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.