Body as media.

In some rural towns in Cameroon women's bodies and their physicality of their bodies translate messeges that are unwanted, sexual ones. Much like women across the world, breasts naturally develop with the age of the female. However in Africa some tribes women actually manipulate their bodies by mashing, pounding or massaging their own daughters breasts to make them practically non existent -- or at least delayed. To change the message their body is communicating as media.

According to the cultural dynamics in the tribes, a man most often will rape a woman whom has matured breasts, so it is the hopes of their mothers that delaying the natural breast development, they can protect their daughters a little longer.

For long periods of time, months, if not years, a mother will continually pound their daughters breasts everyday after school with an intensly hot stick, stone, or rod that actually destroys the developing breast tissues and creates scar tissue that further delays growth.

Interestingly enough, due to a lack of police or government to protect their daughters from rape, these women have done the next logical thing: prevent it themselves.

Oryx + Crake

This book was an interesting read. It was like molasses to get started, but eventually it picked up when he went on his journey for the lab. I feel that it mostly had to do with the dry flashbacks and so much backstory. I didn't feel it was needed to practically recap his entire life. I suppose it did parallel the aside that Margaret brought up with righteous men at sea or on epic adventures journaling their entire existence in hopes someone would read how their fate came to be. But none-the-less I felt she could omit a major of the first 3-4 chapters.

She riddles the book with fun and inventive vernacular like Pigoon that keep the read somewhat entertaining rather than abysmal. The tricky dystopian aftermath from Crake's experiement gone wrong is illuminating into Atwood's soul, but doesn't speak much for humanity. It questions the reader to think "Are we really important or can we be extinct as easy as the dino's?" She parlays back and forth with the SARS scare or the Black Plague sort of idea but eventually lands on something hidden and deadly.

I suppose I caught glimpses of the love triangle you had warned us about in class, but I felt that it was more about humanity post humanity. I find it strange that Snowman has the power to retool history to the children of Crake. Teach them basically from scratch what's right and whats wrong, whats going to kill you and what wont. Imagine the world without the internet, are any of us truly better off?

DUN DUN DUN.

Player one

I thought the story was interesting. I loved how he played with visuals, and descriptors. For instance, when Karen is in the airplane her imagination was running wild. When she stared at the skies and imagined how it would look if the stars turned black during the day as if the sky was peppered.

Douglas also seemed to have an underlying theme of time and space and distorting it. Utilizing player one as an interior voice that is not tied to past, present, or future.

Robert altman work in progress

Like its representation in Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), The Player (1992) and Prêt-à-Porter, the world of entertainment is both treasured and condemned for its fascinating and coercive images.

Gosford Park reconstructs classical narrative form in many ways: It ironically interweaves numerous genres – the Agatha Christie murder mystery, the upstairs/downstairs social drama, and the country house comedy of manners. Forty-four speaking parts in the film provide glimpses into the tangled implications of over 25 separate plots and constitute one of the largest cast of characters of all his multifaceted narratives from MASH (1970) to Prêt-à-Porter (1994). In Gosford Park logical causality disappears under the pressure of traumatic engagements that are not only unspoken by the narrative but are repressed by the characters themselves. The classically requisite discovery of the culprit at the end is contravened by the geometric progression of alternative clues and Altman’s insistence that the murder is never resolved. The confusing multiplication of plot lines and the hybrid mixing of murder, manners, maids, and man servants critiques a singular and stereotypical view of crime, justice, and social class by subverting the classic detective story. The film breaks the ideological illusion of harmony between masters and servants valorised in cultural representations like the 1970s British television series Upstairs/Downstairs. It reveals hypocrisy and meanness in the class system where social crimes and misdemeanors multiply and expand beyond the ability or the interests of the mystery story to say ask “who dunnit?”.

Stalking your way to enlightenment.

Through my readings I could not help but cherish the value of learning to let go, Humbert Humbert never learns this lesson in the book and infact he fixates upon Lolita in a very stalkerish way.

My main idea is the idea of letting go, I looked specifically at how he projects annabel onto Lolita and the swimming scene where he is contemplating her mothers murder because she is taking her away from him.

Multiple times throughout the book Nabokov demonstrates this to us with the internal dialogue of Humbert Humbert. The swimming scene where he portrays Humbert Humbert fighting with his internal thoughts of killing Lolita's mother to prevent her from moving Lolita away from him. "I could surely grab her ankle and swim as fast as I can towards the bottom of the ocean, no one would see and I could blame it on an accidental drowning" he describes.

You see, the whole value of letting go has a lot of universality behind it, we as humans, are easily transfixed on certain things, actions, people and it's something we all go through, but it's only through learning to let go, that we can cope with the situation. Most people never let go, but its that faux idea of letting it go that makes it seem all the more worth it. For Instance, most people never get over their first love, but tell them selves they are over it and can continue to love another, but the first is always in their mind at some point.

Nabokov actually uses this idea in the book by allowing Humbert Humbert to manipulate the reader into believing this was his justification of his obsession with Lolita. He loved Annabel first until she died at a very early age and we find out later that this is the "root of all of his problems" and she is being projected onto dolores to fufil some sick fantasy lingering from Annabel. Nabokov is right in assuming a tragic incident like Annabel's death at a young age could impact someone's love life, but perhaps this happens to a lot of people and they get on with their lives, yet Humbert Humbert was trapped in a nasty cycle of never learning to let go.

The author barely dabbles with Humbert Humbert and his realization of his need to learn to let go. Nabokov used the teacher or principle as a catalyst to make humbert humbert open up a bit more and give his girl some life opportunities, which unfortunately bites him in the ass because it enlightens her to see a way out of her situation. But if Humbert Humbert had just learned to let go he would not have felt this heartache at this point of the story and could have been proud of Delores for getting on with her life rather than looking at it as if he destroyed his.

Value Lolita

Write about value , find a quote in the book. Discussion quote and vaue in response.

I felt that there was a shift in character relations where the main guy humber humbert learned the valuable lesson of parenting. His shift upon moving to the new city was surprising to me and the author used the teacher or principle as a catalyst to make him open up a bit more and give his girl some life opportunities that unfortunately bit him in the ass because it enlightened her. "You should really let your daughter be more involved, she seems sexually under developed" said the teacher that made him let her have friends over more often (Although this benefited him too.) Nonetheless he developed that value, it's almost as if this value could be compared with a "learning to let go" value in which he eventually accepts her rejection (even though he was pushed away forcefully) but he is always transfixed with his "Lolita" just not so much Dolores.

the whole value of letting go has a lot of universality behind it, we as humans, are easily transfixed on certain things, actions, people and it's something we all go through, but it's only through learning to let go, is when we can sort of cope with the situation. Most people never let go but its that faux idea of letting it go that makes it seem all the more worth it. For Instance, most people never get over their first love, but tell them selves they are over it and can continue to love another, but the first is always in their mind at some points.

Lolita discussion

Write about value , find a quote in the book. Discussion quote and vaue in response.


Genre: explicit adult, adventure, tragic comedy.

It's like a toddler, it's pesky and difficult for the sake of being difficult.

Reminder of the jailhouse memoir, he's the victim.

Is it a love story? Or a lust story?

Threads :
Lots of references to musical categories. Marilyn Manson.
Cue quilty is humbert humbert's doppleganger.
American Beauty movie.
Smurfs. (pedophilia)
Beauty and the beast (ultimatum)
Pedobear
Baby doll fashion (gothic Lolita)

Unreliable narroator effect how I read?
Had to buy book on tape to help me get through it, he moves from scene to scene and I found my self getting frustrated with him because I would get invested into a scenario and he would change it according to his pace to manipulate me and woo me into his tale. So I had the book on tape to help my mind snap from one scene to the next almost as if I was reading on a treadmill, I even had to make the narrator read at 2x speed to make my mind accept it and move at a quick pace to follow along his manipulation.


I tried to read this book at the park by the marina and had to leave, I felt horrible reading this book with small girls running around, it forces the reader to think certain thoughts, that ought not. It forces you to want to justify your situation within the novel, during discussion we all kept making claims that it was horrible and not okay, to over compensate for our partaking in the novel.

Inception, he tricks us into his manipulation and then we came to the conclusion that might have been how Lolita felt. Accepting at first then slowly started to realized I have been raped.

What do we make of the characters?
Lolita. Pet name, nymphet version
Dolly younger smarter version a bit older tweenager.
Dolores older woman fully cognizant.
Humber humbert,