Friday, May 8, 2009

About the Class


English 204 has been a great experience. I found myself developing as a writer, and most importantly, as a thinker.


Surprisingly enough, the poetic analysis paper was the best part of the class. It gave me an appreciation for poetry which I was lacking all this time. I also appreciate the fact that we did not dwell on nit-picky details and still managed to do some in-depth analysis of the texts we read. In high school, I was accustomed to getting carried away with every little symbol, trying to find meaning in every little thing. An example of a text that has been ruthlessly dissected is The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Reading this book in an AP English class in high school made me realize just how ridiculous it was to take a book and spend hours talking about one tiny little detail which Joyce may have just randomly stuck in there. So I asked my teacher if Joyce really intended us to pick up on all these things and if they were indeed as meaningful as we had been trained to interpret them as. And she said, "No, Joyce would probably make fun of us!" Indeed, later I found the quote by Joyce himself: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

I don't care much for Joyce. His book was is not the most interesting but his prose is often brilliant and he left his mark in the world of classic literature and keeps us "busy for centuries arguing over what [he] meant." This is what writing tends to do: immortalize the writer and baffle/confuse the reader. This is very good. All books should seek to confuse their readers because confusion will provoke readers to discover something about themselves and the world. As we saw in the class, that discovery can also be that the book itself sucks or that the book is excellent.

Perhaps the greatest thing about a college English class is that the professor does not direct students to pick up certain literary techniques. Whatever we pick up on is what we ourselves have discovered. There is no forced interpretation and the scope of interpretation itself is very broad and liberal.

Just taking a glance at my previous blog entries, I can see a tremendous change in my writing. The best part about being an English major is that I will continue to see my writing develop and this class has only made me a little more confident for the English courses I will take in the future. Thanks Professor Ramachandran!

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

My Unhealthy Obsession with A's


I've spent quite some time explaining to my mom that A+'s don't exist in college. When I was little, if I came home with a 97 on a test, my mom would ask me, "Where are the remaining 3 points?" If I came home with a 100, my mom would ask me, "Where's the extra credit?" Such was life - The subject matter was irrelevant and the only thing of consequence was the grade.


Growing up, I had a hard time in school. I was expected to excel in everything but I couldn't get my head out of books; in all other subjects but English and Social Studies, I was a mediocre student. If I could bring myself to care enough about doing well in a subject I didn't care about, I would excel in it but I was often unable to generate that much ambition. But in high school, I realized that I was, in fact, in love with the act of learning. Information and the act of thinking is what has and continues to sustain me as an individual. So I gave up the mechanical process of generating A's in subjects I couldn't care less about. I began to focus on things I actually liked doing such as writing. But still, the mechanical part of me remained; as long as I was getting A's, I felt as though I was writing well. An A- would leave me devastated. Though I was doing what I truly liked, I was restricting it and making it an unnatural thing. I had trained myself to follow the conventions of conventional writing. And I was rewarded for these conventional, hackneyed essays with A+'s which reinforced my misconception that I was writing great things. This combined with my fairly decent grades in everything else got me ranking amongst the top 25 of my graduating class. It hadn't been my goal, yet still, I found myself rejoicing.

Then I came to college and took a writing class, quite confident of my writing abilities, only to discover that an A+ paper in high school is a B/B- paper in college. This convinced me that high school had low standards making my writing low standard. So I emailed my writing professor an obnoxious number of times to figure out how to bring every paper up to an A. And when I did get an A, I thought I had finally learned how to write good papers.

In truth, I am only beginning to learn how to write now. I got an A in Writing 102, but aside from forming grammatically correct, complex sentences, my papers didn't say very much. A good paper is not testimony to the fact that the conventions of grammar are working, but rather a substantiated statement of the writer's opinion about something. In order to make the statement have any effect upon anyone, it has to be readable. It shouldn't leave the reader puzzled and irritated. I was brought to the epiphany this semester that needless words, rigid sentences, and the need to sound sophisticated creates a rather crappy paper. What good is something that is well written, if it only makes the reader miserable in the act of reading it? So, I've been brought to the realization that I have a bad case of perfectionism which is making my papers boring.

It's hard not to be grade-oriented in college. I can be totally idealistic and say, "No, learning alone is the purpose of college" but in truth, no grad school/med school will want to accept someone whose grades suck. A's will always be most desirable and satisfying but at the same time, I've found that when I write loosely, without the A obsession, I most importantly end up conveying why I care about the topic. Writing loosely also allows me to omit half of the needless words which would otherwise serve as space-fillers and attempts to sound sophisticated. This is the most important lesson I've learned about writing: no matter how profound the subject matter, boring, repetitive writing will reduce it to crap. In that sense, Odysseus in America was not a completely pointless read/skim. It is a fine example of a book that misconstrues length as a means of substantiating its thesis. In the future, I may find myself referring to this book as an example of the type of writing I should not be doing; as Professor Ramachandran said in class today, "Don't write like Shay in your paper."

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Dangerous Women? Catharsis?


By now, I've come to the conclusion that Jonathan Shay's PHD/MD drivel is pretty much shit and the only reason I still have things to say about it is because it's so bad. I was completely stunned (in a bad way) by the essay (for that is what it ultimately is) when I got up to the chapter called, "Witches, Goddesses, Queens, Wives--Dangerous Women." Whatever we know of literature comes from perspective. Shay's perspective, as far as I comprehended it at least, is that the Odyssey presents women as dangerous and untrustworthy. Oh. That's one interpretation but to be convincing, Shay would have to argue against the countless ways in which women are presented as strong, powerful, and supportive towards men. Having read the
Odyssey I think differently and I get so distracted by how much I disagree with Shay's interpretation due to his lack of convincingness that I forget that the point of the essay is to talk about the Vietnam veterans. There we go. The extended Odyssey allusion/reference fails.

It continues to fail throughout. Sure, I like the idea of Shay's book but the way he wrote it makes me side with a good friend of mine who said, "The only thing worse than war is a book about war." A person who hasn't read the Odyssey will be able to concentrate only on the information about the veterans. A person who has read the Odyssey will become totally distracted like I did. I became more interested in Shay's interpretation of the Odyssey, as opposed to its connection with the war veterans. But wait, that's because the connection becomes increasingly stupid and relentlessly pointless as the essay goes on (and on and on).

There are several reasons why I am bitter. For one thing, large paragraphs are dedicated Shay's retelling of the Odyssey. I have tremendous respect for anyone who has the patience to fill 253 pages, even if it is 253 pages full of bullshit. It takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, and dedication. But I'm not saying Shay has written bullshit; Shay has simply written a decent essay that does not work for many reasons. First of all, I do not need to read a summary of a book I've already read. But that's just me. Now, here's what I gathered from this chapter: Dangerous women and whores, and sex with prostitutes renders army veterans distrustful of and dissatisfied with their wives. Not being a psychologist, I can't ever know if that's a logical argument. But maybe that's the problem with this book--maybe it only reaches out to policymakers and psychologists?

When I read the Odyssey, I thought that women were presented as powerful. Nausicaa habitually handed Odysseus over to "toughs who habitually kill strangers?" Euryclea is the kind of woman who "can accidentally get you killed by seeing through your disguise?"
Oh, now that I think about it, this is a great excerpt and I must quote it in its entirety:

"Turning back to Odysseus as a veteran (rather than as a military leader), the Odyssey shows how dangerous a woman may be to returning veterans: she can trick you onto a fragile sea raft from the safety of dry land and then drown you (Calypso), she can betray you to assassins who lie in wait for you (Clytemnestra and--who knows?--maybe Penelope), she can see through and betray your disguise, getting you killed (Helen's chance to blow Odysseus's disguise to the Trojans), she can accidentally get you killed by seeing through your disguise (Odysseus's old childhood nurse, Eurycleia), she can hand you over to toughs who habitually kill strangers (Nausicaa), she can turn you into a caged pig eating acorns or castrate you in her bed (Circe), she can fill you with such obsession that you forget to eat and starve to death (Sirens), she can literally eat men alive (Scylla). [Oh look, the sentence finally ended]. She may have gotten you and your friends into the war to begin with, where most of them were killed (Helen)."

These two sentences were slightly more difficult to type than they were to read. Shay's writing style makes me not want to read this book. Furthermore, I can't help but feel that Shay's interpretation presents women in a worse way than Homer does. True, Clytemnestra ruthlessly kills her husband and this makes us wonder whether Penelope will do the same--or rather, it makes Odysseus wonder. But what about Penelope as the loyal wife? What about Penelope as Odysseus's equal who actually does understand Odysseus when he returns? What about Penelope's own compromise? After all, she takes back a man who has been sleeping around with countless women for over ten years. Also, what about the fact that if it were not for Nausicaa "handing Odysseus over" to her people, he would still be wandering perhaps.

But I still get where Shay is trying to go with this. He's trying to say that this is a misconception men have of their wives when they return. But so what? What if veterans have this misconception? What do we do about it? How do we stop veterans from beating up their wives? How do we prevent them from feeling lonely because they longer can have sex with whores in Vietnam? How do we cure their fear of the dangerous prostitutes they had sex with in Vietnam? I perused this chapter, but could not place my finger on a spot where Shay offers a solution to this problem.

Here's what Emerson says:

"Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason."

We can't help PTSD. Yes, it hurts character. Yes, it's wrong for veterans to have to go through this. But what can we do? We can be nicer and that will make things easier but it won't solve the problem. And contrary to what Emerson says, the veterans have had so many "electric shocks" that they've been put out of communication with their own reason.

I wish this book offered a solution. But maybe it proves that there is no solution. So everyone should attend to their own work, skim Shay's 253 page essay (which could have saved a lot of paper if it were shortened by even 100 pages), be nice to veterans and respect them for their tremendous sacrifice to our country, and "already the evil begins to be repaired."

To conclude, if I was trying to make the point that Shay's book ultimately serves no purpose, then this blog entry in many ways serves no purpose, for it is just as incohesive as this chapter and countless other chapters which I've given myself the pain of only skimming. But I do like the letter "A" a whole lot, especially the way it appears on Solar. It will be a nice contrast to the "C" I will get in Calculus.