I Am A Dharma Bum

It was winter of my senior year at UCSD, and my life was taking form. The problem? The form was much too formal-it wasn’t the life of the cavalier poet that I’d imagined. It was a life of responsibility to “the machine,” to “the man,” to a profession, to everything that, in my deadhead mind, was going to send me “down the road feeling bad…bad…bad.” Enter Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. A life not on the typical American road to the west, but a life on the road to a wilderness that I had thought was lost when the golden spike forever welded the coasts together in the 19th century. More than just living vicariously through the characters, I wanted to live the characters’ lives of backpacks and wine and adventures. So, I gave a couple of buddies a copy of the book, and we decided to track Kerouac’s ghosts up and over the eastern Sierras to the Matterhorn peak.

Scenes from an Execution and Inconvenient Truth

Here's a link to a transcript of An Inconvenient Truth:
http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf

Here's the link to the Hitchens essay:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ERjrcFPSkHkC&pg=PA235&lpg=PA235&dq=hitchens+scenes+from+an+execution&source=bl&ots=ic-XBH_tVK&sig=lmogFpyymDudKwxZHF8EGVNGOdo&hl=en&ei=IJO7SqGiCYrKsAPG4OncBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Beauty=Truth?

In his emphasis on the fleeting nature of beauty, Wilde’s Lord Henry overtly challenges many assumptions his audience, in both the readers and in Dorian, have about aging and truth. This dramatic monologue from chapter two of the novel steers the title character towards a predetermined destination, thus emphasizing the power of the critic’s language.
At the outset of the speech, Henry, by negatively connoting thought and passion, prepares the soil of Dorian for the seed of his argument. Writing, “When you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines” (28), Wilde, through Lord Henry, insinuates that the final destination of any life is ugliness. In short, by making ugliness a foregone conclusion of any life that’s not youthful, Lord Henry paints an unflattering picture that conflicts directly with the idea that old age brings wisdom. Or, if it does, wisdom, which necessarily corresponds with thinking, “sear[s]” the thinker's face with wrinkles. The idea that thought is dangerous, that it can burn, undermines the conventional wisdom that a lack of thinking is dangerous. In essence, Lord Henry takes to the extreme the idea that ignorance is bliss. He essentially states that young and beautiful ignorance is not only blissful, but is “the wonder of wonders” (28). This, according to the novel, is not explored on the symbolic level; it is on the superficial as Henry makes clear, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” (28).
By not having the audience interject, Wilde creates, much like Browning’s Duke, a persona in Lord Henry who is trying to control every aspect of his environment. When he anticipates, or informs Dorian, of why he reacts to his speech in a particular manner, Henry is also anticipating the reader’s counterarguments. There are no pauses in the monologue to allow for debate. He then, in his praise of Dorian’s beauty, erects the character as a hero, who’s fighting against the personification of Time. By putting the battle on a mythical plain, Henry builds Dorian’s confidence while encouraging the rest of the audience to side with the promethean hero that is Dorian Gray. He is a human who is fighting against the gods that made him, and this makes him, to an extent, an everyman. His beauty is human, and the tragedy of our existence is that, in the words of Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Redemption Songs

Covering or treating one of the most powerfully beautiful, yet simple songs of the 20th century requires great chutzpah or great stupidity or both. Bob Marley’s haunting lyric and simple guitar accompaniment make any rendition of “Redemption Song” a challenge. Despite their masterful treatment of the lyric, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash, due to who they are, fail to level their rendition with Marley’s work.
As this lyric is essentially a slave narrative, “Old pirates, yes, they rob I; / Sold I to the merchant ships” (1-2), Cash and Strummer’s voices, as they’re white, are less valuable than Marley’s. And what of African-American Stevie Wonder? His pseudo-gospel rendition of the song exalts in the celebratory nature of the chorus while totally missing the tragedy entrenched in the verses. Wonder completely botches his rendition, and, as a result, is barely worth mentioning in an analysis of the piece. The simple, uneducated diction of the narrator belies the complexity of the story that the song tells. As a song of overcoming, the narrative emphasizes not only the overcoming of physical slavery, but also the psychological slavery associated with being a part of an oppressive system. While the pain in Strummer’s, and particularly Cash’s, voices appeals to the pathos of the audience, Marley’s raspy storytelling grabs his audience with deep compassion for the oppressed as well as it appeals to an ethos that all humans deserve physical and ideological freedom.
Looking at the notion of redemption as freeing oneself “from the consequences of sin,” “Redemption Song” emphasizes a dual responsibility, that of the oppressor and the oppressed. The second verse castigates the oppressed, “How long shall they kill our prophets, / While we stand aside and look?” (19-20), for inaction even as the first verse points out the hypocritical nature of the colonizers, who offered salvation with the Bible shortly before conquering with sword and shackles. Marley’s voice matters, as a Caribbean whose ancestors, more than likely, made their way across the Atlantic on a slave ship in a much deeper way than the voices of the Anglo artists. This is true, even though Cash and Strummer, by addressing the narrative so directly and honestly, speak to the redemption that the oppressors may potentially be seeking.
So, yes, speaker does matter. How a speaker gives voice to a message determines aspects of how an audience will react; however, who a speaker is must equally be taken into account. In a simple way, who a speaker is in all her or his complexity will determine how deeply an audience will react.

5th Period Musings On The Common App

A jerk. A nerd. A wimp. Perhaps. But Stephen Dedalus has is many ways formed me or, more accurately, defined me. Although Joyce’s protagonist predates me by nearly a century, when the novel’s cryptic words made their way into my consciousness, I, for the first time in my life, was reading myself.

Born the first son of an Irish Catholic only child father, my lot was, in essence, an awkward one. I was defined by my name, George, the fourth in a row of Georges whose history could be traced to the impoverished farmers of Ireland’s County Cork. Being raised my father’s son and a Catholic were two mantles that I could not remove regardless of how hard I tore at the fabric. Enter Stephen Dedalus my senior year of high school. Diving into the character’s thoughts and dreams, I saw my experiences reflected in the glass. Someone had lived my life! Someone knew what it meant to be relied upon to carry a family’s heritage and tradition like a sacred chalice to the altar of experience.

For years, I felt I was destined to a life that was full of indulgent reflection and its corresponding melancholy. I walked the world with the heavy steps of the seriousness of an “artist,” and I failed to realize that the character’s destiny wasn’t necessarily mine. Everything seemed to fit, love for art, frustration with the powers that formed us, but I finally realized that I was always going to be George and never Stephen. I was liberated from what I thought was my autobiography.

It was at this moment that the power of art became real. When I first read the text, my path wavered, my truths became less true, but now, nearly twenty years later, I know that my encounter was more that an undulation, it was a crossroads. Standing daily in front of young intellectuals, preaching the power of language and art and passion, Dedalus’ words, “This country and this life produced me, I shall express myself as I am,” still throb in my temples. However, time has tempered the character’s impact to that of a mentor, leading me away from some choices; he is no longer the feeble hero in whose steps I’m destined to tread.

April is the Cruellest Month

In so many ways, April is relentless in Central Oregon, as it's, unlike the rest of the country, not really spring. People behave in strange ways when the sun is out, but the batteries are not turned on, and the wind blows hard from the south in the morning and the north in the afternoon. People seem to question all they believe in; it's as if the wind drives the unconscious out of them.

Yes, I've been out on the bike too alone and too long, but today Ossie and Billy accompanied me on a twenty mile jaunt around the back roads of Redmond. Next week promises to be warmer, so check the forecast and plan to ride towards May with the club.

Of Wind & Other Things

Although there were a lot of people inquiring about yesterday's ride, the winds blowing out of the southwest deterred all but the most stalwart of spandex-clad (and, let's be honest, there was denim also) warriors.

In short, there were two of us.

Bryce and I set out along 126 with a cross wind that rivalled those that split the peloton along the coast of Normandy. It split us too, but we regrouped (repaired?) before making the left onto Helmholz and more importantly embracing the tailwind. Riding out for about twenty minutes, we disucssed quantum physics and other trivialities. At that point, Bryce had to turn around to tutor kids at the Boys and Girls Club.

As I'm not a saint who tutors in the afternoons, I rode on, but no one wants to read all the thoughts that meandered in and out of my brain as I fought the headwind in a solo effort of futility.

Until next week...