Bill Buckley here

If I were to try to copy another writer, I would probably aim for William F. Buckley Jr. He has a style about him that is nearly impossible to imitate, so--I have to admit--a great deal of the urge I feel to copy him would be just in the challenge. In all honesty, I don't think it would truly be a waste of ones life spend time walking around in suits, talking in a vernacular that Webster's could hardly boast, and spending free time riding in Yachts.
If not William F Buckley, or possibly even his son Christopher, I think I'd go for imitating American Psycho author Brett Easton Ellis. While reading his work I think my id goes a little above and beyond its standard bounds, so being able to emulate that mindset more often would be enjoyable. At some point I think it would be a bit depressing to be "that guy" who tries to make college students think he's a competent writer, but we all have to do something to fill the extra time we have.

Persepolis

While there are notable differences between what was read in the graphic novel in class and the film version of Persepolis, it is much easier to stand the two next to each other, than try to stand them against each other.

One of the first things I noticed about the animated version of the story was the shading in every scene. The drawings were much the same, and the art kept much of it’s same strength in contrasting the white and black; but in every scene of the film, greys are blurred and blended in the background to make a more fluid atmosphere. One of the things that was most striking in the book was the contrast of the individuals, and the simplicity of the images. By blending the images together, and softening some of those contrasts, the impact of the blending is lost. At times, one could argue that they use the softening to further show the polar contrast when they choose not to use the blended colors, but it is often more a show of what can be done within a grey scale than what should be done to faithfully recreate the original.

One instance when the above is most striking is during the war scenes (both during the revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war that followed shortly after.) In the book and in the film, the two are much alike, using backlighting to show black tanks and soldiers against white, contrasting the world with the action. In the book it functions also to show her in a sea of blank color (either black or white), but it doesn’t effectively show that in the movie, making the setting more about artistic ability than about the spirit of image. One could argue that a reason for this change is because more tone can be implied within the tone of voices and action than in the image alone, but ability in one area does not necessarily merit or forgive change in another.

Also, an easy factor to note is the change within the bounds of the story. What we read in class only concerns the portion until she leaves for Europe to flee the war. The film follows through, what I believe is, the entirety of the book series. I actually consider this a good thing, because the transition is fluid, and the story being told was fluid. When I noticed that all would be covered in the same film, I feared that what was done to Lewis Carol’s Alice In Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass would be repeated here, and that the story would mix and become blended simply to distort the originally finite nature of the first book.

Marjane’s interest in boys is delayed until where the second and third books would have come into the story. This allows for the story to focus more around the on-goings in the nation, and direct more attention to her views of political upheavals than personal social strife. For this reason, I think I ended up enjoying the first section of the movie the most, as the other were concerned more with her social life, and how she interacted with others and felt about patriotism than the political change in an area that was going through many fluid upheavals. At one point, she returns to Iran and is wearing make-up and modern clothing, but it never explains what reforms have happened in the country to allow for such attire to be allowed. The same occurs with western style clothing shops, that would one would believe to be illegal, due to the Iranian leadership’s disdain for “western headonism.”

While the movie does have some merits insofar as it allows for what you’ve seen to come to life, I still enjoyed the book, and due to the art, and the ironic simplicity for a complex situation.

If I could turn back time.

Aside from stopping Cher's inexplicable rise to power, there are many things that I'm sure everyone would undo, if given the opportunity. The fact that there are faults that many would want to undo has led many to question the ramifications of undoing them in the first place. If we were to kill Hitler before the Holocaust, would he be viewed as a Martyr with even worse events following due to his death than his life?
If I were to reverse any catastrophe or major event, I would change the events of "operation zapata" or the Bay of Pigs invasion. I think the benefits of removing Castr fourty years ago are still obvious in todays world, where Cuba has been sinking consistently behind the free world, and has not let go of a cold war mentality that they lost decades ago.
I think that the "reversal" of any event in history would be damaging though. The book seems to loop all events, so anything done couldn't be "reversed" in the realm of newtonian science. One would have to venture into a theory of parallel universes, but still one couldn't be certain of the impact of our actions.
When we say "hindsight is always 20/20" we can only be sure that it is in it's definitive sense, but we can't be so sure that something in the past was the right or wrong choice. Aside from being able to see the moral value of any situation, many wrongs have been used to springboard progress, so--to insinuate that we could make better progress by reversing a wrong--is not all together sound reasoning.
Rather than asking "what wrong would I have reversed" what we should ask instead is "how can I make these wrongs into an opportunity or springboard for the future.

Sept. 11th : Never Forget

One of the things talked about when we were reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was the fact that many in the Jewish community thought that Jonathan Safran Foer had made the Holocaust an event of nostalgia, after not having experienced it first hand. When I read his first book, I noted the passion that he had written about the Holocaust, and had thought that a non-jewish author would have a difficult time trying to infuse the writing with the same passion and would lose some credibility of being an outsider writing about such an event. The fact that he didn't experience it first hand, and was at least a generation away from the events, hadn't occurred to me in relation to his sincerity of writing about the subject.
When the terrorist attacks on September eleventh happened, I honestly wasn't sure how to react. I didn't know why we were being attacked, who attacked us, I was thousands of miles away, watching it on TV, and--while I knew it affected me--I wasn't there to feel it directly. I remember one of the most poignant images I saw being that of the man falling from the building.
While I don't accuse Foer of attempting to use tragedy for literary or economic gain, after the class discussion I'm a bit less able to accept his writing as entirely sincere. I noted the fact that the two novels were almost identicle in it's use of tragedy and time shifts, and felt that the power of tragedy was being used more as a common demonitator, imposed upon a common formula to make a story. The story was still well written and moving, but I felt that being moved was more intention of writing than honestly intended emotional empathy.

Greenhouse Effect

We were asked to look out the window from our west facing room on the second floor of the CUE building and, after finding something that would function as a muse, write a short poetic description using imagery.

The corner of the glass shelter. The triangle roof that lets everything in without being able to feel even the gale force winds on the other side. Every pane rattling against the metal frame, but the leaves in here with me don't even have a breeze to blow in. Even with the world ending in ice, there is more fire on the other side.

Then, we were asked to write about the same thing, with the added emotion that would come after some horrible news. The examples given were deaths of families and friends, or being passed up for a job.

This is a time capsule that is moved by nothing but the earth it has attached itself to. In a one room time zone, time is only truly alive when...
instead, I open the door,
the capsule is polluted by its inability to be isolated & removed

That was easy enough, just remember every emo kid you went to high school with
Same concept
this time, you won the lotto, or something else equally good.

The king of all I see,
I look down on everything
that I knw and remain untouched
by its attempts to gaze upon me.
The karma police must be at the donut shop.
Because I'm up here
and I love me too much
to let something bad happen.

I enjoyed that,
because whenever I think happy
I think egomaniacle, and--better still--self-assured

Is it ethical to create and raise children to donate their organs?

I think that we can rule this as individual choice?

I have my own views on the pro-life v. pro-choice issue
I don't think I need to voice them here, but is it much of a jump to say that if we allow partial birth abortions we couldn't allow this as well? This isn't to say we should begin harvesting people for organs today, but if you're going to abort a child, why not put it up for organ use. I mean, if their only outlets are to die or to die in the long run after making someone else's life slightly longer, I would assume that the latter would be the preferable of the two.

Maybe this book is a modern day swiftian modest proposal, but as far as the question itself, I don't think I've envoked the slippery sloap, but rather the logical conclusion.
It may not be moral, but it has to be more moral to have some utilitarian worth than none at all.

oh, the humanity...

In Life After God, we're asked by Coupland what unique characteristics make humans human, the defining factor that can separate us from all other animals on the rock we inhabit. I'd like to think that there is a little more to our complexity than higher intellectual ability and an opposable thumb.
If you're religious, then the abilities of good and evil instilled on man are very important, but I've found that religious debate has the ability to turn even a wayward english blog into something very dismal and disenchanting. In my ecological ethics class, the question was posed,"without man on earth, could there be ethics?"
I think that there's a resounding no to that answer. I think that man is the only being capable of not only choosing an ethical corse of actions, but endowing a situation with an moral qualification. I don't think that humanity is necessarily in our actions or our creations, because we all think, act, interact, and live--for the most part--very differently from one another. I think that what makes us unique as a species is our ability to apply a sense of worth and value beyond the egoist or utilitarian worth that is almost scientifically defined. In essence, being human is unique because we can define what it is to be human.