The Infinite City

Click on the title and it should bring you to the site where this was published. You can read for free.

Recycling PSA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7g7Ou7vx-Y

For my final project I chose to make another public service announcement, though both the style and subject matter of this one are very different from the last. This PSA is about recycling which, as a more widely recognized and less life-threatening issue than pharmaceutical abuse, deserved an entirely different kind of commercial. I ended up using clips from various iconic movies and TV shows involving garbage in an attempt to create a lighthearted feeling of responsibility. Recycling is already an issue that many people care deeply about, so instead of trying to shock viewers with the realistically abysmal amount of things we waste every day, I decided to create more of a friendly reminder that recycling is something important that everyone can take part in.

The visuals used in this commercial are, with the exception of the Star Wars clips, all from comedies. It starts out with a brief scene from Futurama, an almost instantly recognizable show to many American viewers, in which the crew is on a giant pile of 20th century trash which was launched into space. Whether or not the viewer knows the original context of the clip, the basic concepts are all pretty much laid out: they're in space, on a pile of trash, and it's 20th century trash. Viewers who are familiar with Futurama might take away more meaning from this clip than nonviewers, though, because they would know that the show is set in the year 3000, and in that context, when Fry calls the trash a “glorious monument,” it's not much of a metaphor. They might immediately take away the implied meaning that our trash will be here long after we are gone, but for those who are not viewers of Futurama, many of the other visuals used also include this meaning in some sense.

As well as being mostly comedy, most of the video clips I used were also set in the future. The most obvious examples of this are the Futurama and Star Wars scenes, but the garbage avalanche scenes are from the movie Idiocracy, in which the solution to waste management continued to be dumping for another 500 years. Even the Simpsons clip at the end has a futuristic feel to it since the waste depicted is a bright green river of nuclear waste through which Radioactive Man floats in a Flash-looking costume. The only exception to this theme is the clip from 30 Rock, which is set in the present, although Tina Fey's cry of “Mortality!” as plastic bags are blown into a tree can be seen as a less explicit version of the idea expressed by the first clip's memorial comment: our trash will outlive us.

I chose to use mostly future oriented clips because recycling and waste management aren't really the kinds of issues that can be once-and-for-all resolved. Even if we managed to reduce our waste as much as possible, we would have to continue doing so in the future also, or the same problems will continue to arise. By using future oriented visuals of trash this idea that there is no quick fix is very subtlety implied, and the feeling of responsibility is also included through the idea of working towards a better future.

Besides being mostly future oriented comedy, most of the clips used in this commercial are also easily recognized. The original Star Wars Trilogy is of course, one of the most widely known series of movies ever created, and the white Storm Trooper armor seen in the clips used is immediately evocative of the trilogy even to those who wouldn’t recognize Luke, Hans, and Leia. Both the Futurama and Simpsons visuals are easily recognizable due to their well-known animation styles, the Simpsons especially since they’ve been a part of pop culture for almost a quarter of a century. By using iconic visuals viewers should be able to identify more easily with the scenes shown, even though they are fictional and set in the distant future.

Earlier I mentioned that the attempted tone of the commercial was one of “lighthearted responsibility,” which may sound like an oxymoron, but is certainly the easiest kind of responsibility to bear. The entire reason satire exists is to bring attention to important subject manner in a non-threatening way. As Freud so dryly puts it in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
“If [any] speech is given such a marked appearance of logic which, on careful examination, is recognizable as being only an appearance, the truth behind it is that the joke declares the [speaker] to be in the right; the thought does not venture to do so seriously... It is only this employment of sophistry for the disguised representation of truth that gives it the character of a joke.” (128)

In other words, we recognize satire as humor because it appeals to our ideas of what is right by asserting the opposite. For already widely known subjects like recycling, comedy can be an especially useful tool in reinforcing basic ideas to which the viewer has already been repeatedly exposed.

While comedy can be helpful in making responsibility easier to bear, it can also have the drawback of being easily dismissible after the initial thought has passed. To make up for this, I reinforced the idea of responsibility through the Radiohead song, “Just.” This song's chorus repeats the phrase “you do it to yourself,” which may be a little harsh since many people are trying, but we could all be doing more and this song makes the commercial as a whole emphasize individual effort. When combined with the future oriented visuals, the overall effect should be to foster a feeling of worthwhile responsibility.

Of course, just about every individual piece used to create the commercial has to be taken out of its original context to be given the pro-recycling meaning. The exception to this might be the Futurama clips, since they were from an episode criticizing 20th century waste management procedures. The Star Wars movies were not about recycling, and a (entirely hypothetical) case could be made against recycling if one were to assume that the Death Star was only built with a trash compactor because of their own inefficient recycling program. The garbage avalanche clips from Idiocracy are only slightly out of context because the movie asserts the mountains of trash as more of a policy (or lack thereof) problem than one of individual effort. The episode of “30 Rock” from which the trash bag clip came isn't our trash outliving us, but about the futility of trying to remain in control of a world dominated by chaos. Of course the song used almost certainly wasn't about recycling, though it can be interpreted any number of ways. In each of these cases I have assigned new meaning to these pieces of the commercial by placing them in different contexts than they were created under.



Works Cited

“A Big Piece of Garbage.” Futurama. Twentieth Century Fox. 11 May, 1999. Television.

“Everything Sunny All the Time Always.” 30 Rock. NBC. 28 April, 2011. Television.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1960. Print.

Judge, Mike, dir. Idiocracy. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006. Film

Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Film.

“Radioactive Man.” The Simpsons. Twentieth Century Fox. 24 September, 1994. Television.

A Clean Well-Lighted Conflict

In accordance with Hemingway's style and conventions, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is not really a story about a place, but rather about a particular set of mentalities which the place represents. The real story is told almost entirely through character dialogue which reveals what the existence of clean well-lighted places means to each. In this sense, the cafe in which most of the story takes place is as much a plot device to reveal character psychology and a deeper philosophy as it is a physical setting.

According to the William B. Bache criticism, Hemingway uses the characters of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” to represent two conflicting ways of life: “The young waiter standing for a materialistic way of life: the older waiter and the old man standing for a nihilistic.” (1956) Bache later uses all three characters to create a sort of continuum of age-related conflict in which both spiritually devoid mentalities fall. At one end of the continuum the young waiter represents the materialistic viewpoint, though Bache also mentions that it has been suggested that the young waiter is already starting to become jaded with his materialistic notions and is on his way towards the nihilistic side of the continuum. Since Bache claims that “with the passage of time materialism often loses its meaning,” we can view the older waiter and the old man as representing two different stages of life which have progressed passed materialism and into nihilism. In this sense, the three characters can be seen not just as separate entities each representing the seemingly polar values of materialism and nihilism, but also as a threefold division of a greater philosophy which includes both of these mentalities.

There are several lines throughout the story which would seem to imply that the younger waiter's mentality is not purely materialistic, but is in fact already tarnished by the spots of nihilism which come with age. If we assume the lines “’Nothing’,” and “’He has plenty of money,’” are spoken by the young waiter, they become the first glimpses of his materialistic values that the reader is granted. According to the Joseph Gabriel criticism, if spoken by the young waiter “’Nothing,’” comes to mean “For no reason,” (1961) expressing the young waiter's materialistic notions that possession can bring happiness and therefore anyone with money has no reason to despair. He briefly breaks from this materialistic mentality, or at least seems to understand that it may not work for everyone, when he tells the old waiter “’A wife would be no good to him [the old man] now.’” In this sense the young waiter seems to recognize that the comfort he derives from knowing his wife is waiting for him at home cannot be the same for the old man who has lived long enough to see such things come and go. This is symbolic of the overall philosophy that materialism shifts towards nihilism with age, as the longer one lives the more things one sees fade away into nothingness. As Bache puts it, “From the older waiter to the old man lies a progression in despair, for the three characters are actually parts of an implied progression from youth through middle age to old age.” (1961)

The next glances the reader is given of the young waiter’s shifting mentality are in the exchanges between him and the old waiter after the old man is kicked out of the café. When the older waiter asks of the younger “’What is an hour?’” the response he is given is “’More to me [the young waiter] than to him [the old man].’” This clearly shows his materialistic tendencies, but can also be used to once again demonstrate that he can at least understand the nihilistic side. Perhaps the line which best reveals this shift comes shortly after this, and is one of the only places in the story where the young waiter’s dialogue is expanded upon with a brief glimpse of his thoughts.

“’No it is not’” are the most revealing words the young waiter says throughout the whole of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” because they are the only words which explicitly express his understanding of ideas beyond his own materialistic notions. Every other place which would seem to indicate this same conclusion does so through implication, and each could very well be inferred as meaning something else entirely. What makes this line unique is narration which follows it: “He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.” With these two short sentences, Hemingway tells the reader that the young waiter at least partially understands the meaning of the café, or clean well-lighted places in general. Had he been a pure representation of materialism, the young waiter almost certainly would not have agreed with the older one, or if he had it would have been only a method of ending a conversation which he cannot appreciate. The line “He did not wish to be unjust,” shows that the young waiter truly does believe what he says while “He was only in a hurry,” reinforces his materialistic side. With these brief, simple sentences, Hemingway shows us that the while the young waiter has mostly materialistic notions he is already beginning to adopt the nihilistic viewpoint of the older waiter.

Through these brief snippets of dialogue the reader can see the young waiter as “even now clutching at the straws of materialism.” (Barthes 1956) Since he would have killed himself if not for his niece's intervention, the old man clearly represents the extreme nihilistic end of the continuum. Barthes calls the older waiter the “truest symbol of modern man,” because, like most people, he is somewhere between the materialistic and nihilistic views. His utterance of the nihilistic Lord's Prayer shows that he is clearly leaning towards that end of the spectrum, yet his ability to understand both the young waiter's viewpoint and the stability of his job show that he is not so far gone as the old man.


Works Cited
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway". Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jenny Cromie. Vol. 40. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. 153-269. UMass Dartmouth. Gale. Literature Criticism Online. 15 December 2011 

Welcome to Strangeland

Today marks the day of Aaron Yates's (better known as Tech N9ne) 40th birthday, but more importantly for Technicians everywhere, today is also the day that Welcome to Strangeland becomes available across America. As Tech's 14th studio album since '99, it's safe to safe that fans already know exactly what to expect from him: rock n roll beats, haunting opera sounding vocals, and the brutally paced rhythmic rhyming of the independent rap giant himself, Tech N9ne.

Right off the bat, Welcome to Strangeland provides all three of these elements in the song "Stars." It opens with a deep voice-over with an eerily beautiful piano accompaniment, eventually giving way to the bass/snare/clap rock beat and the lyrics. In tracks like this it's easy to see where Tech takes his name from: he spits verse like bullets, and just when you think he's through he reloads and comes at you even faster. Excellent use of breaks throughout the song give exactly that feeling: stop, reload, kill it, while the beautifully harmonized chorus haunts you even after it's gone.

"Stars" gives way to the album's title track when the star lands in Strangeland. To introduce him, the outro in "Stars" is the intro from the track "Strangeland" off of All 6's and 7's. After the first track, which is an all Tech track, it's easy to forget that this is the fourth Tech N9ne Collabos album, which means it heavily features the other Strange Music artists, or really just anyone Tech feels like rapping with. "Welcome to Strangelan" gives us the album's first taste of versatile vocal wizard, Krizz Kaliko, who in my mind immediately becomes the Willy Wonka of Strangeland (Gene Wilder not Johnny Depp).

The Tech/Kaliko combination has always reminded me of a more wide-ranged Dre and Eminem, and this one's no exception. First of all, let me just say that I am not exaggerating when I say that I could listen to just the beats of Tech N9ne songs all day, their rapping over them is just icing on the cake. They are one of the foundations of the entire Tech N9ne style simply because they're so very different from every other artist out there. "Welcome to Strangeland" features bass heavy synthesizers over a moving bass/rim/clap drumbeat. The Krizz Kaliko chorus is the perfect welcome to the rest of the Tech N9ne collabos, who are featured more heavily in the rest of the album

"Unfair," the third track on Strangeland, feature Kaliko and Ubiquitous and Godemis, both of Ces Cru. This is another perfect example of unique Tech N9ne beats, but the main focus of this song has to be the chorus. How many rhymes for "Unfair" can you think of? In the chorus of this song Tech gives you about 30 of them in 15 seconds. The rest of the song is excellent, the Ces Cru verses are particularly well written, but there's just no competing with the chorus.

The fourth track, "Kocky," features Kutt Calhoun and Jay Rock, and features a beat that sounds incredibly similar to Dre songs. The slow simple beat makes this song all about the verses, which are great but fall short after the first three mind-blowing songs. The next track is another all Tech track. "Who Do I Catch" is another slow beat track, but this time with a soothing piano melody and the fine vocals of the lovely Liz Suwandi. This song takes the album in a dark direction, which continues until the eighth track. "Bang Out" features the 816 Boys (they won a grammy for their song "Aeriola," remember?) and a slow beat which contains haunting high-pitched vocals.

Track 9 is "Beautiful Music," the last all Tech verse track, but this one with Krizz Kaliko working his magic on the chorus. This song doesn't have that great of a beat (nice bass drums though), but it shows how Tech and Kaliko work so perfectly together. Tech keeps his verses moving quickly which are interrupted only for Kaliko's stunning and meaningful choruses. "Won't You Come Dirty" is the 10th track on the album, and it's one truly different from the most other Tech songs. It features Young Bleed and Stevie Stone, and has a slow techno feel to it. It's not a bad song, but as Tech's style is already like a combination of rap and hard rock, adding the techno feel is just a little off-putting.

"Sad Circus," as its name implies, is the beginning of another set of songs from Tech's darker side. It features Brotha Lynch Hung and Courtney Kuhnz as well as a tragically beautiful piano melody. If you prefer Tech's slower depressing songs, you'll like the last five tracks best, as they're all like mixtures of rock ballads and remorseful rap songs. The four after "Sad Circus" showcase the beautiful vocal talents of ¡Mayday!, Krizz Kaliko, Kutt Calhoun, and Jay Da 3rd.

So, like most Tech N9ne albums, Welcome To Strangeland progresses from upbeat to down-tempo, features artists you wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and is worth whatever you pay for it. It's the kind of album that you can't even appreciate properly the first time you listen to it.

Ask Your Doctor About You PSA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgw892-ZwBA

For my visual rhetoric creative midterm project I have chosen to make a public service announcement urging people to have actual conversations with their doctors instead of simply asking for a drug they've seen advertised on TV. The only visual components I chose to use for this PSA were attention grabbing red slides with thick black text for high contrast and easy reading. I considered using still images in addition to the text, but decided that this might distract the viewer from the real highlights of the commercial which are the text and the sound. There are a total of 14 different slides, though most of them are only 1 word different than the ones before and after. I chose to set up the visual portion like this mostly because I feel that this simplistic method of conveying my message compliments what is itself a simple message (Ask your doctor about you), but also because this is my first time using any movie editing software and this method resembled an advanced powerpoint type format. Every audio clip featured in this video is direct from a U.S. Pharmaceutical commercial which has been broadcast on TV in the past 10 years, and it was a simple process to add these sounds to the still images I had created.

While setting up the visual component was easy, designing it was a little more difficult. To begin, I watched about an hour of pharmaceutical commercials online to establish some things they had in common. I ended up finding 4 common themes* that exist in almost all of them, and a fifth which is in most of the ads of a particular type (possible fatalities appear in a large number of pharmaceuticals designed to alleviate symptoms of psychological disorders), but due to time constraints I only sampled clips regarding 3 themes: talking to your doctor, side effects, and possible fatalities. The two that I did not use were an establishment of symptoms (many of which could be caused by a wide range of disorders) and product superiority (ie “#1 doctor recommended,” “the only prescription which treats/proven to treat...” etc). I didn't use these common pharmaceutical advertisement themes due to time constraints with my own commercial, but also because of the five I established, they are the only ones which are designed by the pharmaceutical companies to sell the product, while the others are what they absolutely need to say.

First of all, since what I have focused on in this commercial is prescription drugs rather than over-the-counter or illegal drugs, I have chosen to rely rather heavily on the morality of doctors in general. The argument may be made that pharmaceutical lobbying in not just government but in healthcare practices and doctors' offices is the real problem, since they are paid to hand out prescriptions for certain drugs and not others, but that's certainly not an issue I have the power to affect through rhetoric. Instead, I am assuming that all doctors faithfully uphold the Hippocratic Oath, and that the burden is therefore on the American public to seek, at the very least, a basic understanding of their own medical conditions. That is why the first focus of my commercial is on the common theme of “ask your doctor.”

To legally obtain prescription drugs, you must go through your doctor. This is why pharmaceutical companies lobby in healthcare practices and tell you to talk to your doctor about their product. They list a long list of symptoms and a product which they say will alleviate them, and ask you to do the work of bringing these subjects up to your doctor, and the bribe the doctors to recommend their brand because it would be a shame to do all that work and lose the money to a generic brand. All of this, though, starts with the viewer, whose unprofessional diagnosis already comes with a cure in mind. By asking my own viewers to talk to a doctor about themselves, I hope to shift doctor-patient conversations from patient demands towards doctors' recommendations. Again, this places a strong emphasis on the individuals involved in the doctor-patient relationship; it is not meant to change how direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising operates, but how we respond to it individually.

The second focus of my commercial is “side effects.” This is a part of pharmaceutical advertising which they are legally required to include in their commercials, and it's always the part they want to finish quickly. This portion of their commercials is best known for rushing through a list of everything from headaches to internal bleeding, and doing it all in a cheery voice while images of puppies and happy couples flash by. My commercial does just the opposite; there are no happy images but there are also no horrible side effects. The idea here is that having an actual conversation with your doctor may not bring you that puppy, beautiful wife, or perfect lawn, but it could bring you piece of mind. In both the first and second portions of my commercial, the audio tracks are meant to remind the audience of the prevalence of pharmaceutical advertisements by placing the soothing voices out of context.

The third part of my commercial is the most serious one. This uses a statistic which I gained from a Fox News story, but which they gained from the CDC. Fox goes on to say that there are more annual deaths from prescription drugs than from heroin and cocaine use combined in the U.S. And that the prescription drug overdose rate is four times higher than it was a decade ago (Fox News). The message on the two slides used in this portion is clear: thousands of people die every year from prescription drugs but no one dies from having a straightforward conversation with their doctor. These slides and the final one are accompanied by seven audio segments from real pharmaceutical commercials explaining that their product may lead directly to the user's death through heart attack, stroke, coma, or suicide.

The final slide shown is a repetition of the overall message of the commercial. The possible fatality audio plays through this slide to reinforce the necessity of the message. What viewers should understand from this commercial is that prescription drugs are dangerous and should not be taken unless absolutely necessary as dictated by a doctor with a full understanding of the patient's condition.

* As an interesting side note, I found that many non-prescription pharmaceuticals were fond of boasting about how many doses they required to be effective. This was mostly in terms of “1 a day” “half as many as the leading brand” “lasts twice as long as the leading brand” and so on.


Sources:

“Abilify for Depression Ad.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsqJju3ePJU

“Celebrex Ad.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GvYI4VdVEI

“Cymbalta TV Ad (2005)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkKzVKnR7w

“Detrol LA.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVF2ek95Ltw

Fox News. “Surge in Accidental Prescription Drug Deaths. ”http://video.foxnews.com/v/1253221053001/surge-in-accidental-prescription-drug-deaths/

“Lunesta You Can't Stop Thinking? Suicide By Butterflies! (American Commercial FAIL)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRUVkZ7DKlc

“Prozac TV Ad – Let the Sun Shine In.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p5NzaRcAgY

“Real Valtrex Commercial.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iLTfG75s6g

“Restasis Ad (2009)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUIyE_q7SAo

Words Are More Than Just Ideas

As I write this, I have just finished unpacking a collection of books left behind by my grandparents from their passing earlier this year. Despite the generational gap between us, much of what I found myself placing on bookshelves were things I have read before. Classic works of fiction such as Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues, a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, Frankenstein, and The Wind in the Willows, greeted me as old friends, as did the poetry of Robert Frost and Longfellow. While I already have digital copies of most of these on my Nook, I found that holding the old, printed copies was evocative of a whole different set of emotions and memories than those gained through simply reading the stories themselves.

For a great deal of human history, the written word has been the only way to be sure that your words would be heard by future generations. We may credit an unknown man named Homer for the creation of some of the greatest and most renowned stories ever told, but most historians agree that each bard would tell the stories differently, while keeping only the major points the same. One can only imagine how many stories and oral traditions have been forgotten over the ages simply because they were not written down. While we may never know who the man William Shakespeare was, or even if he was the definitive author of all the works attributed to him, the words he wrote have been copied, reprinted, read, and even re-imagined by countless people. While we may consider the availability of such well-known texts trivial, many societies, both historical and modern day, have used censorship to deny writings to their people.

I consider myself a fairly modern person; I grew up in a house filled with computers, (both working and in pieces) I was born into a world where we can communicate and share information with each other effortlessly, and I dream of a day when mankind can do the same on other worlds. I believe that the ease with which we can share and access information is one of the defining aspects of my generation, and that such availability, if properly used, is beneficial to all those involved. Seldom do I enjoy looking back at our own history, content instead to keep looking forward, but as I flipped through their delicate pages, I could not help but wonder at the history contained in the books themselves.

By far the oldest of all the books I recently unpacked was the collection of Longfellow poems, which was printed in Cambridge in 1882. It was an odd feeling to hold in one hand a thing which was created more than a century before my own birth, odder still to imagine how many people had held the very same book. How many had been touched by the words, or even just the illustrations within, and how many of them carried this influence with them to share with others? When was it first read with the assistance of an electric light? When was it first transported by an automobile? Even sitting on a shelf in a single room for all that time, how many memories long ago forgotten might it have seen? I can't speak for the book's history any more than it can, but I do know that simply by being there it has more history than any digital copy ever could. While I love my Nook for allowing me to carry an entire library around with me wherever I go, I seriously doubt that one day my grandchildren will also gaze at its screen.

I often find it hard to imagine a world without the technology that we take for granted every day. As I said, I look forward to the future; I prefer to imagine a further evolutions and applications of the things we are just beginning to understand now. At the same time though, it scares me to think that one day, not long from now, there will come a time when all books are considered relics such as the Longfellow now sitting on a shelf in my room. Will our own histories be typed, written, or simply forgotten? Might a future society look at the practice of printing words on paper as we look at hieroglyphs on stone tablets: not just obsolete, but barbaric? What will we leave behind for them to remember us by?

If these words are found years, decades, or even centuries from now, may they be in some way physical and not just pixels on a screen.

R.I.P. Charles and Anne Reid

Reaping

Weeping willows whip in the wind

On the banks of a river they've cried.

They drink in the mornings

And mourn in the evenings

Breathing each other's sighs.

Cloaked in their shadows a pale figure wanders

Beneath the gnarled branches of woe

With sickle in hand

He harvests their sorrow

And tends this most ancient of groves.

All You Need to Know

Wonder at the universe

And wander outside its bounds.

So much of what makes life worth living's

Intangible right now.

Earn your money earnestly

And with it break your bread.

Make your bed in a humble home

But take pride in your head.

Idle minds the Devil's playthings

Their busy hands his tools.

Doing without understanding

Is the work of fools.

Good Riddance

Hurry home without delay

The storm is on its way.

The fog rolls in, to skin it clings,

And all it eats away.

The wind it roars

Through bone it bores

To strip away the sin.

Killers, thieves, and common whores

Never seen again.

So hurry home my wayward child

Soon the rain will fall,

The tide will rise up to the skies

And wash away us all.

The Process

Conform to our standards of innovation

Proven to make integrity profitable.

In an effort to reduce redundancy

All employees are now their own supervisors.

Waste not, want not.

There are starving children in India

Which is why we are laying off half of you

And moving our offices to New Delhi.

We're in the business of making our customers happy,

But we have a lot of customers

So go for quantity over quality.

Success can't be measure in dollars.

For a more accurate representation

Measure the meniscus of your liquid assets.

Remember,

Your large sums of money can never comfort you,

But the employees you own have to

If you add it to their job description.

Aesthetics

You remind me that all that is beautiful was once ugly,

That form and perspective are the only qualifiers.

When I look upon you, I can't help but think

"One day all the universe will devolve into that."

I cannot imagine the effort that went into your creation

But I often consider destroying it,

And what little effort it would be.

Numb

Buried in the soul a shard of hate festers

Blossoms and blooms when indulged.

On the surface you're calm,

Beautiful even,

But something inside is all wrong.

You take all your pain and bury it there

That place where your dreams lived and died.

It was once a garden

But now just a desert

Lost when you let your tears dry.

Seasons

I want to roll with the thunder

And climb a wall of falling rain.

When the wind whispers I will answer

With a flash the seasons change.

I want to smell some summer flowers

And listen to the bluebirds sing.

Although each second feels like hours

Without a care there's no such thing.

I want to feel the wind rush past me

As I plummet towards the ground

Precipitating, falling freely,

Touching down without a sound.

I want to wallow in the darkness

When all of life seems at its end

Because I know its grandiose purpose

Is simply to begin again.

Picking Up Pieces

Like I didn't warn you it wouldn't be all right,

Like I didn't tell you how hard you'd have to try.

And, now, this is how you live your life?

I can see it all clearly now, why,

I wanted to run away at first, I,

Could see in my heart,

What I fought for was lost,

Still, you were the one who ran away first.

You fled to another, and when that didn't work,

Another after him,

Then a third,

And a fourth,

Till you've run the whole world.

Still, the search must go on.

Why can't I stop thinking of you when I hear that song?

It's like torture,

And I want to torture you.

But I can't.

Because nothing I could do

Would be worse than What you've done to yourself.

You gave up your hopes, and your dreams,

And what else?

These questions are like plagues on my mind;

How could you have run?

When will your search be done?

What could you have been?

And there's always that most despised

word, question, philosophy:

Why?

Why do this to me? To yourself? To us?

I hate asking because I always blame me.

Though I know, it as never about me.

Even when we were together.

It was always you, and he, and she,

Your need to be free,

Your wants, hopes, and dreams.

And they're all just pieces now,

Like a puzzle never meant to be put together.

Like us.

Why Time Travel is Theoretically Possible

The subject of time travel is one that mankind has been fascinated with since before the concept was even fully developed. The idea that we can change events in the past in order to consciously sculpt the future is something that almost everybody has thought about on some level. While both artists and philosophers have discussed the topic of time travel, there remains some controversy regarding its theoretical possibility. Some argue that because of certain paradoxical events which could occur, it impossible to travel through time. Time travel is theoretically possible due to the ideas of personal and external time, even though it may not seem so from a standard view of time.

As a literary device time travel is most often used to convey the theme of fate, or predestination, as triumphant over free will. Much like the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy, predestination paradoxes are often used to exemplify a character's lack of free will. When this is the case, the character will know of an event either through lived experience in the case of time travel, or through prophecy, and they attempt to change what they know of the causes of that event. With time travel, the method of changing the present or future events is to eliminate their causes in the past. With prophecy in literature, however, the process is a little more complicated; because the event has not occurred yet, the causes may still be unknown. Therefore, in deterministic literature it is most often the character's attempted negation of the prophecy which causes the event to unfold.

Perhaps the most well-known victim of self-fulfilling prophecy is the tragic hero Oedipus. Before Oedipus's birth, his father, Laius, the King of Thebes, consulted the oracle to ask what kind of children he would have. The oracle prophesied that any son of Lauis would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Of course, Laius tried to keep the prophecy from being fulfilled by giving his son to a servant to abandon, but the servant ends up giving Oedipus to a poor family who raised him outside of Thebes. Years later, when Oedipus is a grown man, he met his father as a stranger traveling on the same road. They argued with each other until eventually a fight broke out, which led to Oedipus fulfilling the first part of the prophecy: the murder of his father. Oedipus later saved Thebes from a sphinx, causing him to inherit the title of King of Thebes, as well as his mother, the recently widowed Queen. This is a basic example of a predestination paradox because the events which caused the prophecy to be fulfilled were all linked to the conscious efforts of Laius to avoid the prophecy.

Much like prophecy, time travel can also be used to incorporate the the theme of fate in literature. Predestination paradoxes within time traveling scenarios start with a character who wants to change their present situation by altering the events of the past. In traveling to the past to undo the causes of the present, they either become the cause themselves, or become the cause of the original cause: setting in motion the same cycle they tried to prevent. The most famous hypothetical example of this would be any time traveling situation in which the traveler becomes his own grandfather, paradoxically causing their own existence years before they are even born. Of course, this is only possible in the first place due to the theoretical difference between personal and external time.

Traditionally, we view time as a universal force which moves forward at the same rate for everyone and everything, regardless of where they are in the universe. When examining the concept of time travel, however, more complex models of time are sometimes necessary. For instance, when traveling 20 years into the past, time is reversed by 20 years for everything except the traveler. This is because he has moved through external time, but his own personal time continues to progress as normal. If it were otherwise, the traveler would find himself 20 years younger, doing whatever they were doing then. A traveler would also be unable to travel to any time before their birth, or after their death, because with only external time, he cannot unhinge himself from his constantly looping time-line. Instead, the ideas of personal and external time, as proposed by David Lewis, ensure a way of differentiating between the traveler's personal experience of time, and time as the rest of the world perceives it.

Personal and external time are generally one and the same for everyone who is not a time traveler, but for the traveler, some interesting questions may arise as a result of disjointing their personal time from external time. For instance, it is possible that the time from which the traveler departed could still be progressing at what we consider to be the regular rate. In these scenarios, a traveler who has spent five years in another time may attempt to return to the present only to find himself 5 years later from his starting point. Of course, all the traveler would have to do is go back five years from that point to reach their date of departure, but by doing so, they would essentially always be living five years in the past, as the present he left would continue to exist ahead of him.

Regardless of whether or not time continues progress from the point of a time traveler's departure, personal and universal time will always be at least slightly disjointed upon the traveler's return. This is another distinction which would be impossible to understand without the notion of personal time. A traveler who has lived even a single moment in either the past or the future will have gained experiences which are chronologically different from the flow of external time. Because of this distinction, a traveler will still age regularly in the past and future, and can actually die before the time of their birth. By the same principles, an object made today and left a thousand years in the past could be dated as a thousand years old, even though it was manufactured on the same day it was dated.

The notions of personal and external time can become even more confusing when one considers fiction such as Jorge Luis Borges's “The Other,” in which a character converses with himself through an act of time travel. In this story, Borges as an old man sits on a park bench, where he is joined by a younger version of himself. This story does not give any account of how the time traveling is managed, but the entire thing is described as if it were a scenario of deja vu, and Borge even writes that it was a very dreamlike encounter. Lewis would say the reason for the deja vu quality of this kind of experience is because the event takes place twice in the traveler's, in this case Borges's. personal time, but only once in external time. The reason for this, is that Borges actually experiences the event twice: once as a younger man, and once as an older, and has different thoughts and reactions to it each time. Even though the traveler experiences it twice, this is still a single event in external time, because any outside observer would view it as such.

These concepts dissolve one of the more basic paradoxes of time travel, as well: that it is impossible to travel any period of time without that period of time passing. This paradox would reduce the entire notion of time travel to just waiting for the desired time period to occur, if it were not for the concepts of personal and external time. For a traveler, the trip from the present to any other point in time is measured in personal time, as external time would flow quite differently outside the time machine. In this sense, traveling a thousand years in either direction could take only a moment of the traveler's personal time. As I briefly mentioned earlier, without personal and external time, a traveler could not go to any time before his birth or after his death. This is because with only external time, they would find themselves as the same person they were at that time, performing the same actions, defeating the entire purpose of time travel. With personal time, however, the traveler is a different person from his other self because he has different experiences.

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of time travel, as stated by Paul Horwich, is that “Whatever has already happened cannot now be undone.” (Horwich 435). This is another paradox that makes time travel completely irrelevant, as it states that nothing can be changed because it has already happened. Horwich argues that it is, in fact, logically impossible to change the events of the past, but not to influence them in the same way that we always influence future events. Of course, this still allows for a present in which events have been influenced in the past by people from the future, or a predestination paradox. In this situation, the causes and events would not be fully understood until external time caught up with the personal time of the traveler's departure. This is just one of several techniques used in literature to avoid this particular paradox of time travel.

Another way of avoiding the paradox that the past cannot be changed is to say that the time traveler has moved not only through time, but through universes to an alternate reality. This concept is not really a solution to the paradox at all, but merely a neat hypothetical sidestepping of it. In this theory, the traveler could change all he wanted without becoming the victim of paradox, because the events which he changes are not truly the events he remembers, just different version of very similar, possibly identical, situations. DC comics has long been criticized for using this technique to bring back dead characters. Sometimes Superman must fight alternate versions of himself, or is even saved by himself. This concept has become more popular recently as the genre of alternate history is becoming more prevalent, but alternate history should not be confused with time travel, though they are similar situations.

Alternate history stories are different from time traveling stories because rather than having an agent, or time traveler, change the past, they are hypothetical situations in which a past event occurred differently, making the time-line different from the one we know. To draw on another graphic novel reference, Alan Moore's Watchmen is an alternate history story in which the pivotal change from our own time-line is the existence of masked vigilantes in the 40s through the 60s. In the Watchmen universe, the vigilantes lead to America “winning” the Vietnam War, which causes Richard Nixon to serve five terms as president. A recent novel, And Then Everything Changed, by Jeff Greenfield, contains alternate histories for President Kennedy and his brother, Robert, as well as for Presidents Carter, Ford, and Reagan. Any one of these situations could be explained by time travel, but are instead just hypothetical alternate universes.

Another of the most commonly discussed issues of time travel are the creation of causal loops within time. According to Lewis, a closed loop is scenario in which “each event on the loop has a causal explanation, being caused by events elsewhere on the loop,” (Lewis 148) In other words, there is no way to determine what the original cause was, because each one loops back on the other an infinite number of times. This typically leads to a predestination paradox, as described earlier. Now that we have a greater understanding of the workings of personal and external time, let's look again at the infamous grandfather paradox, with a strange twist, as told by Matt Groening's animated series Futurama.

In the Futurama episode “Roswell That Ends Well,” Fry causes the crews' spaceship to be transported back to Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, ultimately becoming the “Area 51” aliens, which influenced a lot of Fry's beliefs and interests. Furthermore, Fry ends up accidentally killing his grandfather, and sleeping with his grandmother, paradoxically becoming his own grandfather. This situation is a causal loop, because it is impossible to determine which events determined the others. Specifically, where did Fry come from in the first place? Fry's personal time, that is the way he experienced time, is easily traced. His existence in terms of external time, however are difficult to understand.

As Fry experienced his life, he was born, grew up, went back in time, killed his grandfather, slept with his grandmother, then went back to the present and continued to live. In terms of external time, however, Fry murdered his grandfather, slept with his grandmother, and disappeared. Then, decades later, Fry was born, he grew, up, disappeared, then reappeared a short time later. In this case, Fry is able to go on living his life after the whole incident, but suppose a traveler in a similar position never makes it back to their starting point and dies in the past. The causal loop would be closed, and the events which caused the time travel would repeat themselves infinitely from Fry's point of view. A view of external time, however, would proceed as it was before, but Fry would simply not reappear a short time later. Such a difference between infinite repetition, and time progressing naturally with a minor bump suggest that even if paradoxes such as the proposed situation do occur, they are just minor eddies in the flow of time as we all experience it.

Turning again to Borges's “The Other,” we see another example of as circular loop. Though the conversation happens in a single moment in external time, the fact that it was between the same man at different times in his life creates the loop. The old Borges vaguely remembers the conversation he had with himself as a young man, and remembers that he must pass on good advice to himself to shape the man he will become. So he essentially grows up to be the old Borges based on the information he gives to his younger self. In this case, where does the original information come from? As Lewis says when examining a similar situation, “There simply is no answer. The parts of the loop are explicable, the whole of it is not. Strange! But not impossible,” (Lewis 148). It is indeed strange, but as demonstrated, this is paradoxical only from a view of personal time, and does not automatically negate the possibility of time travel.

Though the majority of stories involving time travel involve causal loops, this does not at all mean that time travel is impossible. In fact, there are certainly more possible situations that do not lead to causal loops than do. As Bradley Monton says in an article on the possibilities of time travel, “I know of no extant consistent time travel story which does not involve causal loops, and it may well be the case that such a story would not be interesting. But it does not follow that such a story is not possible,” (Monton 3).

While time travel has been both a literary focus and a point of philosophical debate, it seems to have very little use except in the hands of a highly trained professional who wishes only to observe. If there is one thing we know about time travel, it's that the consequences of making a mistake in the past can be so disastrous, that it's literally beyond comprehending. The philosophical consequences for the individuals involved in time traveling definitely outweigh the benefits of changing the past. Perhaps the best way to avoid these devastating consequences is to not attempt to change history through time travel, but use it to learn history we do not already understand, much like Mister Peabody and Sherman.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Other.” Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Penguin Books, New York, New York. 1998. Pages 411-418. Print.

Horwich, Paul. “On Some Alleged Paradoxes of Time Travel.” The Journal of Philosophy, 72.14 (1975). Pages 432-444. Retrieved May 6, 2011 from JSTOR.

Lewis, David. “The Paradoxes of Time Travel.” American Philosophical Quarterly, April 1976. Pages 145-152. Retrieved May 4, 2011 from JSTOR.

Monton, Bradley. “Time Travel Without Causal Loops.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal Compilation, 2008. Pages 1-14. Retrieved May 9, 2011 from JSTOR.

“Roswell That Ends Well.” Futurama. Matt Groening, Rich Moore, Billy West, Katey Sagal. Comedy Central, 2001.

Vivimancer

April's 75 word story:

Aziz had been exiled from the Halls of the Dead for practicing the art most despised among the unliving. The monotony of the afterlife had driven him to blur the lines between life and death, only to see his wife for a moment. The dead had cast him out, but kept his beloved, Eda, so his new life was worse than his death. He would give her life, and they would reunite. He vowed it.

Woof!

Here's the under 75 word story for this month. The theme I wrote it on was Crime and Punishment, without that information it just seems weird.

The dog licked at the pool of blood spreading across the otherwise pristine hardwood floor. He was so hungry and so tired. In life, his master had not taken care of him. It was a strange justice that the dog would eat better with his master dead. Gnawing at the man's exposed foot, the dog proceeded to show him who was the master.

Wandering Mind

Is insanity a sign, I wonder,

A sign of creative thought.

I ask myself, but before I answer,

The question has been lost.

Instead I find only riddles

And ideas I have bought.

Why do my thoughts desert me

When I think I need them most?

Why don't they stay and waste away,

Idling at their post?

Perhaps it is because I am

Such an ungrateful host.

I wonder where my mind dwells

When I am at wit's end.

If what it says is true, then you

Are truly a good friend.

I know myself to lie though,

So the whole thing I contend.

The Quest

If you seek an explanation,

I'm afraid I can help you not.

All I know is what we're told:

That answers stem from thought.

If instead you search for reason

I must warn you none are sure.

We all depend on foes and friends

For something to adore.

You ask what will make you happy

But my answer you forsooth.

Why do you think me lying

When I tell you "Seek the Truth"?

Why ask me all these questions?

Why not find out for yourself?

Weren't you taught that cautious thought

Is a sign of your good health?

I support the search for knowledge

Of things we'll never know.

Where else might we wander,

And where else would we grow?

Last Requests

This is an under 75 word story I submitted for an online contest. Before writing it I never realized just how short 75 words is. There will likely be more of these to come, as the site does one of these every month and I find them a healthy exercise in brevity.

The string quartet played on in the corner. Whether they were completely oblivious to, or trying to enhance the panic in the room, I knew not. My drink was empty but the musical rapture carried me beyond sobriety. The rest of the room stared at me as I shouted requests to the cellist, but I saw no harm in it. We were all about to die, the least we could ask for was good music.

Both Earth and Man are Born in Fire

This is essentially the creation story as told by a priest of fire in a short story that is still in progress. The short story connects to Kronicle, (the novel I am also writing) because it is the story of a character who will eventually meet up with the narrator of Kronicle. This story is told to that character when she is feeling depressed. I will post the short story this belongs in when I have finished it but for now here is an excerpt.

“Once, long eons ago, when the world new in its creation, fire ruled the planet. The fire was so hot that the whole Earth burned with it, a smaller flame emulating the Sun. Agnor's strength on this planet was so mighty that no others challenged it. He took this power to the space around him, and his enemies of stone and ice which he saw he burned and added to his strength.

“But soon there were fewer enemies in the Earth's path, and Agnor tired of it. He had almost forgotten it entirely when he was visited by the mysterious father of the gods, Kaos. Kaos promised Agnor that he would be greatly rewarded if he relinquished his fiery grip on Earth, but the fire god was young and headstrong in his own plans of burning Earth to an ash. It was not until Kaos offered Agnor a chance to severely harm his enemy of ice that the fire god accepted. Since he was so mistrusting of Kaos, who is said also to be the father of all lies, he continues to this day to hold on to Earth's core, ready to bathe it all in fire again.

“For many long years the Earth grew steadily colder, and Agnor could feel the chill growing even from the planet's fiery depths. Great quantities of water boldly sat upon Earth's face, and Agnor raged at them from the Earth's core. Eons passed and a thick tangle of plants covered most of the Earth and swam in its water. Eons more and animals came to live in the great oceans of Earth, and then its rich variety of land. Many times the ice god threatened to destroy all the things that lived on Earth, but they were Father Kaos's creatures and he made sure that something survived every time. Eventually the ice and stone gods worked together to hurl a massive frozen boulder at the Earth's face in an attempt to once and for all end life. This impact toppled the order of life on Earth, but so clever are Kaos's plans that the asteroid only played into them, allowing true chaos to spread throughout the world and fulfill the promise made with fire.

“When the icy stone hit the Earth its impact caused a burst of fire which momentarily caused Agnor to again control the planet. Everything above ground perished, and even many in the great oceans were burnt. But deep underground in tunnels they dug with their own claws, our earliest and dimmest ancestors survived the fire and found themselves kings of a new world. It was during this age of fire that man was born into the world.

“As time passed Agnor grew increasingly disappointed with his bargain with Kaos. He had temporarily consumed the planet in flames again, but already the cold crept back onto its surface. All that had changed was the life on the planet. He sought an audience with Kaos to demand an explanation. 'Patience,” Kaos advised the fire god, 'for when I dip my hand in the stream of time, all things are possible.' So again he waited as the forces of the cold and wet built their strength.

“Infuriated by the slow attainment of his promised power on Earth, Agnor retreated to the planet's core to fume. Occasionally he could feel fire on the surface as the skies cast down lightning to burn to the fauna, but even this brought him no pleasure, such was the extent of his anger. He eventually became aware of a prolonged, if not very intense burning on the Earth's surface. Ascending to view the cause of this, Agnor discovered a tree which had apparently been struck by lightning and toppled to the forest floor. The tree was mighty and would surely burn for a long time, but there was an odd activity about the burning tree. Small, hairy creatures were poking at the flames with branches, sometimes accelerating the flames and sometimes dampening them. One of the creatures prodded at the flames until his branch also caught fire. Alarmed, he dropped it to the forest floor where it began to singe other plant life nearby. This greatly lifted the fire god's spirit, for such a curious creature would surely set the world ablaze again, fulfilling Kaos's promise.

“But years passed without the curious creatures reigniting the world. One day, when Agnor was again becoming impatient, Kaos appeared to him and beckoned him to the surface. 'Behold!' spoke the father of gods, 'For today I present to you the product of my interest on Earth. This thing which is the adaptable human will bring fire and chaos to everything they touch for so long as a single one survives.” Agnor looked again upon the curious creatures, and was unimpressed. Before he could voice his displeasure, however, one of the furry things started smashing rocks together while yelling at a small pile of sticks. To Agnor's amazement, this action eventually resulted in the creation of a small fire.

“'With your blessing, these people will live always with fire in their hearts,' spoke Kaos. 'It will pump through their veins so that they both create and destroy with it. It will bring them to new worlds, and they will always bring it with them. With these people you can melt your icy foe, for the cold has always been their enemy. Protect them and they will go far.' And so with the blessing of Agnor, mankind has survived and thrived, though we never forget our allegiance to the fire."

Last Second Thoughts

This started off as an attempt to make something in an interesting rhyme scheme, but I started moving words around when it was just starting out and saw a way to keep the rhyme scheme I found and make the whole thing mostly coherent and not just an exercise in rhyming. The title might change, for now it is just the pun of last second and second thoughts that I slapped on.

You lie there staring solely at the floor,

You thought that life was meaningful before.

The persistent wave of overwhelming difference

Pours in past the windows and floods through the front door.

With nothing left for which to live or die,

You slowly bow your head and start to cry.

Waiting for the rising of the tide

To take away what's left of you, and leave you nothing more.

All the things you fought for were untrue,

Fairytales became your point of view.

When reality lay right there in your sight

You simply passed it by, you were too caught up in the lie.

And what exactly did you think you'd gain?

Respect because you were so very vain?

Acquitted for you were found not quite sane?

Or did you just not want to bother to think of something new?

You spent your whole life waiting for your death,

But now that it's impending you're having some regrets.

Was it right for you to not think for yourself?

Too late to wonder now, you've just taken your last breath.

The Lesser Evil

Say one thing for the First Law Trilogy, say it's far from your typical fantasy series.

With The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie creates a unique fantasy world so dark and manipulative, that it has produced skewed versions of the stereotypical fantasy heroes. The amazingly well-crafted characters all blur traditional moral lines for their own purposes, creating unpredictable plot twists and reinforcing the underlying principle of the series that the ends always justify the means. Every character is fatally flawed in their own ways, but the fairytale notion of justice is scarcely found in the series.

Sand dan Glokta is a scheming torturer with nothing to live for but his hatred of everyone and everything. Once a rash young soldier, Glokta was captured by his country's enemy and held for years as a prisoner before being ransomed back. Years of torture left him crippled, spasmodic, and hateful, yet he survived to work his way up in his nation's Inquisition out of pure spite. His attention to details, capacity for bluffing and taking risks, and utter ruthlessness allow him to plot his way through any task and justify anything he needs to do to succeed. His character is hard to sympathize with, and is by no means likable, but one can't help but respect his cunning and above all, his perseverance.

Jezal dan Luthar is a parody of the chivalrous knight that can sometimes be found amongst sword and sorcery. He is a loud-mouthed buffoon who's rich family bought his position as a captain in the Aduan army. When we first meet Jezal his goals in life are to marry rich and get drunk while playing cards with his fellow officers every night. Jezal starts off as an infuriating character who comes across as even more unlikable than Glokta, (Jezal is referred to by more than one character as a pompous ass) though his blundering is often funny, but he is the character who changes the most throughout the series, and I found myself eventually warming up to him.

Logen Ninefingers, or the Bloody-Nine, was my favorite character throughout the series, possibly because he starts off as the simplest and most well-meaning character. Logen seems to ascribe to the principles of the typical fantasy warrior hero: courageous, fierce, honorable, for the most part. He is hideously scarred all over his body from years of experience fighting, but his philosophy of being realistic and doing whatever it takes to survive have allowed him to beat every opponent he has faced. Losing the middle finger from his left hand in a battle earned him his name which is feared throughout his homeland. However, there is a much darker aspect of Logen's personality that haunts him and caused him to wander away from his people aimlessly. One of my favorite quotes from the series without giving anything away comes from the third book when a man is describing The Bloody-Nine to his children. "He'd send you back to the mud. Faster than the [lightning] killed Willum, and with no more regret. Your life hangs on a thread every moment you stand within two strides of that nothing-looking bastard there."

Of these three characters which the First Law Trilogy offers as protagonists, Logen is my personal favorite, though none of them are fit to be called heroes. Most of the minor characters are more easily distinguished as good or evil characters, though a few are even more ambiguous than the main characters. Because so many of the characters do terrible things out of self-perseverance or ignorance as well as to advance their own goals, it is incredibly hard to judge any character as plainly good or evil.

The web of character interaction spreads the moral ambiguity throughout the major and minor characters of the trilogy, causing each character to change the others' situations and attitudes. This only multiplies the reader's difficulty in trying to decide which characters are in the right and which are the real "bad guys." The twisting, character driven plot makes the First Law Trilogy an excellent read that will leave the reader guessing even when they think they know all the answers. When you plunge yourself into this series remember that nothing is as it seems, rules were meant to be broken, and the only thing that matters in war is winning.