Mission imossible= understanding the ticket that exploded

So on a day like any other I opened up a book that was a new assignment for our English class. Sounds pretty normal right? Well unlike any other book before this book made absolutely no sense to me. At first i though that maybe i was just not reading it right or that i need to read into it more to understand it better...but NO!!! The farther you move on the more you understand that there is no way to really understand this book. For the most part the confusion is caused by the fact that the book is written in slashed up parts which when read don't seem to connect much with each other so you are constantly thinking of "What just happened?" or "How does that even relate?" but the most frustrating part i think is that after a while the author goes back to having normal paragraphs and you think yay i understand this part i must be improving and then BAM, and again you have no clue. Like someone is class put it really well the book basically gives you the middle finger.

Another aspect of the book that makes it a bit different from what I'm used to is all the graphic imagery used in the book, for one thing i definitely didn't expect a school book to have sexual context, but this goes beyond plane sex, but more into constant sexual details that make you feel disturbed at first. Yet as you keep going further into the book you just accept all those graphic details and stop feeling strong emotions like disgust towards it. So that makes me think that we can teach ourselves to accept even the most disturbing things if we just get in the habit of constantly seeing them.

A good question that was asked in class is why do we find the book disturbing. I honestly can't think of just one answer to simply explain it so I'm just going to show you my chain of reasoning on this question. First on i think that the book draws disgust because of all the sexual details in it. Yet as a civilized person we are constantly taught to think of sex as something privet that we don't talk about and here it is just flat out slammed into your face. Then when we look at sex we like to think that sex is something beautiful if it is associated with an emotion like love for another, and in this book sex had no emotions attached to it so that seems frightening and amoral. Also all the sex in this book has some alien feeling to it whether it is sex between non human object or whether it is sex that involves using some kind of weird thing shoved up someones ass. Furthermore the whole book has no sex between a man or a women which i think most people think of as normal. Another disturbing aspect is the loss of the control of the body associated with sex that just seems scary like the melting of the skin from a good orgasm. So like i said i can't pinpoint the reason the book brings the reader to disgust but i think it has a lot to do with the preexisting rules about sex that people have.

I actually started to find the book pretty funny and interesting after a while. I mean maybe i don't really understand it but from the way its written i figure its not meant to be understood in the usual way. Its meant to stretch our views on the relationship between the reader and the book. I admit that i would feel uncomfortable if someone saw what exactly i was reading about, because I'm sure i would be seen as a person with a sick fantasy, but i think that life is all about trying new things even if you don't always understand them.

The Moral behind Morel

The first book that we read as a class was "The invention of morel". The book has an element of psy fi to it because you face a man who got stuck on a mysterious island and who rights the book as somewhat of a journal of his life and his will. Then you have the the mysteriously appearing people who seem to have suppurb control over their emotions. Finally you have an editor who somehow got this book and works on questioning some of the points our castaway makes.

So what was kinda scary for me was the thought that like the appearing and disappearing people on the island we think we are living a life no knowledge of what is to come next, but maybe we are also just replying our lives over and over and people outside our realm see us as a video. Also the question of weather the soul was put into the projection arose when discussion the choices Morel made. He decided to make this friends and himself live forever through the projection, and after he made the projection he basically killed everyone with himself included. My first thought about it is that he was crazy and definitely unfair to his friends for making decissions about their life without their prior agreement. On the other hand if the projections did really make the people "live on" then who am i to say that it wasn't worth it. I feel like im looking into a mad scientist's mind and trying to understand all the sides to his ideas.

Another important aspect to mention when talking about the book is the authors obsession with a woman named Faustine. Her character most likely represent a famous actress of the time the book was written who the author probably admired in real life. Yet in the book the author tries to catch the attention of Faustine yet fails to do so. Then closer to the end he finds out that Faustine is just a projection and decides to add a new projection on top of the old one so that from an observers point of view it would look like they where a loving couple. What is interesting about the relationship is the author fell so passionately in love with Faustine to a point of stocking her practically every move, and although this seems like a creepy relationship it was better then the one he would have with the actual Faustine who was dead by the time of the arrival of the author on the island. So this projection of Faustine at least gave the author a chance to imagine the possibility of a relationship between the two.

Then later in class we watched Groundhog day and we discussed why Bill Murray doesn't come of as a creepy stoker while Borges' character does. I think that there are a couple of reasons for that some of which include the fact that Bill's character could actually interact with the characters in the reappearing day and could affect their actions and change them while the castaway could only manipulate the already existing image and only add a new image on top of the existing one. Plus Bill didn't come of as a stoker type who his in the bushes and watched his object of desire in secret. But then again it could just be because Bill is projected as a funny guy who the audience can relate to while the castaway is someone we know practically nothing about and we have no reason to like him.

A new beggining

So this very sentence gives birth to my very first blog. Honestly that seems a little weird even to me since my 18 it seems everyone has at least had one blog or another. I guess the motivation to put my thoughts into electronic form came from my english nanotext class. Really interesting things are discussed in this class, you almost feel like you are entering a psy fi world of possibilites which starengely enough don't apear to be too far fetched. Another element of the class which I particularly like is the use of cartoon for education I mean how many times did you watch Daffy Duck and think of a higher meaning? I bet you not too many times (more like zero). In addition to the cartoons and fun videos we have to plurk each week. Yeah you heard me PLURK for those of you that have no idea what that is (like i did one week ago) its basically a site where you write short messages on a board for everyone of your friends and fans to see and the messages are displayed in a timely fashion. So what I think of this Plurk is the following, first of all it can get VERY addictive when you start reading a ton of different ppls messages and wait at your keyboard waiting for cool new updates, secoundly i think that this tool lets the class (which is a larger class) connect without the timely strains that could be needed for that kind of enteraction face to face in class, and finally i feel that plurking gives us students a feeling that we are comunication with our instructer on a much more personal level then we usually do in class. This by the way sometimes makes me think about the appropraitness of some of the messages on the plurk page, i mean i love fun messages and all but I still remember this is for a class and my proffesor can see it (although he is pretty chill). Ok well i talked a lot about the class but i think i'll write a lil later and mention a bit about myself, meanwhile gotta run, life is calling, peace!