Change in Media - it starts with me?

Wrote this letter for class - it really challenged me to think about what questions I had, what I want changed, and how to effect that change in media.

Dear Toni Morrison,

            Hello, I am Matthew Nielson. I am a 24-year-old student in Utah. I am in the middle of reading your novel, Song of Solomon. I was immediately drawn in by your powerful characters and intense, ingenuitive use of language. However, after continuing with the book I am becoming more and more disheartened with your liberal use of offensive language and sexual content. What I really want to know is your motives for including these elements in your writing. Is it to give a realistic depiction of the life that these characters would have had, had they been real? If that is the case, is it possible to give a realistic view of a culture without including deleterious language and scenes? I also wonder whether it is harmful for someone to stay naïve or innocent about some of the atrocities in our modern world; obviously offensive and depraved acts are going to continue whether I am apprised of them or not. Is there value in introducing this derogatory material into my life? I would appreciate your views on this topic because I am honestly do not understand it.  According to what I have experienced so far, modern literature would be improved if offensive language and overtly sexual content were limited. In my opinion, it detracts from other themes and messages of the writing, it limits audiences, and it leaves a negative feeling.

            One important reason why I do not appreciate strong language and explicit sex in literature is because it detracts from the other themes in the book. As you know, humans are physical creatures and have a natural arousal corresponding with sexual content. Of course literature can use sex in many different ways, several which are not intended to be arousing. However I think the very nature of the topic makes it overshadow other issues that may be present. I would rather spend more time thinking about the journey of discovery you characters undertake, but it is difficult when the sexual content speaks with such a loud voice.

            If lingering thoughts about the book are on sexual content and language rather than other messages, the receptive audience of the message will be naturally limited. This is in addition to younger readers who (in my opinion) should be shielded from many of the topics you explore in the book until they are older. That raises the question that what about being an adult makes reading mature themes acceptable? If something is pornographic shouldn’t it be inappropriate for everyone?

            The last reason that I feel that sex and swearing do not improve a book is the overall negative feeling that accompanies it. I am not talking about depression or realism that may come from seeing such a naked view of the sad state the world is in, I am talking about how peace, love, comfort, and light cannot share the stage with wicked things. When we choose to surround ourselves with bad influences, good influences cannot stay.

            I love reading and I want to be well read, but offensive language and explicit sexual scenes make it difficult to achieve that goal. I do not want to enforce my own ideas of morality on other people. We are free to think and choose to take in what we will, but as for myself, I would appreciate it if you would limit your use of profanity and sex in your novels. I would also appreciate you answering some of my questions about the role of naiveté or awareness.

Sincerely,

Matthew Nielson

Grooveshark

It has recently come to my attention that not everyone know about Grooveshark. It's a music platform that is like a mix between Pandora and Youtube. I imagine that it is comparable to Spotify which I was going to try out, but then I heard it at my cousin's house and realized that there are commercials on spotify. Blech. Grooveshark is commercial free music on demand that you can organize into your very own playlists. Also, Grooveshark has updated its music suggestion lists, and they are phenomenal. I have found so much good music from it lately including:

• Delicate - Damien Rice
• Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men
• People Help the People - Birdy. 

Look them up. They're Quality.

A Spiritual Red Bull

I had kind of a hard day yesterday and I came home right in time for FHE - or so I thought. Turns out my bishop lives in Highland, not Orem, so there was no way that I would be able to drive over there in time, late as I was. I was pretty unhappy because I have really wanted to be a more active contributer in the ward and also I wanted to end the day on a spiritual note. One of my roommates is sick and he didn't go either. Still feeling strongly that I wanted something, I suggested that we watch a conference talk and discussed it. We ended up watching Elder Eyring's priesthood talk, Help Them Aim High. It was just what I was looking for. As we were watching, I felt the spirit return back to me, and I remembered again that I want to do everything I can to keep its influence with me.

Reasons to Survive November

I am taking a poetry class this semester so that I can become a better descriptive writer. This is a poem I have found that is so powerful (and perfectly seasonal).

Reasons to Survive November - by Tony Hoagland

November like a train wreck—

as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

—Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
                in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
          like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

Bookface: (like Facebook for books :)

So the social network that is like Facebook for books is actually called Goodreads.com. 

I have been a member for about a year and these are the reasons why I love it:

• All my scrappy little booklists have been compiled onto one place online. Before I was on Goodreads I tried to keep track of the books I wanted to read by simply remembering them (not very effective), by saving them on the notepad on my phone (I remember to look at that like twice a year), and on scrubby pieces of paper stuffed in between the receipts in my wallet. Now when I discover an intriguing new book I simply add it to my "To read list"!
• Your friends can recommend books for you. In the past, my siblings and friends often forgot to tell each other when we discovered a new literary gem. Months or even years later we'd be talking and say, "oh yeah, I read a really good book last year. It was called... uh..." 
• You can see what your friends are reading. Even if people don't get around to recommending good books to each other, interesting titles that they are reading come up on the newsfeed.
• You can write reviews for the books you read. Go ahead! Discover the secret pleasure of becoming a book critic and breaking down pros and cons of the plot, characters, writing style, whatever - it is much fun.
• Goodreads send me a newsletter each month about new books my favorite authors have written. Hello! That's amazing!

Watching or Snacking?? A Mutually Beneficial Relationship

I had been doing research for a paper for a couple of hours in my apartment when I suddenly realized: "I'm hungry. And I want candy." I hustled into the kitchen and found a bag of chocolate chips. It was so easy to gobble as I googled that before I knew it I had eaten a hefty amount. Consequently I vote that surfing the net/research be added into the list of media that enables one to "eat mindlessly." Yum!

The dialogue in this movie is too low... but the music and sound effects are too loud! (And other First World Problems)

I just responded 3 times on Blogger... But I forgot to "prove I wasn't a robot" every time!! On the last one, I actually realized my mistake, but as I was going through the confirmation process, my computer ran out of battery and died :) Amazingly, my 21st century world has adapted to deal with people like me, and when I plugged my computer back in 10 minutes later, my same screen came up! And I was able to publish the stinking comment! Not only that but I went back to the other two blogs I had commented on, and they still had my comments there, just kind of hanging in space waiting for me to come back and confirm them. Pretty cool. Also pretty cool are these first world problem memes: http://www.quickmeme.com/First-World-Problems/popular/.

Allrecipes.com is Media, Right?

That moment when you come home from school with a bag of spinach - the final ingredient in a week long quest of gathering various foods - in order to make these Southwestern egg rolls that you have been waiting for for a long time, and you read the directions and find out that they need to be frozen for four hours before cooking. Pah. Looks like I'll be having that last square of casserole instead. Any of you guys have good recipes you have found online?

Reading - life changing stuff

“She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing.” This quote from Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli emphasizes the principle of finding wonder in our world. That is one reason why I love reading so much. It was difficult for me to differentiate between my favorite books of the past and my favorite books of the present because I am a big re-reader and constantly reread my old classics so that they are actually ever-present classics and my continual favorites. Therefore I chose Stargirl as my past favorite and Creative Nonfiction essays as my current favorite to provide a nice contrast.

            Stargirl is about an eccentric, wonderful girl who moves to a new town and the effect she has on its occupants.  Throughout the novel she constantly repels labels and stereotypes and is alternately accepted and rejected. The story is told through the lens of a boy living in the town. As he becomes enamored of Stargirl and the life she represents, he realizes the shallow life he has been living, and he is forced to choose between social conformity or individuality and genuine happiness.

            I love counter-culture adolescent identity formation books. I relate strongly to them because of my own adolescent experience and the constant choices we have each day to be true to ourselves or not. I grew up in a small town with a small town high school and I was quite different than the majority of boys down there. It was inspiring to read other accounts of people who faced up to that social pressure and the subsequent joy they felt at being their true selves.

I chose the genre of Creative Nonfiction (particularly essays) as my current favorite. I was introduced to this genre through my sister and college literary magazines. I did not realize before that there was a name for the beautiful pieces of writing that link seemingly disparate experiences and lessons learned throughout the author’s life. One of my favorite authors is Brian Doyle. I was going to describe my favorite piece of his, Joyous Voladoras:

Joyas Voladoras

Brian Doyle

FROM THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

CONSIDER THE HUMMINGBIRD for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas Voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It IS a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

A Pukey Kind of Motivation

I got a cold the other day, which sucks because I am about to run my first marathon on Saturday. However, yesterday my friend showed me this video and I thought, if Justin Bieber can keep on singing even after throwing up in front of a billion people, then I can run with a runny nose.

In case that grossed you out, I will share my other newest favorite youtube video to cheer you up. Now we have two ways that media has influenced our emotions!

Harry Potter's Evil Younger Brother: The Casual Vacancy

For the last five years I have unofficially been keeping tabs on J.K. Rowling, hoping against hope that she would yet again put pen to paper and spill out her delicious thoughts for all of us to read. Over two years ago she said that she was "very busy writing," and my happiness was assured. I was so proud of her. I guessed that it would be very difficult to venture out on anything new after the success of Harry Potter. Her new work was sure to be compared and criticized heavily, but if she did write anything, it would show that she is simply an author and authors continue telling stories. I was confident that I would stand by her side and love whatever she wrote. I mean, this is the woman who gave us Dumbledore and Hermione. 

On my way home from Smith's on the evening of the 27th (there was no midnight release - a bad portent), my new book clutched in my hand, truly the old excitement was flooding through me. I began reading that night and was quite surprised at the five f-words in the first ten pages. Obviously we were expecting some kind of genre switch into "adult literature," but this was pretty extravagant. I kept reading for another 150 pages peppered with profanity, particularly that doozy. After some thought, I decided I could overlook the language because I have lived among members of the desperate demographic that are represented by some of the characters in the book, but some of the scenes in the casual vacancy were nothing but casually pornographic. 

 How could you do this to us, Jo? I did enjoy the in-depth character analyses, particularly one of the teenage boy questing for identity. She was able to verbalize well the internal conflict that accompanies that stage of life. Did any of you have expectations about the book? On another note, much of the time I stick to Juvenile fiction because apparently I'm not grown up enough to be a real adult ("because clearly 'real' adults can't speak without profanity and only like to read sexually explicit material." - thanks for the quote, Julie!). What do you do about that?

Twilight for Boys

There is a style of writing popularized by Stephanie Meyer but existing long before her and her creations. It is characterized by a fast paced, creative plot and a sloppy dramatic writing style. It originated with pulp fiction and dime store novels. I always thought that pulp fiction was just something to do with that weird movie that seems to have something to do with Halloween, but the term came from quick writing printed on cheap wood pulp paper.

 I'll freely admit that I read Twilight, and I liked them a lot the first time through. In the beginning, I was quick to defend Meyer against her attackers, but after trying to get through the books again I realized that most of her talent lies in storytelling rather than writing. I just read a popular juvenile fiction book called The Maze Runner by James Dashner. The plot could have made it really exciting, but Dashner's haste to tell his story and inattentiveness to detail made reading his book a chore.

I know everyone reads for different reasons, and I have found that I relish reading writing that has been labored over and worked and reworked till it is in its finest form. I love authors that use long and previously undiscovered words that I can look up and enrich my own vocabulary. One of my favorite authors who practically made this style her own is Robin McKinley. What kind of writing do you prefer? What are some good examples of it to share with me?

Some of McKinley's books

Gillmore Gush

That gush stands for gushy, as in the sound two fat things make when they splosh into each other, not as in I'm about to gush over the Gillmore Girls episode that I just watched with my girlfriend. Truthfully, it is not my first time attempting The Gillmore. In high school I ended up watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants after a prom date. I thought the dark haired girl was really pretty, and I learned that she was on Gillmore Girls, so next time I was watching TV I flicked it on. Then off again a few minutes later. I was surprised that a popular show like this had cheap cinematography and (super) cheesy lines. The portion I watched even had spoken lines that didn't match up with lip movements like a Chinese translation movie. Anyway, watched Gillmore Girls yesterday. The episode included a renaissance wedding for those of you who want to orient yourselves. I passed over the cheese-gush, since I already had witnessed that, and my overarching feeling coming away was that it made things kind of awkward between my girlfriend and I. There wasn't anything hugely uncomfortable or sexual going on on-screen, but there were some innuendos I wasn't expecting and a male stripper scene in which Jayni covered my eyes with her hand. End of story: Leave Gillmore to the girls.

Imbibed Opinions and Ideas

This afternoon I was reading from "The Best American Essay 2006" although I was supposed to be reading for another class. You know how tempting essays can be though :) And I found a fantastic quote about media by Poe Ballentine in his essay "501 Minutes to Christ". The protagonist is watching TV here goes:

"One night, without warning, H. Ross Perot's earnest nasal rant about the arrogant complacency of the American people triggers the realization of my own arrogant complacency, and self-reproach suddenly gurgles up to my eyelids like storm water in a backed-up sewer. I think to myself: I'm thirty-six years old and rotting in front of a television set. The electrons that bomb that cathode-ray tube are crumbling the cartilage of my soul, eating away my youth and the children in my loins. I don't need to see another riot, or plane crash, or evil twin, or clever light-beer commercial, or guy pointing a gun at me, or steroid millionaire swatting a home run. I snap off the tube, and all those emotions that have been sluicing into my veins, all the opinions and ideas I have mistaken for my own, zip dizzily up into the atmosphere, and I am suddenly a man alone on a fold-out couch in the empty darkness of an add-on room."

That last part especially is what motivated me to climb back up to the top floor for this book so I could type it up. The first is admittedly melodramatic, but I liked the phrase that the ideas and emotions from the TV were actually not his own, and when the source was switched off, they fizzled away and he was left empty.