Susan Bordo’s Source Annotation Of Ron Long’s The Fitness of the Gym

Long, Ron. (1997). “The Fitness of the gym,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. IV, No. 3, Summer, pp. 20-22.

Ron Long is a gay theorist who has done studies on what makes men attractive in The Fitness of the Gym. His research is in the interpretation of what the “beauty” of a man is. He would therefore support that men are attractive to other men not just because of their“hard bodies” but because of their entire image. 
The idea that I use from Ron Long’s The Fitness of the Gym is that contemporary gay sexual aesthetics are closer to “lean, taut, sinuous muscles rather than Schwarzenegger bulk.” The reason this idea is presented is to note that there are many interpretations and personal reasons to why men may be sexually desirable—the desire is not just because of his muscles and buildup, but because of how the muscles appear. While the bulkier guy appears to be the sex symbol (the traditional way man were portrayed), the other guy presents more “dynamic tension”. When you see him, you imagine more than just a bulky guy, but you envision a guy with more flexibility, more agility—he is designed for movement; this allows your imagination to be limitless.

David Foster Wallace

I think that the most significant thing about the David Foster Wallace's piece is when he talks about actually taking in the information verses just sucking the information in to only spit it out later. This is very similar to what Pablo Freire was saying about understanding and applying what you learn to your life, as oppose to just taking it lightly.

Even though there are many different subjects a student may take in a semester, the student must realize that it is important to synthesize all of the information; but how one takes in the information varies between person to person. This fasinates me because I think that as long as the subject is meaningful to the individual--and it doesn't matter if the person "receive" what he or she should from the situation-- but yet the individual at least understands why the information  is taught or given.

Blog 4 "The Banking Concept of Education"

"The Banking Concept of Education," by Pablo Freire, deals with almost two definite sides explaining the way the teacher-student relationship exists. What Freire does essentially is deciphers how the relationship between the two should be: the job of the teacher and the position of the students should be interchangeable, the teacher must be willing to learn from the students and allow them to speak what they believe.

However, since the beginning of formal education, the teacher is the one who instructs, and the students are the ones who listen. Through this process, and strict mindset of what  a classroom is, the teachers are ones who dump knowledge into the students (the containers); then, "Education thus becomes an act of depositing. Freire attempts to gain all of the information presented.

I find that I relate to him in the sense that I felt that I had to work hard at learning and gaining an education, and that I often would work so hard that I would be overworking (doing more than above average). To me, one is either not working hard enough, or is working hard, but apparently, there is a such thing as working "too hard". I find that it is hard to tell when one is working "too hard". Whether it be out on the labor fields, or in a classroom. If you are getting the job done, you are doing the job. There is a such thing as working diligently, persistently, ect.

He works "too hard" perhaps because he spends a lot of time studying, a lot of time a way from his family. But I do not think that working "too hard" is an issue, I think that having good working skills is a plus, as long as it does not interfere with personal/individual development.

The Psychological Effects of Acting

First of all, actors consider their job legitimate. If one has pleasure in doing a task, one is willing to give up a lot of time to do it. For instance, famous actors, such as Natalia Portman and Leonardo DiCaprio, spend ample time studying techniques of acting. It is not a profession you can jump right into; acting is a process that needs to be taken as such with delicacy and this is how the successive actor must first see it. The successive actor also must learn to find the self, be creative, and inspiring.

Many people think that actors are in their profession mainly for the ability to become a star, for fame; many may also think that it is an easy way to make a lot of money and become rich. This is not how a successive actor thinks about his or her job. They may enjoy the benefits they gain from working and hope to gain more, but they also suffer from the privileges of having these benefits.

Sometimes actors do not always get the job they want, and when the successful actors do, they may not be able to live with that. How can you measure success?  Success is measured by if the actor is famous among the media. Filming acting is theater; theater does not exist unless it has an audience. If the audience does not like the product, the actor’s career suffers; then, the actor becomes stressed.

Actors are constantly being watched. They become self-conscience.  Strive to put on a scene; they can lose themselves.

Actors gain different perspectives when analyzing real world scenarios, but are somewhat psychologically damaged by this.

They do not know what they think from themselves. Constantly overanalyze.

4. Counter argument: What is a successive actor? A successive actor does not necessarily mean that the actor is a star from Hollywood, or that the actor makes a lot of money.

Actors are themselves and just play themselves in front of people; however, sometimes they must change their appearance to remain in the media because they can become old news.

Seeing in different perspectives does not mean you automatically overanalyze; however, it is harder to go for your own personal impulse, your own judgment.  

 
 

5. Research – what kinds? After research, what do you hope to discover?

What do actors consider themselves to be like.

The difficulties of being an actor, other than the ones discussed earlier.

1. Playing to the camera : film actors discuss their craft

edited by Bert Cardullo ... [et al.].

Published: New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998.

Learn the difficulties of learning acting.

2. Actors talk : profiles and stories from the acting trade

Dennis Brown.

1st ed.

Published:

New York : Limelight Editions, 1999

How acting influenced the actors.

3. Gunmen and gangsters : profiles of nine actors who portrayed memorable screen tough guys

Schlossheimer, Michael

Published: Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2002.

How acting influenced the actors.

Blog 3, "The Achievement of Desire"

" The Achievement of Desire", by Richard Rodriguez, is a story about how the author started off as the uneducated student to becoming a "scholarship boy." This "scholarship boy" is someone he described as wanting to gain knowledge, and as someone who’s greatest desire is to achieve an elitist education.
                             
In this sort of pursuit, to gain knowledge, he says the person becomes an imitator; the person is actually becoming a bad student because he forgets about himself, he forgets how to be genuine about a topic; instead, he focuses on writing and speaking about facts he has acquired about the topic; he does not use the facts to support his opinion, but he uses them to almost always inform as if he was writing an academic essay. This leaves the student empty in heart, and yet full in the mind.

When the student becomes empty, the student forgets himself; he no longer knows how to be himself. He becomes distant. The author wrote that he had trouble relating to his parents because he was transforming into this person. Essentially, the author is not able to relate to his parents because his goals were different than theirs. Of course, they wanted him to succeed, but they never experienced what he was, so they could not relate to what he was going through--they could not help him in some ways, even in academia--he surpassed their expertise.

Also, he became this person by forgetting and losing most of his culture, and his family. His goal was to learn as much as he could about what he was told was important; things told to him from people teaching him how to become educated (the nuns, teachers, professors, etc...). At the expense of not knowing, and/or learning, and/or maintaining what was valued by his parents and his family, he optimizes what he can learn, he reads constantly; he forgets and loses a lot of his past.

He knows that he is changing and becoming a different person. The elitist student, the "scholarship boy" knows/learns he has to make this sacrifice early on. This is why he and his parents have a hard time accepting each other. It seemed that he was making a choice between his family and his education, and his family members were losing, and that was the main problem; education was what his parents wanted him to focus on primarily, they were proud, but the problem was in the way he went about gaining his education. His parents did not understand. Why did he have to leave home for college? Why was reading such a passion of his? He isolated himself from them because it is something he says every individual must experience to some degree; it is the only way one can morph into his own self. The struggle is: how does one maintain proper education and loved ones while in a similar situation?

Prep for Paper: Power Kanye West

Visual choices/ images.

The video starts off zoomed-in inside of a picture (just showing Kanye West). As time progresses, the video zooms out and reveals West surrounded by unearthly creatures. The picture frame not only zooms outward, but the surrounding obejects and individual creatures are in motion (the clouds, the twin staff holders).

As the image zooms outward, more creatures are being revealed and the speed at which everything is moving seems to speed up, making it harder to see every thing. This is ironic because one would suspect that as the frame becomes larger, the picture would start revealing itself to the audience; we could better understand what the visual is intended to say. Instead, we get a lot of creatures bunched together whom are all moving making it harder to focus in on one thing at a time. It may be intended to be a metaphor: the seer's frame is always subjective to what actually happens. You don't see it all for what it is, well you can't unless it is really important.

What West may have wanted us to pay attention were those visuals with sudden movement paralled to the sound of the beats that separated the verses from the chorus and vice versa. When the upside person drops the sheet that she is holding, you can't help but notice because it is so suden. Then the attention wander away, but where to; after, my eyes went to the opposite side of West, where there was a guy coming at him with a knife.

The two opposite sides of West are equal in space, while what goes on in both vary, if not, are opposite in what some of the creatures are doing on either side.

Prep for the Summary/Analysis Paper: Power by Kanye West

What is Kanye West saying about himself and his career?

Clearly he is casting himself in a brighter light, and being egotistical: he says he is doing better to the 21st century than anyone else, he refers to himself as a superhero, and he says he count time by the hour.

It seems that he refer to the "success" of his career as the thing that makes his contribution to the 21st century such a success.
Simply by calling himself a superhero, he is saying he is not human, or that he is not just another man.
Counting by the hour is uncommon and it may be a preference of West becasue it is so, and because he is suggesting that he is a busy man.

Then, he switches subjects; it is now from West to perhaps 'black people in general'. "With some light skinned girls and some Kelly Rowlands In this white man world we the one's chosen": now he isn't appraising himself, but maybe the black race. The struggle for power involved, one time at least, whites against blacks.

The focus switches again: "Fuck SNL." He targets this group because now he may feel he must struggle against black people who he consider his competitors. Their careers are successful, but he argues that he is more successive.

He recalls that "They say I {he} was the abomination of Obama's nation."

In this piece he feels obligated to say that he is and was successful, this whole thing is him trying to prove himself. He is saying that his career is succesful and that he isn't the bad person people think him to be.
--even though he is being egotistical, which he addresses.

Blog 2: Pain Scale

"The Pain Scale" by Eula Biss affects me intellectually. Although it is a hard piece to classify and understand what the central message is suppose to be, this piece still grabs my attention and holds it.

The main concern Biss seems to have is the inability to quantify pain. There is no way to measure how much pain someone is feeling and have the other person who recieves the measurements to completely understand that pain. She furthermore explains the attempt that we make in quantifying pain: on the pain scale, from 0 until 10, with zero being no pain to 10 being extreme pain. The dilima with this is that pain is a subjective event that includes physical and emotional feelings, and sometimes even spiritual and/or social and/or financial feelings/reasons.

When Biss is asked what sort of pain she felt at a particular moment, she felt she had to protect her "reputation" and "act certain" that she was feeling pain that needed to be tended to; she did not want the doctor, her farther, to think that her pain was a lie. This is how many people feel about going to the doctors: you just do not know how to express your pain whereas the next person will understand it as you do.

Although pain and the inability to measure it or express howmuch of it one is feeling to another person seems to be the core theme in this piece (especially because it is titled "The Pain Scale"), religion and the number zero are reoccuring thoughts throughout. Biss compares zero to be less tangible than Christ. This maybe because when one speaks of Christ one speaks of love, and there's only one force that opposes it: hate (Satan); you can only have one or the other. With the number zero on any scale, you're essentially measuring whether you have something or not; but you have many more choices: from 0-1 there is an infinite amount of numbers between these two numbers along; so how is that one could ever reach zero at all?

Throught, Biss appeals to the readers' logic with her knowledge but she also presents many unanswered questions to leave us to figure for ourselves.

Why Bother?

Michael Pollan's article, "Why Bother", starts off by explaining the title. The question is meant for individuals hoping to become active in doing something to stop climate change. It is until Pollan is influenced by Al Gore that he writes. Gore simply ends with: we (the people) must "change our light bulbs"--this being the most and only realistic thing we can do right now. Which leads Pollan to
discuss the core question: what if one does bother?

Pollan essentially says that becoming an activist for energy conservation, to hinder climate change, one must work at it. Even if one does become an activist, the overall climate changing conditons would not be influenced upon globally; The individual could persevere on--which is a sign of virture; but Pollan goes to frase that many, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times put it, acclaimed it as a "personal virture". How does one know if the climate will be affected by changes suggested?

Pollan does find that many individuals all across the globe are worried about Global warming, and he even finds that scientists' projections shows that the warming and the melting is occuring much faster than the models predicted. He quotes Michael Specter: "Personal choices...take laws and money." If
we do decide to change climate change rates, we will have to change our lifestyle. He says we must convince the politicians first becaue they are the ones we leave the job to through specialization; which is a blessing but also a curse: it "obscures the lines of connection--and responsibility".

Pollan adresses that cheap energy/fossil fuel is easier and efficient eneregy, but it gives us climate change. We must act now because we are running out of time; we must "act as if acting will make a difference." We must treat the Earth as if it was our home for infinity. So we must maintain sunlight
but replace fossil-fuel fertiliziers; we should utilizy the sunlight and gardening--these are by-products to living a healthy life.

More pondering

A person who is lazy is normally so out of choice; but that doesn't mean the person is because that's the person's personality. There must be a deeper meaning to why it is that a person chooses not to do something. Maybe that person is having a hard time trying to relate. What if we scratch that point, what if that person sees that socializing is pointless unless it contributes to the knowledge of society.

Or what if that person is a man of few words just because he doesn't see the need to explain by detail that point that stands clearly stated.

What does all of the above sentences say.

Maybe the person has issues. From where-- family memebers, friends, peers, church...?

Tentative Research question--

Many people think that by taking a pyschology class they can better interpret a person based off of his or her first impressions of that person; but in reality, with this class experience, it may make the job a lot harder. Now, there are many more possibilites floating in the students' head to why a person may think this way or act that way.

I am really interested in taking maybe a pyschology class next summer because I'm interested in knowing why people act a certain way, or why a person feels this way about this thing while another person reacts differently. What strikes me more is the ability that each individual gets to be his own person, and not one person is exactly the same as another--no matter how similiar their ideologies or beliefs are. I find that learning the inside of another person's mind is a crucial element to understaning one's self.

It is a vey difficult task, and I use to find myself frustrated at the number of possibities that shape a person in a specific way, especially when I'm acting out a part for a theatrical performance. When analyzing a character I learned that you have to go directly from dry reading the lines--without emotion or preconcieved ideas of the charater--to understanding the character's goal and interest, and purpose for being on stage, and the obstacles to which the character acts against.

Off that point, when analyzing a person in everyday life, or that newly acclaimed friend, you start with what you think and then you ponder.

 You start at this point/idea and you expand upon it from there. You go from point A: this person is interesting because he/she likes this, and I like this thing too; to point B: he/she likes this because I like that very thing, or he/she geniuely likes the thing.