and infinitely more intellectual than I am(having never written a book) and also because a lot of what was said is based on theory and sort of loosely related to the reader. Neither of these things are bad for a piece of writing and I think actually add something to it. They’re just bad for pieces of writing that I’m reading.

So this week I decided to analyze a song. Every time I hear this song there’s always something a little bit off. I remember the first time I  heard it I was a bit confused. So I asked myself, “Why are these lyrics confusing?” And here they are:

And his yard was mowed, and his grass was green
And the driveway was edged and all the shrubs were trimmed so perfectly
I had a crush on his wife and I played ball with his son
I pondered how much money he made, went inside and turned the TV on

I was watching TV, having one of mom’s famous rice crispy treats
Watching Tom and Jerry, I heard a car horn beep
I ran to the window, his wife and son were home
With bags of stuff they had got at the mall      (Red Water by: Rehab)

I think what the problem is is that where the last line of the first verse goes into the hook it makes it seem like the boy is watching a news report or something and thats how he finds out that his neighbor committed suicide. Then, when the second verse starts you realize that he doesn’t know yet and he’s just watching Tom and Jerry. I think that if they would’ve done the first and second verses together before the hook that it would’ve contributed more to the continuity of the story. Too much information was revealed at once. In a nutshell.

I read “Expanding Our Understanding of Quality of Life, Standard of Living, and Well-Being” by Sue L.T. McGregor and Elizabeth B. Goldsmith this week. As I was reading, I kept getting distracted and it became increasingly hard to focus in on what exactly the article was trying to say. So that’s the question I asked: “Why is this article so hard to focus on?” First of all, I think it was hard for me to initially get into because the first four paragraphs were all very similar and basically the same information stated in different ways. Plus, a lot of the text was concerning the Family and Consumer Sciences division of some organization. An organization I’m not in and therefore don’t really care about. Second, after each explanation of the three terms there were long lists of examples that i just tended to skip over and could have possibly skipped important material. I just thought there was a lot of additional information that wasn’t
exactly necessary to the message of the article.