Evaluating the class, and the project, and the everything.

How does one begin to evaluate a group project honestly, in a place where the entire group can see it and know exactly who said it? Perhaps timidly, or with only praise. It can be difficult to be honest when your anonymity is taken from you. It is as Oscar Wilde said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

So with that in mind, when it comes to this project I will say what Slaughterhouse Five's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, desired to have on his Tombstone: 

Flashbacks: Not just for TV shows

My, my. What a semester it has been! This class has come a long way, dear internet, and you've been along for the ride with us. It's been quite the journey, getting here. We started small. Back in the first week of January, we talked about some of the books that most impacted us. Mine was Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I look back at that post and see a version of myself with little experience writing for blogs. It was the first time I had ever written a blog post that was intended to be read by the entire internet. I'm sure it hasn't been read by the entire internet or else I'd have heard about it, but it was the intention that counted.

From there we began to explore various kinds of literature. We began with Poetry. We analyzed some of our favorite works of poetry and even song. We wrote a little bit of poetry ourselves, including my own sonnet written about Warhammer 40k, considered one of the "Four Pillars of Nerdhood." Even that early on, we were exploring the ways that the internet influenced us and our understanding of literature. We were discussing how the internet served to bring new literary works to our attention, and allowed us easy access to works that we had not even heard of only a few days previous. The groundwork for our eBook was already being laid, even back then.

Put on the science glasses, it's Research time!

So, I will be typing up this post as I find sources, to keep things fresh in my mind. I've decided to start with my second chapter, as it is the one that I am currently spending the most time working on.

"It's Us. Only Us": The Movement of Reading from a Solitary Hobby to a Social Activity

So, for this chapter I'm using the changes made to the traditional comic book formula in the graphic novel Watchmen to highlight some of our changes in the way that reading is becoming a more and more social activity.

For my Social Graph, I will be talking with two people who I know through social networks. The first is a personal friend named Johnathan Grover. He is a major comic book nerd, has attended and even worked at Comic Cons in the past, and has pretty big opinions on such matters. The second is a user on Imgur who goes by the username Deadpoolsupplier. Spending more than a few minutes looking at his comments should indicate why I find him to be a good source.

For the New Media section, I have found a treasure trove in a single video: Watchmen - The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics 30 minutes of discussion about what Watchmen is and how it changed comic books? Count me in.

For my social networks, I will be using two. The first will be the reviews section of Watchmen on Goodreads. The other is a forum discussing Watchmen over at Comic Vine.

As for my traditional sources, I will be focusing on one in particular that covers this issue very explicitly: Hughes, Jamie "Who Watches the Watchmen: Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes"

Unstuck in Time: An Analysis of the Nonlinear Consumption of Literature

For my Social Graph, I will be setting up a facebook group among my friends and discussing with them in a style similar to a facebook "focus group." I have no made the group yet due to time constraints, but I think it will be an interesting way of gathering opinions. 

For my New Media, I will be using something interesting, but which demonstrates my idea wonderfully. It is a video called Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut reads War backwards HD.

In the video, it has music playing and a voiceover reading the portion of the story when Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and watches a movie backwards, which changes the entire meaning of the movie. 

I had a hard time finding discussion forums for Slaughterhouse Five outside of Goodreads, so I will use a somewhat combined source between Social Networks and New Media by way of a podcast that features a book club having a discussion about Slaughterhouse Five that was put on by Slate Audiobooks. 

For my Traditional source, I'll be working with an article titled Slaughterhouse Five: Time out of Joint by Arnold Edelstein. 

Peer Reviewed and Social Sources

On Monday, the class talked about various research methods that go outside of the traditional sources that we are used to.

In my searches for sources, I have come across some interesting places to look. One of the most interesting is an "index of indexes." Essentially, journals and other sources for more academic works are stored in various indexes. In an index of indexes, you can find out what indexes a certain journal is kept in, and then go on to find similar journals that might contain something you're looking for. Very cool stuff.

Mosy recently, I have taken to speaking with other readers of both Slaughterhouse Five and Watchmen on forums and facebook groups, and have been combing through Goodreads reviews for evidence of socialization through these books and interaction in opinions. Goodreads also serves to give me insights into popular opinion of those books.

My biggest concern is finding that delicate balance between credible sources and social sources. What do you all think is the sweet spot for Peer Reviewed sources vs Social sources?

Adding Chapters Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

So I'm a little bit late in posting. In fact, I'm posting from class. Hello!
I've been a little bit swamped this week, with a test and a research paper proposal filling up my schedule yesterday.

With that in mind, I'm looking to have my second chapter cover a book other than Slaughterhouse Five. Namely, the graphic novel called Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It's in the Time Magazine's top 100 novels of all time, so you know it's good.

BOOK PART
How we read, probably.

CHAPTER TITLE

"It's Us. Only Us": The Movement of Reading from a Solitary Hobby to a Social Activity

TWEETHIS

In the past, reading has been a largely solitary hobby for many people. With the advent of sites like Goodreads, reading can now connect a reader to others around the world.

KEYWORDS

Watchmen, Social Networking, Goodreads, Amazon, Connection

TOPICAL IMAGE

CONTENT PARAMETERS

DIGILITERARY VIA AMAZON-KINDLE-GOODREADS CONNECTION

Goodreads social networking capabilities.

LITERARY WORK

Watchmen

TRADITIONAL REFERENCES - (General Literary, Scholarly)

Hughes, Jamie "Who Watches the Watchmen: Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes"

(http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00278.x/abstract)

SOCIAL REFERENCES (current conversations, social media, interviews)

Watchmen Goodreads review page.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/472331.Watchmen

CONTENT LAYOUT

I think that in all that we're talking about, we've somewhat glanced over the movement of reading from being something that is more of a solitary activity to one that is becoming inherently social, especially through the medium of Goodreads. 

The Next Few Days: A Plan of Action for the Project

I've been looking into some of our key parts in this project of ours and have come to some early conclusions about how we ought to proceed as far as a schedule goes. We will need to do a little bit of front-end lifting to ensure that things later on are much easier.

Specifically, the areas of Design, Content Editing, and Publication. This shouldn't be horribly heavy lifting, but I think that getting a few of the initial concerns off the table entirely will be a good idea. 

As has been planned already, We will be getting our early drafts to Meghan so that she can get an early build up an running. 

Before we do that, I would like to have some of the formatting information from Publication to be in Meghan's hands as well. I don't want us to get four weeks into the project and suddenly realize that we are in the wrong format, and have that cause us a major hassle. If I'm not horribly mistaken, I believe that I am part of the Publication duo. If so, let me know. I can get on that soon. 

Since most of us will likely seem to have nothing to do over the weekend while Meghan will have a lot of work ahead, I would suggest the following:

1. Work on some first edits for at least one of your two chapters and send it to our Editors and Researchers. Editors, send them to each other. The sooner we have fresh edits, the better. We will be editing a lot, and we need to. Editors, don't be afraid to tell people that a paragraph or two need to be thrown out. Part of writing well is realizing when a paragraph needs to go, just as much as knowing when one needs to be added. Those being edited, remember that even Shakespeare needed an editor. 

2.I'd like for the Social Media Publicists and Impact Editors to have some ideas for us by Monday, as well. Work together on this one. I don't think we need a 20-minute marketing presentation, but a good list of options and a summary of the general plan would be great. I was going to be in Advertising at one point, and so I still carry around that skill set. I also still have friends in that program who I could network with. My early recommendations are to know how frequently to post about it, and which venues will allow the most traffic to see it. I would also preview individual chapters or things about the book itself to engage interest. There are surely hundreds of books like ours out there, but not all of them include using The Giver as a metaphor for the "long tail." 

3.Researchers, take your copies of the edits and do a quick double-check of some of the major claims. If possible, make some top-ten lists of the best features that Amazon, Goodreads, and the Kindle have to offer. This gives us some ideas to work with as we better our chapters. 

4.As for the Managing Editors, I would like for us to have a more thorough calendar by Monday or Wednesday with actual dates involved, and hopefully some method by which we can measure our progress and celebrate the little victories along the way. This project may prove difficult, so I would like to make sure that we occasionally take a moment to appreciate how far we've come before barreling ahead and drowning ourselves in work once again. Like my Momma always said, "Take time to happy-dance." 

If you have any issues with this calendar, PLEASE let me know. If it's too fast, too slow, if I'm an idiot, all of the above, let me know. 

The Book Recipe-Book

A recipe book for putting together a book. An interesting and difficult task if ever I've heard one. There are many ideas at work here, and it can be easy to end up with some weird book layouts. So let's first try to digest the larger issues being discussed by each of the titles we've been working with, and then we can try to order them up.

Leah Smartt, Removing Prejudice to Classic Literature: Reconsumption on Goodreads and Amazon
The new accessibility to literary classics within social reading networks like Goodreads influences readers to reread and reconsider titles they'd disliked. 

(Goodreads, Accessibility, Reading, Social-Networking, Rediscovery.)

Nathan Scovill, Callous and Kind with Books Online
Online anonymity and alternate identities allow readers to become more callous or more kind as they review and discuss literary texts.

(Anonymity, Behavior, Social interaction)

Nathan Scovill, "So it Goes": Disconnecting Readers and Books on Online Platforms
The lack of a physical relationship with books read electronically changes readers' relationships with literature.

(Technology, Accessibility, Change) 

Nathan Scovill, "Slaughterhouse Mind": Reading Out of Order in the Digital Age
Digital media cause us to experience stories from literature out of order, and that's okay.

(Technology, Change, Time)

Lauren Sullivan, Reconstructing Society through the Long Tail of Digital Books
The broadened availability of literary works through ebook platforms makes possible a revitalizing of society.

(Technology, Change, Social interaction)

Lauren Sullivan, Reading Laid Bare: The Intimacy of ebooks
The rise of ebooks exposes the need for human connection even as it closes off true connection among people.

(Social interaction, Behavior, Technology, Change)

Lauren Sullivan, The Isolated Reader
Electronic reading deepens the joys and the isolation of readers

(Social interaction, Behavior, Technology, Change)

Saren Bennett, Readers at Home in a New Land of Literary Study
It's hard to make our presence of worth in online reading platforms, but it's possible to feel at home in a new world.

(Social interaction, Behavior, Technology, Change)

Saren Bennett, Reader Reviews and a Multitude of Views
Reader reviews function differently on different ebook platforms.

(Technology, Social interaction, Criticism)

This might be a bit crude, since I don't know what each person is meaning, but I am seeing that a few different things stand out as explicit and recurring themes. Personal behavior changes due to technology, and Societal changes due to technology. Perhaps you could even divide it into changes of behaviors that are Personal, Interactive, and Societal. 

Technology is changing the ways that we, as individuals, behave.

Thus it is changing the way that we communicate and interact with other individuals.

As our interactions change, our societies change with them.

We could easily have sections divided into those three categories, and possibly a fourth.

I think one of the things that hasn't been addressed is the connection to scholarly works, as well as the conflict between the old guard and the rising technology. We discuss the change and its effects both negative and positive, but we have yet to focus on the actual people involved in the frontlines of that conflict. 

Slaughterhouse Mind

The book I will be focusing on for our project is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I perhaps should have chosen something else, since I'm running into a few interesting problems with finding themes to share between the digital age and a book written about WWII. However, I think I may have broached a few options.

• The Tralfamadorians have a different way of perceiving time than humans do. They see all of time at once, and consider the future to be inevitable. They can also directly observe the past. I could liken this to the way that the digital age allows us to document our past unlike any previous era. Whatever we do, a permanent digital copy can be made and easily shared. Our opinions are suddenly widely visible to any who care to look, our habits are made known, and we are accountable for ourselves in a way humanity has never been. This gives us a great deal of resources for researching new topics, but also makes it much more difficult to find sources that are respectable or accurate. 
• The protagonist of the story experiences his own life out-of-order, and so it can be related to the ways that digital media can cause us to experience a story out-of-order. It is quite common for us to read a quote from a book, or see a single scene from the film adaptation of a book, long before we ever get around to reading it. In some cases, we can even find out the ending to a book long before we ever read it. Yet this doesn't hinder most of us from seeking out those books and enjoying them.
• Whenever a person dies in the book, their death is followed by the phrase "so it goes," which can serve to minimize the impact of the death, and creates a disconnect between the reader and the action. In some ways, digital reading platforms can create a disconnect between the reader and the book. It has been shown that students who read out of a physical book have greater reading comprehension than those reading from a digital source. It would be possible to delve deeper into this subtle disconnect and see if there are ways to close the gap. It could also discuss the wall of anonymity that is created by using a web-based platform. Our statements are subtly disconnected from ourselves, allowing us to say things that we would never say in person. We can be entirely different people on the internet, more kind or more callous. We can be like the unstuck Protagonist, or we could be like the time-seeing Tralfamadorians. Enveloped in ourselves and others, or callous and indifferent. 

Words, Words, Words

Lisa Nakamura has a lot to say about the website Goodreads in her article entitled: "Words with Friends": Socially Networked Reading with Goodreads. Despite the title of this post and the image to the right, I actually found her comments to be an interesting mixture of praise for the platform and concern about very real issues that arise from its use.

Goodreads as a platform is very interesting, to me. I suppose that the easiest way to describe it is "Like Facebook, but with less Face." Goodreads still suffers from a syndrome that we see in a lot of social media, which is the "me-centric" attitude that can easily grow there. When we are teenagers, we gain a concern that the entire world is paying attention to use and is super interested in finding our faults and beauty spots. I consider it a sport to go down to the mall and watch teenagers. If you watch carefully, you'll see that each of them is trying very hard to put on a particular display, and each of them is displaying so hard that few of them ever have the time to notice the displays being put on by their compatriots.

I think that most social networking platforms eventually lead to this inevitability, but with some more mature twists. It is still possible, however, to break down Goodreads users into some standard High School Movie character types.

Woah, Nellie!

I have heard it said that a skilled writer can put the themes that will be relevant to the entirety of a text within the first few sentences. Especially good writers can do it within the first sentence. 

Today, I'll be analyzing Heart of Darkness and its themes, basing my analysis of the entire text upon the first two paragraphs of the text. Without further ado, let's get started, shall we?

"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of
the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly
calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come
to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of
an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded
together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails
of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red
clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A
haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.
The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed
condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest,
and the greatest, town on earth."

Let's begin with the first two words of the first sentence: The Nellie. "The Nellie" is the name of a ship, and after a little bit of poking around I discovered that the name Nellie has a few different potential origins. The one that is most prevalent to us is its origin in Old German as an alternate of Eleanor. Eleanor, and by extension Nellie, means "other" or "foreign." Within the first two words, Conrad is encoding foreignness into his narrative about the Congo. 

From there, we identify the sort of boat that The Nellie is. It is identified as a "cruising yawl." A yawl is a two-masted ship, commonly used in the 1800's by fishermen. They were most common in the early 1800's, though they remained popular for quite a while. We can likely surmise that The Nellie is an older vessel rather than a newer one, and has likely seen some use in its time. The Nellie is also identified as "cruising." Cruising in the sailing sense usually means sailing for pleasure. So from this we learn that The Nellie is most likely owned by a rich man. If it were used for fishing, it would be called a fishing yawl. Instead, it is called a "cruising yawl," which indicates that its primary use is for pleasure. It is unusual for a member of the working class in the 1800's to be able to afford a boat simply for pleasure. At this point, both the overarching meta-themes of rich, old men is starting to shine through. An old ship, owned by a rich man who is likely to also be older if his ship is old. Both of these assumptions are later proven true about the occupants of the ship. 

Next, we'll look at the first sentence of the second paragraph. In case you don't feel like scrolling, it reads: "The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of

an interminable waterway." A sea-reach is the point of a river as it reaches the ocean and begins to straighten, indicating that they are near the coast. Unsurprising since they are in a boat. Yet, they describe the Thames as an "interminable waterway" or "a navigable body of water without end." This brings to our minds one of the main focuses of the book: The Congo River. The Congo is described in terms that make it feel endless, and mysterious. 

From there, we pass through several more major themes from the book. Light and Darkness: "Limunous space" and "Mournful gloom." And we see the air of European superiority made manifest in the statment of "the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth." 

A well-crafted book prepares its readers from the very start, even if they don't know it yet. All it takes to find the symbolism and meaning deep within the prose, is to take the time to look for it. 

A picture of myself and my wife from the night we got engaged. Not related, but a great photo!

Ten outta Ten

The future is upon us. Or rather, it has been here for a rather long time and only recently are people jumping on the bandwagon. The voice of the singular man is slowly coming to be on par with the opinions of the great critics, in terms of swaying public opinion.

The only thing standing in their way, is making sure their review is worth reading.

What makes for a good review? I spent a little bit of time looking through and finding reviews that seemed to be well liked by fellow reviewers. They tended to have the following distinct aspects:

• The review included at least a small summary of the book, or at very least its major themes. In doing this, it treats the readers as if they had not read the book already. They avoid bringing up or revealing major plot turning points without fair warning. The review understands that those who are reading it have likely not read the book yet, and may use this review to ultimately make their choice.
• The review was edited for grammar, and presented professionally. The writing is solid and avoids unnecessary repetition. 
• The review is stated not as an opinion, but as an analysis of the book's merits. This means that they rarely use the terms "I liked" or "I disliked" but rather terms such as "Conrad demonstrates skill with..." The review seeks to be more than a simple opinion piece, but a brief analysis of the work itself and what it stands for. From there, conclusions are made as to whether or not the book is worth the time and effort needed to read it. 

With this in mind, I went to Goodreads and posted my own review. See it here.

I then went on to post a link to my review on my Facebook, which I won't be sharing for personal reasons. However, I will note that my review gathered a small amount of attention, mostly in the form of "likes." Most of my friends aren't particularly avid readers, and so I only got comments from two of my friends who are intense readers. They disagreed with some of my thoughts, but that doesn't particularly bother me. Everyone who reads the book will have a different stance by the time they get to the end. Getting their opinions about my review was valuable, however.

I found that people on Goodreads are a little more willing to talk to you than people on Amazon or Facebook. This is likely because the site is much more focused on books. Much like you would be more likely to get interaction about your movie review on Rotten Tomatoes than on Facebook. 

The internet is changing the way that reviews work. We have broader options to choose from than just the expert critics and those of our friends who have consumed the media in question. We can now read and enjoy the opinions of individuals around the world. We can make decisions about what we want to read based on reviews made by those who share a similar passion to us. The only caution to take into account, is that the most common reviews will come from those who have a strong opinion. Most of the readers will read the book and never bother to leave a review of it. This can cause things to skew either highly in favor of a book or highly out of its favor. I will admit that I review things very rarely, simply because I hardly ever feel strongly enough about a work to put in that much effort. By contrast, I tend to look at the reviews of a product before I purchase it. So perhaps I am hypocritical in this regard. 

Like Carving a Path Through the Congo

There are times when I am given a book to read in class, and by the end of that book I immediately understand why that book is important and why it resonates even until this day. Heart of Darkness was not one of those books.

Heart of Darkness, I will openly admit, seems like the kind of book that was once considered very posh and important because it pretty much says that colonialism is hypocritical and bad, and in our modern time casts a large and not-at-all-ominously named "Company" into a questionable light. It seems as if the only reason why we consider it a classic is because it is old, and it reminds us of the mistakes once made in the past against native peoples.

Heart of Darkness is not well written, in my opinion. For the time, it was probably excellent and exciting and horrifying, but I don't think that this is the case anymore. It makes me think of a phenomenon that I like to refer to as "Nostalgia Goggles." We are found to be wearing Nostalgia Goggles when we think a thing is good and important now, because it was good and important at some previous point in history and for no other reason. We usually see this is mediums such as Film and Video Games. The Maltese Falcon was a good movie for its time, and did a lot of things right. However, if you were to re-release that movie with the exact same dialogue, film quality, camera direction quality, and other aspects of the film, it wouldn't be considered good by the majority of people, unlike when it came out.

From reading the reviews on Goodreads and elsewhere, I feel that Nostalgia Goggles have been keeping Heart of Darkness alive while the general consensus of the book comes out to "meh." It's okay. It might mean a lot to you if you're into it, but a lot of people won't like it at all. Yet, we put so much stock into it that one review puts it like this: " Heart of Darkness is one of those classics that you have to have read if you want to consider yourself a well-educated adult. "
Why?
I could learn most of the important lessons of the book by brushing up on the history of colonialism, and would likely be more educated about world events and important matters than if I read Heart of Darkness. 

This is not to say that all that is old is automatically bad. There are films and media that withstand the test of time. I just don't think that Heart of Darkness is one of them.

"And So it Goes"

The novel I will be writing about is "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is important to me as a piece of literature for several reasons, not the least of which is that it was the first piece of school-assigned literature that I felt had a large emotional impact on me.

The book is, in a phrase, mildly disturbing. It speaks of the horrors of war in a way that is disjointed and separate from what is occurring, while also casting a clear lens upon those horrors. It is like watching the film of JFK's assassination. You witness a man's death, see the blood shoot from his head, and even see the panic afterwards. But as real and as horrifying as the image is, you are still so far away from it.

Slaughterhouse Five changed the way that I read books. I didn't read that book because I was enjoying the story. The story is disjointed and difficult to follow. The main character jumps around in time, creating a set of small, strange vignettes that surround a truly horrible war story. And yet, the emotions that it causes in the reader are real. The feeling of confusion and disorientation is purposeful and a mighty tool in Vonnegut's arsenal for telling this story. You feel exactly as certain of what is happening to this man, as he himself is.

And through all of this horror, the words of the strange aliens that have such a central place in the plot echo after every single tragic death: "So it goes." The deaths are violent and cruel, yet immediately dismissed in a way that makes you want to scream at the pages that they deserve some proper eulogy because they were people and no one deserves to die like that and be so handily dismissed. And in that moment, you recognize the sanctity of life. And you feel the weight of inevitability. And you feel the sadness of loss.

It is rare that pieces of "school" literature make me feel real emotions. This one, however, has haunted my thoughts for years since I first flipped through its pages.

Exeunt Omnes

My first experience with this story came while I was at BYU, in the class called History of Creativity. After reading it I had to do a creative project based on the reading. I based my work off of the last two words in our version, which is actually a piece of stage direction:
Exeunt Omnes

It means "Everyone Exits." Meaning everyone leaves the stage. The phrase stuck with me, even though it isn't an intentional piece of the story. It's simply stage direction for "Everyone gets off the stage, we're done."

The phrase reminds me of Oedipus at the end of the play. From the very start, he has been prideful. In a way, he was without peers. One of the greatest of men and with a singularly disturbing destiny. When it is finally accomplished, Oedipus is just as peerless as before, although now peerless in loneliness. In some way I like to imagine that everyone exits except for Oedipus, who is left utterly alone. His Hubris has brought him low, and now he has no one there who could possibly help him. He is blind, bleeding, and tortured by his own decisions. He will literally never see a friendly face again. Oedipus is simply left alone in his own personal darkness, permanently unable to escape from it.

Everyone has exited from Oedipus' life, and now he is left to suffer alone.

That image in and of itself was sufficient for me to create an entire piece based on it, which now sits somewhere among my forgotten school documents. Somewhere dark and lonely, without a doubt.

Exeunt Omnes

FOR THE EMPEROR!

When I heard that the assignment for this Sonnet was to take an epic story and retell it, I began to think about Epic Poetry. Which led me to think about great heroes and warfare, which eventually brought me to something that is buried so deep into the depths of nerdhood that I don't think anyone who is in this class, or who has taken this class before, has heard of it. Which is a shame.

I speak of a game called Warhammer 40,000. (Or WH40k, as it is abbreviated.) Originally it was a "war simulator" style of game played on a tabletop using miniature figures and dice. Since then it has expanded into the realms of books, tabletop role playing, and even a handful of video games.

I have known about WH40k for a long time now, but only recently did I start to examine it in detail. I don't play the original game, because as a hobby it is prohibitively expensive for a young college student. (Some of the individual miniature figures can cost over $150.) However, the details of the world in which these mock battles take place is readily available, and a lot of the other media produced in the setting is able to be found for very cheap. I won't go into advanced detail about it, but I will link a very brief video that explains the absolute basics of the lore in about 60 seconds (and doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.) That video is HERE. I just happen to find the lore to be amazingly cool, and decided to write a Sonnet about it.

The sonnet about this world is below. I used the Italian Sonnet style as opposed to the Shakespearean style, as it sounds even more pointlessly ornate. (Which is a major theme of Warhammer 40k.)

The Emperor sits on his Golden Throne
A corpse kept living by their sacrifice
a thousand souls per day the vicious price
ensures that we the Emp'ror's death postpone.
When Horus wrought that Heresy well known
To take our Terra was his sick device
The Emperor's death for Horus would suffice
and he would take our Terra for his own.
But lo, the Emperor would not be spurned
The prodigal that he had once adored
The heretic who now could not be turned
The Emperor would strike down with the sword
and through his wounds, the lesson would be learned
The Emperor protects, our Deathless Lord

The Internet: Bringing you things you never knew you would love.

One of the things that I most often read on the internet is the phrase "I didn't know I needed this in my life until just now." What an interesting sentence that is!

That's what the internet does for us in this day and age. We find ourselves going out and looking at things and ending up in strange places that we never thought we would end up in. Sometimes we find new hobbies that we are dying to try out. Sometimes we find something hilarious that we will share with our friends. Sometimes we find something beautiful that needs to be shared.

Just in the last two weeks I was introduced to several new games that I want to try, the whole lore system of Warhammer 40,000 which is phenomenal, several books that I want to read, a new web series that I want to watch, a web tool that helps me do assigned readings faster, and several more websites.

So in this discussion of the internet and poetry, and in keeping with my theme, I want to share a piece of poetry that I found in a very unusual way. Not in a book, not even on a poetry website. In fact, I wasn't searching for poetry at all.

To Poetry

We lost, but have moved on

My most recent experience with poetry is the one that I have been having over the past week or so. In this class as well as another, poetry has been a main focus of this first week or so. During that time I have been reading and digesting a lot of poems. Of those, one in particular stood out to me. It is titled "To Piano Lessons" and is written by Kenneth Koch.

The poem spoke to me in a way that few poems manage to do. In “To Piano Lessons,” I hear the tones of regret. That familiar and perhaps most painful of emotions, when one sees their own potential while seeing where they ended up. My father once told me that he believed that the burning of Hell or Outer Darkness or whatever torture one would face for wickedness was simply regret, because nothing so scorches a soul like regret. It is written like a love letter to a love never taken. The poem is beautiful and sad, like all good things that we allow to slip past us.

Poetry usually has a hard time getting through to me, likely since I would not describe myself as particularly in touch with my emotions. I instead find myself reading them only when academic needs force me to. 

Something tells me that this won't change about me, and I am at peace with this idea. I think that it isn't necessary to force myself to enjoy a kind of media that I don't normally enjoy, and yet at the same time I can't help but wonder if my brief and often striking affairs with poetry may some day come back to haunt me in the same way that the Piano Lessons spoken of by Koch.

For all these reasons and more, I will be memorizing "To Piano Lessons" itself, since it is my favorite poem in a long time.

Of Battle School, Buggers, and Bonzo Madrid

I read Ender's Game for the first time when I was only 12 years old. This was, for me, an unusually short book to tackle. When I was 9 I read most of the way into Jurassic Park before my elementary school teacher confiscated it because I was reading too much. I suppose you could say that I was a precocious reader. 

Perhaps that is why I connected in some ways with the character of Andrew Wiggin, also known by the titular nickname of "Ender." Ender had many attributes that I aspired to as a young man. He was intelligent, he was adept at finding creative solutions, he was goodhearted, he was able to defend himself. Ender's experiences in Battle School felt as if they paralleled some struggles in my life dealing with the cruelties of other children. Ender's mind felt like it operated on many of the same principles as mine. 

Ender became a sort of idol to me. He became an example of the kind of person that I want to be, in many ways. As the series progressed into further works, I found myself gravitating towards Ender more and more. Through the novels Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, which I read some years later, I watched as Ender grew from a young boy into a grown man. I felt as if I was watching a friend grow up alongside me, and eventually surpass me in age. Ender's struggles with his own identity and his past mistakes were a large influence on my teenage years. In many ways, this fictional character served as not only a motivational force, but a guiding one. I still think of Ender as being one of the most important people in my young life, even though he isn't real. 

That's why I consider Orson Scott Card to be one of the best authors I have ever read, and why I esteem him to be the author I'd most want to write like. 

 

-Ender Wiggin