Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Journal #3

After finishing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I feel like I can identify at least one relationship between humans and nature. Based on the extreme skiing movie and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I see nature as the closest thing humans can reach to beauty. As the book’s title suggests, nature is “a miracle.” In the extreme skiing movie, the mountain-men skied on uncharted mountains because the slopes were natural and hadn’t been groomed or explored by man yet. The skiers claimed they were closest to nature when they skied the natural slopes. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the local, home-grown food was completely natural, and had not been processed or altered by humans yet. Additionally, in my eyes, when Kingsolver described watching plants and chickens grow over the year seemed like a natural miracle.

Overall, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a good book; I was definitely interested and intrigued the whole time. I’m someone who likes to read health magazines and food magazines, so the topic was interesting… but as I stated in my previous journals, the Kingsolver family’s experiment was a little too all-natural for me. I can appreciate wanting to become closer to nature and experience natural miracles. However, I feel like you can experience this only occasionally and still be happy. The older daughter, Camille, provided a good example. When she went away to college, she was forced to quit the local-food project, but she still attempted to eat locally when she could. Additionally, when the entire Kingsolver family slowly decreased the size of their garden, I believe they truly met the perfect balance. They were still able to experience the miracle of nature, but not become so absorbed in the miracle that they quit seeing it as a miracle. Had the skiers alternated between skiing on man-groomed slopes and natural slopes, they could have experienced the miracle of nature and spared their lives.

After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I can see myself perhaps growing my own tomatoes or shopping at a local market (like the one that’s in the Bank of America parking lot on Wednesdays). I appreciate the locally grown experiment enough to try it out. However, I don’t ever see myself completely devoting my entire life to the cause like the Kingsolver family did. 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Journal 2

The second third of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle focuses greatly on the personal benefits of eating locally. Heirloom foods (like tomatoes) simply taste better. Cooking at home, rather than eating out, provides valuable time for families to spend together. Additionally, gardening, as Kissinger believes, is a hobby in itself, not just a lifestyle. It gives her time to relax, time that others would spend watching television. And, taking food from seed to the table is satisfying – knowing that they creating their own food provided Kissinger’s family a sense of achievement.

I initially saw this local food thing as simply a trend. The farmer’s markets that are popping up weekly seem to be people’s way of acting like they care for the environment. And when I first started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I thought Kissinger was simply following the trend.  To me, the “trend” of local food is horrible. If you don’t plan on devoting your all to the cause, then you aren’t effectively fighting for the cause. If you buy local vegetables, but buy packaged cookies, then you aren’t fighting for the cause. The eggs used in those cookies were probably from caged chickens, the flour was probably bleached, and the sugar was probably shipped from Brazil. When Kissinger showed signs of hesitation toward first starting the experiment (it took her family a few months once they had moved to quit shopping at the grocery store), I thought she was simply following the trend. But as I’ve read further and further, it’s become clear that Kissinger actually cares for the environment, and actually enjoys what eating locally does for her – she’s definitely not doing it to follow the trend.

I still stand by my belief that I could never go with the local food trend. It definitely is starting to make more and more sense to me – the entire book is like a giant argument essay to convince me to eat locally. But, as I said previously, I think you either have to go all the way or don’t go at all. If I started eating locally, I’d feel guilty eating store-bought foods. Also, I think one of the most satisfying things about the local food trend is growing foods yourself. I have no desire to garden, so I don’t think eating locally would be as satisfying for me as it is for Kissinger.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Journal 1

While reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I’m initially inspired to improve my eating lifestyle. All the benefits of eating locally Kingsolver provides are extremely appealing: reducing use of nonrenewable energy sources, savoring foods rather than having access to all kinds of food, all the time, and, of course, not consuming dozens of chemicals that allow us to eat any kind of food we want whenever we want it (even when it’s unnatural to have it). Additionally, the emotional benefits of eating the fruits of your own labor seem nice; it must be extremely self-empowering. However, this eating lifestyle she provides is also extremely unrealistic. First off, we don’t all live in areas that are easy to grow in. Kingsolver herself started off in Tucson, where it would certainly be difficult to grow your own food or access locally grown food; if she tried her experiment there, her diet would probably consist of dirt (literally). Additionally, how many of us have the time to grow our own foods? My dad, for a couple summers, spent hours babying his precious tomato plants; when the squirrels got to them later in the season, he would give up. The time it required to get what few tomatoes he could eventually wasn’t worth it, and he gave up growing his own tomatoes. Finally, if we all gave up our lives and devoted ourselves to farming (as Kingsolver suggests) how would all of our other businesses be maintained? How would our technology improve, how would we get from point A to point B, how would our government function? She’s probably going to eventually argue that we don’t need all that stuff… but that’s a little bit too primitive and granola for me. I do see the benefits of shopping locally and supporting your town’s market, but giving up all processed and exported foods, all of the sudden, would be too challenging for me. I think I could mentally do it, I have no problem with self control, but the effort to only obtain food locally would be too time consuming to commit to.

1984 journal #3

OH MY GOODNESS. Last time I spoke about a potential revolt! Then about ten pages later… that dream got crushed. Not only did Winston get caught for Thoughtcrime, he got sent to prison, whereupon he waited, and waited, and waited to be interrogated. It may have been hours, days, months… there was no way of knowing since Winston had no access to daylight. Finally, O’Brien was hurled into the same cell as Winston. Only, as Winston soon discovered, O’Brien wasn’t there for a crime; he was there to punish Winston. Winston had been watched for seven years—every thought Winston had against the party, every word written in his journal, every visit paid to the proles, every evening spent with Julia—the Party had watched. Winston was not simply a Thoughtcriminal. Winston was what the Party called “a lunatic.” But the Party didn’t just want to kill or torture Winston for his crime. They wanted to “cure” him, to transform him into a brand new man who wouldn’t ever have the kind of thoughts Winston had. O’Brien kept mentioning something along the lines of, “we don’t let heretics die.” To the Party, letting heretics die means they’ve let someone slip passed them that doesn’t agree with their beliefs.” As such, the Party chooses to cure Winston in a three-step treatment process: 1. Learning 2. Understanding 3. Acceptance. Winston struggles to change, even after what is essentially a lobotomy is performed on him. His brain now is one with the Party and can no longer perform doublethink, but his heart is still his own heart. The entire time Winston spends in “rehab” I kept thinking: “Shutter Island much?” There’s one distinct line at the end of Shutter Island; Leonardo DiCaprio asks, “Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” In the movie, this refers to why Teddy, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, makes up his alter-ego (SPOILER ALERT: he killed and regrets it so he goes psycho and makes up a whole new identity for himself). I was reminded of this line while reading 1984. In this case, the Party wants Winston to die a good man. But I kept wondering, if they eventually will kill Winston, why waste the effort to “cure” him? They want to lobotomize him so they can eliminate all martyrs; they want all men to die “good.” In the eyes of the Party, good essentially means lacking personality and not straying from positive thoughts of the Party. The flaw in the party, then, comes from failing to recognize the power of Winston’s heart. They break him down, then build him back up with the prospect of building him to be a perfect party member. Due to the power in Winston’s heart, though, he is able to still remember bits and pieces of his old mind, and builds his mind back up as he builds his body back up. He ultimately has no will to do anything with this power, because he knows there’s no use in trying to revolt because the Party could never be broken.

1984 Journal #2

Now, so far in 1984, the inevitable has happened. Goldstein’s secret revolt that the Party may or may not have made up is actually real, and Winston is on board. But is it really inevitable? Last week, when we argued either for or against Huxley’s argument (that technology controls us) my group came up with the argument that whether it controlled you or not didn’t matter, how you handled the oppression did. Since people generally enjoy and benefits of technology, society chooses to ignore its domination. However, if we had an oppressive government that we disliked, we would all notice the oppression and choose to revolt. The distinction between whether the oppression is “good” or “bad” comes with the passing of time. Winston feels that the oppression is bad, because he can vaguely remember a time when there was no oppression, whereas children in 1984 who don’t know anything different don’t see the oppression as a bad thing. As the book states, “… so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never become aware that they are oppressed” (Orwell 207). Since a revolt can never be successful if the people don’t understand the cause of revolt, I believe the Brotherhood’s methods of revolt are illogical. The measures it has taken to avoid getting caught by the Party/Thought Police make it so that no member of the Brotherhood will ever even know the name of more than five other members. This method prevents the Brotherhood from ever uniting as a whole, from ever extending their message to all generations, and from ever having success in eliminating the regime.

Julia’s tactics, however, might just be the answer. She doesn’t necessarily want to get rid of the Party, but she does not agree with the rules. As such, she breaks the rules, but avoids getting caught. By defying the Party, and imposing her rule-breaking on others (the men she has affairs with), Julia slowly dilutes the morality of Party members, and could ultimately destroy the Party from within… that is, had she not settled for Winston and ended her marathon of flings. 

1984 Journal #2

Now, so far in 1984, the inevitable has happened. Goldstein’s secret revolt that the Party may or may not have made up is actually real, and Winston is on board. But is it really inevitable? Last week, when we argued either for or against Huxley’s argument (that technology controls us) my group came up with the argument that whether it controlled you or not didn’t matter, how you handled the oppression did. Since people generally enjoy and benefits of technology, society chooses to ignore its domination. However, if we had an oppressive government that we disliked, we would all notice the oppression and choose to revolt. The distinction between whether the oppression is “good” or “bad” comes with the passing of time. Winston feels that the oppression is bad, because he can vaguely remember a time when there was no oppression, whereas children in 1984 who don’t know anything different don’t see the oppression as a bad thing. As the book states, “… so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never become aware that they are oppressed” (Orwell 207). Since a revolt can never be successful if the people don’t understand the cause of revolt, I believe the Brotherhood’s methods of revolt are illogical. The measures it has taken to avoid getting caught by the Party/Thought Police make it so that no member of the Brotherhood will ever even know the name of more than five other members. This method prevents the Brotherhood from ever uniting as a whole, from ever extending their message to all generations, and from ever having success in eliminating the regime.

Julia’s tactics, however, might just be the answer. She doesn’t necessarily want to get rid of the Party, but she does not agree with the rules. As such, she breaks the rules, but avoids getting caught. By defying the Party, and imposing her rule-breaking on others (the men she has affairs with), Julia slowly dilutes the morality of Party members, and could ultimately destroy the Party from within… that is, had she not settled for Winston and ended her marathon of flings. 

1984 Journal #1

Orwell’s 1984 hypothesizes the future of London, 36 years from the day it was written. It describes the outcome of a revolution that, to the main character, Winston, is irresolution to what he barely remembers of the erased past.

Winston is an insignificant official in the Party, the totalitarian political regime that rules all of what used to be called England, part of the larger state of Oceania. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, as an officer that alters historical records to match the Party’s official version of past events. Though Winston is technically a member of Party’s government, his life is still under its oppressive political control. In his apartment, an instrument called a telescreen is always on, spouting propaganda and monitoring the actions of citizens. He must wake up at the same exact time, every day, to perform age-specific exercises, despite the fact that he suffers tremendously from an injured ankle. He cannot have sexual relations for pleasure purposes, only for the purpose of creating new citizens, and the small ration of food he receives is so putrid that it must be preceded by a glass of gin to mask the flavor. Winston cannot speak to others about the regime controversially, and cannot even think in his head negatively about the Party, in fear of being arrested for Thought Crime.

Winston lives in constant fear of being caught for Thought Crime. In the very beginning of the book, he begins writing in a diary that he recently purchased; he doesn’t know whether he is writing to the past or the future. Ultimately, he decides that he is writing to his colleague, O’Brien, whom he recognizes will probably never get to read the diary. Winston presumes that O’Brien, like himself, opposes the Party, and wants to organize a revolution. However, because both would immediately be tried and ultimately executed, Winston can never know if O’Brien actually does want to revolt.

Additionally, Winston doesn’t even know if revolting is the right answer. According to the Party, the present is far superior to the past, before the Party’s revolution. And after having erased/ completely altered the past, Winston doesn’t know what the truth is anymore. He can vaguely remember bits and pieces here –and-there of his own past, but everything in the history books to newpapers matches with the Party’s desire of how the past events went. So Winston struggles to even believe himself. He, more than a few times, thinks of a memory, then argues with himself whether this was a true occurrence, simply something he dreamed, or the Party’s version of history that has brainwashed him. Winston claims he has one occurrence of solid evidence when he caught the Party in a lie. In the mid-1960s, a cultural backlash caused the original leaders of the Revolution to be arrested. One day, Winston saw a few of these deposed leaders sitting at the Chestnut Tree Café, a gathering place for out-of-favor Party members. A song played—“Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me”—and one of the Party members, Rutherford, began to weep. Winston never forgot the incident, and one day came upon a photograph that proved that the Party members had been in New York at the time that they were allegedly committing treason in Eurasia. Terrified, Winston destroyed the photograph, but it remains embedded in his memory as a concrete example of Party dishonesty.

I honestly can’t understand why Winston is finding it so difficult to dispute history. He recognizes that what the Party tells the population on a daily basis is a lie (for example, they tell the citizens they increased the chocolate ration, when, in fact, they decreased it). Additionally, it’s his job to make up these lies for the party. He’s the person behind the false histories. Does he not realize that everything he writes is proving the Party lies. How could he ever believe that time before the Revolution was worse than the present. Clearly, the Party made up that lie to. I don’t understand why Winston is so set in finding proof—he risks everything to go to the “proles” (proletariat/lower class dwellings) to speak to older people to find evidence that time was actually better before the Revolution. Why doesn’t he just trust his gut on this one?

I suppose his main problem in trusting himself is that he doesn’t know whether others despise the Party as much as he does; he doesn’t know whether he is just being a “lunatic” or not. Orwell writes “Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different” (60). He’s demonstrating that everyone had been so brainwashed by the Party, believes all the lies they construct, so they can’t remember a time before the Revolution to know that the present is intolerable. So, as far as Winston knows, he could very well be alone in this battle.

It’s interesting, though, what the citizens don’t realize is that the history the Party does tell doesn’t demonstrate a time that is worse than the present, it demonstrates a time that mimics the present. The history book reads, “They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as “Sir.” The chief of all the capitalists was called the King…” (73). Although Party leaders aren’t referred to as capitalists, they certainly receive the treatment of one. They blatantly segregate society into Party officials and the proletariat, and treat the proletariat like crap. The capitalist: Party leader analogy also is functional because a) the Party controls every aspect of everyone’s life just like the capitalists own every aspect of everyone’s life, and b) “King” is analogous to Big Brother.

I’m hoping Winston will very soon get the guts to do something about this horrible situation. 104 pages in is enough description of how oppressed he is; it’s starting to get repetitive and I’m eager to read about action, about how a counter-revolution will occur, if it can occur at all. 

Interview with the Vampire: Journal #2

As stated in my previous journal on Interview with a Vampire, the beginning of the book revolved around Louis’ coming of age as a vampire. At first, he didn’t want to drink human blood and lived off the blood of animals. However, in an attempt to comfort a young girl whose mother died of plague, Louis’ vampiric urges take over; he gets carried away and bites the young girl. Lestat then takes advantage of the situation and turns Claudia into a vampire; because Louis was becoming more and more independent and resistant of Lestat, Claudia served as a way to reign Louis in and keep him by Lestat’s side.

After several years, Claudia (who can never age she is a vampire) becomes angry with Louis and Lestat. Soon, however, Claudia and Louis form an alliance when Claudia discovers that Louis despises Lestat for turning him into a vampire as well. Eventually, Claudia brings about Lestat’s demise, so she and Louis can escape his wrath and travel the world.

After Claudia’s attempt to kill Lestat by burning him, she and Louis travel to Paris in search for others of their kind. After their long search, they meet a host of vampires in a theatre. Their leader is Armand, a vampire that is almost half a millennium old. Armand and Louis soon form a lover’s bond; Armand falls in love with Louis’ conscience-driven personality, while Louis looked up to Armand for his age and his wisdom. Louis replaces Claudia with Armand, and Claudia, consequently, must find a caretaker as a replacement for Louis. Louis creates a female vampire to serve as Claudia’s “mother.”

Eventually, the secret that Claudia committed the ultimate sin and killed one of her own kind leaks out, and the band of French vampires kill both Claudia and her new caretaker. As time passes, Louis’s resentment towards Armand for killing Claudia builds, and he leaves Armand to travel back to New Orleans. Once there, he finds Lestat, who actually escaped the fire, subsisting on rats and cats, no longer living life as lavishly as he used to.

The novel ended when Daniel, the interviewer, asked Louis to transform him into a vampire. Louis, enraged at Daniel for not understanding the essence of his story, bit and left him.

The two most common themes apparent in the story are alienation/detachment and passion. Louis, who previously lived as a mortal human, felt totally detached as a vampire and consequently suffered throughout the story. On one hand, he wanted to understand why he was so detached and alienated from humanity yet still have the ability to feel human emotions. The dilemma, of course, was his need to kill to survive, paired with his morality and personal choice to not kill. Lestat always mocked him for acting human despite being immortal. Countless times throughout the story, Louis wanted to die to be like a mortal human, but felt the obligation to stay for Claudia.

            The other prominent theme, sexuality, of course, hits directly on the discussion of gender roles. Gender roles seem to disappear in immortality. Because the vampires can no longer have sexual relations, gender is arbitrary, and choosing ones companion does not relate to sex. In this sense, the vampires are neither heterosexual, homosexual, nor bisexual; I would classify them as omnisexual. In the beginning of the story, Lestat turns Louis into a vampire; he doesn’t explicitly state it, but it is obvious he wants Louis as his mate. When Claudia is turned into a vampire and Louis and her relationship forms, Lestat replaces Louis as his mate with a young male musician. In the novel, they consider the act of drinking blood as the highest form of pleasure and they even compared it to sex. There was a part that Lestat said that he wanted ‘a lady’ for appetizers, an evil-doer as his main course (he didn’t mention if it was male or female) and he wanted ‘handsome youths’ as his dessert. The act of Lestat turning both Louis and the young musician boy into vampires represents taking his relationship to with them to third base; consequently, this act creates a lifelong companion for Lestat.

            The arbitrary role of gender in immortality again is seen later in the story when Louis and Armond become companions, as Lestat and Louis were. 

Interview with a Vampire journal

            My group chose to read Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire primarily to be able to analyze an extremely convoluted gender relationship that we’ve heard oh-so-much about. Personally, I wanted to read this book because I have read the Twilight series, liked it okay, and heard that much of it was based on Rice’s vampire series. The book, however, isn’t written like any normal novel. It’s very similar to The Princess Bride. There are two plots occurring simultaneously; one between the vampire and the interviewer, and the other of the vampire’s tale. So far in the book, the vampire, Louis, is relaying the array of events that led up to and occurred while Louis became a vampire. Louis came from a wealthy New Orleans plantation owning family; since his father died, Louis served as the head of the household, taking care of his mother, younger sister, and younger brother. The interviewer soon is told of how Louis’s brother claims to have seen saints and the Virgin Mary, and that they asked for his family’s property. Louis laughs in his brother’s face when he hears this, and suddenly his brother dies. Louis struggles to determine whether the death was his fault, and ultimately is unable to conclude why his brother died. Louis visits a priest, who claims that the brother had been possessed by the devil. I believe that Louis’s brother was faced with the opportunity to become a vampire, before even Louis had become a vampire or knew vampires existed. My theory is that the vampire Lestat (who would later turn Louis into a vampire) wanted the plantation, so he approached Louis’s brother. Louis’s brother wanted to become a vampire, but in order to do so had to give Lestat all of his family’s property. When Louis denied giving his brother the plantation, his brother was so ashamed to face Lestat again that he killed himself. And that is why Lestat later approached Louis to turn him into a vampire instead, and gain access to the plantation and Louis’s family’s wealth. So far, I don’t know if this theory of mine is correct, or if I will ever know. However, it is true that Louis was approached by Lestat to become a vampire. However, as Louis describes, although he was given the choice, there was no possible way for Louis to deny the proposition.

The story continues as Louis completes his transformation into a vampire, and learns the implications of being a vampire. Lestat serves as Louis’s guide, to teach him how to survive as a vampire. Unfortunately for Louis, he despises Lestat, but he is the only vampire Louis knows, and therefore the only person Louis can learn from.

            It’s very interesting, this entire beginning of the book is background and character development, but I still feel as if Lestat and Louis have just been introduced. I automatically am drawn to liking Louis, because the story is told from his perspective, but there are no character attributes that I like about him (he was cruel to his brother and didn’t fight to prevent Lestat from killing innocent people). On the other hand, I hate Lestat, just as Louis does, but have no justification for doing so… he hasn’t done anything to make me hate him yet; I simply hate him because Louis does.