On "Seeking"

"Seeking" was the article that Melissa chose to share with our class for her Choice Essay presentation. I read it last night and was absolutely taken away by it.

The article basically told about how our brains get a great deal of pleasure by searching or hunting for things. In fact, they receive more pleasure from the chase for something than actually getting it. This explained to me so many things in life in so many different areas. This explains a lot about love and sensual excitement learning, eating, and all sorts of things.

I love to learn and I figured out why it's so rewarding for me: it's an ongoing search and there is no final goal or ending point at which I am let down some by the final high. Dopamine is the stimulant that gets one excited in the chase, while opiates are what is released when the reward is reached. Dopamine is a stimulating high and opiates are a relaxing high. So basically, when I'm learning it's like having a high without ever having the let down. The same part of the brain is stimulated by sexual excitement. I won't go into the physiology of sex too far, you can read that on your own...but if you think about it, sex brain chemistry can relate to lots of things in life.

I found myself relating to the article at every point: personal experiences were ubiquitously connected. In fact, I was connecting what I was doing at the time with the article. While reading the article, I was multitasking by reading, Facebooking, and chatting. The article spoke about conditioning and Pavlov's dog and how people become excited when they get a new message, or their phone rings. I got a sense of expectation everytime my Skype account dinged that I had a new instant message from someone or everytime the little red box of Facebook notifications popped up. It's clear that Facebooking has become a source of dopamine for me. That's probably not a good thing either. When I get bored with doing homework I go on Facebook or Youtube, even if I know there's nothing to see.

The fact that seeking for information online is becoming like a drug addiction is well-founded. We must be careful about how much we are googling or twittering, etc. I don't think that these things are as dangerous as the author says, but we must exercise discretion in how we use them. Searching for information is a good thing; it's just important that we do it at the right time in the right way.

External links: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr

On "The Courthouse Ring"

Malcom Gladwell made some pretty awesome connections in his article about Southern Liberalism and To Kill a Mockingbird. I must admit, like everyone else, I never read into TKAM that much. I took it for an assigned reading in English 9. I enjoyed it, but never read into it.

The connection to Jim Folsom and other Southern Liberals was excellently founded. Throughout the 1800s, one could have said that Northern moderates and liberals fell into the same category. For instance, the Free-Soil Party which later evolved into the Republican party are examples that are similar.

The Free-Soil Party didn't necessarily fight for the abolition of slavery, only for the constraint of it. The party was willing to take action to prevent the spread of the institution, but were willing to allow it to continue where it was, with the hopes that enough sentiment against it would soon follow. This is like Jim Folsom and Atticus Finch because all of these parties are willing to put their foot down to prevent further injury but will not take measures to directly reverse adverse effects.

The Republican Party formed from the Free-Soilers and other parties. As it was created in our country's darkest hour on the eve of the Civil War, it was somewhat more radical than its predecessors. The Republican Party had the same free-soil policy, but as some Republicans began to take their ideals further, they began to call for more immediate aboltion.

Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party's second presidential candidate. He is very much and Atticus Finch. Lincoln's initial goals were to keep the union together. Originally, he planned to bring the South back to the Union, institute free-soil policies and continue slavery as it was and watch it wane away. However, following Gettysburg, he realized that the war was no longer going to be solely a battle over the Union or secession. The war became idealogical as well and that was solidified with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. That action, too, though is also a very Atticus Finch-esque one. For being as famous as it is, the Emancipation Proclamation did effectively nothing. It was just a statement of ideology rather than a true ultimatum of any sort.

In late 1863, when Lincoln gave his famed address to dedicate Gettysburg National Cemetery, he began by saying, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That sentence has been immortalized in history. The tale that Lincoln wrote his address on an envelope on the train to Gettysburg is a myth. He planned this carefully. It was finally then that he had moved away from being a bystander liberal and became a fully active crusader. If we didn't mean to truly find equality, he wouldn't have said "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." That phrase is not just rhetorical flourish to make a citizen feel better about the Union. It is a statement of principal, morality, and a call to uphold that principal.

How I Write

A lot of Romano's words hold true for me. He talked about getting comfortable when writing and finding the places and things that make you want to write.

My best writing is probably done when I'm alone in my room. I'll either sit on my bed and write in a notebook and just write my thoughts or poems and short things, or I'll bring my laptop to my room and type away on my desk until I need a break. I used to do most of my writing in my family's living room area where our desktop computer is, but lately that has been getting too distracting unless I'm alone and it's late at night. It doesn't matter for me much where I am as long as I'm in a comfortable seat, and feel safe in my environment without distractions.

When I was on vacation in Upper Michigan, I went and sat by a lake for two hours just thinking, listening to music and writing so fast and with so much feeling and emotion that I don't know if I would ever feel comfortable publicly displaying some of the things I wrote then. I could tell that that writing was very driven by passion because I went back to look at it just recently and noticed that it took on a very different style than most of my writing. The sentences were short but descriptive. I also didn't do much to break things into paragraphs because when it came out, I was just putting my thoughts almost directly onto a page. Only when I typed these things up the other day did I actually put things into paragraphs.

Stylistically, I often write in fairly long sentences. They are not as long as Mary Wollestonecraft, but compound sentences that have many appositives and often multiple, descriptive adjectives to describe one or more subjects or objects. When I go back and proof-read, I'm very hesitant to change my style at all. Occaisonally I'll but a sentence backwards or change two sentences around because it sounds better or makes more sense to someone reading it. Most of the time, though, I like the words I used the first time and the order they first appeared for me.

At times I feel like my writing is not accesible to readers because I'm afraid I am writing like a textbook or even a politician of the 1700s. I often fear that my thoughts get too strung out, that I tangent too much, and the style and language I use is too heavy. Sometimes I think that I wouldn't even want to read my own writing except for the fact that when I go back to read things, they are clearly things I'm interested in. My writing ends up being okay. I don't like all of it, obviously, but it is readable in the end. I've sometimes gone back to old papers and marked them up and said things differently to see how I've improved from my writing in middle school or even as a freshman.

When Dr. Romano talked about proofing a draft, he emphasized using wide margins and double spacing to make the paper easy to read and accesible to comments. I like to have the same. As much as I believe in conserving paper, I don't like to proof without having a hard copy to write on. That's why I've begun to use the mark-up tool on Microsoft Word when I'm revising papers and don't want to waste ink or paper.

As far as the main theme, Dr. Romano is trying to get across, I feel that I'm doing a better job everytime I write of trusting my language. In the past, every sentence I wrote would take a minute or more of deliberation. I would think, "Is this what I want to say? Does this have some wit to it? Is this serious enough?" Now, I feel like I'm slowly getting better at just writing what I think and having it come out in such a way that it does work. Unfortunately, my thoughts aren't always organized enough for this to work.

Finally, the tone with which I write varies often from piece to piece. In most pieces I've written, one will find a satirical or sarcastical sense of humor evident. Sometimes it will be a very childish or ironic remark in the midst of a fairly serious subject. This is me being me in my writing. However, at times, I leave the humor out because I just get so caught up with something that I don't allow my little wits and jokes to spice-up my writing. On the other hand, there have been papers that I go into intending to be funny to keep the mood light and the reader poisoned with laughter.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition"

The second choice essay I have picked is quite a contrast from the first. Below, my very brief analysis of The Federalist No. 51. This particular selection from the Federalist Papers is by James Madison, under the pen name Publius as all the papers were.

I have read this essay at least three times and each time I learn more from it. If there is one particular piece of writing that can be used to describe the basis for the Constitution of the United States of America, it is this paper. It's freaking awesome.


The essay focuses on the system of checks and balances to be set up in the government. Publius says that each branch of government must be seperate so that the legislative branch is not domineering although they are intended to be the strongest. Additionally, Publius stresses that positions and posts in the government must have enough power and salary to attract people to those positions. For instance, if the president had little pay and barely any power over the legislature, nobody would want to rise to the presidency. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

As always, there is the importance that each branch and faction is protected equally. To ensure this in the government, the branches have powers and checks on each other that anybody who has taken a civics class should be educated in. More in depth, though, is the way that the people check each other. Publius continues the argument he laid forth in The Federalist No. 10. He says that we can control the effects of liberty rather than remove its causes which would be against all republican and democratic doctrine. He warns that too much liberty can be extremely dangerous, especially to the minority that could be easily oppressed. Instead, justice must be achieved. "Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society."

The effects of liberty are to be controlled and justice to be served by expanding the population and landmass of the republic so that there be so many interests and factions that no one homogenous group can form a majority in all cases. This is exactly what has created the controversies that run Washington and our nation.

I would love to discuss this article and some of the other Federalist Papers at great length, but I'll spare us all the extensive time.

On "The Last Iconic Baseball Card"

For my first choice essay, I chose an article from a recent Sports Illustrated Issue by Luke Winn.

The article discusses the changes in the baseball card industry (or sports cards in general) in the past 20 years. It begins by setting a scene at the headquarters of Upper Deck, a card producing company. Winn is very descriptive in his portrayal using excellent metaphors and similies to insert humor and imagery. Upper Deck will be no more soon because after 2010, the MLB has granted monopolic rights only to Topps, another trading card company.

The article also talks about how in Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie year (1989), his card was not expected to be the #1 card although it ended up being. His one rookie card is worth a great deal. When Derek Jeter was a rookie in the early 1990s, eight rookie cards were produced and reproduced. Then when Albert Pujols was a rookie in 2001, he had 43 rookie cards. The extensive inflation of the industry is a result of lower demand. The value of cards has become very low. Now many companies are going out of business rapidly.

I noticed that this article was written in a nice and simple tone using very common vernacular, as most articles from Sports Illustrated are. This helps appeal to the audience of people like myself who just want to read about sports and not have to think too much about it. Still, this article does provoke some thought as to what other industries have begun to decline like the baseball card industry. Are we getting unappreciative of things too fast? Is there any value in nostalgia any more?

On "A World Lit Only by Fire"

I would like to begin by saying that William Manchester is basically the man. However, despite how much of the man he really is, he seems to have a severe man-crush on another the man, Ferdinand Magellan. More on that later.

A World Lit Only by Fire really grabbed me when I started reading it. I began by reading it on vacation up north and in the first two days of my vacation I read over 100 pages of the 296 page book. Over the next three days of my vacation, I read 30.

To provide some background, the book is split into three sections: The Medieval Mind, The Shattering, and A Man Alone. The first is only about 30 pages in length, the last nearly 80.

Being that the second is so lengthy, I think that Professor Manchester would have been better off carefully splitting (rather than shattering) The Shattering into multiple sections because it discussed some topics, that although not extremely varied, became confusing when all put together because of the time period overlap and such. The Shattering generally discusses the ways in which medieval Europe reached a barrier of corruption and stupidity that launched the world into the Renaissance.

The first section provides the reader with an idea of what the average medieval man would be like and how individuals and institutions thought or didn’t think and how society ran. The third section is nothing but a tale of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe and the isolation of his crew from goings-on in Europe at the time.

As for an analysis of Professor Manchester’s style and rhetoric in this book, I noticed a few things in particular. I have not read any of his other works but certainly plan to when I find the time. Immediately, I noticed it read slightly different than most non-fiction books I have previously read. Perhaps that is because many of those are chronologies of events told by primary sources in great detail or are often autobiographical. This book, though is also unlike a history textbook because it reads a bit more conversationally and informally. It is almost like a lecture for a class of 25-50 students. Manchester doesn’t tend to pose rhetorical questions as many lecturers might, but in many ways his short two page sections that make up the book are like short lessons.

Something else I took note of while I was reading was that Manchester often uses longs lists to emphasize points. These lists can be for descriptive purposes, but more often they list a number of nouns or verbs to show depth or breadth of a certain topic. For instance, at the very end of the The Medieval Mind, he sets up his next section to discuss some certain men and two women influential to the times:
Some of the dragons were benign, even saintly; others were wicked. All, however, would seem monstrous to those who cherished the status quo, and their names included Johannes Gutenberg, Cesare Borgia, Johann Tetzel, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Jakob Fugger, Francois Rabelais, Girolamo Savonarola, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Niccolo Machiavelli, William Tyndale, John Calvin, Vascon Nunez de Balboa, Emperor Charles V, King Henry VIII, Tomas de Torquemada, Lucrezia Borgia, William Caxton, Gerardus Mercator, Girolamo Aleandro, Ulrich von Hutten, Martin Waldseemuller, Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Chrisopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and—most fearsome of all, the moan who would destroy the very world cartographers had drawn—Ferdinand Magellan.

Was that list long enough for you? I can name many others that Manchester talked about with some extent in the book, but there are also two or three of those names I swear never came up.

I’d like to direct your attention again to the above quotation, but just to the last two lines about Magellan. Honestly, I was expecting the build up at the end for one big name, but I expected it to be Martin Luther, Michelangelo, or Leonardo Da Vinci; the latter two don’t even appear in the list. In any case, the description he uses to build up Magellan is quite characteristic throughout the book. He uses flowing, crescendo-ing, often lengthy sentences to describe a person. I enjoyed this for the most part, but it became a bit annoying at times. He often starts a point with a short compound sentence and follows it with a longer, descriptive one or two that give examples. Additionally, the subject or object, followed by a dash, followed by a phrase, followed by a dash, followed by the remainder of the sentence, is a ubiquitous tool in Manchester’s writing. He uses the dash to insert appositives and parenthetical elements that he feels deserve additional emphasis. I must say, it’s effective as hell, too.

Some criticisms I have of Manchester, and this might be to my own fault as well, deal with confusion. For one thing, the book doesn’t go in chronological order, it discusses a person or event and then, to provide background, has to tangent to talk about the people and places involved. The result is that in the middle of the book, the reader is assumed to know about some characters and events already and then is being introduced to new things that seem like they should follow the events already discussed, but are really occurring before hand. It gets very confusing and a more detailed timeline provided with the book would have been nice. Another source of confusion to the somewhat unengaged reader is that Manchester might go a full two pages referring to a character only as “he” or “she” and the reader easily forgets who is being talked about, especially when there are multiple people being discussed. A character might be referred to by multiple names or titles too. For instance, Martin Luther is, among others, “the monk, the heretic, the professor, the young priest, the Franciscan, the Wittenberg man…”

The final section of the book is where the man-crush the Professor Manchester has for Ferdinand Magellan really becomes apparent. For one thing, the final section, at times, reads more like a fiction book or non-fiction story because of the more romantic language and description. He certainly borrows much from Don Antonio, Magellan’s biographer.

The last few pages of the book discuss the ways that the medieval world exploded or shattered into the renaissance and how the 247 men of Magellan’s crew that didn’t return to Spain didn’t get to witness some of the most explosive events of it. The ending also portrays Magellan as an immortal hero and gives a morality lesson in what heroism truly is.

I could talk all day about the history lessons I’ve learned from A World Lit Only by Fire. This book has been eye-opening by increasing both my historical knowledge, and ability to read and hopefully has taught me things to apply to my writing.

On "The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character"

I was going to do my blog from a satirical chauvanist perspective because I think making fun of ignorance is funny. However, I am far too tired.

I have seen a couple other blogs mention the difficulty of decoding much of Ms. Wollstonecraft's writing because of her style of rhetoric. I've read a great deal of things from this time period particularly by Thomas Jefferson and his correspondents, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison etc. Still, Ms. Wollstonecraft has one of the heavier styles that I've seen. It reminds me a lot of how Hamilton wrote, actually. He was a very verbose man. One might call him a wind-bag.

This flourishing rhetoric, in my opinion, is a possible way that Ms. Wollstonecraft attempts to assert her position. She is obviously a very well-educated, knowledgable woman. However, the last word in that sentence is exactly what is holding her back. I think she uses her flowery, sometimes heavy, language to assert herself as an educated person, not just an "innocent" woman. It may be out of insecurity or just show off. On the other hand, it could be that she's just used to talking like that.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this piece of writing. Although, I thought that the second half began to belabor the point. She could have reduced that to simply saying: Women are not meant to be objects of men's affection. They should pursue their own interests and be equal to men as friends and companions.

I actually laughed when I read some of the things that Rosseau and others said. These chauvinists hardly seem to regard women as the same species let alone equals of the same species. The way that these men used the argument style of by treating you like inferiors we're actually protecting and honoring you was quite ingenious to be honest. By convincing another that you're inferior treatment of them is what's best, you have a huge advantage.

What's quite eye-opening and stunning, though, is that women would actually fall for that crap! It's embarassing to me, even as a male, to think that women once thought themselves so weak that it actually made them special.

There are a couple things I specifically wish to address with this blog entry by providing commentary to Ms. Wollstonecraft's writing:

First, the position of women if Ms. Wollstonecraft's goals are achieved:
I really liked that Ms. W is not a classical feminist in the sense that she doesn't want women to control the world and doesn't consider women above men. Therefore, she is not a hypocrite. She believes in equality and reaching a level on which men and women interact and are educated toghether without difference.

Title IX is something to think about in this type of sense. Title IX requires that schools provide equal funding for men's and women's sports activities. This all seems fine. However, equality should not have to be stipulated. It should occur naturally. True, it does not always. It should be expected that institutions fund equally or close to equally for both men and women. Getting specific, men's sports are generally going to cost more than women's anyway due to these factors: More men generally play sports, traditionally male sports such as football and sometimes hockey aree usually more expensive.

This is even more true of affirmative action. Women don't need that leg up. It should be assumed that they get their rights equally, there should not be quotas. I'll hold off on the politics for now.

The other issue I wish to address is a little more deep. That is the difference between what Ms. W refers to as "love" and what she calls "friendship."

I have to say that I disagree with her on this. I think love is not simply the romantic, kissy, huggy stuff. Just as friendship is not the stage when two lovers become intellectually and spiritually connected. In my opinion, infatuation and enamorment is that "love" stage. Friendship stays the entire time when people share interests and converse. Love and companionship is when two people are inseparable except by physical means. It's when they'd do anything for each other and have the highest respect for each other along with having that romantic part of a relationship. Of course, love can mean something else to everybody. It's all semantics.