The Abridged Version of The Intelligent Investor, summarized by Daniel Alexander Apatiga

The Abridged Version of The Intelligent Investor, summarized by Daniel Alexander Apatiga

                According to The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (4^th edition Audible mp3 version), the main thing that is the most important is to invest in securities/equities (with the exception being that of Bonds, which doesn’t fluctuate like a stock by nature) whenever they are at a “bargain” price.  But, in order to analyze the stock, one must look at its past history.  After the past history is looked at, for instance, how has the p/e ratio changed over time.  If the p/e ratio is high, then it must be a growth stock.  A low p/e ratio (price-to-earnings) implies that it’s undervalued by the market as a whole.  A stock with a low p/e is considered safe.  However, why then does this stock not increase in value and is not more popular?  The fact that the stock is overlooked might imply that it is unpopular, however, it might not grow at the rate you would want it to.  Generally, it is a good idea to invest in unpopular stocks (by volatility and p/e) if you believe that it will become popular.  If you look at a chart of p/e relative to the value of the stock, you will see that there is a close correlation.  Thus, if you buy a stock with the attitude that you think the company will make higher than expected earnings than what other people on wall-street think, then you are on the right track.  Aka., if you go after a stock with lower-than-expected earnings but you think the analysts are wrong, which they typically are (and also analysts vary from one to another), then you should buy the security at the bargain price. 

                Regarding what Graham calls, “dollar-cost-averaging,” this is simply the exercise of depositing funds into your brokerage account every month or at some specific interval to invest into stocks.   This is a practice that I’ve begun, and it’s useful to the extent that it allows for one to invest in various stock as they are “low” so that later you will not regret not investing in the same security you should have invested in. 

                Regarding what Graham considers to be the ideal bond-to-stock ratio, this can only take place once the investor has sufficient funds to invest in bonds and thus, for our purposes as “poor investors,” investing bonds will have to wait until one has around 1k in funds to invest in them.  But typically, the investor should invest in stocks at least 25% of one’s allocated funds for investment purposes and the rest into stocks when the market is at a low, according to Graham.  To take the contrapositive of that statement, if one were to allocate one’s funds when the market is at a high and you have enough funds to invest in Bonds, then the desired ratio is 25% in stocks and the rest into Bonds.  Of course, there is an in-between area from within the spectrum, which is entirely up to you, the intelligent investor, who thinks about the market as a whole.  Bonds are particularly useful because of their historic steadfastness in yielding better results when the market is in depression than if one were to invest in stocks.  Graham gives many examples of this in both his 4^th edition book and abridged version combined. 

                Regarding “types” of investors, I was totally unaware that there are more than one type, but according to Graham, the defensive investor is one who does not have time to check his or her portfolio every day.  This kind of investor invests in large-cap stocks, mainly, with little emphasis in high risk, rather, investing in stocks with low p/e and in technology stocks or well-established, popular companies.  The other type is the entrepreneurial investor who spends time in security analysis like it is his or her “quasi-business.”  This is the kind of investor who invests in small businesses he/she thinks will do well, objectively, and who does not listen to analysts because they can be wrong.  He/she looks at small, or unpopular, large businesses “that are going through a time of trouble” in a prophetic way.  This prophetic way is a lot like how Nvidia did well because I knew that Nvidia would become a much larger company than it was.  The entrepreneurial investor is a lot like an inside trader, except he/she does not truly know company secrets, in that he/she has a hunch that the stock will do well because of external factors.  We must all try to be entrepreneurial investors.

The Motif of Music in a Few Science Fiction Short Stories and the film, Children of Men, by Alfonso Cuaron

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

Professor David

12/17/2014

English: Science Fiction class

The Motif of Music in a Few Science Fiction Short Stories

and the film, Children of Men, by Alfonso Cuaron

While Samuel Amago argues in regards to Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men, through “various audiovisual stimuli… we are drawn into the dystopian world envisioned,” what the music conveys in the film often serves as a reminder of different eras and, therefore, as reminders of how the characters in the dialogic, or narrative, are reliving the past (Amago, page 213).  Amago mainly considers the visual universe of the film—not the sonorous.  He does talk about the tone and diction of the various characters though.  But he does not show the impact that music has on the reader or viewer. This essay will look at purposes the motif of music might serve that are dichotomous to those discussed in Samuel Amago’s critical essay, “Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children and Men.”  Furthermore, the essay will look at how music can play an important role despite it lacking a sonorous (listenable) quality in sci-fi narratives.

The motif of music can also be ambiguous or symbolic to the audience, often eliciting a certain mood or indicating change of setting.  Music can be very harmonious or very dissonant, the typically conveying chaos to the listener; likewise, harmonic melodies that have been composed typically convey beauty, sadness, or any “ordered” phenomenon that is easily relatable.  In Cuarón’s film, music conveys meaning more readily and easily graspable by the listener than in Zoline’s short story.  For instance, mentioning a composer from within a text, like Bach, evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of the baroque period but the reader cannot possibly hear the notes unless one has a strong imagination.  Likewise for Mozart, who evokes a classical timeframe, or Tchaikovsky for romanticism and nationalism.   Cuarón includes more contemporary genres towards the middle part of the film.  For some reason, while all the totalitarian police force are busy caging people and removing people’s freedoms, Mahler, Handel, and Penderecki’s music is playing in the background.  The significance of this is that they’re all German except for one, and the listener immediately remembers the totalitarian history of Germany from history lessons.  Although these composers had nothing to do with it—for instance, Penderecki was Polish and alive during the Holocaust and subsequent sacking of Poland by the communist, totalitarian U.S.S.R.  Likewise, the mentioning of composers and/or music in science-fiction texts also can convey specific meanings.

Music can help create the place and/or time of a text. In the movie Children of Men, Cuaron skillfully sets the scene by including music that correlates with the setting.  During the opening scenes of the movie, where Theo is sitting at the café sipping a coffee, marching music is played by an orchestra.  Viewers are likely to infer from the choice of music that this is not a normal society.  Because of the way Theo is brooding over his coffee and sipping it, the viewer also can glean that there is something troubling about his world.  People are marching to-and-fro, and the music is an agent to convey the war-like nature and totalitarian government of what has become of Great Britain.  If the viewer is not a musician or knowledgeable about western musical genres, the music, which is clearly military, is still likely to achieve the end of helping set the tone of the narrative.  When a composer is mentioned, or a well-known melody of a composer is heard, the composer is associated with being both great, with this certain style, having lived from this date to that, and having influenced so and so, which has a specific symbol that applies to the surrounding narrative.   Anyone who can hum a melody who has listened to a Bach fugue for instance or a string quartet can imagine the sound that the text is trying to convey.  Similarly, readers of science-fiction texts may decode messages from within texts. 

The mentioning of music can suggest order within chaos (or vice-a-versa).  I do not mean to imply that music is inherently either chaotic or ordered, as the organizational quality of music relies mainly on the competency of the composer, who controls its form and structure.  Rather, music exists as either well-formed or poorly formed, depending on the medium it will be present in.  For example, music might be situationally ironic to the narrative.  In “The Heat Death of the Universe,” Zoline’s short sci-fi story is about a seemingly schizoaffective or schizoid woman who is borderline psychotic.  This is because the narrator’s children are driving her nuts.  Amidst the chaos, which is interwoven skillfully into the plot, she is shown to have tastes in various subjects, such as music.  She loves Bach’s music and repeats the motif of his name twice throughout the short story: once on page 417 and once on page 420.  She also mentions Mozart on page 424.  At first, she mentions that “music [is the] best of all the arts, and of music, Bach, J.S.” (Zoline, page 417).  The setting is set in a particularly dismal location: her home.  In this setting, her children have apparently drawn words on her wall—or was it Sarah Boyle all along and she had imagined the existence of her children?—that certainly is possible.  She mentions the motif of music again, stating, “music [is] the formal articulation of the passage of time, and of Bach, the most poignant rendering of this” (Zoline, page 420).  If it can be agreed that the ending ends, for Sarah Boyle, in a chaotic, psychotic state just because a turtle had been drowned by one of her children, then music plays a situationally ironic role (from earlier in the text) because of its ordered nature: “She picks up eggs and throws them into the air.  She begins to cry… they go higher and higher in the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to fall away slowly, slowly, throughout the fine clear air.”  While the eggs and the various noises and/or ambient sonority of the destruction in her path is not music, the character has a chaotic mind.  The motif of music earlier in the text serves as a contrast to the chaos that ensues her life, which builds on the drama aspect of the sci-fi short story.

Music can act in the situation as a symbol of intelligence in light of the overarching theme of the sci-fi narrative.  As a means of characterization, a musically knowledgeable protagonist is generally viewed as more nuanced and wise than if his or her preferences were omitted.  The same is true for other professions, however I will not delve into those topics.  For instance, in “Day Million” by Frederik Pohl, the narrator comments on the nature of “aptitude” of which he implies that if someone goes to Julliard and receives a degree from that school, then he or she must be acknowledged as having a strong ability: “if we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Julliard” (Pohl, page 381).  And this intelligence would have a significant impact on the reader’s general view of the protagonist, making him or her more attractive: “Don was tall, muscular, bronze, and exciting” (Pohl, page 382).  While the quote does not mention music, it has already been provided to us earlier on in the story as support for the argument that he is “exciting,” since music has an overarching effect on the structure of the plot.  If a character did not have an “aptitude” for music, then he/she would not truly be as human as we’d like to imagine.  I’m sure there are counterexamples that contradict my argument, however.  The best counterexample to my prior arguments can be the absence of music—however there is an example in the world of contemporary music literature that silence exists as a piece of music: namely, a piece by John Cage.  In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” by Samuel Delany, the narrative does not mention the word music at all and the narrator focuses purely on the dialogue between a man who’s a spacer and a woman who’s a frelk.  Well, the absence of music can also be interpreted as music as I aforementioned, however, this does not add much to the narrative and we would be doing a disservice to this short story if we criticize it vehemently for lacking any mention of music.  Nonetheless, the characterization of the two protagonists is limited without the motif of music existing within the text as either part of the setting, or in the dialogue, or simply as a characterization tool by the author. 

Music can have an impact on the conclusion and moral of the story if it is mentioned within the text/film.  Multiple examples of music, or the motif of music, within science fiction is prevalent out of the short stories I read for class (in addition to works by Arthur C. Clark, whom is one of my favorite authors).  Critics and readers are focused on the visual rather than the sonorous, and this is a detriment to the meaning that one can decode from literature.  Characterization—while some authors are better at it than others—does not have to be vastly improved in short stories with the mentioning of music, as these short stories do include the motif of music.  Music can be scary, emotional, or just plain uncanny moments with the dissonance of strings with the right lighting, visual effects, and uncanny moments in a film scene.  Like an opera, good science fiction literature in movies includes music to evoke particular melodies and eras of music in the reader’s mind.  Critics, like Amago, neglect this philosophical realm that is not wholly unrelated to tone and diction in the English philosophy.  Not coincidently, those elements are present in good music, and if the selection of music were criticized more in media and science fiction, we could discern more meaning that these composers are or have intended (if they’re dead) to convey.

Bibliography

Delany, Samuel R. "Aye, and Gomorrah..." The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B.

Evans. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. 405-414. Print.

Zoline, Pamela. "The Heat Death of the Universe" The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur

B. Evans. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. 415-429. Print.

Pohl, Frederick. "Day Million" The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur

B. Evans. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. 379-484. Print.

Cuarón, Alfonso, dir. Children of Men. Universal Pictures, 2007. Film.

Amago, Samuel. “Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Future in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Discourse 32.2

(2010): 212-235. Project MUSE. Web. 18 Dec. 2014. 

Shailja Patel’s and Esmeralda Santiago’s Differing Views on Communication with Regards to Zen Buddhist Teachings

Shailja Patel’s and Esmeralda Santiago’s Differing Views

on Communication with Regards to Zen Buddhist Teachings

The narrator of Migritude, through use of anecdotes, illustrates that strong communication can persuade the audience to think differently about how we treat ethnic minorities; however, strong communication is in direct contradiction to Zen Buddhist teachings about communication.  But the main heroine of the transnational novel When I Was Puerto Rican, Negi, views communication as a means of improving herself, which shares more parallels to Zen Buddhist teachings on communication than does the aforementioned.   Strong communication can change society, but toned-down communication can have an even larger effect.  

Zen Buddhist teachings on communication is similar to Christian, Hindi, and African religions in many respects.  Buddhist philosophy about it had been wholly unknown to me until I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s work, The Art of Communication, during this semester in addition to the required readings.  Their philosophy can be summarized by the following quotes: “Everything—including love, hate, and suffering—needs food to continue.  If suffering continues, it’s because we keep feeding our suffering.  Every time we speak without mindful awareness, we are feeding our suffering” on page 7; and “you just need to sit down and breathe in and out.  In just a few seconds, you can connect with yourself. You know what is going on in your body, your feelings, your emotions, and your perceptions” on page 15, which correlates closely to their philosophy on meditation (Hanh).  Another way of interpreting Zen Buddhist philosophy on communication is that you should not cause more pain via communication than necessary, or at all, because the language used would come back to haunt you.  So this could be done by: first, toning down communication that seems negative; make it something positive; criticize in a way that does not hurt the other person yet still gets him or her to change; and thirdly, be in control of one’s emotions through natural means of breathing, meditation, and being truthful to yourself.  With that said, my understanding of Zen Buddhism is somewhat limited.   

Although the novels are somewhat different in genre—one is a poetic performance that encompasses many topics, the other, an autobiographical fiction—we can extrapolate information about the narrator-of-Migritude’s and Negi’s philosophies on communication.  Negi exemplifies an active stance with regards to reacting to society’s turmoil because she is young and rather naïve throughout the narrative, which is a bildungsroman.  However, communication for Negi is apolitical, and this is in stark contrast to the poetic performance, Migritude, for the narrator of that novel believes communication, as a kind of monologue and soliloquy, is necessary to commence discourse on heated, political issues that are unique to her ascribed status as a member of the minority to Kenya and the USA.  Communication for Negi is used as a means of revealing her somewhat stable and poor society, Puerto Rico.  Her environment is in stark contrast to the displaced, or diasporic, status of the narrator in Migritude.   

The narrator of Migritude believes in communication as a means of finding outer happiness; her soliloquy in front of the audience jolts or shocks people into seeing the realities of life for minorities.  She says for instance, “As if Palestine will never be anything but a social justice summer camp.  A case study in genocidal oppression for wealthy American teens with wanna-be-radical parents” (Patel, page 34).  Patel goes on to explain (in her DVD performance and the poetic performance, Migritude) that “Israel is the apartheid South Africa of our times.  The only country in the world whose constitution allows torture” (Patel, page 36).  I was immediately shocked and not offended, but I was in a thoughtful frame of mind after hearing her say it in her tone of voice in the performance.  In this way, Patel does not communicate Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Buddhist teachings, as he expresses them in The Art of Communication, because she does not “convey only compassion and understanding” for the Jews, rather, she seeks empathy and critical thinking; Patel, in contrast to Zen Buddhist concepts of how to communicate, conveys inner rage and suffering (Hanh, page 51). However, there is a place for “mindfulness” in Zen Buddhism: “Knowing how to handle suffering, you know at the same time how to produce happiness,” writes the monk on page 35; and, “the foundation of love is understanding and that means first of all understanding suffering” on page 46 (Hanh).  So, in a way, Patel is still in step one with respect to Zen Buddhists who have progressed from that point to at least step two.  And, according to Hanh, one must practice the alleged “Right Speech” to understand suffering, which is a wholly different topic and cannot be covered in this essay.

In continuation about Zen Buddhist teachings that seem to contradict Patel’s own communicative philosophy, Patel does not use “peaceful language” in one poem, “The Making”; and she uses “violent words [and] cruel words” (Hanh, page 53).    This stanza, for instance, seems to contradict Buddhist philosophy about communication:

Make it from rage / every smug idiotic face you’ve

Ever wanted to smash / into the carnage of war every

Encounter / that’s left your throat choked / with what…

    Readers and audience members may react differently to the facts Patel communicates; some will empathize while others will misunderstand despite perfect grammar and English.  Thus, she will experience the frustration of telling ”the truth, [but] sometimes the result isn’t what [she] wanted” (Hanh, page 54).  Furthermore, before stating the facts, she ought to state them with “mindfulness that makes the present moment into a wonderful moment” for readers and audience members (Hanh, page 83). 

Despite Patel’s contradictions to Zen Buddhist communicative philosophy, her Migritude performance is also very tragic that has dramatic moments, which are meiosis to the actual realities she’s trying to communicate.  In terms of communication through entertainment, this is desirable.  Zen Buddhist teachings would disagree, however, in that they imply “the paths of talking and thinking should be cut off” to avoid a “misperception” (Hanh, page 20).  Does this imply communication should be avoided to become happy?  According to Zen Buddhism, it is.  So, in contrast, Patel communicates the atrocities and injustices that occurred in her native country, Kenya, and the audience immediately empathizes with her use of hard-to-listen-to facts.

As a performer on stage, Patel allures and daunts her audience somewhat sexually through nonverbal communication.  She communicates a lot of her intended meaning this way that expects her audience to decode their various meanings.  This contradicts, as a performer, the intended result of the message to the audience.  According to Zen Buddhism, being “truthful” is key.  But sometimes, the audience laughs in less serious moments due to the verbal communication that Patel conveys in addition to nonverbal communication.  This is not her intention deep down.

Patel’s Migritude communicates many different subjects that would not be covered in any typical book, since it has “various genres… of memoir[s] and political histor[ies] which [are] connected to the history of [her] family” (Gundara, page 225).  This is in sharp contrast to the main heroine of When I was Puerto Rican, who is perhaps more dynamic in the sense that her agency for communicating political turmoil is more powerful and deep than the limitations of Negi’s impoverished setting that affects her communication.  She is also limited due to her wisdom and age throughout the beginning of the novel.  From the very start of her poetic performance, Patel has a higher sense of political nuance than Nagi because “she realizes that despite her being a loyal Kenyan, she will never be accepted as a black Kenyan” (Gundara, page 225).    Whereas Negi was born Puerto Rican into an ethnic minority that is an ascribed status, too, she has a European ancestral background that places her in an upper, desired position in Puerto Rico. 

Negi, the heroine of the bildungsroman novel When I Was Puerto Rican, communicates her life’s issues through her various reactions to her privileged status, (though relatively unprivileged by American standards).  And these issues are somewhat immaterial, natural, and fatalistic.  Negi is like a Zen Buddhist monk.  For instance, her thoughts turned inward: “I wondered if it were true, as Mami claimed when she and Papi fought, that he saw other women behind her back. And if he did, was it because he didn’t love us?” (Santiago, page 92).  Her family is nontraditional in that her father cheats on his wife, possibly, and this causes great pain in her.  She does not seek expression through talking about the injustices in her country, but she does ask many “what if things were like so and so?” type questions that Patel asks.  When Negi’s mother acquires a job opportunity in Toa Baja, Negi is very mindful and un-oppositional to her mother: “who’s going to take care of us?”; and, “will you work every day?” (Santiago, page 112).  In terms of Zen Buddhist communication, they both seek understanding and love which are central commandments to their philosophy. 

Patel’s use of verbal interpersonal communication is not typical of what one would hear from a Zen Buddhist monk.  Monks, despite diction that might be loaded with emotion, are very logical and coolheaded most of the time, like Hanh and the Dalai Lama. This is not Patel’s religion, and she has a unique art that fuses music with soliloquy and other voices of her mother in audio clips, and sometimes her sister speaks if I remember correctly, in the DVD.  Patel makes the forgotten remembered and injustices avenged through her oral poetry, which Zen Buddhists do without.  Negi, on the other hand, has simpler issues to deal with in terms of communication.  She is progressing from childhood to adulthood, from submissiveness to independence, which is all the more helped by becoming an American citizen in a country where opportunities abound. 

Bibliography

Santiago, Esmeralda.  When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir.  Jackson: Da Capo Press, 2006. Kindle

file.

Patel, Shailja.  Migritude. New York: Kaya Press, 2010.  Print.

Hanh, Thich Nhat.  The Art of Communicating. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. Print.

Gundara, Jagdish.  “Migritude.”  Intercultural Education 22.3 (2011): 225-226.  Online file.    

Shailja Patel’s Poetry in Migritude

Shailja Patel’s Poetry in Migritude

                Patel’s performance poetry, Migritude, places the performer in center stage in a way that lures and daunts while she challenges the audience to think about the consequences of war and colonialism.  In addition, the audience is drawn into her politically infused narrative by empathizing with victims, whether they be: women or boys who’ve been raped by soldiers, and the unfair treatment of ethnic minorities who have endured hardship and injustice at the hands of the colonizers, such as: the expulsion of Asians, who were mistreated.  The performance poetry mentions the prevalent Western perspective that we “mistake austerity, living without waste, for deprivation” of Kenyans or Africans in general (Patel, page 34).  This criticism and others like it paint Western colonizers or Western people in general as possessing arrogant, ignorant, and judgmental attitudes towards African culture, peoples, and history in general. 

                In her poetry, evidence of the success of her trans-nationality is present in her abstract poem, “Opening” (Patel, page 101).  This poem seems to ask a simple question in the first stanza in a way that breaks from old forms since it has a lot of enjambment (no rhyming or meter like Donne’s poetry).  The poem seems to imply some kind of injustice has just occurred and now she wants that person to “let go” of that joy (Patel, page 101). 

what would it take

to let joy go

with the same wide arms

that drew it in?

The poem and other poems she has in her collection contain fragments of moods or thoughts.  The stanzas, in some of them, do not contain periods or punctuations, no capitalization, and lots of short, 1-2 syllable words, particularly in the aforementioned poem.  This contradicts her other poems later in the collection.  Although “Opening” can be confused as having blank verse, however, it is not as that would imply that it is in iambic pentameter and she does not follow any meter.  In the poem, she asks a profound question, asking for something she could do in order for someone else to feel a lack of joy.  In terms of binary oppositions, she in the second stanza seems to want affection and love, in contrast to the first stanza, where she shares her yearning for human connection as a flute.   In a poem, “First Dates in Utopia,” Patel expresses herself in a way she would not normally express in day-to-day life (Patel, page 117).  Although, she thinks of poetry as a means of preparing for that moment when one can’t think of something to say that would otherwise go amiss, causing regret and despair later on in life.   

Let’s regard each other

With eyes that smile

With faces that engage,

Savor without urgency

The strangeness of being human.

Release,” another poem that shows complicated form and abstraction also shows some paranoia on the part of the narrator, perhaps like a paranoid schizophrenic.  The tone of the narrator seems withdrawn, asking simple questions, such as: “Who’s watching now?  No one” (Patel, page 102).  Perhaps out of this angst, Patel’s last poem in the collection, “The Making,” portrays her desire for societal change through the art of making, whatever that might be: could be child rearing, writing essays, words, or poems, composing and performing music, etc. (Patel, page 124).  And she uses words in a semi-violent way that jolts the reader, though it is most pleasant to read because of the politically infused diction and tone of the narrator. 

"Who was the best character in Star Trek in my opinion?" ~ by Daniel Alexander Apatiga

The best character in terms of charisma, leadership, and goodness of heart was Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Captain Picard. In the realm of Star Trek, he knew inside and out Gene Roddenberry’s dream of what Star Trek could do, would do, even when he passed away. Captain Picard carried that vision forward in a way no other character of New Age science fiction has ever been able to do.

In terms of charisma, Captain Picard knew how to make people like him. The officers underneath his high status—albeit not Admiral or even higher like with Captain Jim Kirk (William Shatner)—always followed his steady example, or tried to. And no one ever tried to question his character because there was no reason to, except in “Star Trek : First Contact.” His charisma even carried sway with aliens from previously unknown worlds, because he always respected them even when it was difficult.

In terms of leadership, Captain Picard knew how to inspire people to obey and follow his command, whenever it was necessary. As a leader, he told his officers to do their jobs and they did, because he knew how to compliment them for a job-well-done, and whenever they made mistakes, he brought them up subtlety. Even when he was compromised as a Borg, (because his loyal crew knew him and loved him), they understood they had a duty to him as his bereft acting-officers in command.

In terms of goodness of heart, Captain Picard knew how to do the right thing whenever it was demanded even if it was unpopular. Too many examples exist in episodes I watched in which he helped alien species despite the prime directive. In the prime directive, one is not supposed to alter the future of any alien species by providing technology. Although occasionally he would aid Romulans with the above mentioned when they called for aid (S.O.S.), he would still abide by his principles but never at the cost of Goodness. Captain Kirk, Janeway, and Benjamin Sisko were never so pure.

Even though Star Trek succeeded in breaking many social barriers in cinema, it couldn’t have been done without the help of Patrick Stewart. Captain Picard embodied the proper principles of charisma, leadership, and being good in general. Too bad Patrick Stewart doesn’t portray Captain Picard, since his crew is retired and “Star Trek : The Next Generation” is over.

"A Small Place" Reading Response #13/14

Daniel Apatiga
Reading Response #13/14
11/17/2014


The accusatory tone of the narrator affects the reader’s self-perception when visiting other countries in a positive aspect; it causes him/her to rethink what it means to be viewed as an outsider, essentially. The narrator’s accusatory remarks are founded on the narrator’s observations for the most part on white, typically European and American tourists, despite the novella being a fiction. And these observations that the narrator makes on a few institutions that are set up to create a sense of security, like airport customs, are defamiliarized to the reader when he/she realizes airport customs make it difficult for non-whites, who are considered untrustworthy, to be delayed and be abused—unless of course, one has experienced discrimination. Some of the observations of the androgynous narrator are only half the story in my opinion: “you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot clean air…” as not all white Europeans experience this level of ease in going through customs and most definitely, not people of radically different ethnicities (page 5, Kincaid).

Given the rich history of Antigua, I notice then that the novella’s initial dislike for English domination that is interwoven into the novel’s structure is elaborated on greatly: in regards to the Mill Reef Club, they “ who seemed not to like Antiguans (black people) at all, for the Mill Reef club declared itself completely private” (page 27, Kincaid). This dislike is often in loud complaints, but the 2nd person mode is omitted: “It’s possible that when [the English] saw how rich banking made them, they gave themselves a good beating for ending slave trading (for surely they would have opposed that)” (page 26, Kincaid). In the USA, a private resort would be exclusive of a lower class, unless one still lives in a racist community; if there are racial discrimination, there are also class disparities to complicate the matter. Kincaid’s novel has a narrator who changes tone when using the 2nd person towards the end of the novella.

At the end of the novella, the narrator refrains from accusing the reader of injustices against Antigua almost completely. Only a reference to former colonial domination is expressed, but the focus is clearly on how beautiful a country and innocent a people Antiguans are. Also, in the déneoument, its tone is almost that of begging the reader to visit as though the last chapter were a travel brochure, and so the narrator in a sense asks for forgiveness for his/her prior accusatory remarks.

Since being a tourist and being a non-tourist is natural for every human being to experience, depending on where you are and have been, we can all relate to looking like a fool and an idiot. Jordan’s essay, “Report from the Bahamas,” suggests that looking like a tourist does not necessarily imply one is from another country and is a tourist, rather, one might be a foreigner who dislikes the government. In the setting of A Small Place or any place for that matter, one might be from another part of the country who is exploring other regions of his/her country, which is still technically a tourist. Xenophobia, which is hardly addressed as seriously in this novel as it was in Welcome to our Hillbrow, seems to be rampant in the narrator’s diction that is against Europeans and their ways. I am almost empathetic to them, after reading this novel; however, having a dad who’s from a third world country and visiting Mexico myself, I can see how unfair things are when one is privileged and others are barely scraping by due to the lack of opportunities that we are blessed with in this country. The novella paints the situation in Antigua as hopeless due to corruption, Europeans who exert their power, and Lybians/Syrians who buy properties; but, the desire to climb out of their economic depravity is unaddressed. Rather, we read a frustrated narrator who rants about her legitimate concerns: corruption, unethical/morally bankrupt ministers, and pointless institutions such as the “ministry of culture.”

Racial prejudice in the novella, for me, was lightly touched upon. Between the English and Antiguan sides of the matter, such as: the narrator’s disdain for the private resort and the English and the European’s desire to colonize in underhanded ways like by building condos and buying land. Xenophobia on the part of the Antiguans exists with respect to the English, Libyans, Syrians, and Europeans in general for colonizing and using the Antiguans’ land. The novella also says in multiple places that these others, for instance, people at the Mill Reef Club did “not like Antiguans” (page 27, Kincaid).

The stylistic choice on the part of Kincaid to include instances of the parenthesis seems to denote, for me as a reader, instances of sarcasm and moments in which the narrator is sure that the reader needs to know something, yet, doesn’t know it and often it’s in the form of a geography lesson: “(the size of Antigua)” on page 9; “(while at the same time surrounded by a sea and an ocean—the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other)” on page 9 . As for sarcasm, these instances most closely aligns itself with my opinion: “(which is to say special)” on page 5; perhaps more literally, “(or, worse, Europe) on page 4; and at the beginning of one of the chapters, the narrator complains about the unhappiness of the English people in general in one long parenthetical paragraph on pages 23-24. I find these statements helpful, because they offer a glimpse into the narrator’s own bitterness that are somewhat unrelated to the love-our-country-Antigua moral of the story. It exposes narrator as if to say, hey, I’m not perfect and perhaps I’m wrong, but don’t take what I say with a grain of salt.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the Mill Reef Club is a bad instance in which language such as, “private,” is meant as a method of exclusion, which symbolizes the people who-work-at-the-resort’s antagonism and racial prejudice against native Antiguans. Another instance is that of the rich Libyans and Syrians who buy land near the beach and build large condominiums who dirty their landscape, according to the narrator. While this is not my own prejudiced perspective, it does symbolize a new sort of colonial presence in which people from another part of the world build architecturally unsound and unharmonious buildings that conflict with the Antiguan’s own sense of archecture, according to the narrator.

I think the line, “the people in a small place can have no interest in the exact,” sums up the narrator’s argument: Antigua, which is a small place coincidently, has many people who don’t know these foreigners who visit and the Antiguan’s own sense of history and place isn’t necessarily as nuanced. The narrator concedes a lot from prior statements regarding the prejudice of the Europeans and North Africans who are greedy. Also, since the beginning of the new section about people “in a small place” on page 52 seems to apply to anyone who’s from a small place—could be a rural village, or a someone who has never been outside of his/her state, let alone, country. The theme seems to be on limitations by experience and not necessarily memory, in my opinion. But, connecting it to Rushdie’s ideas of memory from “Imaginary Homelands,” his memory is closely connected to photographs, which he states on page 9 of his essay. In relation to A Small Place, memory for the narrator is something it relies upon to push the narrative forward. There is not really any concrete characters in the novella, rather, little anecdotes from her memory that all seem disjointed from one another, such as the ministry who is corrupt in contrast with all the good ministers who lived on to be “taxi drivers.” Also, the mystery of the refrigerator that electrocuted intruders, which killed ambassadors to Libya. The narrator hardly mourns their deaths, but if I remember correctly, this is all memory from the narrator’s past. Either that or the narrator must have read a news reel. The narrator includes a lot of political criticism in the novella.

Film review, "Dear White People"

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

“Dear White People” Film Response #

11/18/2014

                The film, Dear White People, juxtaposes two ethnic groups and shows, psychologically, how they intermingle and behave under different, complicated situations.  Within these two groups, a smaller, highly educated group, the Dean of Students and the President of the University, of whom I want to focus on in my first paragraph, are foreground to all the conflicts: firstly, the cafeteria at the black Greek house sprawl; secondly, the dislike that occurs between the former and then reestablished head of the black Greek house with the son of the President of the University; and thirdly, the fight between the homosexual black man and the formerly mentioned.  These seemingly racially infused situations causes different reactions to these highly, educated powerful elite who work for Winchester University.  The Dean of Students, who is black, has a son who was in a relationship with the president’s daughter (who is also the sister of the head of a white Greek house), and he loses his head status because of a fluke in the mobile app.  He thought he would win, but instead, Sam wins of whom is a female.  This, however, does not go well with the president of the university, who feels that she is too radical and that she is causing racial division rather than bringing about positive change.  He says essentially, racial prejudice at my school does not exist and belonged to an older era.  The Dean of Students, who has a stake in his son’s success, wishes to appease the President of the University by pressuring Sam to end her radio talk show.  She does not end it however, because she feels it right to make the racial prejudices public and also that Winchester University does not have the right to limit her free speech.   Essentially, the film is about creating this balance between what is socially acceptable in a more racially tolerant epoch.   The film does not address the new intolerance of Mexican-American immigrants or central American immigrants.  In fact, there is a line that suggests we black and white folk do not care about them, which I would like to complain about.

                The president of the university is more concerned with the university’s outwards appearance and to his donors, since Winchester is considered to be a prestigious university, and so he does not wish there to be racial division making headline news at his university.  Similarly in terms of selfish-agendas, the Dean of Students is more concerned about his job position and his son’s success in general than resolving Sam’s behavior to a more white-friendly mode of thought.   The Dean of Students seemed to me to be the more corrupted of the two, considering, he may have lied about the election results for the head of the black Greek house.  Indeed, Sam had legitimate concerns that she expressed in her radio talk show, where she always points the finger at white people for being racially prejudiced.    However, the legitimacy of the radio talk show goes unresolved at the end of the slightly comedic film:  a lot of the jokes that I did not get that others immediately laughed at, observationally, made me think of the movie as falling under the drama genre of film.   At the conclusion of the film, Sam resolves to end her talk show, but she does so in a film that she shows to class.  To her amazement, all the people clap and for a long period of time, the camera moves to show the white teacher and her white boyfriend clapping.  Does the film moral seem to suggest that all talks about racial tensions should cave in to a big black hole? 

                To me, racial intolerance is not over for everyone; racial prejudice and racism in general exists on both sides.  However, the moral of the story is based on a correct premise: if both sides agree to stop the hating, and that includes the incitement that Sam causes and the violence that the son of the President of the University exhibits.  The sooner we drop all presumptions about the other side, the sooner we can move on to bigger more important topics, the film seems to suggest.  I think that this film is highly relevant to the pain and pleasure of travel, as the film transports me to a place where I am more aware of issues of racial division and prejudice in America.    

Reading response on "Welcome to Our Hillbrow"

Daniel Apatiga

Reading Response #11

11/13/2014

Regarding the first epigraph at the beginning of the novel, we see that Phaswane Mpe provides an analepsis and a prolepsis throughout that chapter, because we see him foretelling the story of how Refentse dies and providing the background story to Refentse’s past.  In Danticat’s essay, “Creating Dangerously,” I see a similar story developing: that of two or more characters who are going to die, as explained in prolepsis, and for similar reasons.  Like the two American rebel fighters who fought for the Haitians, Refentse fights for love and opposes death until the notion of suicide overwhelms him.  The reasons for ending his life appear to be because of failed relationships with his multiple lovers: Lerato and Refilwe.  In a lot of ways, the notion of xenophobia, which is a central theme to the novel, is similar to Danticat’s “Creating Dangerously” in that the Haitians who were in power were xenophobic to the Americans.  We know for instance that Refentse loves soccer, and we know that even though he’s dead, he  would have loved to know that “Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco” (Mpe, page 1).  In the first epigraph, furthermore, the historical fact of AIDS provides the necessary background story to what’s to come in the novel, where AIDS affects Refilwe’s life detrimentally.

The second epigraph, which I presume you mean and refer to the second chapter—“Notes From Heaven”—I think most of the chapter is almost as if the narrator is talking from heaven, as Prof. Kruger wisely points out.  We see motifs of death throughout the chapter: the death of relationships between Refilwe and Refentse, Refentse mourning the fact that Lerato cheats on him with Sammy.  He’s seeing it all for what actually happened, and in that way, it is factual since I can see this happening.  However, I believe the author stylistically wrote it in a realistic way and that the notion of viewing things from heaven for what the events actually are is a stretch for me.

The characters play an observational role in that they cannot affect the lives of their loved ones on Earth, even though Refentse wants to.  In life, one can change the way things are and make things better (or worse), and in death, these abilities cease to exist; and, in heaven, one can only observe the rest of the planet and hope for the best.  Whether one believes in heaven or not, or a God, does not necessarily impact whether you will go to heaven, the novel seems to suggest.

An important sentence for me, during “Refentse’s short story,” was: “love across racial boundaries became mental instability” (Mpe, page 57).  It is a self-reflection on himself of when he wasn’t contemplating suicide, were everything to happen just right.  Nothing did turn out right though. 

It seems like gossip and rumor helped people in the end, because had people not gossiped about Sammy’s drug addiction, they would not have attempted to help him.  This was before Refentse committed suicide.  Terror was a merely what it was—a rapist—and, to me, it was a metonymy for who he was along with “child of Tiragalong,” except it was a complicating of something that was already simply, a reminder of who he was.  

Opposition to Institutions, Corporations, and Governments in The Left hand of Darkness and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

Professor David

11/7/2014

Midterm paper#2

Opposition to Institutions, Corporations, and Governments in The Left hand of Darkness and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

In the novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Left Hand of Darkness, the authors both characterize their protagonists as holding political and economic beliefs that cause them to oppose various institutions and subsequently run into conflict.  The human protagonist in the LHD, Mr. Ai, is subject to the laws and governments of Winter.  He finds himself in opposition to them because he’s at the mercy of people in power: Karhide (because Estraven is considered there a traitor), the Orgoreyn Commensals (they sentence him to prison), and border guards who shoot and kill Estraven before making it across the border.  In the TSPE, Barney is opposed to a corporate institution, P.P Layouts, for its immoral, escapist product, Can-D, which has hallucinatory effects on its users.   Mr. Ai’s and Barney’s opposition to their respective “bosses” is key to understanding each hero’s ideology.  Through understanding LeGuin’s and Dick’s protagonists, we will be more empathetic to what they value.

The characters’ political preferences within their respective structures can thus be deciphered: in the LHD, the Ursula LeGuin portrays the alien species, the Gethenians, as only needing the bare minimum (each other, food, their temples, and marketplaces) despite having complicated technology that at one point, historically, they manufactured.  Technology, such as vehicles and sophisticated castle-like structures, require a process of design and a desire to do so that requires creativity and imagination that the Gethenians appear to have foregone, and Barney lives in a sea of technology.  Development for the Gethenians cannot occur without a demand for such items; but there is demand.  Demand implicates the existence of a market and the intelligence to design things.  The portrayal of technology in the LHD, however, takes a back-seat to more interesting concepts to LeGuin that is characteristic of non-hardcore, New World science fiction.  In TSPE, Barney and Anna desire to destroy corrupted corporations: Palmer Eldritch’s Can-Z company; (less so, Barney, wants to leave Bulero’s P.P. Layouts because of their inability to promote him).  Frederic Jameson claims, and I agree with him, that “world reduction” is when the “sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification“ (Jameson, page 271).    This is the case in many of the examples pertaining to each protagonist’s respective economic ideology.  Communistic sharing, essentially, in the Mars setting of TSPE, is reduction of true communism principles; and, capitalistic greediness from CEOs in the LHD as the norm is a reduction of the good things that come out of capitalism. 

The corporations that Barney oppose are both examples of a radical “world reduction” because they resemble an unregulated form of capitalism and all positive facts about corporations are elided.  The various trade networks between different kingdoms in the world of Winter in LeGuin’s novel are also examples of a “world reduction” since they are hardly explored more in depth.  The Martian setting differs from the markets of LeGuin’s Winter world as the markets are in the process of growing as it does in free market capitalism (also partially regulated).  

In Dick’s novel, “world reduction” occurs in terms of Barney’s opposition to evil corporations that is an allegory for activism against real-world corporations that harm people, during his time.  We see corporations as being inherently evil.  For instance, tobacco companies have poisoned and altered humanity, but none have attempted to influence us through alien drugs: "It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality, as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you believe as some do that it's outside of time and space-" (Dick, page 41).  In reality, not all corporations want to use alien technology, obviously, to mislead the public on a sinister quest to betray the human race by alien domination, because we have not met any aliens before, officially.   But in Dick’s novel, the notion of a moral corporation does not exist.  In what seems to be a capitalist society, morality is sliced out, like a heart from a captive, into the hands of a King; in other words, his novel is a criticism of consumerism and capitalism.  The omniscient narrator says, “The communal world is gone” (Dick, Page 182).  By communal, we assume that he means communism has disappeared, where the ideal living arrangements are through sharing, and thus, communals.  The narrator seems to take a dire tone about communism, and its history has been elided.  In today’s context, different cultural communistic experiments have been failures.  Though, further evidence suggests that the tone of Barney paints a corrupted form of capitalism through unpleasant imagery: “What we have here, he realized, is not an invasion of Earth by Proxmen, beings from another system. Not an invasion by the legions of a pseudo human race. No. It's Palmer Eldritch who's everywhere, growing and growing like a mad weed (Dick, Page 186).  Palmer Eldritch, who is the head of a corrupt corporation, is a symbol for the franchising of harmful stores that perhaps is a contemporary issue with capitalism.  Furthermore, corporations, in TSPE, it’s a fact that corporations are run by immoral people seeking to establish an unethical monopoly upon one another, creating a demand for escapism through supplying it with the drugs to do so.  This sounds a lot like tobacco companies that have addicted many of their victims to smoking that affects their corporeal health.  In contrast, both novels, in terms of society, institutions, and economics, holds few examples where there are no parallels to the world today, the main of which is the inclusion of extraterrestrial society.

Various institutions are inherently absent from both novels, which is another example of Jameson’s notion of “world reduction,” that the aliens are against.  Since manufactories are not mentioned, according to Jameson, in LeGuin’s novel, one can only assume that this was elided over.  Mr. Ai was more interested in the social complexities of Gethenian life rather than the institution of the factory: their “aspects of ambisexuality which we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely” was what interested him (LeGuin, page 75).  And again, while from the perspective of Mr. Ai, he thinks, “Being so strictly defined and limited by nature, the sexual urge of Gethenians is really not much interfered with by society: there is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any bisexual society I know of… this was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive” (LeGuin, page 144).  Because of the complicated nature of gender roles in humans—traditionally, men would go hunt and women would take care of their children—and later, men would go to work and women would stay home and go shopping; and more lately, men and women would go to the same work so that they can see each other.  The separation of spheres is in the process of disappearing in reality, and so these opposites that I think are byproducts of gender differences never occurs in Gethenian culture.  How then did the Gethenians perfect technology to the point that upkeep is unnecessary?  Do they have unlimited, sustainable power through far more advanced means?  Technology is pertinent to progress.  The world had no progress, however.  And progress, according to Jameson, could only occur through industrialization.  The institution of the factory, for instance, was something that the Gethenians appear to be in opposition towards in favor of a more rudimentary lifestyle.  Were there factories producing complicated goods (I assume that there are primitive factories for castle building), the protagonists would live in a very similar world to earth.  On the stylistic choice by LeGuin, there would be no defamiliarization needed to make the novel enlightening.  Gethenian kingdoms all enjoy complicated technology through the institution of trade, which Mr. Ai, in the world of Winter, was only interested in fermenting between humans and the Gethenians.  So in a way, the institution of trade was absent.  In the dénouement, Mr. Ai sets up trade between them, finally.

Gethenian law-enforcement is another institution that was absent, but in its stead, the culture of “prestige” existed that Mr. Ai and Estraven were opposed to.  Mr. Ai is in opposition to Gethenian’s way of treating alien guests.  They send him to jail.  He escapes from jail with the help of Estraven, who has nothing to lose but everything to gain because he can get his prestige back.  In that way, there are parallels to today’s society.  And he is central to the plot, as the lone human (most of the time throughout out the story, except in the dénouement) who attempts to establish trade, in what seemed to be a sincere undertaking on his part, by the humans to help the Gethenians through economic inclusion.  His preoccupation, however, takes an unanticipated turn that leads him to Estraven again, an exiled Gethenian, whom he has a romantic affair with when Estraven is in Kemmer.  (The combination of the genders into a single, reproductive creature holds back Gethenians from progress).  But before, they escape from jail “[making] a show of laboring to haul the dead load [which was Mr. Ai], for the dothe-strength was full within me…”, and then they seek to correct society’s injustice towards Mr. Ai (LeGuin, page 155).  They attempt to redeem Estraven’s prestige that is so important to him: “Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man, [being called traitor]; a name that sticks, that fits, that convinces.  I was half convinced myself,” Mr. Ai says (LeGuin, page 59).  Crime and punishment are inherently different than the real world: “The Ekumen as a political entity functions through coordination, not by rule.  It does not enforce laws; decisions are reached by council and consent, not by consensus or command” (LeGuin, page 110). The structure of the plot places Mr. Ai and Estraven in opposition to the institutionalization of “prestige” that governs the actions of others.

The reason why Gethenians are not able to make progress is because of an obsession with prestige that Mr. Ai finds himself in opposition with.  Gethenian culture does not understand the alien concept of progress due to their unique racial predicament: “When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present” (LeGuin, page 57).  By implication, Mr. Ai assumes that pushing for trade is in their best interest.  And in contrast, Dick’s novel portrays the institution of trade in a realistic light, though it’s hardly ideal in capitalist societies.

The economic implications of the existence of a jail is that law enforcement is somehow paid, or there is some kind of exchange, and thus there is economics though in an alien way we are not able to understand.  But there is an absence of money—prestige rules this transaction instead.  There are no parallels to today’s civilized world. This is just like how Mr. Ai is not able to understand why they are in a perpetual dark age, “The Palace of Erhenrang is an inner city, a walled wilderness of palaces, towers, gardens, court-yards, cloisters, roofed bridge ways, roofless tunnel-walks, small forests and dungeon-keeps, the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale” (LeGuin, page 9), an age that has no progress.  By inductive reasoning of the Winter world, people steal, people violate other people’s space, people break all sorts of laws, and thus, some form of mercantilism must exist or a Marxist mode of radical, communistic sharing.  But in a sci-fi novel, alien is alien.

In Dick’s novel, the lack of police is similar to that of the lack of police, as we understand it, in LHD.  In TSPE, the law is through a new totalitarian like government, because of the draft that Barney opposes that sends citizens to Mars.  The novel has many motifs from the free market.  The UN is there to regulate it since the UN requires human test subjects to take the drug, if I remember correctly.  Corporations regulate themselves through the lawlessness like it is in the Wild West film genre.  Barney’s success, in the dénouement, of toppling the Palmer Eldritch Corporation was bloodless, like it is usually when a corporation goes under.  This moral suggests the free market and nonviolence can save humanity.  However, there doesn’t exist a real-life parallel of an alien being who procreates through the infiltration of the human economic system.

Barney finds himself in opposition to the institution of drug addiction; he only uses Can-Z when bribed.  Capitalism or mercantilism, in the TSPE, is a central theme throughout it that centers on the trade and entrepreneurship of businessmen trying to sell hallucinatory, drugs—one of which is alien, Can-Z, the other, Can-D, not so.  However, Barney works for Leo Bulero’s corporation nonetheless, unethically: “While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish. Can-D had made this possible; they continued to require it. In no way were they free” (Dick, Page 49).  Dick’s novel does not portray anything similar to what has happened in today’s context in any country; drugs cannot or do not have such a powerful, escapist effect that one can travel to different places and come out of the experience feeling normal; there is no parallel to hallucinatory drugs without adverse effects.

Can Z and Can D, which when used, are metaphors for drug addiction that Barney are opposed to, in Dick’s novel.  They are symbols for similar drugs in contemporary society, such as: cocaine, heroin, marijuana, LSD, caffeine (in high doses), alcohol (which isn’t so bad). However, the degree to which they cause hallucinatory effects greatly dwarfs contemporary examples as I have never heard of anyone becoming schizophrenic, and biconditionally, able to live in a dream world, as a direct result of the use of cocaine, LSD, etc.   The stereotype that people moreover, and statistically liberals, love drugs, aka. Marijuana, etc. but they do not care about the negative health effects that it has on one’s life is a moral stance that Barney and Anna, more or less, fall in line with: “Once you've taken Chew-Z you're delivered over. At least that's how dogmatic, devout, fanatical Anne Hawthorne would phrase it. Like sin, Barney Mayerson thought; it's the condition of slavery. Like the Fall. And the temptation is similar” (Dick, Page 189).  Barney questions the morality of taking drugs from his boss Leo Bulero, who represents a giant corporation, despite the unethicality of working for him.  This important fact is not enough to cause Barney to question his own firm belief in the morality of not taking drugs.  He contradicts his own beliefs when Palmer Eldritch meets him and expects him to take Can-Z in order to promote his drug by bribing him that if he does not do what he asks, he will make him stay in Mars forever.

The notion of the “invisible hand” of economics in Gethenian society is a central theme to LeGuin’s novel that Mr. Ai opposes.  LeGuin draws upon conservative notions of economics, which is in a way, dystopic of the real world, when progress is at a standstill. It is also a demagogue-like mode of thought that seeks to justify top-down capitalism as being positive for society, in the real world.  Capitalism that assumes supply and demand are the governing forces of economics without any regulation will not lead to the general well-being of an individual without some upper regulation.

Some institutions that Jameson forgot to mention are not examples of “world reduction” according to Jameson and are ambiguous as to whether Mr. Ai was opposed to or simply trying to understand them.  For instance, in terms of economics, the Gethenians possessed an “Orgota Naval Trade Commission in Erhenrang” on page 67; there are markets in the world of Winter: “the Great Markets of South Mishnory” on page 65; “Orgoreyn had gradually built up a unified and increasingly efficient centralized state.   Now Karhide was to pull herself together and do the same; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that; that’s all civilization, veneer, and Tibe dismissed it with scorn” on page 83.  Was he interested in submitting the Karhidians, the subjects of Orgoreyn, and Erhenrangians to human economic domination?  His actions implies he has no malintent, yet he is sentenced to prison because they do not believe him.  Moreover, economically, Jameson’s “world reduction” quote applies to economics and society of today’s histories and religions.  The difference between the Gethenians and Mr. Ai, who is a representative of humanity, pushes Mr. Ai’s to oppose the Gethenian prestige-based, law-enforcing institutions.

Dick paints an outlandish, divided solar system to symbolize the opposition that Barney has to society, (since he was drafted to go to Mars), since part of the setting is on Mars.  There isn’t a stark contrast between the settings of Dick’s novel with LeGuin’s Winter world—both are “rude environment[s and] inhospitable” (Jameson, page 269).  Mars is like a desert.  Also, Mars is a place where people live in small, enclosed hovels, because the UN must make people move out of Earth due to limited space and heat, in the novel.  This horrendous fact is another example of a setting, like in LeGuin’s Winter world, that serves as a catalyst for opposition to Barney’s corporation institution.   Here, everyone knows each other because of the similarity between Martian life and rural life.

The opposition to the systems of economics, prestige-based law enforcement, being unethical, and injustice in general are all central to LHD and TSPE.  Both novels try to address real problems in the real world, which is in line with Jameson’s essay about LeGuin as an author: “such is our entry into the other world of The Left Hand of Darkness, a world which, like all invented ones, that awakens irresistible reminisces of this the real one” (Jameson, page 267).  A lot of what Jameson suggests in his essay also applies to Dick’s novel: “SF [is] a form [that] precisely [has] this capacity to provide something like an experimental variation on our own empirical universe” (as an observation of LeGuin’s novel, LHD) (Jameson, page 270).  Examples of excellent SF prose that share no parallels with contemporary society are present in LeGuin’s LHD and Dick’s TSPE.

Bibliography

LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: Orbit, 1969. Paperback.

Dick, Phillip K.. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Boston/New York: First Mariner

Books, 1965. Kindle file.

Jameson, Frederic. "World Reduction in Le Guin." Archaeologies of The Future: The Desire

Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005, pages 268-280. 

"Time" - a poem

Time passes slowly:
times of suffering;
times of joy;
times of ecstatic love;
and times of meaningful,
curvy roads.

Time is a young face posing as thought it were old.
Time's enigmatic impetus that is invisible proceeds while we learn everything we can,
while fighting the alien.

Time is misery of knowing what has come to pass will no longer be.
Wind by contrast speeds,
ages whistle past,
whispers of 'bye, bye foreigner' that is time.

Time is an alien who utters not and lives in the fourth dimension.
It can speak of Earth's home,
but it wont reveal its watch on the alien's wrist.
Goodness of love can depart and shocking death can return,
once time shocks my anti-Utopian paradigm.

Time may return, reengaging frozen gears designed for progress,
but science doesn't accept the existence of love potions as ethical,
since the beginning of time.

Reading responses to "Shattering of Silence."

I think being mute has a more empathetic effect on the reader.  The reader would not have been as understanding and moved by the denoument of the novel if the main protagonist/heroine were not disabled.  Disability requires a special kind of empathy that not everyone, historically, has been able to provide.  Similarly, not everyone in the world has supported the Guerillas and rebels who want to have independence from colonial powers such as Portugal and Spain.  On page 138 of the kindle edition, Juan tells Faith that she can “…tell him you’re a deaf mute and that you can’t hear what we’re saying,” and this to some effect helps Faith survive the interrogation by Marcelo and his compatriots.  The plot of the story would be altered considerably were she able to speak, which occurs in the ending of the story.  This coincides with the semi-positive ending of the novel, since she’s able to make it to safety, but Juan dies in Prison.

In a more general sense, I believe that for Faith to be mute, it adds a musical element to the novel, kind of like John Cage’s silent piece for orchestra that lasts 4:31 seconds or so, in that the narrator does not always convey her thoughts because of a lot of what is missed if she were able to talk.  This instills the idea of repression into the reader’s mind in terms of gender (she being a woman) and also her being on the rebel side—the guerillas—by the PIDE and the soldiers.  

In “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie exclaims that his art and the art of the transnationalist is derived mostly from the past, of the things that one wants to return to out of longing.  Similarly, Karodia’s novel, Shattering of Silence, implements her yearnings and longings, because of the act of understanding one’s own life that takes reminiscing and delving into one’s memory somehow.  But regarding the broken mirror metaphor in the Rushdie’s essay, the Karodia’s novel is about the author’s broken mirrors of his own path.  Because isn’t she the one traveling in a plane back to Mozambique in the prologue in order to return to her homeland?  She has written a protagonist who’s white into her novel and so this character is symbolic of the fact that she’s coming from Western civilization and can only write from the perspective, perhaps, from her heroine, Faith, and as a mute.  It gives her more leeway as an artist to convey her concern for her country. 

Well the Portugueese-run PIDE has been the central enemy to the rebels, (to Faith and her friends), but the Portugueese culture is not painted in a negative light other than its oppressive qualities.  Music, on page 190, is a key example of this cross culture analogy throughout the semester, because Fado music, which I have previously unheard, is part of the universality of it.   We’re all human, music seems to say, and we all want to enjoy a dance; however, this rarely comes to play or existence when there are far more fundamental problems such as housing, finding foster parents, etc., that Faith has to endure.  The enculturation of the Mozambiquenpeople into Portuguese, and thus, European culture, is a question that’s up for debate.  While many of Faith’s friends are Mozambiquen (she’s the only white) and they hold similar positions as doctors, then doesn’t this mean that they’ve been assimilated and encultured by Portuguese culture—just not wholly.  Also, this assimilation process is largely with their consent, despite the fact that the Mozambiquens throughout the novel want independence from foreign control.

I thought Faith’s diction as largely dreamy and dreamlike.  She portrayed with a sort of matter-of-factness, attractive quality, that perhaps, the author envies in a real-life, white friend.  The fact that Faith sleeps with an Englishman, David, and then Juan, means she’s successful with men and understand her sexuality even though she states that she questions her sexuality, but ironically, immediately afterwords, sleeps with Juan and they have sex.  I suppose this portrayal of a white woman as being particularly positive and we don’t get to see her in her negative light.  We don’t get to see her negative qualities, instead, we get the perception of a white woman as what women are expected to be able to do.  

Furthermore, the portrayal of Faith as being supportive of the rebel cause in opposition to many higher-up in the power-food chain, like the Portuguese government, pushers her into theliberal limelight.  We see her as being for the underdog, the repressed, and the poor.  This is something that a PIDE supporter—a supporter of colonialism—would be unable to do.  If that were the case, the protagonist would obviously become an antagonist and the novel simply wouldn’t be the same.

The fact that these relationships don’t mature for Faith is evident of what white women do to men—they leave them in the dust without telling them where they went or who they’re with.  This is perhaps an overgeneralization and a derogatory remark, however, I have personal experience with this issue.  With Juan, he obviously cannot return to Faith because he’s dead—died from being in prison for a year.  With David, Faith leaves him for David essentially and doesn’t tell him where she’s going even though she misses him and thinks about him from time to time. 

​Without the epilogue, I would be left without a strong closure to the plot.  The ending would essentially beg the question, what happened to Faith?  Did she make it to England and did she meet up with Juan?  The ending’s open ended statement, “adious” that came from Faith also signifies a certain healing.  This healing is as if it comes from her dead parents in heaven, who wished her to leave that hellhole of a war-torn country and to go somewhere safe.  This part to the ending is symbolic of PTSD, perhaps, in that one can become healed under the right environment and circumstances.  Being mute is perhaps not entirely a mental handicap, rather, a mental mindset.  

The Position of the Reader in terms of AIs and Interpersonal Relationships in Neuromancer

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

The Position of the Reader in terms of AIs and Interpersonal Relationships

The reader is in a distant position away from the novel, mentally, throughout, because of the narrative's difficulty to be understood until later and sometimes, its tendency to be incomprehensible, to the reader, according to Booker and Huntington.  The novel is difficult to follow at times because of the medical, futuristic science that seems to be dictated in an urban dialect.   In addition, computer lingo is used often that only a computer-savvy person would understand, which has a de-familiarizing aspect to the reader when used in conjunction with Gibson’s writing style in the realm of sci-fi, such as: sheheyuans, jacking into the matrix, ROM, ice, and constructs.  But, the reader is brought closer in the end to the raw emotion of heartache, a subtle theme intertwined into the plot, which positions the reader in a vulnerable spot.  In Neuromancer, the position of the reader picks up a sense of unrequited love, in a way that raises goose bumps because Case and Molly were meant for each other.  However, they will never see each other again. 

The ending of Neuromancer puts the reader in a position of reminiscent contemplation of interpersonal tragedy, in terms of one’s own experiences and memory.  He/she begins to emphasize with his/her external, real-life human relationships, in general, which gives the novel a transcending aspect to the genre of Sci-Fi, making it something that is out of a Shakespearian play.  Case in Neuromancer shares a parallelism between other characters in similar works of fiction, which transcend the genre in terms of tragic effect, such as: Brave New World (the protagonist hangs himself when his love sleeps with too many men or does not return the same feeling to him), 1984 (relationships are impossible because of constant surveillance and strict guidelines by a totalitarian state, and Winston learns to accept the presence of big brother at the café, whoever big brother might be).  This tragic effect displaces the reader’s position on the interpersonal relationship in his/her reality/fantasy, however way you look at it, created from reading this book.  The Cold War, which is itself symbolic of the failure of interpersonal relationships, would have been an issue at the time this book was written, and so Asian diplomatic ties are brought up, and also, the Chinese ICE-breaker, so to speak, almost saves Case from Wintermute/Neuromancer, of whom is not interested in creating ties with China in the novel’s structure.   Some say the Cold War is a political theme in 1984 as well.  Regarding the goose bumps effect, however, created by the novel’s powerful ending, this has been created in earlier works of fiction such as Romeo and Juliet.  The deaths of the hero and heroine in Romeo and Juliet due to family lead to a similar heartache-effect in the position of the reader/audience. 

Neuromancer is set apart from other novels in its genre, hardcore, (arguably), science-fiction (not new world because of the “lack of romance”), because of this; the distant mind of the reader is rarely trying to make sense of the relationship between Case and Molly and Case's earlier love interest.  The reader is more focused on the constant bombardment of terms that are out of sync with the reader relating to future science than with the portrayal of interpersonal relationships.  The conflict between Wintermute and Case throughout the novel is met with constant strength from the relationship between Molly and Case, since Molly always seems to whip him into shape.  In the story, near the fusion event between Wintermute and Neuromancer which it shall be called, the motif of unrequited love returns, epically, because it seems as though Riviera and Molly have a child together.  That child is Neuromancer’s construct in the matrix.  Though how this this even makes sense is part of the nature of fiction—things do not necessarily have to add up. 

            The position of the reader is that he/she dislikes being heartbroken, and when the heartbreak moment comes and passes, it lasts like an illness.   This is something everyone can relate to, and is shared with Case’s experiences with Molly.  The fact that Case never sees Molly again is a tragedy, and also that he chooses to not be with Linda in the end, which is of less consequence, is sad too.  Throughout the novel, Molly is central to Case's life; we the readers get to know her strong personality and characteristics through her interactions with Case.  When Case comes to the realization that he won’t see her again, the position of the reader is left in the dark as to why and how, as it is throughout most of the novel. 

The fact that the mere existence of Neuromancer as Riviera’s child goes against the grain of the entire novel, though it’s in the position of the reader, to consider it as a possibility, given the dystopic world, subconsciously at least.  The reader’s arrogant position that AI are bad when they’re too powerful/intelligent, is turned on its head in the end, too, because of what or who Neuromancer/Wintermute becomes.  But even if it isn’t Riviera and Molly’s child, who are concealing this fact from Case throughout, Neuromancer chooses a face, in the matrix, intelligently since it’s stated that he can basically foresee the future.  An alternative explanation for this phenomena in the book can be that he is foreshadowing Riviera and Molly getting together, though I’m uncertain of this.  Either way, the implications are tremendous, causing the reader’s arrogant, negative position about AI to be rewritten.   And also, either way, questions about the matrix’s symbolic meanings are raised in terms of the reader’s position, which I will attempt to answer shortly.  The reader’s position has been that Wintermute is an evil AI that wants to kill off Case’s team, and has succeeded in doing so.  However, when Riviera’s intentions to seduce Molly become clearer, this shifts the position of the reader to take a stance against him although he was an ally before he backstabbed Case. 

From a different angle of the same issue, the position of the reader before he/she has read the novel is that science is supposed to provide solutions to common human problems.   But science, in this dystopic novel, reduces the characters' humanity and desire for friendship into a make-believe fantasy land—the matrix—that Case can withdraw to.  In this future that is anti-Utopian, because, according to Huntington, “the hacker and the game player, far from disavowing technology, [glorifies] it and [uses] it to compensate for the overwhelming power of the world symbolized by multinational corporations” (Huntington, page 140).  But not everyone in the novel is shown to visit the matrix, and not everyone wants to, which is why I disagree with Huntington’s assessment. The matrix is not necessary for a civilization to survive, but the novel reminds the reader of what the Matrix movie trilogy later spelled out when machines controlled the fate of humanity and sucked the energy out in little womb-like apparatuses.  If you can have everything you want in the matrix, as Neuromancer tried to persuade Case to stay in his fantasy world, why then, didn’t Case take the opportunity if it feels real though it's not?  Clearly technology isn’t so damaging to the human psyche that humans can’t see what is and isn’t good for them.  If you can have everything you want, why not take it if it feels real though it's not?  Indeed, the reader adopts the position that technology shouldn't be too time consuming.

The reader adopts the position that technology needs to be life freeing, which it is not in Neuromancer.  And according to Booker, “the future of capitalism would be dominated by Japan,” and thus, our technological ego would be hurt, which he seems to take grave concern over, would be over.  (I disagree with his thesis argument).  The anti-Utopian future according to Booker, in the end, is reduced somewhat, because the matrix will take over the world and put humans into little womb-like apparatuses, assuming the sequels to Gibson’s trilogy are anything like the Matrix trilogy films.  Then, the concern for Japan becoming a world power, seems to me unfounded, because Japan is a democracy; although the stigma of Japan being an Axis power during WWII could still be a concern of the essay by Booker.  To the reader, the position in terms of contemporary issues seems to be that of a warming towards Asian cultures, and the friendly overtones between Linda and Case.  The ninjas, the ninja weapons, and the matrix, are all suggesting the story wants the reader to not shy away from Japanese, Asian cultures.  But the matrix is symbolic of present day issues relating to escapism and distractions that everyone seems to do and use, aka: tablets, smart phones, fancy electronics, video games, and even computers.  All this time that is spent on playing video games, or jacking into the matrix for that matter, could be better spent making human relationships.   Politically, the novel seems to take an anti-technology position, and thus, the reader absorbs its position.

But aside, for now, from the political morals implied here, which are part of the complex structure of the novel, Neuromancer, the AI, Wintermute, becomes something too powerful, and the reader absorbs this position like a sponge.  Because there are many AI antagonists like in Asimov’s I, Robot series (not the sentient robot but the irrational AI that wants to take over the world at the military complex) or Arthur C. Clarke’s Hal computer that goes awry from 2001: A Space Odyssey, of which is a seeming intelligence that is beyond human control.  The reader’s positions himself in acceptance of all the arguments that Gibson has portrayed: 1) the fact that in the future, there will not be time for friendship, but there’ll be time for work; 2) the fact that in the future, there will be cramped living space with populations soaring; 3) in the future, women will give themselves freely to any attractive man without a second guilty thought; 4) the matrix will provide an escape into a simpler world that is better and more understandable; 5) in Gibson’s dystopic world, sex is meaningless unless one’s married; 5) life will be meaningless, because, in the world as portrayed in Neuromancer, the only mode of pleasure is sex and computers.  It sounds like heaven right?  The reader is not prepared for the dose of reality that Case encounters in the catastrophic end, however.  The novel doesn’t prepare the reader for the worst of the worst, much like the stylistic techniques used in Brave New World and 1984.  Indeed, Gibson employs a stylistic device to shock the transfixed reader.