Good-bye!!!

The class was awesome. I will miss it.

I wish you all a beautiful summer and a most stupendous life!

Have fun, Steve and friends!

Sincerely,
Tiff the "Scriff"

Orientalism in The Joy Luck Club

In this paper, we’ll be looking at the ways the movie, The Joy Luck Club, perpetuates the old tenets of Orientalism. At first, one might think many Asians worldwide would embrace this movie, finally one of the few films that represents the Asian American population and culture, but under a closer lens, you’ll soon discover how Amy Tan in her novel and subsequent screenplay panders to the white audience, taking on an obsequious, ass-kissing stance. Perhaps Tan bows down to white Americans simply to be on the best-seller list, but by making a quick buck, she only makes a fool of herself, discoloring and besmirching the Chinese race, so often confused with other Asian races.

Before getting to the text, a most insidious blunder is mixing Japanese, Malay, and Vietnamese actors in with Chinese and Chinese-American actors. This perpetuates the horrible and erroneous notion that all Asians are the same and look alike. China has always been a country to stand on its own with an identity like no other. To do justice to the Chinese race would be to first and foremost use only Chinese actors—there are so many to choose from, thousands willing to fit the part. I don’t understand why production would ever need to outsource. This is not Memoirs of a Geisha.

Now let’s examine the text and the Orientalist implications simmering under the surface. Number one, even though the movie flip-flops between 1960’s-1980’s San Francisco/Oakland and 1920’s-1950’s China, the backdrop of China is shrouded in mist and clouds, bespeckled with dirt roads, sharp, tall mountains, and swirling with shabby-looking peasants. China has this supernatural, ancient, cob-webbed aura—a mystical, inscrutable, backwards land that one might like to explore and colonize. Even at the end of the movie when June reunites with her two long forgotten twin sisters, China still looks like a country in shambles with no technology or modern advancements, exemplified by the fact that June arrives by boat. It appears that Shanghai didn’t have an airport in the late 1980’s.

It is this separation of East and West that is most deplorable. The East is portrayed as a land of oppression, antiquity, savagery, superstition, ignorance, and misogyny. If a Chinese woman is fortunate, she’ll be able to leave this land of bitter misery and burden and filtrate through the golden gates of America—the land of promise, opportunity, prosperity, good fortune, and enlightenment.

In Suyuan’s thematic story to June, she speaks of a duck that becomes a swan and is “too beautiful to eat.” What an outrage! Here, Tan is reaffirming the stereotype that Asians love to eat birds along with dogs, as if small pets are always on the Chinese menu. This is a cheap shot, its only foundation being the kind of racist and imperialist bullshit Tan should rally against.

Suyuan’s story goes on to say, “[In America] nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there, nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there, she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow.” This implicates that in China, women are valued only by the tyrants they marry, are undeserving of respect, have no education or knowledge of the most essential language, English, and must always swallow their emotions, suffering greatly in silence and sorrow. This perpetuates the stereotype that a beautiful Chinese woman must always suffer in humility, obscurity, worthlessness, and submission.

There is a huge cultural and linguistic chasm between the mothers and daughters. The mother is the so-called “(m)other.” The four mothers—Suyuan, Lindo, Ying-Ying, and An-Mei—represent the East while the four daughters—June, Waverly, Lena, and Rose—represent the West. The daughters are ashamed of and/or baffled by their mothers, because they think that just because they are American and their mothers originate from a country on the other side of the world, they are not on the same page. In the end, though, to finish on a happy note, the daughters come to understand and respect their mothers. But throughout the movie, we see plenty of tension.

When Suyuan tries to make nine-year-old June play the piano, June pipes, “I’m not your slave. This isn’t China!” Adult June narrates, “There were so many things about my mother I never understood.” Waverly is extremely critical of her mother’s hair, prepping for her wedding. Waverly tells the hairdresser, dismissing her mother’s presence, “God forbid she’d pay to have anything professionally done.” Her mother eventually begs the question, “Why does my daughter think she’s translating English for me?” Bitter Rose tells her mother, “I like being tragic, Ma. I learned it from you.”

Number two, and probably the most egregious blunder in the text is the misrepresentation of Chinese men (as opposed to white men) and Chinese women. In the movie, all the Chinese male characters are undesirable in some way. Chinese men are portrayed as sexist, cruel, effeminate, weak, and shameless. Wu Tsing rapes An-Mei’s mother and takes her as Fourth Wife, perpetuating the myth that Chinese men are horny, dirty, and take many concubines. When young An-Mei is sleeping with her mother, Wu Tsing comes to have sex and suggests that An-Mei watch her mother and him get it on, showing that Chinese men have no regard for children. Lin Xiao is referred to as “the bad man in China” who wildly cheats on and abuses beautiful Ying-Ying, at one point throwing her to the floor. Harold, Lena’s husband, is viewed as a calculative cheapskate who splits the household expenses, but pays himself 7 ½ times more than Lena in his firm. June’s father is the asexual, Uncle Tom character, who is willing to please and bow down to anything or anyone. Old Chong, June’s piano teacher, is literally a buffoon, a hearing-impaired, brain-impaired moron who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. Tyan-yu, Lindo’s first husband, is a comical, boorish, fat boy who plays with germy critters. Most subtle but noteworthy is the Chinese man on the roadside who ignores dysenteric Suyuan’s pleas for help as she struggles to escape war-torn China, depicting Chinese men as uncaring, heartless, and uncharitable. The last example is the mockery of old feeble Chinese men at Suyuan’s last Chinese New Year party—sleeping at the dining table with their mouths open as if they were dead or trying to catch flies.

The two white men are great and wonderful in the movie and redeem themselves for any transgressions they might have unwittingly made. Rich, Waverly’s husband, is the blond, handsome, affable, wealthy, good-natured man whose only flaws are his inability to use chopsticks efficiently and his unawareness of Chinese etiquette. He buys Waverly a beautiful fur coat and is considered by her, “the love of my life, who treated me like I was perfect.” Ted, Rose’s husband, is this stunningly gorgeous successful well-bred heir, who courageously defends Rose in front of his racist mother, tries to reconcile the marriage by imploring Rose to have an opinion and fight for herself, who is not to blame for cheating on Rose (it’s all her fault), and who in the end reconciles his marriage with Rose as the good guy.

The Chinese/Chinese-American women are portrayed unjustly too. All four mothers and four daughters are or were at some time China dolls. The majority of the women are portrayed as disturbed, insecure, weak, indecisive, and submissive. If they are not sweet and meek, they are Dragon Ladies like Huang Tai Tai, Second Wife, and Waverly. All this does is romanticize the East and pander to sexually perverse American men who have Asian fetishes. Few men who faun over foreign, exotic women want them strong and assertive. What does Oliver Stone have to say about this?

June, the main character, is too inconvincingly sweet, agreeable, and passive. We don’t see any passion, resistance, or fight in her, not even when her mother takes Waverly’s side and embarrasses her at the dinner table. Not to mention that she and Auntie Lindo don’t have the backbone to tell June’s twin sisters their mother is dead. We see more spunk in June as a nine-year-old than as a thirty-something-year-old woman, as if growing up Chinese female depletes the spirit. Lena can’t stand up to Harold without her mother’s relentless prompting and inference. Rose has no voice and can’t make decisions in her marriage to Ted until she hears her mother’s epic story. Ying-Ying is a shell of a woman after enduring an abusive husband and the drowning of her son. An-Mei’s mother doesn’t stand up for herself after she was raped—she just accepts her fate and ultimately kills herself, allegedly to give her daughter a stronger spirit, but in practical terms, to escape the hardships of living.

The third display of Orientalism in this text is the depiction of Chinese people as being more narrow-minded and racist than white America, when in reality, the Chinese are some of the least antagonistic, most embracing, tolerant people. Ironically enough, the Chinese can at times be harsher and more judgmental of each other, imploding within the race, because they’ve been brainwashed by the West that they’re physically less attractive, less important, less marketable, less educated, less likable, and more barbaric, superstitious, and ignorant.

Because of racism, Orientalist ideals, and the constant brainwashing by the media of what is beautiful and alluring, many young Asian-American women look down on themselves and develop self-esteem issues and identity crises while Asian men battle society’s castration and emasculation and feelings of sexual inadequacy. Because of Orientalism and books and movies like these, Asians are at odds with themselves and try their hardest to escape their roots.

Treacherous one step further, Tan downplays white racism towards Asians. For example, Ted stands up to his racist mother at a family regale, stating, “This is the first time in my life I am ashamed of you . . . I’m sorry, Mom, you made a fuckin’ asshole out of yourself in front of the woman I love.” Honestly, when has this scene ever played out in real life? No white male is going to put his exotic girlfriend before his mother, the woman that gave birth to him and reared him from day one.

Tan is showing that white Americans are very liberal and will more than often stand up for what is right, even if it means sacrificing. Whites judge people by character rather than by race or ethnicity. In Tan’s view, whites are open-minded, scrupulous people whereas Asians are staunch discriminators. Even more dreadful and bogus is the display of anti-Semitism by Auntie Lindo. At the mahjong table, she tells June, “Jewish mahjong not the same thing, entirely different. Now Chinese mahjong very tricky . . . And if nobody play well, then the game is just like Jewish mahjong. No strategy. You American girls—Chinese, Jewish, what’s the difference?” This is appalling. Lindo is obviously slighting both the Jewish and Chinese-American demographic. She says this humorously, but she said it which means she thought it which means she believes it.

Lindo is repeatedly quite the racist bozo. She is very prejudiced towards Rich, insulting his expensive fur coat gift to Waverly and commenting to her daughter that he has “so many spots on his face,” as if that determines a man’s worth. Even at the dinner table, she has this uppity air about her, at one time sarcastically commenting, “He has good appetite,” when he takes too much shrimp. If Tan is not showing how obsequious Chinese people are, then she is underscoring how close-minded and prejudiced they are.

The final atrocious display of Chinese racism is the subliminal message the movie leaves you with—that Chinese moms tell their daughters to only marry Chinese or white men. We never see any hookups between a Chinese person and a dark-complexioned person. This white/Asian pairing is becoming very cliché. Tan is just furthering the fallacy that Asian women go gaga over white men or settle for Chinese men to appease their tyrannical, bigoted mothers.

The fourth adherence to Orientalism in the movie is that Chinese mothers don’t care about the welfare of their children (mostly daughters). Lindo’s mother sells her to a rich family when she is only four. Waverly marries a Chinese man and has a beautiful daughter with him simply to gratify her mother. Ying-Ying drowns her baby son to get even with her husband. An-Mei’s grandmother rejects An-Mei’s mother, not believing she was raped. An-Mei’s mother kills herself, not considering that her daughter will grow up motherless and at the mercy of Wu Tsing and Second Wife. Rose gets pregnant to hold on to her marriage. Suyuan abandons her baby twin girls on the roadside in pandemonious China to save herself, knowing baby girls are unworthy of saving. And Suyuan and Lindo both want to succeed vicariously through their daughter’s achievements, pushing the poor girls against their will, one to play the piano, the other to excel in chess.

The fifth display of Orientalism in the movie is that Asian women have to die or be in tremendous pain in order to contribute something to themselves and/or society. An-Mei’s mother cuts her arm and puts her blood in a soup bowl as an act of beseeching her dying mother’s forgiveness. An-Mei’s mother commits suicide by swallowing opium-filled rice balls with the delusion that through dying, she will give her daughter a stronger spirit. Suyuan dies so that June can take her place (at the mahjong table, the East corner where things begin) and for the first time, assume an identity and gain a sense of purpose.

All throughout the movie, these poor China Dolls are suffering and conquering their pain. They never seem happy, always conflicted. It is only in the end, when Tan wraps things up at the two-hour mark that past wrongs are forgotten, all is well, and life is beautiful for the mothers and daughters of the Joy Luck Club.

The sixth and last point of contention is that Tan perpetuates the myth that Asians are superstitious and idiosyncratic. Lindo is able to fool the whole household that she must escape this travesty of a marriage and get a plane ticket out. She tells them about the rage of the ancestors, the cycle of destruction, and the three signs. Huang Tai Tai, the matriarch of the household, falls for this, and castigates the Matchmaker, who in turn replies, “Mistakes happen in heaven.” Because of the ignorance of old school Chinese matrons, Lindo becomes a free woman. Ying-Ying states that she is waiting in the shadows like a tiger, ready to cut her daughter’s spirit loose. In believing this, she helps Lena escape a dysfunctional marriage as if all problems can be mended via mythical stories. At An-Mei’s mother’s funeral, An-Mei convinces Second Wife that her mother’s ghost will come back to settle scores, to which Second Wife’s hair turns white and Wu Tsing honors An-Mei and her brother as his First children. And of course, the movie keeps revisiting June’s story about the duck and the single swan feather as if her mother’s coming to America is based on a mythical story, as if all life events can be written with a keen imagination.

This blending of fact, fiction, and superstition compromises the integrity and cogency of Tan’s words. The history and stories become surreal in places. Worst of all, the Chinese-American experience and notions of China become surreal to the point that Orientalism can find its way in. A true China is far more complex and not always a pretty picture, but if one were to be a Chinese writer equipped to represent her Chinese heritage, she should base it on more than just assumptions, myths, and the whimsical. She must be true to the billions of Chinese and Asian people she gives voice to, the beautiful people who depend on her for the ultimate expression and overdue reverence.

Works Cited

Clifford, Nick. “H-Asia: ‘Orientalism’ Thread.” AOL. On-line. 2-11 March 1996. 14 May 2010.

Hayot, Eric. “Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound’s
China.” AOL. On-line. Winter 1999. 14 May 2010.

Henrickson, Shu-Huei. “The Joy Luck Club (Criticism).” AOL. On-line. 14 May 2010.

The Joy Luck Club. Dir. Wayne Wang. Perf. Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren
Tom, and Rosalind Chao. Hollywood Pictures, 1993.

Martinez-Robles, David. “The Western Representation of Modern China: Orientalism,
Culturalism, and Historiographical Criticism.” AOL. On-line. May 2008. 14 May 2010.

Tseng, Ada, Rowena Aquino, Ana La’O, and Cathryn Chen. “Joy Luck Club Revisited.”
AOL. On-line. 14 May 2010.

Wong, Al. “Why The Joy Luck Club Sucks.” AOL. On-line. 28 Jan. 1997. 14 May 2010.

Yu, Su-lin. “Narrating Chinese m/others: new orientalism in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck
Club.” AOL. On-line. Jan. 2008. 14 May 2010.

My Cousin in Shanghai--the Quintessential China Doll

The face of innocence and purity.


The face of mystery and intrigue.


The face of seduction.

"Tuberose" a.k.a. "Fragrance of the Night" by Teresa Teng

This song was played in The Joy Luck Club.

A Psychoanalytic Reading of Aimee Liu's Solitaire--Redo of Midterm Paper

Solitaire, America’s first memoir of anorexia nervosa, was written by Aimee Liu at the age of twenty-five. Beautiful, ambitious, and extremely bright, she fought a war within her teenage self that at times made her feel alone and solitary. Only by owning her identity apart from her attachment to codependent boyfriend, Ken, and shedding the ideals of society and her ideal self, does she slowly regain her womanly physique and health. Let us start from the beginning when this monster of a disease took hold of nine-year-old Aimee.

The fear of fat began at a party when Aimee’s grandmother says to her, “My, you’re a chubby little girl, aren’t you?” (23). Anorexia often begins with a careless comment about a girl’s weight that buries itself within her unconscious and becomes the mantra she feeds off of for the rest of her life.

Being told you’re fat by someone who supposedly loves you is a devastating blow to a budding girl’s ego. A tall pubescent teenager at 130 pounds seems healthy, but Aimee feels like an obese monstrosity that must be erased or undone. She is unhappy with everything about herself which morphs into a hatred of her body. She wants to be somebody else, and that “somebody” is thin.
So often when we hate ourselves, we do something about it, either by killing ourselves or by killing something within ourselves. By killing the very thing we despise within ourselves, we give birth to what we love, relishing this very potential of perfection within our bodies, the essence of beauty.

There is so much excess in pain that denial, starvation, and abstinence are the way out of excess, depravity, and decadence. That to be less than what we are is to be more, because this society has taught us that in some respects, less is more.

Anorexia is about regaining an identity that was always shaky to begin with. When Aimee entered high school and lost connection and intimacy with her brother, Scott, she needed to fill the void and replace it with a fascination with food and thinness. But an equal contributor was that she was afraid of becoming a woman. Eleven-year-old Aimee states, “I . . . detest myself. My body is developing faster than the other girls. I am curvaceous and tall and, though not obese, am still my grandmother’s chubby little miss. Just before Christmas I have my first period. I’ve been dreading this since fifth grade . . .” (33).

Menstruation is a horrible affair. It is a duty and responsibility that a young woman is not ready to take on, the whole idea of being fertile and a sex object. It makes a girl realize that all she has to sell in this world is her sexuality and beauty, and if she feels less than beautiful, why be sexual at all? Because fertility is a mark of competence, strength, and maturity, a floundering young girl is not ready to cross over and will do anything to rid herself of breasts, curves, and her period. A young girl is afraid of herself which is why she can never envision herself growing into a bigger monstrosity, her mother. Aimee even fears that if she eats, “I would probably look and function just like my mother” (80).

A girl fears desperately to become her mother, because she sees her mother as washed-up, old, terribly unattractive, and jealous of younger, lither, more beautiful women such as herself. Mothers are the ugly threat in a young woman’s life, a reminder that we all get old, fat, bitter, decrepit, and overbearing. So often anorexia is about the struggle between mother and daughter, the mother cooking and trying to feed her daughter and the daughter making every attempt to disobey her mother’s wishes. In the end, the daughter wins, because anorexia is stronger than anyone or anything.

Aimee says about her mother, “I want to surpass her, not follow her lead. Losing weight is the one task I can perform better than she. For years she has talked about reducing, struggled with diets and exercise, but has never had much success. When I began losing, of course, I wasn’t out to compete with her, but I must confess, it’s kind of exhilarating to manage something she’s failed. Now she pretends to worry about me, tries to convince me that I’m destroying my looks, but I know she’s just saying that because she’s jealous. I don’t care, I enjoy being thin. This is the one time I won’t let her control me” (80).

Aimee feels that her mother is trying to take away her only power, her most accessible identity, the thing that separates her from her mother. Aimee’s father is always in the background, floating in the distance, a mere money-making machine, as if his absent role and love for her is replaced by her anorexia.

Aimee needs a father to adore and faun over, to feel secure with and protected by. Unfortunately, she lacks that security. So her next choice is to find something all her own that will love and protect her from the world and shield her from the threat of her mother. Her father is anorexia and her mother is the very monster that wants to tear her from the grip of this disease. Anorexia has become the staunch dominant paternal force in Aimee’s life and she will stop at nothing to defend this twisted father figure. She will not let her jealous mother break them apart. Anorexia is the only thing Aimee loves desperately, the only love in her life, and she’ll be damned if her mother comes between them.

Later on in the novel, Aimee meets her codependent boyfriend, Ken, the third phallic symbol in her life (the first shortly being her father and the second being anorexia). In college, she and Ken do everything together. Aimee states, “The setup seems too good to be true. Ken and I are like children together, intimate pals unwilling to let each other out of sight. We attend classes together . . . We study side by side at the library, read one another to sleep at night, and exchange moral support . . . Three times a day we troop to the dining hall for our version of meals” (193).

Instead of starving herself to death, Aimee now maintains a Spartan and odd diet regimen. She eats on funny terms, but at least she eats. She eats, because she has found her second power, the first romantic love of her life. So often anorexics become anorexic, because they have no passions or pastimes or people in their lives to cling to. They use anorexia as a substitute for all the integral things they lack. Now that Aimee has Ken to cling to, her prowess and phallus, she no longer needs her anorexia so staunchly and feverishly.

The ultimate leap Aimee makes is when she sheds herself of Ken. She doesn’t need an exterior penis to complete her, she has internalized her own penis and is strong and steady by herself. She no longer resents her mother or craves the wrong kind of attention. She can give to herself what she’s been searching for her whole life—her virility, empowerment, know-how, and the confidence in herself that she can right her own wrongs. She does not need to starve in order to feel powerful nor does she need men to feel loved. She is her own machine, she can be her own player in the game of Solitaire, she needs no one but herself and the strength that has brought her thus far.

In her breakup speech to Ken, Aimee states, “Ken, can’t you see how sick this relationship is? . . . The way we’re living, doting, depending on each other . . . God, we’re practically sucking each other’s blood. Before you came along I blinded myself to the world around me by dwelling on food, modeling, my weight, anything profoundly superficial. And now I’m blinding myself by living through you . . .” (206).

An anorexic’s recovery centers on realization, enlightenment, and self-empowerment. Aimee had the courage to turn her life around and go on to graduate from Yale, write a number of books, marry and birth two sons, and do great things. She eventually realized how much she loved her mother, how she tormented her poor mother, and apologized for that. She went on to accept her father. She accepted sex and her sexuality and truly fell in love with herself for the first time. She needed no one but herself, realizing that though we are social creatures who need love and affection, we begin and end with ourselves, players in the game of Solitaire.

Work Cited
Liu, Aimee. Solitaire. New York: Harper, 1979.

Review of Group Presentation

My group is the Elephant Man group and we'll be presenting tomorrow, the last class meeting. My group members are Cathy, Dylan, and Larry.

I am so fortunate to have these people in my group. They are all very kind, generous, smart, and gifted. We all got along so well, and everyone was so open to what the other had to say, whether it was viable information or not.

We got together four times, three times at school and once at Cathy's house. At school, we discussed the logistics of our presentation and at Cathy's, we sealed the deal.

At first, we agreed on having a gimmick like past presentations. But we soon settled on just focusing on the texts and getting serious about the work and theory rather than deviating from the essence.

We had a collection of movies to sort through to parallel with The Elephant Man. We were even thinking of showing a snippet of The Twilight Zone's episode, "Eye of the Beholder," which is the one where the woman wakes from surgery and screams because she does not look like the pig-faced people.

The idea behind this was to beg the question, "What is the standard of beauty? And who is the 'other'?" but we agreed that we were veering off course with that clip.

We finally settled on showing the parallels between Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and David Lynch's The Elephant Man. We will be juxtaposing three scenes of Clockwork Orange with three scenes of The Elephant Man. After showing each pair of contrasting scenes, we will ask the class to write their visceral responses, and will in turn discuss the material.

We are crossing our fingers that all goes well. But what counts the most is that all four of us really had a blast together. The camaraderie was amazing. We were always in agreement and willing to try new approaches. And in enjoying our time together, we learned quite a bit. So, to be strictly honest, this presentation has been a wonderful experience, probably one of the highlights for me of this entire class. And I can only hope for such harmony in future group presentations.

The Elephant Man

This movie was of course very depressing. It is about being an outcast, the "other," a deformity that every cunning, evil person tries to capitalize on.

In a way, I feel a little like the Elephant Man. I have been the "other" in many ways and have had to tell many people that I'm worth more than they think.

I love the part in the movie where John (Joseph Carey) Merrick says, "I am not an animal! I am a human being!" This is where he speaks up for himself and becomes his own master. So often, people who cannot defend themselves become the so-called animals, beasts, in society.

I relate this "other" concept to everybody. Just think how if you were bullied in middle school and high school, you became the "other." Just think how painful it is, now magnify that a thousandfold and you are the Elephant Man.

I was very moved and saddened by this blatant exploitation of such a human being. To me, the Elephant Man, a creature who craved acceptance and love, was innocent and kind, and therefore very beautiful and admirable. He stood for anyone who ever felt like the odd ball out. I was so moved by John Hurt's performance that the floodgates wouldn't stop.

My heart goes out to Joseph Carey Merrick, though he's long gone. He will always be that symbol of the "outsider." The lonely downtrodden will always find solace in this notable person, and if Joseph Merrick should be remembered for anything, it should be that he made the rest of the world feel not so alone. We are all sometimes the Elephant Man. We may look normal on the outside, but inside, we're just as disfigured and just as lovely to unravel and discover.

My Thoughts on The Woman Warrior

Phew! Just finished the book for the third time today.

It took a while to read, because I don't agree with everything Kingston says about Chinese-American culture. I get the impression that she is almost at times ashamed to be Chinese and prefers her American influences. She portrays the older generation as ignorant, loud, uncouth, and steeped in wild notions and remedies. It is true--there are many Chinese people whose lives revolve around superstition and the notion of ghosts, but Chinese people are far classier, higher-educated, and more dignified than how Kingston represents us.

The Chinese are very humble, perhaps too humble, and their ignorant American-born children take their humility for shame and often mock their elders and heritage. My mother's family is very Chinese, we love what we are, never losing sight of our rich culture, but I know many friends of family who are flippant towards their heritage.

Kingston and her siblings remind me of all these stupid little ABC (American-Born-Chinese) brats who though are aware of who they are and where they come from have no respect and pride for their 5,000 years of elaborate history.

I have no clue what Kingston means by American-feminism versus Chinese-feminism. She portrays the latter as almost bestial and unrefined and an embarrassment and desires to be feminine in the classical sense--like American women. Is she just kissing ass? Apologizing for her beauty that she mistakes as vile, because she lives in America and does American things, and wants desperately to wash herself of her Chinese blood?

My impression of Chinese-feminism is the essence of grace, class, gentle, refined speech, small, slow movements, dignity, and always thinking about serving others and being humble and bowing down. Chinese people are not like Brave Orchid who is an abomination. They do not push family against their will as Brave Orchid so stupidly does to her dearest sister, Moon Orchid. Chinese people have class and style (in the words of Amy Tan), and it's a shame that Kingston doesn't accurately portray that.

But there are things that strike a positive chord with me, things that I can relate to. I really enjoyed Kingston letting her imagination run wild with the vignette on Fa Mu Lan. I like the whole idea of Chinese-American women being strong avengers who don't always fall into the stereotypes of being meek and mild-mannered.

And it's true what Brave Orchid says at the bottom of page 203--the Chinese always say the opposite, meaning that though we are beautiful, we call ourselves ugly. With Western influences as of the last few decades, Chinese people are becoming arrogant and vain, but in the old tradition, Chinese people never drew attention to themselves and lived a very austere, abstemious lifestyle. They subsisted on very little, with the belief that less is more. And the old school humility mesmerizes me, because I, like all Chinese brats, could never be what my predecessors were. I am just like a vacuous, sometimes-shallow Valley girl.

I like The Joy Luck Club better, but am saddened that there are so few popular frames of reference for being a Chinese-American female. It makes me want to go out and write another book from another angle, a much more reverent perspective.

The best thing, however, is the woman warrior theme, the female avenger, the Chinese voice and fight. So often Chinese people are the target of overt racism, because the rest of America does not feel threatened by us, they see us as the perfect targets who decline to speak up and raise hell. Well, that's changing everyday, there's power brewing, pride overflowing, and soon we will show everybody not to mess with us. We fight just as hard and we often win.

John Heard, His Son, and Me at the UCLA Festival of Books

This past Saturday, I went with my family to the UCLA Book Fair and fortuitously met one of my long-time crushes, John Heard, who is just dazzling in Beaches. He and his son are wonderful people.

It's All About Me

When I first picked up The Jungle, I was disinterested. Then once I got past the wedding and Jurgis beginning his life with his family in the stockyards, I started zipping through the pages till I hit the part where Jurgis's struggles and life evolved into a plea for Socialism, and there was no more story, but rather an outcry for social change.

To be honest, I am not interested in politics and social change. I haven't yet made ammends with myself or my surroundings, how am I to effect change on a larger scale? What really draws me in is the humanity of things, the practical, the here and now, the very power that clothes and feeds me and gives me recreational pleasure.

I suppose I think on a smaller scale, the "me" rather than the 6 billion people worldwide or the 300 million Americans. I can't relate to things too big for one person, I can only relate to the particular.

What really drew me into The Jungle was Jurgis's pathetic lot in life. It was almost a reassurance that I don't have it as bad as some, and if there is hope for a miserable hapless person as Jurgis, there is hope for me, because the story ended on a positive note, one I wasn't expecting, but a good reminder that if you stay strong, you will come to some good.

I just can't imagine a life of hard work and no fun, of horrible food and starvation, of stench and horror, of poverty and abuse. I am terribly pampered compared to these poor people. I think I shall read Hugo's Les Miserables this summer. I like profiting from others' sad stories, I'm a predator like the rest. I cannot deny myself of my animalism.

I too am contributing to the disparities in society. This past Monday, a classmate said that if we were all to live equally, we would live as the poor people in the Appalacians live. How horrible! I could never live below the life I'm living now. Am I to blame for that?--to be shown a life of comfort and then have that stripped from me so that the world can live equally and frugally with no hope of having a better life? Are we to blame for our consumerism?

I shop at WalMart though I have been warned. Why? Because I get stuff cheaper there. Do we ever put the general populace or affected populace before ourselves? Honestly, if you can go to a place that sells things cheaper than elsewhere and in some far distant part of your mind, you know you are profiting from another's labor, are you willing to put down your shopping basket and ban yourself from that store, while really, WalMart will continue to prosper with or without your business? Same with Forever 21, same with so many other places. If you were really the kind of person that put others before you all the time, you wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be alive, because the whole schemata of survival is to protect yourself first and foremost, so don't take the high road by saying you don't want to shop here or there because you care about people. You don't--you truly don't care about everybody. Since you care for yourself and your family, there is no way you can care for the rest of the world--there is not the time or energy or reserves and there is never the passion or zeal of humanitarianism in you unless you are some budding saint. And even saints cannot affect or help or tend to the entire world and be loving and responsible for everyone.

I don't believe in helping the world. I believe in helping ourselves. If each and everyone of us could get our shit together, then the world would thrive in harmony. We can only be responsible for ourselves. So to me, I like to read texts on a personal level, because the only thing I recognize in art or science is myself, how I can deal with the next the day and the day after, and the day that is my last.

Of course, I don't mean Stop the Philanthropy! What I mean is that we must recognize that by helping others in whatever small, big, or indirect way, we are really serving ourselves, our karma, our sanity, our equilibrium, our rest, our good night's sleep. But always, donations are beautiful, because they give both ways. What I'm saying, however, is that survival is based not on tending to others but on tending to ourselves.

Gavin Newsom and Me

I met the mayor of San Francisco over the Spring break during a visit to the Capitol. Just thought I share. FYI, he's the most irresistibly gorgeous man I have ever had the fortune of seeing before my very eyes (my mother shares the sentiment).

"Power" by Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense
"I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color." and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."

Tiff's response:
Black or white, whatever color, in whatever society, during whatever era, we are full of hyprocisy. Just look at this poem where hate begets hate. To be human is to be a hypocrite. Is it right to condemn others or the system for transgressions we individually are guilty of? Is it right to feel right when we are so unfailingly wrong? And why must we feel better and superior than the other when we ourselves are nobodies, literally beasts of prey? Isn't humility best--who's to judge? Can we be our own judge or the judge of others or does that lead straight to hypocrisy? Is there anything wrong with hyprocrisy if there is nothing wrong with being human? And does anything really matter on earth when we are condemned to unbearable suffering, death, injustice, obscurity, and oblivion?

In my opinion, the jungle is not around us, but rather within each of us. And there's no way to tame what has a mind of its own, a mind that outwits the intelligence and power of our mental faculties, a mind that is a separate beast from our consciousness, but tears at every dimension of our condition, and makes this jungle a veritable hell.

COWS!!!

This is an e-mail sent to me by my father's bridge-player friend. It made me laugh. Hope it sheds some light on class systems, politics, and undoubtedly--cows!

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. You push for higher taxes so the government can provide cows for everyone.
REPUBLICAN
You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cow-operative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows. Under the new farm program, the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pour the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one. You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch and drink wine. Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You engineer them so they are all blonde, drink lots of beer, give excellent-quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately, they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch. Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You drink some vodka.You count them and learn you have five cows. You drink some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which is two. You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts. You get a $40 million grant from the U.S. government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.
IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows. They go into hiding. They send radio-tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls. Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow. The cow is schizophrenic. Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish. The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow. The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk. The cow asks permission to be cut in half. The cow dies happy.
FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow. Everyone votes for the best-looking one. Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one. Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows. They make real California cheese. Only five speak English. Most are illegal. Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.
Estelle

What do you see--beauty or bones?

Anorexic Girls on You Tube

http://www.truveo.com/this-weekend-was-a-flop-food-is-my-enemy/id/642747423

Why does this young woman not want to show the upper half of her face?
Is anorexia a faceless disease, a social disease that expunges individuality and unique beauty?

http://www.truveo.com/rant-about-eds/id/2925098957

Do you see anorexia as a way of boxing in chaos? A sort of order or language ascribed to the unmanageable?

Is anorexia a social disease stemming from unresolved issues in early development or a disease arising from a genetic predisposition? Can it ever be fully cured? Why is this disease so serious and detrimental? Have you ever heard a group of girls joking about wanting to be anorexic?

If anorexics know how wrong their disease is, why can't they just get better by eating?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU_kUrXpjl0

When does the quest for beauty become too much?

Is thin really beautiful? Why do so many young women gravitate towards this disease when awareness of this disease is at its apex?

Midterm Paper

Finding Never Land: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Anorexia Nervosa
Tiffany Celeste Lum Wansee
English 638
Seminar in Critical Approaches to Literature
Steven Wexler
Spring 2010
Midterm Paper

Introduction

We can apply Freud’s Psychoanalytic approach to anorexia nervosa, the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. The term was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, a physician of Queen Victoria. Anorexia dates back further to such notable people as Mary, Queen of Scots and the first recorded death of anorexia by a Roman woman in 383 A.D. In his book, Holy Anorexia, Bell asserts that there have been 261 cases of anorexia between 1206 and 1934, many elevated to sainthood (Bemporad On-line). But it was in the 1960’s, starting with Twiggy Lawson, when anorexia would soon become a household term.
Anorexia is a social condition on the rise, however an inevitable one stemming from the psyche too. It is about taking control when feeling powerless, the body being the greatest tool in coming to grips with the mind.

Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

The Oral Stage:
One can argue that anorexics have unresolved issues with food because of a lapse in the oral stage. Perhaps the mother doesn’t breastfeed and bond with the baby sufficiently or the baby isn’t able to assume its independence in the feeding process.
Because there are problems in the baby’s feeding during the first months of nourishment via the mouth, the baby becomes conflicted over this natural phenomenon of eating. When the baby is not given the breast regularly, the baby feels like it is not worthy of sustenance, that starvation is a means of survival and the only way to earn the mother’s love. Love is associated with refusing food and breast milk, denying the body of what it needs.
The baby is helpless in feeding itself. It needs the care of its mother. If the mother is an absent caretaker and neglects feeding the baby when it cries out, the baby will be stuck in this helpless, powerless state, and in adulthood will cry out for a mother’s love and care by starving, trying desperately to get the mother’s attention, hoping the mother will do what she has not done before—force feed her grown child via tubes, doctors, and pleas of desperation. To the anorexic, not eating is a relentless tug-of-war with the mother, a kind of in-your-face spectacle, saying, “Look what you’ve done to me, Mother! You’ve castrated me! Now I’m going to do the same!” More on this shortly.

The Anal Stage:
One thing anorexics are concerned with is excretion—defecation. The greatest control they have over their bodies is controlling what goes in and out, expelling the waste matter within—heavy, weighing toxins.
Anorexics are avoidance people with constipation of the soul. They starve and purge, because they can’t shit out years of suppressing their pain and feelings. Their tenseness and sparse nutrition also lead to bodily constipation which then leads to anxiety about maintaining control over their bowels, maintaining control over their shrinking existence.
An anorexic fills her soul by emptying her body, the most satisfying exit—her anus. There is an interplay between mouth and anus. The anorexic, powerless because of an unfulfilled childhood, only knows her mouth and anus as the two focal points in her life. Whether she is throwing up or downing laxatives, she is in control; she is her own master, dictating the landscape of her digestive tract.
Because the anorexic is unfit to give birth and nurture a child, the anorexic like men who lack a womb, gravitates towards killing. If the anorexic can’t create, she can destroy, her most viable weapon her anus. By vomiting and defecating, she is taking delicious, life-giving food and killing it through her digestive system. She is taking all her power to destroy the very thing that empowers and sustains the human race. In this way, she feels powerful. With her anus as the magic wand, she is the Tinkerbell of her universe.

The Phallic Stage:
Anorexics are very troubled by what they put into their mouths, because food resembles a phallus (e.g. hot dogs, bananas, popsicles). Ninety to ninety-five percent of anorexics are women, who when entering the phallic stage will develop penis envy. Because girls never sprout a penis, they rationalize to themselves that a penis is vile and reject all phallic symbols, the most obvious—food.
They come to equate their mouths with their vaginas, associating their taste buds with their clitoris. Just as it feels good to eat, it also feels good to be sexual. But because of the shame that comes with a woman’s budding sexuality, she denies herself of sexual pleasure along with eating, because both activities make her feel disgusting, vile, boorish, indulgent, unattractive, and unlovable.
Now let’s apply the Electra Complex (coined in 1913 by Jung) to anorexia. Anorexic girls feel castrated by their overbearing, controlling, loud-mouthed mothers, so they turn to their fathers for love and affection, because the sexual distance and differences make them feel safe and unthreatened. They are repulsed by their mothers’ fat, womanly, fertile bodies and feel oppressed by the bodies they would have as healthy adults, bodies similar to those of their grotesque mothers. They starve to never become their emasculating, castrating, baby-wielding mothers.
They are “Daddy’s little girl,” wanting to stay youthful and ethereal so their fathers will always love them, hold them, and protect them like delicate, porcelain dolls. Threatened by all women, feeling in competition with all women who resemble their mothers, they will do anything to be the only women in their fathers’ lives.
So often do aging, over-the-hill men like fathers have the wandering eye for younger women. By Daddy cheating on Mommy for a younger hot dish, the girl will do anything to be that hot, young thing, so that a big, strong thing such as her father will always be there and shield her from the dangers of the world. She does not want to be the fat mommy cow that daddy has lost all carnal interest in.

Id, Ego, and Superego

The anorexic avoids satisfying the id, because of her superego, fashioned from society’s unrealistic demands of thinness. There is a constant battle between the id and superego, and because the anorexic is a high-minded, ambitious individual, she will give in to her superego. She strives for ideals beyond her limits. She derives great pleasure from starving her body and not allowing herself to feel pleasure. She confuses hunger with satiety, starving the body with feeding the soul, and in the end, lets her conscience and all of society’s propaganda override her primal needs.

Defense Mechanisms

Regression:
The anorexic cannot deal with her internal turmoil plus the demands of adulthood, so she regresses back to a simpler, more primitive phase of her life where she feels safe and guarded. Because she cannot nurture herself and feels starved of attention as a child, she seeks nurturance and attention by being a defenseless child.
Womanhood is a state of the unknown. Because the anorexic is already insecure, she cannot venture into a world of ambiguities and responsibilities. She wants to be a little girl forever and put growing up on the back burner, because she wants to frolic in a so-called Never Land where there are no battles, no losses, no letdowns, and no evils. She has already seen a hectic, cutthroat world, one that she is not ready to face and deal with, thereby regressing into a child, responsibility passed on to someone else.
Besides the tragedies of life, there are also men to contend with—men with their google-eyed lusting, advances, infidelities, and big, scary genitals. One can argue that in order to escape the damage that men so often bring about, the anorexic is trying to make herself look like a baby, becoming a sexless object rather than someone vulnerable to men’s transgressions. By losing her menstrual cycle (amenorrhea), she stops herself from being a fertile, life-bearing, sexual creature. By shirking a curvaceous, womanly figure, she avoids growing up and becoming a woman who can be hurt. She regresses to being a child to escape her inevitable evolution and the unfolding of her life.

Denial:
The anorexic will lie, cheat, and steal just to feed her illness and cover up her rituals. She is deep in denial, telling herself that she is not sick and emaciated, but rather fat and in need of losing more weight, that she has no control over her condition. Just ask an anorexic if she’s anorexic, you’ll most likely get a “no.” Denial preserves the quest for thinness and allows the anorexic to continue avoiding the real issues. Just ponder how fat people say they never touch a calorie and how skinny people call themselves incorrigible food whores. Food is always a trigger of denial, either way.

Repression:
Usually anorexia develops because of something repressed within. Rather than facing the thing being repressed, the anorexic channels her energy via her anorexia. The anorexic deals with her repressed emotions by eating and purging food which she takes as eating and purging her emotions. The anorexic assumes that by starving her body, her repressed feelings and torment will disappear. She believes in taking her repressed energy and using it to construct the perfect, svelte body.

Reaction Formation:
The anorexic hides her true feelings and ignores body signals by telling herself that she is not hungry, that she does not need to eat. She cannot come to grips with the reality of her condition; she does not want to change, so she tells herself she is the opposite of her nature, every bodily urge.
So often, an anorexic becomes fascinated with nutrition books, cook books, and the food network. All she’ll do is talk about food. Everything revolves around food: cooking and baking for others, eating vicariously through friends and loved ones, binging, and purging.
Some people think anorexia is all about restricting and leaving the fork on the table, but an anorexic will think about eating more than anyone, dreaming about food in her sleep, making a lifestyle of food, and ultimately never reaping the full benefits of eating, always at odds with her greatest lover and enemy.

Deborah Hautzig’s Second Star to the Right

This novel based on Hautzig’s own experiences with anorexia follows the descent of healthy, fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller into the bowels of an eating disorder. At 5’5 ½,” Leslie goes from 125 pounds to 74 pounds. In the later part of the novel, she spends her time on a psych ward, and never fully recovers, as we are left without resolution on the last page, fully capturing the sad fact that no one recovers completely from an eating disorder.
The title comes from a song in the animated film, Peter Pan, a character referred to countless times in the novel. It’s about finding perfection, Never Land, the Peter Pan Syndrome—staying a child forever in a sort of Disneyland fairytale. The title also stems from the story of Leslie’s Aunt Margolee in the Holocaust who chose to go to the left, the line to die, instead of to the right, the line to live. Leslie chooses, ideally, amidst her personal struggles, to go to the right, but more and more, she feels that is not hers to decide. Her fate seemingly feels like that of a concentration camp prisoner.
So often, anorexics feel two polar opposites battling it out in their minds and bodies. Leslie confesses, “I want to be a skeleton—but I also want to be attractive. I want to die—but I also want to live. I don’t deserve to feel good—but oh, I want to so much!” (Hautzig 149-150).

Conclusion

An anorexic will never fulfill her desires through starvation, though anorexia seems to be her only recourse, the only viable answer. The real solution is too far away, too shapeless and impalpable. And so continues the cycle of destruction that will never completely end. Is there hope for recovery? Yes. Is there hope for a permanent, steadfast recovery? Sadly, no. Being anorexic is an undulating search for happiness, perfection, and the answer to the unanswerable—it is about finding that fictional place of love and serenity—Never Land. Because of unresolved issues in the formative years of life, an anorexic will take on the imagination and illusions of a child and create her own existence with the only power she has left—the strength to battle food.

Annotated Bibliography

Bemporad, Jules R. “The Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatics and Eating
Disorders.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Traces the evolution of anorexia from the Hellenistic Age to starving
saints to the 19th century to the 1960’s when numbers soared.
This text is important, because it gives anorexia a place in history and shows how
the evolution of the world coincides with the evolution of this disease.
Chabert, Catherine, and Jeammet Philippe. “A Psychoanalytic approach to eating
disorders: The role of dependency.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Discusses addiction, erogenous zones, oral sadism, and anal control. This in-depth text is important, because it raises awareness and debate over the
insidious machinations of a misunderstood addiction to and denial of food.
Cherry, Kendra. “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development.” AOL. On-line. 10
March 2010.
Summary: Overview of Freud’s Oral Stage, Anal Stage, Phallic Stage, Latent
Period, and Genital Stage.
This text is important, because it step by step, takes us through the stages of our
development and explains how unresolved issues in our early life affect the rest
of our future endeavors and behavior.
Hautzig, Deborah. Second Star to the Right. New York: Greenwillow, 1981.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller’s abrupt and rapid descent into anorexia nervosa, her avoidance of food, her plunging weight, her relationship with her troubled mother, her shame and animosity towards her Jewish heritage, her strained friendship with loving, concerned, best friend, Cavett, and her stay in a psych ward amidst other anorexics.
This text is important, because it was written at a time before Karen Carpenter’s death when the general public still had little knowledge and awareness of this social disease. It is one of the first books to really illuminate the seriousness of anorexia and so beautifully and candidly reveals the deeper layers.
Kolodny, Nancy J. When Food’s A Foe. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992.
Summary: Discusses self-image, anorexia, bulimia, and ways to seek help, prevent, and overcome an eating disorder.
This text is important, because it very simply, concisely, and candidly introduces the reader to the psychology of eating disorders and informs already E.D. sufferers in such a way as to motivate them to seek help and not take their disease any further. This book perhaps is one of the most straightforward texts out there for young E.D. sufferers.

My Understanding of Equus

A few years ago, I heard that Daniel Radcliffe was going all-out nude for something. Now I have finally connected the dots, he went nude for a play I'd eventually have to read. That made the reading a slightly more intriguing one. I like it when I can visualize the exact actor playing the role. I don't like forming my own picture of the character. And nudity makes the play feel gritty and raw to me, especially when the actor is Harry Potter.

I really like this play, and I'm not just saying that to be agreeable. I read it in about four hours practically straight through, only breaking for American Idol at 8 p.m.

One thing I find forced is when Dysart meets with Alan in the dead of night. Everyone knows that psychiatrists don't work on a psych ward at night. That time is reserved for patients to sleep. Perhaps it would be more viable if Dysart and Alan had this breakthrough session in the early morning while the ward is still calm and quiet.

The minute I read about Alan's fear of the horses watching him, I kept thinking of Panopticism and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby--the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelberg. I think it is inherent in us to always feel like someone or something is watching us when in reality, we are our most captive audience. Our conscience is inescapable, for we cannot escape ourselves, and that is why most criminals confess. Though there is no evidence around us of our trangressions, there is evidence within us and the evidence is too much to live with. We must always release our sins to the open air.

The real A-hole is Frank--what a close-minded, ignorant, dopey man. I hate people who castigate television. There is nothing wrong with TV. It doesn't make us dumber. It doesn't turn our brain to mush. It stimulates the brain and informs us greatly. It keeps us abreast of the times. I really don't see the difference between books and TV--they are all a text in their own right.

But I see what Shaffer is trying to do with the denial of television. Coupled with Frank's horror of finding his son with another girl watching a dirty movie, Shaffer is trying to show how the denial of passion, pleasure, and human need can send anyone over the edge. Shaffer is not just blaming Frank, but society as a whole. Society constructs what is acceptable in our nature, thereby making us hate within ourselves--our sexuality and need for intimacy--what doesn't fit the mold.

Sex is a very natural, beautiful thing. It's just that it gets cheapened by human depravity and becomes a topic of shame. It is something pure made impure by human vice.

All the youth and free-spiritedness are sucked out of Alan, because he is denied feelings and urges that are nurtured in other healthy, growing, young men. He has been reduced to jingles (I cracked up at the Doublemint one). And he is made wild and rageful, because of the confinement within his father's dogma. Alan needs a God, but when the Christ poster is taken down, he finds horses to be his God, confusing horses and God with his overbearing father and society as a whole. Because the restrictions of this God are too much to take, he attacks the only creatures he can, the most defenseless of all threats present in the play--horses.

In the end, I got the impression that what Schaffer is really trying to say is that we may champion animal rights and sometimes go for a vegan lifestyle, but no matter what we do to ease our conscience, we are all hypocrites just by being a part of this society that preys and feeds off weaker, defenseless animals. We may nurse a sick dog on the street to health, but then we pick up our forks and dive into "Approved Flesh" (Shaffer 109).

There is no escape from being predators. Our survival is based on the slaying of weaker animals, all part of the food chain. So perhaps rather than castigating another for doing what is socially and morally wrong, we must look at ourselves doing the very same thing. We always look around and find error in others when we are just as much to blame as the rest. If there's any hope left for human beings, it's to understand our depravity, to not judge harshly, and to accept that killing and attack are all part of the greater plan.

Order and Chaos

I am very happy to admit that I am intrigued by Post-structuralism and Deconstruction. I think I know more about Differance and the idea of infinite, open ended significations than Structuralism itself, though Structuralism led to this reformation of thought.

To be honest, I think this theory shedding light on the undoing of binary oppositions is very good and interesting in theory, but not in the practical world we live in. Why? Let me explain.

I believe in absolutes, in good and evil, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, spirituality and depravity (arbitrary as I may be as an individual). Even though my absolutes are different from the next person's, they are still absolutes in my universe, and to be blunt, I am egocentric like any other. All that matters to me is me.

Because we are human beings, infinitesimal specks of dust, insignificant to the larger context, and limited in our perception, we are not created to bear the idea of infinite possibilities. We were created to live and die, to begin and end; therefore we are creatures of extremes, endings, and limitations. There is no way we can fully grasp the concept there are no identities, that all we can rely on are differences. This notion of endless signs and significations is too high above our realm of comprehension and functioning. Just as a dog will never fathom the intricacies of Derrida, we will never grasp the Greater Workings of the Universe. We should just be content with extremes of thought and coming to terms with the grayness in between. I mean, come on, if the gray areas are hard enough to live by, how are we supposed to live with infinities?

There is a reason we have laws and boundaries and borders. There is a reason we pass judgments on others, why we stereotype people and reserve our prejudices. It's because we were not created to figure out the grandiosity and totality of the universe. We are here to serve ourselves and even in serving others, we are still serving ourselves, never the higher cosmos. So why even bother to be so high and mighty, when that is left to some greater being, God? And really, what is God? Another container to encapsulate meaning so it doesn't run away from us.

In my opinion, absolutes and binary opposites, one signifier per signified, is the reality of our reality. And endless signifiers and signifieds is the reality of the universe's reality. We can not marry our reality with that of the universe's. We must exist as binary opposites (ha ha).

This whole idea that nothing can be contained, that there are no identities, is chaos of thought. I do not believe in chaos--there are no answers in chaos, and human beings must answer many questions in life. We survive on truths, not truths of truths of truths. We need the essence, the epitome of existence. We can't flourish amidst confusion and anarchy. We were made for structure as we have built half the earth into structures and buildings and left the other half to what we'll never grasp.

In order to keep sane, we cannot believe in this "ongoing network of relays and references" (Rivkin and Ryan 259). We must preserve our human side and know that we'll never get the answers in this reality, maybe when we die, who knows? But really, who wants to know? Sometimes it's true, ignorance is bliss. So, we must be happy in our little cubicles of the universe and not allow ourselves to get too caught up in our dreamy ponderings. We are creatures of thought. Wait a minute, perhaps we were made to hypothesize endlessly. Perhaps crazy postulations are inevitable in our beings. Perhaps we are projecting our thoughts, our grandiose ideations onto a blank screen, a universe that contains nothing, that means nothing, that perhaps in its entirety is smaller than a fragment of one person's consciousness. We may be far more complex than this ever-expanding-shrinking universe. Who knows? Yes, questions and confusions are inevitable in the human reign.

See, I love Post-structuralism!

Penis Envy, Type A Personality, and Genetics

Freud, though obsolete in today's understanding of the mind, is quite an interesting character. I never considered the idea of penis envy. When I was a kid, I really had no concept of a penis, not until I reached my early teens. I knew about genitalia as a means for urination, but I never considered a man's genitals, his sexual prowess, so how could I have penis envy in my childhood? I didn't find out about the concept of sex until I was thirteen when my cousins told me. I thought it was the most hilarious thing on the planet. Even today I don't take sex seriously. I am ashamed of it and still laugh at the thought, wondering if sex is just God's joke for the entire human race.

I had quite a sheltered upbringing, one full of misguided care however. When I think of Freud, I wonder about all the weird fetishes and preferences I have. I wonder if Freud can explain why I like weak, effeminate men. And why I am such a control freak. Did this all begin in one of his stages like the phallic stage or anal stage?

I am the most anal-retentive person I know, and it depresses me. Are Mom and Dad to blame because of faulty potty-training? Or did I inherit this trait through my genes? It's very easy to blame genetics and far more complicated to blame environment. It ends with genes, easy as pie, but where does it end with upbringing and social influences?

I still rely more on genetics, because I feel like there are intrinsic parts of me that no one has power over, not even me. I was born this way and no one can change that, though I still give some credit to Freud.

There are so many theories in psychology and they all seem pitted against each other. There're Cognitive and Humanist and so on. I like to take a little from each and form my own picture. I like Freud most, because of his outlandish claims and his fixation on sex.

I don't want to stereotype genders, but I'm pretty sure crazy sex is not number one on women's minds, probably not even in the top ten. If Freud were a woman, I wonder what the Psychoanalytic Theory would be like with all its alterations, if it would materialize at all. And could there ever be a Mother of Psychology? It would make more sense, since women are the child-bearing sex and the greatest creators of humankind.

Author, Text, and Reader

I've had to read parts of Eagleton multiple times and still didn't get it. Is it only me? God, I feel dense and distracted. The Olympics are not making my studying any more enticing either. And even more abstruse and grounds for wanting to break something is Ferdinand Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics." What's the point of all those dumb illustrations? It's not like they're the shining light I'm waiting for, the all-appointed Messiah. Usually, I love learning through pictures, I'm a visual learner. But those pictures make me feel stupid. Am I really that dumb? Or am I of average intelligence with one part of my brain broken and malfunctioning?



Okay, so one thing I got that kind of puts things into perspective is the third paragraph of page 64 of Eagleton where he states that Romanticism and the nineteenth century focused on the author, New Criticism exclusively concerned itself with the text, and the Reception Theory brought attention to the intrinsic role of the reader.



If you asked me, it's not all or nothing. Why does one thing have to take all the credit? Why can't each theorist come to terms with the other and agree that in any reading of a text, the author, the text, and the reader contribute proportionately?


And if you want my honest opinion again, who the hell cares? Do I really have that much time in the rest of my dwindling life to break down the process of reading? Why can't I just enjoy a nice afternoon of reading a good entertaining book like Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, you know? Why must I have to wonder about all the microscopic machinations of reading? Really, if we broke down every fine minutiae of living and dissected it even further, we'd go crazy and stab ourselves to death.

So I've come to the resolution that theory and the means of survival don't go hand in hand. If you want to live to the utmost, do not read Eagleton and Rivkin and Ryan. If you want to be happy and airless, don't dare open the pages of any theory book. And if you need to take English 638, learn what you can, write the best papers you can write, let the teacher know you're trying your hardest, and let the rest fall away.

Eagleton Readings--Intro and The Rise of English

Okay, I've gotten through Eagleton's intro and first chapter and Chapter 1 of Rivkin and Ryan. I haven't read Bakhtin's links yet, but I really want to focus on Eagleton.

On page 16 of "The Rise of English," Eagleton states that the Romantics valued fiction over hard fact, that fiction gives far more pleasure than the truth.

I've always found this to be true. This is most evident in the fact that I hate reading about history or science or anything grounded in staunch reality. I love the whimsical. This is also evident in the fact that I could never have a true romance with a real man or partake in anything that is not a dream.

Let's just start with this. I thought I loved dancing in nightclubs before I ever danced in one. Then when I visited a nightclub, I realized that was not the venue for me--the noise, the smoke, the alcohol, the touchy-feely guys were far too much dirt and grime for me. I wanted something, but after getting it, I didn't want it anymore.

Now, second, I always wanted to go on a date with a man. But when I hung out with a guy or two (not a date), I didn't enjoy it one bit. Imagine, if I had gone out on a real date, how horrific that would have been!

What I love is writing about romance and love, reading novels where the underdog ends up with the smashing brooding man, and of course dwelling in my dreams.

Why does reality stink? Well, I finally figured out why. We cannot control reality. And usually, when we get involved in rather lofty endeavors, we never see the dark side. Because while reality is a mixed pot promising pain and disappointment, fantasy is always beautiful and alluring, grandiose and awe-inspiring.

Life never turns out the way we want. But fantasy is the reality we can only hope for. I love fantasy, because I can take someone unattractive like me and pair myself with the man of my dreams. And that man will not abandon me, get sick, beat me, cheat me, rob me, murder me. That man is someone I can count on to please and satisfy my whims.

Perhaps an artist's lot is to dream. I consider myself an artist, primarily a poet, not particularly an exceptional one, but a poet who writes to get by.

And maybe if I weren't such a dreamer, maybe if I lived life rather than ruminated over it, I wouldn't be a poet. For Jane Austen never married and she wrote about love. Perhaps I am destined to write about things I can never attain or possess. Perhaps I shall always be on the outside peering in, wishing for the magic that really is not there.

I am a control freak, and life cannot be controlled. Therefore reality is disappointing and always falls short. I need to escape this existence of ambiguity and tragedy to reach a world of perfection and tranquility. The only way I can find peace in this godforsaken wasteland is to dream up many worlds, worlds that become words on paper, words I can crawl into, words that keep me warm on cold, creepy nights, words that become my dearest companions when everyone is gone and tired.

Eagleton also touches on what we discussed in class: emotion versus reason.

While reason is more conducive to survival, it is emotion that makes us who we are--human. Emotion is the glory of being on earth. It makes us loving, feeling, pulsating, fallible creatures who experience the gaunlet of God's miracles.

We are not here merely to exist and go about life robotically. We are here to know the inside of our souls and to let our hearts be sad at times, to let our hearts nurture the hearts of others and vice versa.

I've always been a very passionate person. I wear my heart on my sleeve. And I am not ashamed of my tears or desperations, because genuine emotions only come from good, loving people, and I want to believe I am a good, loving human being.

I believe far more in emotion than in words. That sometimes we don't need literature or a canvas to have art and inspiration. Emotion is the art that decorates our internal beings, emotion is the light that leads us out of the shadowy veins, emotion is the only way we can live successfully and purposefully.

How funny it is that we are so ashamed to open ourselves to strangers--perhaps for fear of being understood and hurt. But then when we are vulnerable and attacked, the assault is not on us, but on the buffoon who cannot understand what it means to weep generously in a crowd and not apologize for it.

Reason may be preferred, perhaps even easier to attain in its shallow dimensions. But emotion is the only thing that connects us to the earth and the divine. Emotion is sublime. It is the reason we have made it this far. It is the reason we keep going.

Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus readings

I finally read the first week's readings which was the majority of Classical Literary Criticism. The book is very dense and laden, precluding me from absorbing all parts. Because of the enormity of passages, I lost track here and there, but caught glimpses of truth and wisdom when my mind suddenly focused amidst the blur.

I clearly recall the many distinctions between great and lowly men, effective poets and clowns. There were so many obscure names being dropped here and there--perhaps the equivalent to rock stars in their day.

The problem, the reason I lost focused, is like I mentioned earlier, I don't see the relevance. Sure there are the great truths, the great strengths, nobilities, and follies of man, but really, events and thought thousands of years ago are not going to prevail today.

Sure the human condition transcends space and time, but society, the sign of the times, has its reign.

Maybe good ol' sexy Plato and Aristotle captured the hearts of men and women in their heyday, but they do nothing for me. And really, what does it all matter? Do philosophy and disseminating grandiloquent ideas really contribute to the condition of man? Do they end all wars and fill the universe with love and harmony? Do they do anything, but sit pretty in the tirades of man? Are they nothing but decor of thought, separating scholars from laymen?

My gods, my muses, my great philsophers are my contempories: rock stars, movie stars, reality show contestants (yes, really), athletes, and dear profs.

All these music videos I posted don't give me wisdom directly (the lyrics can be quite corny), but they set the stage for great thought. They are the background to all my dialogues and preachings to myself, to every story I've ever written, to every fantasy I've ever had, to every paradise I stepped into.

I love idolizing men, particularly rock stars. They are removed from my reality, yet they are still real. I love them, not for their outstanding talents and attributes, but for the reason that they are like dress-up dolls. I dress them any way I please. They are mine to dictate, they are my creations.

Once I realize the reality of my human condition, I feel disgusted. I want romance, rainbows, waterfalls, lullabies, Hawaiian rain. I don't want a man who's going to piss me off and cheat on me. I want a perfect man, and that is exactly what an idol is.

An idol has nothing to do with the person idolized. An idol is an extension of my desires and dreams. An idol is me alone. So I do not love the actual Pat Monahan, Raine Maida, and Charles Kelley. I love how I've painted them--how many realities removed?

I don't believe in human endeavors to be great. I don't believe in greatness at all. Who are we to be great? Who are we to rule the universe? Who are we to be remembered? In the end, we will be expunged and forgotten, if best repainted ghouls.

It is not reality that matters, the layout of time and events. What matters is our artistry, our depiction of a far distant place and time, a far distant mind. I believe that reality does nothing but contribute ill will and ill health and much grueling unhappiness. I believe our imagination is our greatest solace, our greatest outlet, our biggest means of enduring tragedy and moving past the scars and tears.

I am fine being small. I have resigned myself to mediocrity, poverty, and obscurity. My dreams of leaving behind any mark have faded into dreams of escaping the world for periods where I am queen.

Life can only be beautiful if we stop seeing the world in its natural depravity. Life is beautiful, because it allows our hearts to travel to other lives even more radiant. Life keeps us from being content, it keeps us passionate and battling and flailing, and it is hell. I am an optimist--this is the worst it's ever gonna get. We live in hell with portals to a world one day we may possess. And I'm hoping to stop dwelling and believing and wishing and hoping. I'm hoping to be in my dream world without the concept of dreams. Emotions are hell. In an ideal world, we'll just be. It's so simple. And that's heaven.

"Drops of Jupiter" by Train

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS0CV_GWEMI

"Her Eyes" by Pat Monahan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecKn_uIXIhs

Hi, my name is Bumby. My owner named her blog after me, because I'm an awesome dog!

"Nothing Left to Lose" by Mat Kearney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7YP4k7rMuc

Reading through the book, all I can say is that these attempts at understanding life and art seem irrelevant to my life.

Philosophy only has purpose if it can inspire and ease the tribulations we face everyday.

I was so bored and absent while reading the ideas Plato evoked. All his theories are so obsolete and impertinent. While we have always been human over the centuries and millennia and share the same faculties and senses, there are differences between us then and now.

I believe theories are only good if they effect change in the present. What's philosophy if it is dead to the people of today. Philosophy is not here to serve the ego of its creator. Philosophy is here so that we can bear the horrendous pain dealt every moment to us, the hell that we can only escape through our minds and intelligence.

Besides fulfilling a requirement, I want to take this class, because I want it to shed light on existence and myself and to bring me to a larger peace with myself and art, and to help me love literature more than ever, because it can be absorbed through a higher level. I want to see beyond the surface of words and hold thought in my grasp long enough to feel a certain euphoria that there is more to life than the banal and concrete. I want to go somewhere that I have never trespassed, and I'm hoping that I can find the right place that fills me with joy, as short as that joy or inspiration may be.