Blog Party

I feel as if I would be a different person without books. Both as a reader and as a writer, fiction has shaped my life in many ways. So my inquiry question for the blog party is: "How does reading affect a person's personal life?" This question, for me, started with looking at how a person reads. I compared two people, one who reads constantly, and one who has never, according to him, finished a single book in his whole life.

Person A, the big reader, is full of curiosity about the world. She reads to enrich her life and disappear into a fantasy world. She reads fiction and nonfiction, depending on her mood and if she finds something she wants to learn more about. She is in her early 30s and still single.

Person B, who has never read a single book all the way through, graduated from high school playing football. He then went directly to work, got married young and started a family right away. He watches TV and hangs out with his circle of close friends and thinks books are a waste of time. If he wants to know about something, say how to fix a motorcycle, he learns from a mechanic. He might watch an educational program on the history channel, but more for entertainment than to learn.

So are these two different, apart from their reading habits? Person B has a family, whereas Person A does not. Has she spent too much time reading to find someone to marry? Or is that a factor here? Which one is happier?

I come from a family that does not put much store on reading. Most of us do, occasionally, but to read and to be a Reader (capital R) are two very different things. A person who reads might read on occasion, or even very frequently. A Reader puts reading first, above most everything. For those people who say that they don't have time to read, they are not Readers. Readers find time between the cracks in the walls. Readers always have a book with them. Readers read while walking down the street, or at red lights or while stopped for a train. Readers lose sleep and miss meals because of books. Readers have jobs to pay for their book habit and have houses so they have somewhere to store their books.

Reading has had a very large impact on my own personal life. I would rather read than be out with humans. I prefer fictional characters to most people. But that does not mean than I am better of than anyone else. Nor does it mean that someone who doesn't spend all their time reading is better off than I am.

I believe reading is just like any other past time. It doesn't fit everyone. I do not enjoy putting together model airplanes, but that doesn't mean it would enrich the life of my neighbor. However, I think that reading can enrich a person's life like very few other things can. Without books, I wouldn't get thousands of people's opinions on every subject possible. Such as Stephen King's opinion that a person can get used to anything, given the right circumstances. Or Dave Barry's opinion that a man is like a fly sitting on top of a truck tire and when that tire starts to roll and the fly is squished into a small, dark blot, the only thing going through the fly's mind will be - and I quote - "Huh?" Or Mercedes Lackey's opinion that Unicorns are distracted by passing butterflies. Or a thousand other things that are sometimes useless but more often than not, things that I have used to shape myself.

After reading the book Sphere by Michael Crichton (who does not kill children in his stories), I found something he wrote very useful. "If what you're doing doesn't work, try something else." That is a form of the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

So my question to everyone else is: How has reading shaped your personal life? Do you find that it helps you in the read world? Does reading affect your life in a negative way? Or is reading just something like any other hobby?

Week 8 Freestyle

Ah, the final post before the blog party. I have enjoyed the class, much more than I thought I would. Literature is still not my favorite thing in the world and I still feel sort of icky thinking about it, but I may take another lit class in the future, in order to force myself to learn more about it.

I would never have read the Lord of the Flies if not forced to in a class many years ago. And, without it, I wouldn't understand all the Lord of the Flies jokes in movies or on TV. And that would be tragic. So I wonder how many classic Literature jokes are going over my head because I have not read the books. Hundreds? Thousands? I must do something to fix this. I must read literature.

Week 8 Scene-Response

The clip I picked was from Act 3 where Emilia finds the handkerchief. Iago is played by Sir Ian McKellan, which was sort of surprising because I never would have pictured him in a play like this. And then I was surprised that I was surprised by it. Of course Ian McKellan has done Shakespeare! What hasn't he done? Okay, he is not in any of the Twilight movies (as far as I know, anyway), but pretty much everything else, yes.

What I took from this scene I got from reading along with the actors, which helped a lot. I could see their faces and get some of their feelings from that. A play is hard to get emotion from for me, because the word "Ha!" could mean a bunch of different things on the page, but when watching it, I could see what she meant by saying it.

Quote-Response Week 8

"And when I love thee not, chaos is come again." (957)

I love this line. I'm not sure why, except I think it speaks about how much he loves her, in his way. That even though loving her is his road to perdition, he would be in complete chaos without her. Of course, it's Shakespeare so I could have it all wrong but that was my take on it.

Othello, by the way, is now one of my favorites of his.

Freestyle Week 7

I am glad we are focusing on film this week. I love everything about movies. And like books, I believe that there is no such thing as a useless movie. Even the lamest romantic comedy or alien-invasion-end-of-the-world-tragedy is worth something to someone. My friends and I watch horrible movies and make fun of them, very MST3K. Not only do we make fun of the horrible acting and dialogue, but we also say very mean things about the directing (sorry M. Night, but really? Too much emotion? Mark Wahlberg is not a robot), set (did those people actually get their set pieces from a yard sale?), lighting (it's 2 o'clock in the morning and yet sunny...there's something wrong here), sound (did someone behind the camera just cough? Was that in the script? And what's with the whooshing noise in the scene changes?), and our favorite thing of all - special effects.

My friend Jed is an aspiring computer graphics dude and he gets seriously offended if the special effects are horrible. Of course some movies have very large effects budgets and can afford Weta and ILM to come in a do a fantastic job making the movie look neato. But some movies have to stack the same explosion 4-high, with the flat grounding in each one. Not cool.

Movies, just like books, can take us places outside our normal lives, even if it's only temporary. There are some things movies can not do that books can and the reverse is also true. That is why I enjoy both.

2nd Quote-Response Week 7

"Let him do his spite." (Kennedy 919)

Ah, Shakespeare. I am not a fan, really. I have such a hard time reading - or watching - his plays because I get tripped up in the language, as most lazy people such as myself do. If I wanted to sit down with someone who understood this stuff and go through it line by line, maybe I could understand it, and therefore, appreciate it better.

This quote sounds not unlike something I might say to a friend who just told me someone is talking smack about me. Let him talk. I know I'm a good person. That is just what Othello is saying here: My services speak for themselves and no one can blacken my name. Or, at least I hope that's what he was saying...

Quote-Response Week 7

"Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire'd go out and her jars would break." (Kennedy 811)

I love this line and the one before it ("Here's a nice mess") Here we are, talking about who murdered this man, clearly thinking his wife could not have slept through something like that, and we're talking about her jars of fruit freezing and breaking. I believe it, though. When confronted with something horrible or sad, the mundane things can keep a person grounded. This woman's husband is dead, whether she did it or not. So her mind goes to something completely safe and normal. Worrying that if it got to cold with the fire out, her fruit jars would break. A trifle, indeed.

Week 7 Scene-Response

The scene I chose is when O confronts Julia's character about whether or not she's cheating on him and she gives him that speech. This is a typical fight for a couple. Are you being faithful, I've heard rumors about you, a lot of jealousy flying around. I particularly liked how she tells him that she wants to be with him and if he really wants to be with her then he'd better not speak to her that way again. Very eloquent, wouldn't you say?

Because I watched this directly after reading the lecture on film techniques, I was paying close attention to the way the scenes were shot. I noticed the close-up on Julia's face, with Mekhi in the foreground, his back to the camera and slightly blurry. The way the camera flips back and forth between the two actors makes the scene flow smoothly and it's hard to forget that this scene probably took hours to film, if not more.

This scene is important because this fight is what is called a "relationship adjustment" (I learned this from an author called Jennifer Crusie). In every relationship there are 4 stages to mature love and during these stages, a fight where the couple involved hash out their feelings, but in the end bring them closer together, is termed as an adjustment to the relationship. Of course, some relationships can't survive a fight like this and then they break up. Not so much an adjustment as a relationship ender. Pop psychology at its best, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.