12/2 Riddick: The Blank Page

I hear a ringing outside. The big black hands indicate that it is now 6:00 P.M.

A blank page can be one of the most daunting things to a young writer, especially when accompanied by a harsh deadline, a high standard, and a spinning clock. The intensity of any situation sets the stage for the insecurity of another, and such an insecurity often creates the parameters for intensity to arise. Most of the time, however, this blank page is a poltergeist. A false specter impersonating a demon who deals in doubts. But who’s the impersonator?

Aside from being a pitless abyss of black mental darkness, Writer’s Block is a term referring to an immaterial condition where the afflicted individual struggles to produce creative ideas or generate active motivation for extended periods of time, sometimes lasting for years on end. First described in 1947 by psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, the malady has left a recorded impact on the lives of many notable artists (writers, cartoonists, singers), including Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, and the well-known rapper Eminem.

The obvious nature of what fails to be recognized is that, in all literal reality, this blank page is nothing. It’s no page at all. Like a point on a graph, it’s nothing until it moves, and it doesn’t matter unless it’s selected to matter. It’s always present and it’s never present. A blank page is a fake obstacle. Writer’s block is a made-up condition. These words are bogus metaphors.

And that’s what makes anxiety such a dick.

These fits of disparaging self-deprecation come in waves that can be triggered by anything. Whether it be a tragic event, inexplicable depression, the premature expiration of inspiration, or the simple pressure of social expectations (dastardly deadlines), this artistic arm-twisting can destroy a person’s entire life, because it isn’t just limited to the arena of expression. It’s a black, endless chasm. Like an unpredictable anxiety attack, it can seize anybody, at any time, for any reason.

For some, that just means a skipped homework assignment or a flaccid penis at the least convenient of times. For others, notwithstanding, it can mean hospitalization.

start at 3:25 and listen to the end for a glimpse into what it's like to suffer an anxiety attack

Or suicide.

As Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. (the civil rights legend who stood next to MLK, Jr. on a balcony during the night of his assassination) spoke to a collection of students at the UC African American Cultural and Resource Center just a few weeks ago, “the only thing worse than oppression, is adjusting to it.” If I may draw an incommodious comparison, I do believe that the only thing worse than a blank page, is black ink (or, in 2015, black pixels).

Bromides filled to the brim with black, thoughtless rifts of bullshit. Fluff, as some high school teachers called it. This is an analogy.

To project anything over 100 words solely discussing the antiquities and platitudes of some recycled liberal concept, 30 minutes before a due-date, would be an utter misuse of time, and a disrespectful waste of any platform. Giving up is not staring at a blank page or screen for hours on end, hoping that God tosses you an idea, until an assignment is late. That’s just life. Giving up is throwing down the creative baton to be picked up by an abused clock, puking up a pressurized mess of little black letters which say absolutely nothing, and waving an unoriginal, white flag in concession to the egotistical, anxious brain.

Of course, it’s been suggested that writer’s block is more than just a mentality. Under duress, according to Rosanne Bane’s The Writer’s Brain, a human brain is said to “shift control from the cerebral cortex to the limbic system,” where many instinctual responses and few creative ones are processed. But where does that duress stem from?

Who’s the real impersonator?

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, an often-context-less excerpt from Frederick Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech (March 4, 1933), is something that should give all of us the heebie jeebies.

I see blank pages everywhere. We’ll all encounter millions before we die, each one equally as non-existent and detrimental as the rest. We see them every time we speak publicly, or stay sober through an all-white drinking party, or put into question a skill we know we have, or flirt with the unfounded possibility that we’ve got a rare disease, or dwell on a past regret, or even feel guilt for being ourselves.

I hear another ringing outside, except this one tells me it’s 7:00 P.M. An hour ago, I was looking into the eyes of another blank page.

As a person living with anxiety, these blank pages aren’t new to me. I overcame this facade of a mountain beast in the same way I kill them all. Not with an overload of black ink/pixels that crowd-pleases and inadvertently silences the rawness of my eccentricity. I refuse to give this world what it wants from me, and I’m not going to write what’s easy to read. I don’t say the polite thing, or the comfortable thing. I say the Nick Riddick thing, because that’s the most I could ever hope to do.

So, the next time you get writer’s block, instead of a cop out, try a free write and check out Lawrence J. Oliver, Jr.


WORKS CITED:

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/05/29/blog/azeen/a-trip-around-the-writers-block/
http://indiereader.com/2012/09/7-pop-culture-icons-who-famously-suffered-from-writers-block/
http://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/6-steps-cure-writers-block-and-streamline-writing-process

12/2 Hulsether- Black Panther Party

We Want Freedom. We Want Power to Determine

 The Destiny of Our Black Community.

 The Black Panther Party (BPP), a black extremist group founded in Oakland, California, is known for advocating the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the US government. The group was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seal. The panthers practiced militant self-defense for minorities against the government (Marxists). The Black Panther Party was the first group to actively and militantly fight for ethnic and working class emancipation—a party whose agenda was the establishment of a real economic, political and social system among all genders and races.

 

 

 

   All power to the people.

 Much of the party’s practices and theories came from Malcom X (Marxists). Malcom had represented a militant revolutionary as well as a role model for the party. The party saw him as someone who sought to bring about positive social services, something the BPP would take to new levels. In the same month the party’s official news organ went into distribution, the party marched on the California state capitol, fully armed, in protest of the state’s attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons. This early act of political repression sparked the fires to the resistance movements in the US. This soon initiated new Panther chapters of the party to arise outside of the state.  In October 1967, Huey Newton, one of the party’s founders, was arrested and charged with kidnapping and 1^st degree murder of an Oakland police officer. This only made Newton a revolutionary icon in the eyes of the party. The Party’s outrage caused 3 years of rallies and protests to “Free Huey” and finally he was released on August 5^th, 1970 (PBS). “That was true power of the people—the freed me. I was just sittin’ up in my 5x7 cell, up in my 5x7 hell, up there on the 10^th floor of the Alameda County jail.” –Huey Newton.

Although the party was relieved to have their leader back after 3 years in prison, it came with a new problem. The party focused on their communist-like state. The people freed Huey because they expected him to free all of them. The true power of the people lies in freeing yourself, but they can’t free themselves because people always have to create a leader and that leader has to be everything the people want and everything the people can’t be.

But the leader will fail.

The leader is just a human and will fail. And when the leader fails, the whole concept of leadership fails and then it becomes a matter of contempt (PBS).

 Even though the party members were willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives, to fight for equality in all matter, the party came with its’ own set of rules…

A set of  26 rules, 8 points of attention, 3 main rules of discipline and a pledge for kids to abide by.  A commitment more than 2,000 members were willing to follow until the party dissolved in 1982.

 

Works Cited:

1.      https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/

2.      https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/unknown-date/party-rules.htm

3.      https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_freehuey.html

4.       

Hammann 12/2 - Divergent

Update: I made some changes to this post, mostly in the form of additions, for clarity's sake.

Book cover & movie poster.

Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent centers itself on a female protagonist, Beatrice (“Tris”) Prior, who abandons her family and their mundane, unbearably selfless lifestyle to live with strangers who teach her healthy selfishness, how to fight, and how to conquer her worst fears. Oh, and she has a secret that she can’t tell anyone, because if the government finds out, it’s game over for her.

It sounds amazing – who wouldn’t want to read this?!

The very first inkling the reader gets of Tris’ character is that she is unhappy with her family of origin; she describes quiet mornings where her brother sets the table, her father reads, and her mother hums while she cleans, and says, “it is on these mornings that I feel guiltiest for wanting to leave them” (Roth 3). Their city’s population is comprised of five “factions,” and Tris belongs to the Abnegation faction, whose “thing” is selflessness, embodied by their plain gray clothes and their uniform, identical housing blocks.

And Tris? Is not selfless. She envies her brother how easily he stops to help people without thinking, and she doesn’t know how to explain to him that her instincts are not like his, or like those of their parents. She thinks to herself, “I am not sure I can live this life of obligation any longer. I am not good enough” (Roth 35).

Her problem, though, is that she doesn’t know what other faction she could possibly belong in – she stares wistfully at one of them, the militant Dauntless faction, and says, “My father calls the Dauntless ‘hellions.’ They are pierced, tattooed, and black-clothed.” (Roth 7); she feels like she’s too weak to fit in with the Dauntless. She knows that her brother will choose to stay in Abnegation, and she wishes she knew where belongs, too.

But when she takes a so-called aptitude test that’s supposed to tell her which faction she belongs in, Dauntless registers as one of her results. Her test administrator, Tori, tells her that people who get inconclusive test results are called “Divergent,” and that because Tris is Divergent, she needs to hide the fact of it, because it’s dangerous.

This is where the story starts to get confusing; she doesn’t elaborate, even a little bit, because… the plot isn’t ready for her to, I guess? If she was confident enough that they weren’t being watched that she decided to tell Tris that she is Divergent and that Divergence is dangerous, well, it doesn’t make sense that she wouldn’t give the kid some idea of what she’s up against.

But why even have the aptitude tests in the first place if everyone has the right to choose what faction they want to go into anyway? Not to mention that it’s a very simple test where your entire fate can come down to a block of cheese and a knife, which doesn’t make sense (but it is sort of hilarious to think about because it doesn't make sense). Since Tris can’t mingle with non-Abnegation faction members much, this is the clumsy way she has to choose. Because exposition. Or something.

When Tris goes to the annual Choosing Ceremony, where every sixteen-year-old chooses to either stay with their faction and their family or to leave them for another, she chooses to leave. She chooses Dauntless. “I open my eyes and thrust my arm out … I shift my hand forward and my blood sizzles on the coals. I am selfish. I am brave.” (Roth 47).

I won’t lie – this is a great moment, but I’d say the same for any female protagonist who makes the realization that she isn’t where she wants to be, and decides, “to hell with it, I’ll do what I want.”

From then on Tris is introduced to a new faction where she sees an unstable leadership, one where the good ideals in Dauntless struggle against the ruthless ones. She meets friends and enemies and learns how to work things to her advantage, even if she has to appear weak when she doesn’t want to. She finds herself wanting to make the faction what she feels it should be, even though as an initiate, she doesn’t have the power to do so.

The red-glowing coals and black as the signature color of Dauntless, with fire as its faction emblem, allows for connotations of the whole "rebirth by fire" thing that lots of fantasy writers love, though this is more of a dystopian sci-fi setting. Who doesn't love black and red together? The base of the Dauntless faction is implied to be underground, with only dim lighting serving as a guide, but Tris eventually gets used to the darkness, and more or less invites it into herself in a more symbolic way by learning to let go of her Abnegation-ness and become a little more ruthless.

Tris gets the Dauntless symbol as a tattoo, because the Dauntless are all about tattoos. (I can't blame her though.)

Which would all be fine, but there’s just one problem: the Dauntless method of training these kids is to throw them in a ring and have them fight until they can’t, which seems like a terrible way to train soldiers – one of Tris’ instructors even acknowledges that it wasn’t always that way, and there’s a sense among the characters of “it is what it is,” but that doesn’t changed the fact that they’re forced into a competitive environment that makes no sense.

Oh, yeah, and there’s like twelve or so people in Tris’ initiate group, and you’d think more people than that would transfer into this faction, even if they have to split up the different groups to make them easier to manage. Dauntless is one of five factions that populate Chicago, so I can only assume the non-transfer initiate group is much, much larger. But there’s only one woman mentioned to be handling it, so I don’t know. (Judging by Tris’ description of the faction as a whole, it’s big enough for plenty of people.)

They get, like, one day of learning punches and kicks, which isn’t really enough to learn how to fight effectively, but it is enough to make a reader question who even decided these rules were a good idea (spoilers: it’s the ruthless Dauntless leader whose mannerisms scream “I’m an antagonist,” not that that’s a bad thing in and of itself). I have problems with the way this book acts like having these kids whale on each other for days at a time and throw knives around somehow turns them into badasses when the crueler of the two instructors is the guy running the show, and he apparently doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The other instructor, Four, kinda just… goes along with it. (Does this guy have no authority at all? I know he turned down a faction leadership position, but if he knows how to teach these idiots properly, then he should be doing it.)

And as it turns out, that lady Tori who administered Tris’ aptitude test is Dauntless (how convenient). When Tris goes to Tori, though, and tries to ask her what it means to be Divergent, Tori doesn’t say anything that she hasn’t told Tris already, other than that her own brother was Divergent and was killed because of it. Then she shoos Tris away, making the whole scene sort of pointless. Thanks, Tori.

Among other things, Tris falls in love with Four later, like that’s not weird – they’re not even like, “we shouldn’t be doing this.” His reaction is just “well, I wouldn’t want everyone to think I’m showing you favoritism” even though he totally is, ‘cause he spends way more time with her than the other initiates, and even lets her have an early go at the fear landscape simulator thing (their final exam).

The romance subplot is tiresome and distracting, as romantic subplots tend to be – it didn’t have to be, but it is, and I can’t really get over the “student and her instructor are in love” thing. I know there’s only a two-year age difference between them, but the unequal power dynamics in their relationship go without much commentary, which seems kind of like an important thing to touch on.

I really wanted to like Tris, reading this book. It’s not even that her narration is annoying, even if it does sound awkward and stilted at times, like she’s a robot for a few seconds at a time occasionally. Most of her choices are things I can get behind, and the very premise of the book is exactly the kind of thing I’d want to read. It’s just that the execution is not that great, and it’s not the protagonist’s fault.

It feels like the story Roth wanted to write is buried somewhere in this book, but it got lost beneath the clumsy writing and poorly-thought-out logistics of the story and setting/worldbuilding in general. She could have used black/darkness as a theme in the Dauntless faction very well, but the time the book could have spent taking care of that was instead wasted on relationship drama and things that seem less important than, I don't know, the fact that the protagonist has to avoid being found out by the government? (But wait, I thought the government was controlled by the Abnegation, so I guess she's really just afraid of the Erudite, who really want to control the city.) The book's approach to its own premise was frustratingly, almost heartbreakingly inefficient.

The movies aren't much better about the plot, but they have good music, and the main actress is stunning.
No, I'm serious, they're actually almost enjoyable.

Works Cited

Roth, Veronica. Divergent. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2011. Print.

Where The Red Fern Grows

Hint: It's likely where my soul should be

When I was younger, I absolutely hated everything we had to read for English class. 

From 5^th grade to high school (and even now), every book was often pushed aside, avoided until the last moment. They all followed this common theme that made me absolutely dread reading them. They were all sad, not a little bit sad, but heart wrenchingly sad. Whether it was the Great Gatsby with it’s ever so happy ending, or The Kite Runner which made me want to throw the book out the window, each and every book was utterly depressing to me. Even my little brother echoed the sentiment and soon we began to describe this phenomena as “sad dog stories”. 

This phrase came about because the first books we ever really had to read on our own in class were, you guessed it, stories where the dogs die. Those stories have haunted us till this day. For me, the book was Where the Red Fern Grows. In fact just trying to write this and re-reading the summary of the story made me cry. 

If you’ve never read Where the Red Fern Grows, consider yourself lucky. The basics are, a boy, Billy, saves up all his money and buys two gorgeous red coonhounds named Old Dan and Little Ann. He trains them to hunt raccoon and they make an exceptionally good team. The story sucks you in convincing you that this team will never fail, in fact they even win the coon hunting championship against everyone else! But no, we can’t end on a happy note. The dogs accidentally tree a mountain lion, who in turn attacks them and Billy. In order to save their master, the dogs fight till the near end. The boy is safe but Old Dan has his stomach split open, his guts wrapped around the bushes. Billy has to unwrap his intestines, clean them off quickly and shove them back into this poor dogs stomach. Then Billy rushes home dragging his barely breathing dog with him, to try and save him. Old Dan manages to hold on for a few days before finally passing away, leaving Little Ann and Billy. As if this didn’t hurt enough, Little Ann is so distraught with grief, that she will do nothing but lay on Old Dan’s grave and soon dies from heartbreak.


I read this in 5th grade, and it was awful. Not only that but our teachers had us watch the movie so we could really imagine the absolute heartbreak this little boy felt. It may sound silly but I never quite recovered from reading that story. It was just so awful and seemingly so unnecessary to read that I couldn't get passed it.  There's no particular reason this book was assigned except for fitting the reading requirements (whatever those were). There must be a reasoning behind this book and all the others, whether it be the push that one can move pass sadness, just as Billy does. He is comforted by the bright red fern that grows over the graves of his dogs, as it's said to have been placed there by an angel, and it's what lets him move on. Maybe it was to teach us the bond between creatures and how strong it can be. Or maybe it was to just make a bunch of 5th grades slightly traumatized for life. 

Really it might be to make us appreciate the good in our lives, that we get a bit of luxury by experiencing such sadness in books rather in our own lives. 

While all of those are possibilities, the actuality is I appreciate the fact I no longer have to read stuff like this. Because, unlike Billy I never found comfort in that red fern. Rather, it just made me cry even more.

 

Works Cited
Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

11/30 - Pink Flamingos - Laug

Pink Flamingos, Black Comedy, and the Carnivalesque

Why do cult films reach their obsessive almost religious status? Is it in their obscenity, immersive milieu, campy beauty? In most cases it certainly is not their narrative, or cinematic qualities, specifically with low budget films like Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Room, Troll 2, or Sleepaway Camp. I think that cult films, specifically black comedies, present a world that doesn’t get produced, and with those who it resonates, it resonates for the first time.

http://salesonfilm.tumblr.com/post/100567133222 

Divine’s grotesque obscenity captures this quality that certainly fits in the zeitgeist of the 70’s counterculture. Her performance as Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos, in which she literally eats shit, marks a turning point in not only her career but what it reflects about society’s reactions.

The film centers on a family, self proclaimed as “The Filthiest People Alive” who live in a pink trailer in Maryland. Over the course of the film they kidnap women, impregnate them, and sell their babies to lesbians in order to sponsor heroin dealers targeting inner city schools. This scenario is perhaps the hellish nightmare of evangelical creationists that persists 40 years after the film’s release. In a direct address and exploitation of their conservative ideology, the film perhaps resonates not with heroin dealing human traffickers, but those who are suspected to be these criminals (low income earners, drag queens, people who eat shit).

It is gross, blatant, and exaggerated, featuring the best “worst” aspects of American culture in the 70s. Black comedy in cult films retains its entertaining qualities through this very notion, by going against the grain and subverting any fabric of structure that has been or will be set up in its audiences world. This is most evident in Babs Johnson's comedic climactic monologue when taken out of context:

“I love the taste of it. The taste of hot, freshly killed blood. Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder!... Filth are my politics! Filth is my life! Take whatever you like.” (John Waters' Pink Flamingos).

In academic terms, this oddly comedic subversion is a reflection of some of the ideas I read in an essay series for a class last year called the Carnivalesque by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin suggests that there is an underlying freedom in subversion of traditional ideals by the humor and chaos of darkly morose, real, unhumorous things. He says “In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act… The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival” (Bakhtin). In many ways, Pink Flamingos, and other Black Comedy cult films exist as carnival acts. They exist in tandem with the active participants who are willing to subject themselves to have the rules of their worlds torn apart for entertainment, and perhaps in that subversion, they can find freedom in a grown woman dressed as a baby with an egg addiction.

http://divineofficial.com/post/99646077530/edith-massey-as-edie-the-egg-lady-and-divine 

Works Cited

-Baxhtin, Mikhail and Emerson, Caryl. "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics." Poetics Today: 560. Print.
-John Waters' Pink Flamingos. Dir. John Waters. Perf. Divine, Edith Massey. Saliva Films, 1973. Film.

11/30 Root: Guns

“Guns are part of the American identity”

- Henry Rollins

Sandy Hook. Virginia Tech. Columbine. Aurora. Amish Schoolhouse. Fort Hood. All of these places have something eerie and traumatizing in common. They all were the sites of some of the infamous mass shootings that have occurred. And the one of these places was the start of it all: Columbine.

Before we dive in with mass shootings, we have to start at the gun itself. How did guns come about? Why are they black?

According to the NRA, or the National Rifle Association, the origin of guns came from gunpowder back in 1250 A.D. either from Turkey, Europe or China. After gunpowder came cannons, or a giant gun. Within 50 years, early cannon had been developed. A large thick metal tube, with one closed end (the breech) and an open end (the muzzle) was loaded first with gunpowder then with a projectile. (NRA) Finally, the first hand-held weapon was created almost a half-century (1350) after the cannon, or as they called it “hand-cannon”.  From there, firearms kept advancing over the next four centuries.  

The hand-cannon from around 1350.

It’s no surprise that guns have extremely advanced over time. Around the 1400s is when the first real “gun”, the matchlock appeared. Then, around the 1540s, the mechanism of “rifling” in guns appeared, followed by the first true flintlock. (PBS) Through 1750 to 1850, dueling pistols came into fashion, and this is during the French and Indian War, The Boston Massacre, the War of 1812, and a War with Mexico. During 1850 is when the “true” shotgun was developed after the design of the musket. Through 1854-1892, the evolution of the gun was enormous due to multiple wars, and technological advances; guns like the Winchester rifle, double-action revolver, cartridge revolver, and automatic handguns. Anything after the 1900s is when the evolution of contemporary guns begins.

Guns now are more modern, more slick. And gun manufacturers have learned how to stop the rust from taking over the gun.

Are you sure this is a gun and not a lazer gun? Yes? Well then I'll take 3!

 Guns obtain their black color by a cheap process called ‘bluing’. The process was developed as an easy and cheap way to protect the gun from rust, and is done by gun manufacturers, gunsmiths, and gun owners. Not only does it help protect the gun from rust, it also prevents scratching and reduces the glare that the shooter will see when they look down the barrel of the gun. The bluing process only affects the outside of the gun. Everything else inside of the gun is metal. However the name ‘bluing” doesn’t quite fit well with the outcome of the gun’s new black coat.

Actually pretty informative!

To suggest that a black coating over guns is ONLY for economic purposes would be silly. There is some metaphorical reason as to why guns are black, however I can only speculate that it is because the color black is feared. Black screams stealth, power, and panic. Shooters want to be feared, whether feared from an animal or a human being.

Columbine was the one of the first school shootings in America, and is tallied as one of the worst. Both shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot and killed 12 people, and wounded over 20 on April 20, 1999. They both had with them multiple weapons.

Guns used at Columbine.

Dylan had on him a: Intratec TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun, a Double-barrel Savage 311-D shotgun, and various knives and bombs.

Eric had on him: Hi-Point model 995 carbine rifle, pump-action Savage-Springfield 67H shotgun, and also had various knives and bombs on him.

They shot 188 rounds together that day.

They killed 12 people together that day.

Both Klebold and Harris wanted revenge that day; they had been bullied by some of their classmates, they also suffered from mental illness, and played violent video games. No one knows the exact trigger that set the two young students off when they decided to attack their school, but they were out for blood. They wanted to be feared and respected, and what better way to gain both from their fellow peers than pointing a black, ominous gun in the innocent faces of others?

Works Cited

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Journals_and_videos

http://www.acolumbinesite.com/weapon.html

https://riversong.wordpress.com/the-guns-of-columbine/

http://www.history.com/topics/columbine-high-school-shootings

http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/a_us_history/1800_1900_timeline.htm

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/technique/gun-timeline/

http://www.nramuseum.org/gun-info-research/a-brief-history-of-firearms.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNYIJPwqbdA

https://www.cga.ct.gov/2013/rpt/2013-R-0057.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluing_(steel)