According to catholicism...

...envy is one of the seven deadly sins. But I can't help, this thought just came to me, but be sinfully jealous of your position as a creeping pixie that crawls into our minds! Bah! But I think, how beautiful! How wonderful to see what we are thinking, to watch us grow, to learn from us. You get a direct channel into not only our thoughts but our feelings and it's such a personal view of each of us. I suppose that depends on how much people say and what they say when they blog to Slothrop, God (and I say God because you in a sense see all, observe all) of the Vietnam Rhetoric Class. I couldn't help but feel vulnerable at first. I wonder if people feel that. I wonder if other people in our class think about just how much should they say, and what should they limit or not limit this personal blog to. For instance at some point I was blabbing, okay no I wont say that, I was blogging about me and where I came from, but i felt it relevant to an understanding of my perspective. (omgz this is like Tim O'Brien shiat right here!!! I'm forming your view so you can see my,.... dun dun dun *hold your breath*, reality and point of view!) Is that a bad thing? Is that off topic? But already I'm off topic from what I was originally posting at the beginning of this entry. What a beautiful thing I think, Mr. Piekarski, what a fragile crystal you hold, what a privilege (that must be cherished, and by no means am I saying you don't) to teach us. The fruits of teaching? Is it wonderful to watch us grow? [the answer is yes. do i need to say that? I could of probably done without the commentary in the brackets. commenting on my own commentary. narrative my own narrative.] :)


FIN.

WTF IS REALITY

It seems like so many of the texts we read/watch/listen to revolve around a question of reality. It's all about point of view. I know we've talked about "reality" and "truth" in class before, but what is real, what is the truth as we defined it Mr. Piekarski? Tim O'Brien told us what was real didn't matter and if we began to ask if it really happened, we missed the point all together. But what is the point? Everyone seems to have their own "truths" their own "realities".

O.K. so "reality" would be like say, what what a detatched third party, non-biased, observer would see, like God or the Universe almost? And whatever body else down on earthy-poo is doing and everything they have to say or everything they feel, is just a point of view? Can we still say that their point of view is a certain truth to them?

I'm very confused. So no one is right, no one is wrong. There's no black or white, no "this is truth and this is not" type of thing. Just shades of grey, "perceived personal truths" and points of view.

BLAH BLAH BLAAH BLAH BLHLLABLHALKJLSKJD;FASJD;LFKAJSLDKFJ

************ okay: QUESTION NOT RELATED TO CLASS:
what does this mean or indicate when placed after a quoted passage:
[sic]
I'm hedging my bets that you Mr. Piekarski, ze reader/writer whizzz, know what this is.

P.S. You're a cruel cruel thug for allowing Halloween to fall on a Wednesday. I'm not bitter.

SUCCESS!!!

5/1/03:




03/06/2006:

creepy

An hour and 38 minutes into Hearts and Minds between the scence where Nixon is talking to the former POWs at a dinner party and the scene where the Vietamese man laments the loss of his daughter, is the creeeeeeeepppiiiest scene ever. After we see the bombs dropping and hear them whistle to the ground, the picture shifts to black and white and the only thing playing in the back ground is a high pitched eerie tone and the sound of remote cold wind. We get a black and white picture of complete destruction, a town that is now nothing except shards of bamboo and dirt, and then a close up of a womans face contorted with pain and tears. We can't hear her cry but the silence seems to magnify her pain as we listen to the high pitched whistle and the sound of desolate wind. And next we see the source of her lament- her dead children. This scene makes me feel like it's the end of the world! It down right scares the shit out of me. I recognize Davis wants us to feel for this woman and her pain and I acknowledge that I do. Davis's rhetoric has worked? Anyway.... craziest creepiest scene ever. Did you not find it disturbing?

EVAluating EVA

WON: ...that my RAs at first aren't going to be anywhere near perfect. And to perfect my work, to make that ideal pot, I gotta throw a lot of pots. Which is why I think it's awesome (as much as I hate it at 2a.m. the morning before it's due) that you're making us write so many RAs! Hmm that doesn't help me any except that maybe I'm asserting my ethos as a truthful character... I've learned that nike really knows what they're talking about when they say "Just do it." You gotta put your RA out there, write it out and stop being afraid of it! I've learned through confirmation in my brain piece that a second draft works wonders on my papers!!! I've learned that past 12a.m. I can't really think anymore. Oh yes... And I've learned about Vietnam. And I've learned that what I'm doing now as a major might not before me. In general I've learned a lot about myself and this class has been the medium of my growth.

TOO: Learning more of.... I'd like to learn more about structuring our writing. How to go about writing. But I think you answered my question already today when you said, "You wanna get better at writing, you gotta read." I think Mr. E.B. White is gonna be my new best friend. Clarity is exactly what I need, and our friend E.B. White apparently has truck loads of it. I want to learn more about other people's writing, more essays, so I can mimic and find my writing style. Yeah, I want to learn what my writing style is and my answer is: read and write.

TREE: RAs RAs RRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Specifically, getting detailed on a thesis and pin pointing what it is. I think I fight myself too much when I'm trying to write RAs. But I think sample essays and sample analyses are the answer to my question.

FLOUR: MORE DISCUSSION. I also would like more from YOU. I'd like it if you told us what YOU thought after we finished analyzing the texts on our own. I get to hear and read what everyone else is thinking, but rarely do I get to hear YOUR take on everything. I understand why this is, you want to give us room and time to discover things and come to our own conclusions, but I'm curious: what do you think about these texts?

FIVE: Useful: That excerpt from our course packets that showed us how to evaluate movies. That was awesome because it gave us the tools for movie analysis by telling us about point of view, camera angles, themes, characters and then it demonstrated how to use these tools by showing us samples essays.

SIX: HEARTS AND MINDS HEARTS AND MINDS HEARTS AND MINDS. HEY AND DID I MENTION HEARTS AND MINDS?!?!?
POR QUE? Because I've watched parts of it at least 5 times and I discover more and more what the message is. But I suppose if I saw any other movie or read other texts I'd discover new thing about them. But for some reason I'm drawn to Hearts and Minds emotionally and because it seems to have so much craft and I feel I dont just see a new face or object in the filmed I didn't see before, but instead I discover a new argument each time within the greater arguement.

My Preformace:
1.) Blogs: Hmm I've missed a few times. I put more effort into some blogs than others but I think progressively, my public blogs have become more insightful and thoughtful versus just blabbing off about what I think and not backing my statements up. Personal blog is well, just that- 'tis mine. I don't know what to say. I think it's great because it's me and if were to put ME down that would just hurt, but that doesn't mean that I can't critique myself. You... I don't know if my blogs have gotten any better. I think I've become more afraid of them because you Mr. Piekarski are looking at them. I know this sounds stupid, but sometimes when I've blogged my heart out towards the beginning of the school year and got nothing in response it was disheartening. I know I would say a lot and God you might have been thinking, Eva stfu already, but I NEED FEEDBACK. I want to know what am I doing well with, what am I doing bad on, so I can improve myself, my writing, my ability to think critically, my approach to analysis. I want to better myself! I started off very emotionally in my blogs. I responded with immediate feelings, and observations, and there were lengthy, long winded. And then I moved to okay no, I need some detachment. And I responded visually and then went into some analysis with the response to Letter to America movie. I think they are getting better in the sense that I have become more reflective, and it helped me the other day when you responded to my post on Tim O'Brien. I loved that. But I feel more withdrawn. Or maybe not. I don't know. GIVE ME SOME DIRECTION OH CAPITAN DE RHETORIC!!!

2.) DISCUSSIONS: ahhh I love them. I realize that discussion is part of our grade and any time it's a part of my grade in any of my classes, I make sure to speak up despite being shy or afraid because well, my grade is on the line. But in this class I can't help but say things, I can't help respond to them verbally, and I can't help that I have so many question for people when they respond in class the way they do. I like to know what everyone is thinking and why they think it so I can see how to approach my writing or my way of thinking. I love the collaboration of though because I get hear new perspectives and think about things I might never have noticed or thought about otherwise. I get a different view on everything from hearing everybody in class. I think I deserve point here because my curiosity and my response to texts take a very tangible, audible, visual form that show, Eva does do at least a little bit of thinking now and then.

3.) RAs: hmmm biggest weakness. I'm able to respond verbally, blog-like-ly, visually, but when it comes to writing and putting all of my thoughts into a formal setting (our RAs) I have trouble. You hit it right now the nail when you told me, You have a love of all things (very true. I find everything fascinating!), but Eva, you need to zoom in and focus in on one or two things in your RAs instead of trying to cover everything (so true. I even feel overwhelmed because I feel like there is soo much to say and I don't know where to begin.) But I'd like to say that I think I did awesome on this last RA that we are supposed to wring another draft on. I wish you could see the first draft and tell me how I could improve or if I'm completely wrong (which could be very right) in thinking that my RA has gotten any better.

4.) GRADE: Because I am still struggling with getting this RA thing down, and because I haven't turned in 3 RAs which are supposed to benefit me (but I didn't do them because I couldn't figure out where to start and when I did it was too late, but who needs excuses since "the road to hell is paved with good intentions").... I deserve no more than a B. And I say a B and not a C+ because, I HAVE been thinking, I'm active in class, I'm active with our texts outside of class. I really think about our texts and respond to them emotionally and thoughtfully and I overcome my fear of speaking or being wrong by voicing my thoughts and not becoming discouraged when I am wrong. That Mr. Piekarski takes guts. People don't like being wrong but I'm completely open to it. I want to be corrected when I am wrong. I want criticism because it will only help me! And I want to improve!!!

5.) O.K. so when you said Eva, "I see that you are a very visual person" you couldn't be closer to truth. For my final project I was thinking big posters, crafted with a message, a meaning, a truth that I'm finding as we go further into this class. So I've been feeding myself with the Wall Street journal to bring immediate relevance to the topics we find in class. I'm pulling from rhetoric as well... How do I not only craft my message visually, but how do I convince my audience that the message in my poster ia important. I have examples of posters/art that I find from the internet and good ol' Corrbit that I stole from my bro to help me with the word aspect. What would be cool is that I'll be incorporating words (like we do our R.A.s) and images to convey a message that speaks without speaking. It's going to be tough but I could work it out, and it will be awesome. It has to be because I won't accept anything less than that. BAM. What do you think? I'd like to discuss it with you and get some.... dun dun dun... (r u ready for this) FEEDBACK. ;] But I suppose my end of the deal is that I need to produce more R.A.s.

What say YOU Mr. P?

Also, Fabulous play list this morning.

YOU KNOW IT!!!

Tres (leches): I had nooo idea M.I.A. was to be playing here, in Austin, on campus! Flippin' fantastic! I'm soooo going! If you haven't figured out who you're going with, come with me!?!

I gots my ticket. You gots yours?

Hearts and Minds

I rented Hearts and Minds and I've watched about an hour of it so far. I thought it might be better for me to have a first run through on my own so I can start to think more critically about it when we all watch it together Monday night.

1:02 hrs into the movie there's this scene showing some footage of the Viet Cong viciously rounding up Vietnamese civilians in Saigon. The frame shifts to one of the soldiers holding a Vietnamese man at gun point and effortlessly without any hesitation he pulls the trigger. The body plops to the floor like a marionette gone lax and in an almost Quentin Tarantino-esque moment blood is shooting out of this dead man's head like a science experiment. I watched this brief scene at least 4 times. I was in awe. Honestly, I thought the squirting action from a fatal wound was just, a Hollywood thing. The exaggeration of constant gore and blood in Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction with severed limbs and squirting artery's that make you feel like it's almost funny, only affirmed my view that this there's no way this kind of gore truly happens in real life. But then I see this man shot in the head who falls dead to the ground and so perfectly on cue, his life gushes through his head hole, all of it unscripted and caught on tape and assembled in this documentry. All I could think and feel was, damn this shit is for real.

I'm beginning to understand this notion of "what is it we DON'T see". Up until now, I've NEVER in my life seen that happen to any human being- on the news, on the internet, on tv, much less in real life. People would flip the fuck out if they saw that. They'd complain and probably start a hissy fit over all the in appropriate gore on a public T.V. station. But when it's in a movie and it's fake and not real, oh that's FINE, it's a-okay . It's okay because in the back of your head you have that tiny bit of comfort knowing that it's not real, that it was just some actor with kool-aide jetting out of his head who's pretending to be dead for the sake of dramatic moment.

I think if people SAW some real carnage, if we saw severed limbs, real gushing head wounds, if we even saw body bags of dead men fighting in Iraq or a ticker on the bottom right corner with the death count on it, maybe we'd wake up and realize how much we aren't getting. Maybe we'd realize that a lot of what's going on is in conflict with what we value. Maybe we'd see that ignorance is not bliss. But who is to blame? Is it us the people watching TV, or the people who provide or prevent the availability of the images we see. If we could see some of these things, maybe we'd realize why we should give a damn about war and about politics and about the media that seems to have an agenda and rhetoric of its own.

Where are the body bags? Where are the faces of everyone that's died in the war we are fighting now? Why can't we see the gore, the death, the blood, the anguish? Where is the cold hard reality and why can't we see it?

Chwast, Seymor End Bad Breath 1968

reply/unintentional-essay

Yo yo yo, check it:
Uno: Easy, you just have to be me. Cool magazine covers though dontcha think?
Dos: You have my word, I will make it to your movie showing! You can't say no one showed up because Severin did and Severin is not "no one." As for the movie showing date/time, it would depend on when we need to have the next movie assignment watched by don't you think? Is there a movie that you want us to watch by next week and if so then I think this weekend would be fine. I could figure out times for the peeps from there. Of course this would all depend on when you get your DVD playa and if you'll even make all of this happen! You know Yoda once said "there is no try, there is only do." Mr. Piekarski don't just try making the movie night, Dooo It.
Dos "beh": I'm already on the well deserved nomination.
Tres (leches): I had nooo idea M.I.A. was to be playing here, in Austin, on campus! Flippin' fantastic! I'm soooo going! If you haven't figured out who you're going with, come with me!?! Jes var nice gypsy.
Cuatro: As for the pelicula, I thought it was pretty fabulous. I'm pretty sure the producer of this film/documentary-ish production did not think Vietnam was happy time and didn't want us to think so because of the emphasis on death and the individual. There was the image overlay in white lettering of the death count number including the date and the letter readings of young men predicting or hoping that they wouldn't die followed by the same white lettering confirming their death. I noticed at some point when the letter reading had briefly stopped, the camera zoomed in on the faces of at least 10 different men all looking either very hopeless or very stern. The close ups along with the reading of these letters, I suppose wanted to personalize and make real to us the death of these boys and in this way convince us that the Vietnam War sucked, especially when (as we discover through the letter readings) most of these soldiers didn't know what/why they were fighting.
Cinco: Yo soy la super guawo y la mejor "numba' one stunna."

Eva

Aiight. One: how'd you make your blog page so spiffy? Two: when the spaceship DVD player arrives, you bet I'd like to offer movie night again. But it's so lonely when no one shows up... If you'd like to do the figuring-out-of-what-date-and-time-works-best-for-everyone business, and then get back to me with what you find, I'll try to make it happen. Two B: If you wanna lend a hand in trying to recuperate some of the funds it took to rescue the spaceship DVD player from the captive aliens, via the avenue I mentioned to Cory, by all means, Eva, the glory and power are yours. Three: M.I.A. in concert on November 3rd! Four: What'd you think of the film we saw today?

both Tim O'Briens seem to think that surrealism is a hard and exact truth, so why can't we say that Apocolypse Now is a kind of truth? Just because its the truth as it seems to a particular person, can we say it is not real, ....real and true to them?! Can we not say that reality and truth is relative????

There is no such thing as "Truth," despite what the Main Building Tower tells us. To say that "surrealism" is a hard and exact truth is playing with language, not much more. The second part of what you wrote is much more sensible: reality and truth are relative, and so much depends on perspective. If there existed no one to perceive it, would the world still exist? All we have are our own perceptions, which are muddled and particular to our own experiences and expectations. That's why for O'Brien, it's essential that we explore the power of the imagination and what it can tell us about ourselves; which, according to him, is often much more than the "hard exact truth" can. Whatever that is.

Johny and Bob sure know how to write and sing a song, now don't they?

Connections

Okay so author of The-Things-They-Carried-Tim O'Brien says, (now check this out Mr. Piekarski obviously great minds think alike baahahha) "...The pictures get jumbled...afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represent the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (p.71). BAM! Yeah, yeah, intro to Apocalypse Now ring a bell?! Mista Piekarski, both Tim O'Briens seem to think that surrealism is a hard and exact truth, so why can't we say that Apocolypse Now is a kind of truth? Just because its the truth as it seems to a particular person, can we say it is not real, ....real and true to them?! Can we not say that reality and truth is relative???? Help me out here, I need feed back!