Arielle Baer

Alrighty...So here's my book review. I decided to do something a little bit different and went with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, written as if it was being published in The Village Voice in 1968. I chose this book for a lot of reasons but the two main reasons were: 1) Kesey's whole goal is to figure out how to capture the now. He understands the lag between thought and action and hopes to remedy that lag by any means necessary. 2) I've always been really fascinated by New Journalism (a term that wasn't even coined until the 70's so that was a hard one getting around in this review). Wolfe basically created an entirely new way of writing in this book in order to capture the new waves of consciousness that Kesey and the Pranksters were on.
So basically I tried to capture those two thoughts, without being so obvious. I tried to capture the tone of the times (thanks in part to my mom) without sounding too cliche - though the best part was realizing that everything from that time sounded cliched. So if I was going the cliche route I was in the right direction. Ok this intro is going on a little long - so in short let me know if/when I lost the narrative, I sound out of character/time, if anything I mentioned before is even remotely visible in the review!

This is an extended response (seeing as how I already responded once) to one of Jessica's older posts.

(that's Lily Tomlin by the way)

So here's my response to Mr. Kowalczyk's post.

Sitting down to write a response to Mrs. Dalloway turned out to be a lot harder than expected. Was it because I was the only one who seemed to dislike the novel (Jess how could you abandon me!)? Was this causing me to second guessing myself? Well no, not second guess - if anything it was forcing me to really analyze my reasons for not liking the book. Truthfully, I didn't even know what my reasons were. It was just a very natural reaction. Mrs. Dalloway? Don't like it. Kind of like fennel. Hate it. Why? Because it's fennel! Plain and simple.

I didn't think Prof. Tougaw would approve of that reasoning. Obviously I had to dig deeper.

So here's my second, final draft. I tried to take in all the critiques and fix the review up best as possible. Hope it's to your liking!

With all this talk of implied authors, author vs reader, metarepresentation, death of the author and so on - I can't help but think of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (I guess it's just a Vonnegut week for me). It's been a while since I've read the book, but the one thing that always stands out for me, and I'm sure for anyone who reads it, is when Vonnegut shows up in his own scene to "check up on" his characters. Talk about breaking down the fourth wall.

Apparently the book was a 50th birthday present to himself. That makes sense. It is pretty much a 300 page love letter to himself. But I guess you could describe most of Vonnegut's books like that.

In general I felt like Zunshine was just wading through well worn territory - oh no wait that was me wading through her terrible syntax and unecessarily heavy reliance on quotes. Sorry, that came out a lot more bitter than I meant it to. I guess I've just always had trouble with teachers/literary critics who were so intent on pushing their interpretation of the text on us (hello Judith Butler, I'm talking to you) when that interpretation seemed a little far-fetched. Reading this just filled me with the urge to scream "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!" or I guess in our case "sometimes donuts and pickles are just donuts and pickles" (Yeah that was an Ethan Frome reference right there)

Maybe it's the writer part of me that is hurt and just a little offended by the idea of the "death of the author." Ouch.

CONSCIOUSNESS REPORT #5

All of this constant change in weather has got me thinking about SAD (seasonal affective disorder). In general, I'm not a fan of light (natural or not) or heat (though dry heat has had its moments), but with all these gloomy days, and my windowless hell of an office, I've noticed a definite change in my moods.

I went the traditional route and chose one of the blogs Prof Tougaw suggested. I went with the Mixing Memory blog. It must have been the "occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about" bit that got me. I wasn't really sure what I'd find there but I was presently suprised when I found this post entitled "Women in Math, Science, and Engineering, and Playing Video Games." Now that sounded interesting. The post discussed the idea that females always perform worse than males on spatial reasoning and spatial attention tasks. He ties in a study done with first person shooter video games proving this theory but also proving that if both genders played long enough, the difference in their abilities disappeared.

While I felt that the author made a lot of interesting and valid points I couldn't help but feel like he had left out a huge one. If all of these numbers are correct then doesn't this prove that women are able to learn more, faster? Not only that - but they are able to learn things they naturally have a disadvantage at extremely fast and extremely well.

Both genders started playing the video game with the little to no first shooter experience and after playing for ten hours, both genders spatial reasoning improved greatly. But what was interesting is that the female players improved at a much greater rate. The males improved 10% while the females improved 17%. If they both started with the same amount of experience we can only assume that they would improve at the same rate, but they don't! Chicks are better at learning things that they are naturally worse at! How cool is that!

Girl power!

(That line is a quote from a Tegan & Sara song - it came on just as I was pressing save. Freaky!)

Memory is a funny thing, isn't it? I spent so much time in high school (and hated almost every minute of it) and now I can barely remember any part of it. Friends will bring up stories, even just mention old classmates and a lot of the time I find myself completely lost. I can't connect names with faces, teachers with classes, brief memories with the grade in which it occured. The few friends I kept from high school are always shocked and confused at my complete lack of memories from those four years. Not that they enjoyed it (I live by this theory: never trust anyone that liked high school) but at least they still remember it.

OK I know that title is kind of disturbing, but keep reading and you'll understand...maybe...hopefully...either way I loved that book growing up so let's just pretend it's all about that...

Reading Slater's Lying was incredibly enjoyable, probably my favorite book so far this semester. I loved it so much I called up my mom mid-read to recommend it to her. I was giving her a brief rundown of what I had read so far and when I got to the part about the phantom smells Slater got right before seizures she stopped me and goes "Oh yeah I get those sometimes. I'll smell something and a very strong memory will be attached to it." I was completely shocked. I hadn't told her anything about the smell being attached to memories. Truthfully it was a piece of the story I couldn't really understand, I guess its just one of those things you have to experience to understand.