Outside Reading: Book Review 5 (LAST ONE EVER!!!) ;)

My Korean Deli

By Ben Ryder Howe

Review published 3/18/11

Review by Matthew Tiffany

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/My-Korean-Deli/ba-p/4491

While reviewing this powerful memoir by Ben Ryder Howe, Matthew Tiffany not only summarizes some of the main events in the My Korean Deli, but he also delves into some of the cultural stereotypes and differences with tactful diction and a hint of a Marxist critical perspective.

Tiffany’s usually repetitive syntax typically bores the reader into a mind-numbing sense of monotony; however, when Tiffany begins his fourth paragraph with the sentence, “And so on,” the audience knows that we are in store for a dramatic change in the nature of this piece. The change is this: prior to the fourth paragraph, Tiffany does an accurate job of depicting the literary merit and interesting plot developments. After this sentence, the audience is given a chance to experience the novel in with more literary insight, such as when Tiffany writes, “Howe doesn't shy away from thorny issues of cultural differences—the double challenge of working out of your element for somebody with an entirely different approach to labor while simultaneously working for your mother-in-law gets an ample share of ink.”

The imagery that Tiffany employs is at times helpful, and at others distracting. For example, when Tiffany writes in the first paragraph, “An especially clever writer can bury all sorts of subtexts in the narrative, wringing meaning and laughs out of situations limited only by his imagination and his taste for absurdity.” Unbelievably enough, only three sentences earlier and only two sentences into the piece, Tiffany tries, and ultimately fails, to make a conclusive thought. The reader is left with this muddled excuse of an image, “A talented orchestral musician might struggle as a military fighter pilot; a gifted lawyer might find managing a fleet of long-haul truckers overwhelming.” Although the audience can see what he was trying to achieve, he spends too much time focusing on this analogy rather than the novel itself.

Details seem to come fairly naturally to our reviewer: he employs them when he needs to cushion his piece. For example, he uses the word “Concoction” a few times to stress the, “light and airy [treatment] of matters that a lesser writer might have approached with a heavy hand.” Tiffany utilizes a bit of alliteration in his closing thoughts to address the small, yet important, detail that, “If it's a cliché to call this a heartwarming tale of redemption, that cliché exists on the strength of books like this one.”

This novel reminds me of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. In her novel, the main female characters suffered and described the stereotyping that they had to suffer through in order to adjust to the changes in American and Asian culture.

Outside Reading: Reflective Essay 5

Holidays on Ice

David Sedaris

“Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol”

Pg. 93- pg. 99

3/21/11

In one of his eloquently written short comedic holiday tales, David Sedaris yet again serves the reader a cup of good cheer. He begins his story with the sentence, “The approach of Christmas signifies three things: bad movies, unforgivable television, and even worse theater” (93). For the remaining pages, Sedaris cites three examples of inexperienced thespians at local elementary and middle schools.

The witty details that Sedaris brings to the table add another level of intelligence to the already humorous story he unfolds. When discussing the Sacred Heart Elementary’s production of “The Story of the First Christmas,” he mentions that the “third-grade actors graced the stage with an enthusiasm most children reserve for a small-pox vaccination.” He later adds that in this production, “one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed, ‘A child is bored.’ Yes, well, so was this adult.” While introducing “A Reindeer’s Gift” from Scottsfield Elementary, he goes on for a (lengthy) paragraph explaining in great detail the ‘dramatic’ plot developments that take place.

Continuing to spin his web of amusement, Sedaris uses vivid imagery to give the audience the chance to participate in such theatrical monstrosities. He mentions, while ending his bit about “A Reindeer’s Gift,” a student actor “Kevin ‘Tubby’ Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity.” One can clearly see “Tubby” fulfilling his role when Sedaris writes, “The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.

Sedaris’ overall sarcastic tone is the result of his precise diction: he makes sure to choose words that the audience will both understand and enjoy. Sedaris chooses such phrases and words as “eliciting screams of mercy,” “excommunicated,” and “zombies staggering back and forth” to bring forth feelings of amusement, slight annoyance, and most importantly, understanding for the situations he was put in. Such phrases and words as these create a certain mood that Sedaris continues with his literary tone throughout the piece. The audience catches on to this mood after only the first couple paragraphs and hangs on to it until the end of the story.

Although I would thoroughly enjoy reading and responding to any of Sedaris’ work on an AP Test, frankly, none of his acclaimed pieces would fulfill AP guidelines. His snarky tone amuses me to no end, but however much I may enjoy his work, I doubt that the AP readers would enjoy reading my almost-as-snarky essay analysis.

Outside Reading: Editorial 5

“The U.C.L.A. Video”

Author Unnamed

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/18fri2.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Published 3/17/11

The unnamed author in “The U.C.L.A. Video,” from the New York Times, uses a partially factual voice with scraps of personality thrown in, too. The creator of this video, Alexandra Wallace, both vented and mocked the situation in question: some Asian students at U.C.L.A. were calling their families in Japan to check on them after the tsunami. The author shows their frustration at the prominent racist beliefs of the video’s creator, but also notes that she has the right, “no matter how obnoxious,” to voice these beliefs that are protected by the First Amendment.

The author uses both colloquial and elevated language separately to address the issues of racism and constitutionality, respectively. The author goes quickly from one kind of language to the other. In one paragraph, the author speaks of whether the video is protected by the constitution. The author writes, while citing an earlier reference to a ‘First Amendment Scholar at U.C.L.A., “A purpose of the American university, he said, is to debate major decisions about social and other policies — to build consensus and the foundations of community.” In the next immediate paragraph, the author almost completely changes their style of language while addressing the racism showed in the video, saying, “Her most offensive words — said while mimicking people speaking an Asian language — sound like an ethnic slur, but it would be hard to argue that they were threatening.”

The diction used is meant to deliver a clear message to the reader. Words like “victimizing,” “offensive,” and “threatening” are meant to evoke a certain feeling of cultural disgust towards Wallace, and the author makes sure that we feel the same way as them by the end.

The author also employs specific and horrifying details to further convince the reading audience of his/her beliefs. The author supports their beliefs about the video’s constitutionality by citing Eugene Volokh and even goes so far as to inform the audience of U.C.L.A’s Principles of Community. These details help add to the author’s voice by giving the audience a chance to put all of the information gained into both a specific and broad context.

Although this piece is well researched and well written, it would not serve well as an AP essay. The author cites their opinion much too often (which is expected, seeing as how it is and editorial) to be a quality AP piece.

Class Notes (3/7 - 3/18)

3/14- 3/16 was spent watching the "quality" Bollywood film, Bride and Prejudice. We finished out 3/17 and 3/18 reading Camus' L'Étranger.

Modernism:

• Many people (and writers and artists) were disillusioned after WWI
• Expatriates were moving to France
• Cri de couer (which means "Cry of the heart): aka, "Make it new"
• The "Lost Generation" term was created by Gertrude Stein; it was used to refer to the generation that "came of age" during WWI
• New narrative techniques resulted: unreliable narrators, multiple narrators, minor characters (as 1st person narrators), nonlinear narratives, and stream of consciousness

Outside Connection: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a Modernist text. (It is also one of my favorite novels! )

Post Modernism:

• The birth of TV shows that all truth is local
• There is no "one truth!"
• The ingenious formula for Post Modernism: modernism + irony
• High and low culture is mixing is a result of Post Mod.
• The Simulacrum: a world where a flawed copy has replaced reality; idea by Jean Baudrillard; Ex: Nuclear weapons as a useable weapon (we create them, but never intend to use them)
• self-reference: people in a mediated world can manifest themselves in other places
• The picture below, taken from Wikipedia, shows a dragon that continuously consumes itself; it represents self-reference

Outside Connection: The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles, is an example of a Post-Modern text. It especially follows the idea of there not being "one truth" because Fowles gives the audience THREE different endings for the book!

Surrealism:

• defined as a movement of the arts, whether it be dramatic, literary, musical or visual, between WWI and WWII
• Surrealism uses "unexpected juxtaposition" through methods that intend to activate our subconscious associations; these focus on truths that are hidden from us when we are in logical and linear patterns of thought
• sometimes illogical, dream-like, and playful
• Freud and Jung's work influenced it
• uses the differences between images and words, decided by psychological attempts to merge the worlds of fantasy and dreams to reality; the goal is to create a "surreality," a larger and more meaninful reality

Outside Connection:

The famous piece of art, The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí is an example of one of his many Surrealist works. It has a prominent dream-like quality to it.

Class Notes (2/21-3/4)

After members of our class chose to read either Pride and Prejudice or Huck Finn, we have been discussing our book in our respective groups. This has included a few conversations of intermingling.
In the P&P group, we discussed:

• how the plot was comedic (Frye v. 6 elements of humor)
• how the characters were comedic (Frye v. 6 elements of humor)
• how the language was comedic (Frye v. 6 elements of humor)

To see notes on Frye, click here.

Notes on Comedy (From "Theories of Humor and Comedy")

There are SIX elements required for something to be humorous:

1. must appeal to the intellect rather than the emotions
2. must be mechanical
3. must be inherently human, reminding us of humanity
4. must be a set of established social norms with which the observer is familiar, either through everyday life or through the author providing it in expository material
5. the situation and its component parts must be inconsistent or unsuitable to the surroundings (ex: societal norms)
6. must be perceived by the observer as harmless or painless to the participants

• we often laught at people b/c they have some failing or defect, or suffer some small misfortune
• some stock figures of comedy: miser, glutton, drunkard
• some mistakes: incorrect answers, faulty pronunciation, bad grammar
• Superiority Theory: the pleasure we take in humor is from our feeling superior over those we laugh at; all humor is derisive; we need not be directly conscious of our superiority
• criticism for Superiority Theory: its is too narrow to cover every type of humor
• comedy is based on incongruity (see more after bullet points)
• for a comedy to work there must be an established set of cultural, human and societal norms, mores, idoms, idosyncrasies, and terminologies against which incongruities may be found
• Plays and jokes can go out-of-date
• The greatest incongruity is violating social taboos, the greates are 1) Sex, 2) Death, and 3) Biological Functions
• A pun is the weakest form of wit (purely verbal connection)
• Humor is more penetrating (real connection between two things normally regarded with quite different attitudes; or forces on us a compete reversal of values)
• many writers on humor have refused to accept the wide-held view that humorous incongruity must necessarily consist in degrading something exalted by bringing it into contact with something trivial or disreputable
• Relief Theory: affording us relief from the restraint of conforming to those requirements; the feeling of relief that comes from the removal of restraint

Three aspects of incongruity:

1. Literalization: when the joke comes form taking a figure of speech and performing it literaly
2. Reversal: reversing the normal, taking what is normal and expected and doing or saying the opposite
3. Exaggeration: taking what is normal and blowing it out of proportion

Some Important People:
Arthur Schopenhauer: all humor can be "traced to a syllogism in the first figure with an undisputed major and an unexpected minor, which to a certain extent is only sophistically [based on false logic] valid."
Thomas Hobbes: believed that the pleasure we take in humor derives from our feeling of superiority over those we laugh at; Superiority Theory
Alexander Bain: all humor involves the degradation of something; we need not be directly conscious of our own superiority; it need not be a person that is derided: it can be an idea, political institution, or anything that makes a claim to dignity or respect
Henri Bergson: comedy must be elastic, and adaptable; comedy is inherently human; laughter is society's defense against the eccentric who refuses to adjust to its requirements
Immanuel Kant: humor arises from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing; "frustrated expectation"
Herbert Spencer: all humor can be explained as "descending incongruity"; laughter is an overflow of nervous energy
Sigmund Freud: humor is outwitting the "censor" (internal inhibitions which prevent us from giving into many natural impulses); this includes both superego impulses (sexual) and malicious impluses; he finds many similarities b/w the techniques of humor and the ways in which our waking thoughts are distorted into dreams

See "Types of Comedy" Handout for complete definitions of common Comedy terms.

We also analyzed an excerpt from "The Other Paris," by Mavis Gallant, in terms of comedy.