im-andyjiang

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A Nightmare of a Project?

One could even describe this research project as Kafkaesque, as we were all dealt with a project that relies on our ability to read, interpret, and use previously scary and unknown scholarly resources like literary criticisms in order to achieve our goal. I think my perspective of the literary world is completely flipped around, much like the worlds of K. or Gregor Samsa. I’ve always been a math and science guy, interested in pursuing a career in STEM, and doing such extensive research in things that previously I had absolutely no knowledge or interest in was really new to me. But unlike the fates of K. or Samsa, I think my experiences trying to do this project benefited me. I learned a lot about academia and the research process on a higher level, and figuring out how to use things like the library, or understand scholarly texts like the criticisms that I worked with. Although I don’t want to be an English teacher or a literary critic now, I’ve actually grown a liking to rhetoric, semiotics, and other similar disciplines. They’re just so universally applicable, and after working on a project like this one, it’s kind of hard to not see their influences in the world around me. Yes, writing this paper was very Kafkaesque in terms of how it seemed to me at the start, and how the process deteriorated me into a shrivel of my former self, similarly to K., but unlike many of Kafka’s works, this project at least has a somewhat happy ending for me.

Sidenote, the Den is super clutch.

[im-andyjiang]

Kresge.

[im-andyjiang]

The End

SPOILER ALERT DON’T READ ON IF YOU DON’T WANT ME TO SPOIL THE END.

The End to The Trial was very sudden. I think two different factors contribute to this. One, the book was actually incomplete, so there might be some parts missing. Although this is true, I still think this ending was supposed to be intentionally abrupt and sudden. K. is sitting alone, expecting someone, when two men come in and take K. away. They end up at a quarry, where K. seems to know his death is here, and contemplates killing himself right there, but in the end the two men plunge a knife though his chest, and the book ends.

It’s assumed that K. was convicted, except we can’t even be sure of that because it’s never stated. It’s assumed that K. was expecting those two men to come get him, unlike K. expecting the two men who first collected him in the very first chapter of the book. A lot of things are never explained in the book in specifics about K, and his trial. I went the whole book having not a single clue about what K. was accused of, and I doubt the full version of the book would include the actual conviction, if there really was. Again, this is how Kafka makes his book very applicable and relevant during different times, by not giving any specifics at all, and letting his story fit the form of countless example in real life, in the 1940s and today. The ending really made me question this book, and what exactly I read, because there is very little development of what actually is going on with the trial, and we only see it though K.’s reactions and emotions. I’m interested to see the different ways that critical theory will work with and analyze this text.

[im-andyjiang]

The Court Offices and the Painter

The way Kafka describes the various courts and court offices that K has go to to in really interesting, as I think the setting plays a big deal in not only the plot, but what Kafka wants to say. One would expect the courts and offices to be held in high regard, large regal buildings, very clean looking, in busy, affluent areas, kind of like this

but in reality, all the courtrooms and offices that Kafka visiting were completely different. They were situated among houses in lower-class, rundown areas. They were very dark, musty, even drove K the the point of nausea just from being in one. The court painter, Titorelli, lived at the top of an apartment complex, and a random door behind his bed lead directly to some judge or magistrate’s office. Kafka makes his descriptions of the places that K visits very deliberate, and I think that shadiness represents Kafka’s opinion of the systems of the court, and foreshadows something dark. 

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The Flogger

The Flogger is a single chapter in the book, only eight pages, about the flogger. One night, K finds the two guards who arrested him that very first day, getting flogged by a higher up in a closet in K’s bank. The two guards beg K to bribe them free, but the flogger won’t accept, saying that he was “hired to flog, so flog I will”. The next day, K finds the two guards back in the closet, getting flogged once more, and the chapter ends with K telling his assistant to clean out the closet tomorrow.

One thing that stood out to me was the response by the flogger, a response that parallels the infamous defense by Nazi officials at the Nurenburg trials, “I was only following orders”. I guess Kafka was a little ahead of his time as this book was written about 30 years prior to those trials. Kafka still brings up that same question of morals vs responsibilities. 

Another part about this chapter is how on its own and bizarre it was. Every other chapter so far has been directly connected to at least one other chapter, but this chapter, the shortest one, stands alone. I’ve been growing to think that Kafka’s writing style is just kind of... bizarre. Another one of his most famous books, The Metamorphosis, is about a guy who randomly turns into a giant cockroach. 

This flair for weirdness really makes me go back and reread, thinking to myself “Wait... What??”. K’s strange behavior with Burstner was another part that really made me double-take. I’m expecting that I’m going to be doing this more as I read the book. 

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Women in The Trial (and the trial)

Ideas about women were not something I expected going into the book at all. being a book focused around the accusation of K and well, the trial. But as I’ve been reading, its pretty clear that the women play a significant role so far in the book. 70 some pages in, K has interacted with three different women, Frau Gruabach, Fraulein Burstener, and the unnamed wife of the court usher.

The main thing that has confused me is K’s romantic life. He lives in a boarding house of some sorts by himself, yet he has already made two successful romantic approaches on two different women, the lady in his boarding house, and the wife of a court usher at the court where he goes for inquiry. These two women are also involved in law coincidentally, or for a specific purpose. Burstener is a secretary at a law firm, and the wife of the court usher is married to a court usher and she also lives in the offices where the court is. I think this idea will get played out more in the book, but I’m not sure how yet.

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The Character of K

They very beginning of The Trial by Franz Kafka plunges you right into the plot. I mean the very first line goes, “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested”. The very abrupt start of the book had me trying to quickly catch up to the fast pace of the book, a feeling I think Kafka was going for.  

The first few chapters of the book got me very antiquated with the character of Josef K, or just K as the narrator refers to him as. K is a pretty well-off man, a high ranking officer at a large bank. When he first hears of his arrest, he seems very unfazed, as if it means nothing. At first I wasn’t sure if that was because the nature of the arrest, or because of K’s personality, but as I continued to read, I was sure it was because his personality.

K comes off as an extremely confident man. He’s very well-off and obviously pretty educated, and as he interacts with other people and responds to his arrest, he comes off as more and more confident, reaching levels of arrogance and cockiness. This is shown even more as during his first interrogation, he basically denounces the systems of court and law, and tells the examining magistrate that he’s above them. 

Adam Gongol aka The Gongolian could potray K very well I think. Both are well-spoken, educated, confident, and think very highly of themselves.

K’s treatment of the guards and Fraulen Burstner, a lady who lives in K’s complex whom K seems to like, are eeriely similiar to Adam as well. I’m not going to expose him here but I thought this was very interesting, and I’m curious as to how his character will change, if he does at all.

[im-andyjiang]

A Day in the Life of Avondale Swimming

2:22 - 7th hour ends and 13 Avondale swimmers sulk their way to the pool, included me. We’re all dreading another day of mid-season practice.

2:30 - The whole team’s in the locker room. Half the team is asleep on the benches, the other half of the team is in line for the single stall because the swimming locker room bathrooms are easily the nicest and cleanest in the school.

2:40 - Emil is being chased around by Justin Van Acker who has a water bottle filled with soap. The typical Emil shriek is heard as everyone has to wake up.

2:41 - Richard Fawaz brings the voice of justice as Justin and Emil “SHUT THE F*** UP”.

2:50 - “We should probably get on deck” I say as the whole team finally puts on their suits in solemn silence.

2:52 - As soon as we get on deck, and we have all come back from the dead. Ashton goes back to not speaking English, Richard and Justin throw Emil’s flip flops into the pool. Everyone else fills their water bottles and takes another nap.

2:53 - Stretch

2:59 - Finish Stretching. I jump into Lane 5. Between Stone, Kendall, Justin and I, we use lanes 4 and 5. They bounce in between lanes every day, but I don’t. Lane 5 is my lane. N

400 Warm-up - nobody bothers to actually count their laps and just rely on finishing when someone else finishes. We end up doing 100 more than we were supposed, and honestly it’s a miracle we even stopped.

6x100 IM on the 1:30 - Another day, another fast IM set, and this one is the most boring.

200 Kick - I make sure to not get the board with “Kimberly Bryan” on it, because the other side has some mysterious stain.

8x75 Free on the :55 - Kill me now. Easily the worst set of every day.

200 Easy - I spend the whole time worrying about what the main set is going to be. Richard and Joey are drowning Justin, and Emil is as silence during practice as ever.

8x50 Freestyle, Descending 1-4, 5-8 on the 1:00 - Oh my god it’s Wednesday. Wednesday is test set day, and especially if we’re starting with these, we know we’re in for a doozy.

2x Yellow Jackets on the 30 - Thank god for the legend Brian Williams. I actually really like these.

            Main Set: 30x100’s, Broken into 12,6,6 and 6.

1-12 of 30x100s, pulling on the 1:35 - If you’re Justin Van Acker you love this. If you’re me, you lag behind because you can’t pull to save yourself, because I can’t keep my hands outside of my shoulders like I should be.

13-18 of 30x100s on the 1:25 - These aren’t too bad. Actually they are bad, but child’s play compared to what we know we are going to do afterwards

19-24 of 30x100s on the 1:20 - If you didn’t get a song stuck in your head by now, you’re probably going insane. The song I’ve been singing today is “The Cops” by K.Flay.

6x100s on the 1:15 - At this point we’re all exhausted, too tired to even sing that song in our heads. We just count down the laps one by one until we’re done.

300 Easy - I can’t move my arms, and I don’t really want to.

5:00 - We all climb out of the pool and walk into the showers. Kendall and I end up sharing our UltraSwim with the entire team because it’s almost magically how well it removes the chlorine from our hairs.

5:01 - Shower Captain Richard leads the way in the typical shenanigans. Daniel Wang continues to meme.

5:04 - The water turns cold and we start dreading the 5ish minutes of cold water that comes before it heats up again.

5:09 - Right on time the water is warm again, and I sit in the water contemplating life.

5:20 - Nobody actually showers, we just like sitting in the hot water.

5:25 - We finally get out and we change like normal. CJR Hostile puts more deodorant on. Dominic is in the stall again. Daniel Wang is still Daniel Wang. Everything is okay, until we have to come back tomorrow.

7:30 - Aston Donaghy sends another roast of the day. Today it’s another lil’ Richard roast.

                                                            FIN

If you read that entire thing I applaud you. It’s really personal and I had a lot of fun writing it. As much as I hate swimming, I wouldn’t do anything else, and I will genuinely miss it. Nothing is a stranger feeling than sitting in the locker room at the state meet after your final event, on the verge of crying because after four long years, you’re finally done. My place in this tribe has changed over the years, and so have the people who have come and go, but somethings will never change, the practices, the memories, the relationships, and the showers.

[im-andyjiang]

A lot of people say their querencia is their room, or their desk, and I suppose I would say the same thing, but there's one real reason why I would say that and that's because of Teamspeak. Really simply put, TeamSpeak is an application where you can create a server where anyone who has the address and password can join. Inside a server, there are a multitude of channels where people can join, voice chat with everyone else, or talk through text within the channel or server.  It's pretty much like a group chat or a Google+ hangout that’s constantly online.

Belonging to the sense of peace and comfortableness, and that's exactly what I feel like in the server.  Whether it's peace and quiet with just me, or the typical me, Adam, and Alex, or fully busy with two or three channels going and 10+ people in the server, I never feel out of place. There's never an awkward place I could put myself in. The Teamspeak is a home for me. It's very personalized, and each channel name, description, and advertisement hold something of meaning or sentiment to me. It's a place where I can discuss anything. I can play LoL or CS with Adam, Alex, Ashton, Kendall, or whoever else. I can watch streams of LCS or basketball or football games with other people. I can work on homework alone in the homework channel, or I can discuss it with whoever is there. Even if I want to discuss things from Twitter, Reddit or whatever else online, I can just throw a link in the chat for everyone else to see. It also makes making real life plans a lot faster and easier.

I feel in my element, it's a very weird thing  to try to understand if you're not a part of it. how can you belong to an internet server? But over time Teamspeak has become such an important tool for building and maintaining relationship for me, especially those ones that distance might normally ruin: now, or in the future.

[im-andyjiang]

Alcohol

I think it’s pretty obvious that Silko wants to talk about alcoholism in Ceremony, or at least how alcohol has a large impact in the lives of some of the Native Americans. Or even importantly how alcohol contributes to the sense of belonging in people, or the clash of cultures. It just plays a contributing part in a lot of different themes that Silko wants to illustrate, and I find that really captivating.

[im-andyjiang]

Usage of Poems

Unlike a lot of other people here on Tumblr, I actually really liked the inclusion of the poetry in the book. It adds a lot of character to the narrative, and contributes a lot to the progression of the plot. The Native American names do get confusing, but besides that I find the poetry pretty easy to follow. I like how it provides the background story to a lot of the things that Tayo witnesses in life. There’s a story for everything and the poems only help that theme advance in the novel. I’m going to be sure to pay special attention to these poems even more as I continue to read Ceremony. 

[im-andyjiang]

ATWOOD?????

When Atwood asked at the end of the book, “Are there any questions?”, you can bet your bottom dollar that I have some questions. The biggest one that I had was about this new society that seemed to be in place of Gilead. I think this very society says a lot about education and race, things that weren’t exactly at the forefront of the main novel. How did this society replace the other one? Was there a full flip? Or did new people just take the helm? Where did they get their names? Where that people with Native American ancestry, or did they come from somewhere? What is this society like? From a social, or political view? They seem like a more educated society, and a society that appreciates such learning, is that true? I think this society and it’s probable differences could say a lot about what we should value, and what we should be doing as a society, but Atwood lets us answer those questions ourselves.

[im-andyjiang]

Pronoun Usage in Ceremony

After reading Ceremony for quite some time, I do kind of like it. There is one thing that makes it pretty challenging to read, and no I’m not talking about the poems, I’m talking about the pronoun usage in the book. Silko’s style likes to bounce around from location to location, time frame to time frame, and character to character, and her heavy usage of pronouns gets really confusing. A lot of the time I lose track of who pronouns refer to, or sometimes Silko will change setting and not even tell you who the pronoun is referring to until halfway through the paragraph. I’m not quite sure if this is intentional but it’s definitely something I’ve noticed. 

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Picking The Work (Spelled Properly) @adamgongolahs

So I have narrowed down to a few books. I think I still need to have a few more conversations with some people to really narrow it down. I’m between The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, The Trial by Franz Kafka, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I think I probably won’t do The Sun Also Rises, cause Alex really seems to want to do it, and between the last two they seem really interesting. Finding critismism won’t be a probably for any of these books, and I’ll read them all eventually, but I still gotta choose which one I’m going to read now. I’ll keep you posted even though most of you aren’t interested at all... (except Alex)

[im-andyjiang]

#aplit16aunt

It’s very obvious that The Handmaid’s Tale is meant to divide. Atwood stratifies the characters into their own social groups, and in turn, divided us as class during our Harkness’s. Atwood does this by showing us Offred’s psychological processes, but not any other characters, so we are left to process and in turn get frustrated. We can see that Offred doesn’t believe in the system, and that she wants to do something, but we can’t see that in the aunts. All we see is what they express to the Handmaids, making us very agitated that they’re a part of the system, even though they are all women. By giving us a limited window into the various character, Atwood leaves a lot of interpretation up to the reader, and gets them engaged in the characters. 

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Stratification 

When you were scrolling you probably were wondering why I posted a picture of a rock. The Handmaids and the rest of the female groups in Gileadean society work much of the same way as the different minerals did in forming this rock. The society stratified the women, each set separate based on their role in society. Unlike normal stratification, the order of these female groups is unclear, but one thing is, these women are all placed underneath men. The stratification of the women is another control mechanism, used to derive women of their power as women by giving each a specific role, and nothing more. Much how like assembly-line and unskilled work was used to unseat skilled workers during the Industrial Revolution of the mid to late 1800′s in America. Big business owners looked to reduce the powers the workers had over them. They didn’t need to rely on skilled workers, because they split each job into very simple, easy tasked that anyone could do. Because of this the workers lost their voices.

The different roles of women in Gilead differs slightly than my example, but I think the core values hold true. The dividing of roles into many different women groups serves to control the women, and take away any power the woman has in society. 

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Girl on Girl.... Violence?

Does the title ring a bell? As soon as we discussed the ideas of girls pitted against each other, I thought about the idea of black on black violence, and how the two are related. Both groups are sort of self-deprecating one another, by challenging one another when both social groups have like interests and goals. I think the role of the Marthas, and especially the relationship between Rita and Offred work to talk about this. Why fight if you’re on the same team? Using sports as a analogy, teamwork wins championships. You aren’t going to succeed by disagreeing and arguing. A whole group working together is so much more powerful, as shown between Offred’s futile singular resistance vs the whole organized Mayday Operation. Power is in teamwork, which serves to show why the Republic would separate females and pit them against one another.