HW 25: Memories... All Alone in the Moonlight

Yes, we are starting to read a new book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend. Reading the foreword and introduction it brought back a few memories of that fateful time of the war. I never believed I would actually have to live through a time when there was a war but I have. These two parts of the book explained two views from Ahdaf Soueif and James Ridgeway about the war. Soueif talks about the book and some of what Riverbend will be talking about while Ridgeway talks about what it looked like from the American view of the Iraq war. Ridgeway also goes into more about the American history with wars, which is a little dry to me. I had no idea the specific day they officially invaded Iraq. The thing I remember most is being in 7th grade in math class with Mr. E on September 11. I remember they would not turn on the television or tell us anything specific about what was going on. I am not a person that is hugely into war but I think this will be a good read and I am very excited to get started.

Lindsay

HW 24: The Progress of Women Today

The last chapters in Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own makes me realize how far we’ve come with women and the role they play in society. Back when Woolf was writing things weren’t as fair as they are today. Not saying everything is fair nowadays, but it is a lot better. Let’s see then, a room of my own, this book confused me a lot. I understand that she does not mean literally a room of your own but just somewhere that you can go and write. My room here on campus, specifically my bed, is sort of a getaway from the everyday drama of school and life. I can go lie in my bed and read. I’m not much of a writer, so I don’t write usually unless I have to. We have made a lot of progress since then. Women can go into libraries and most women are educated or can be educated just as well as men can now. Woolf states “Few women even now have been graded at the universities; the great trials of the professions, army and navy, trade, political and diplomacy have hardly tested them.” (Woolf, 85) We see this has changed. You see women in the army all the time and so many females at colleges and universities. Recently we have had women stand up and try to run for president even. Woolf also says “Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished.” (Woolf, 104) This shows no single sex can be in the world and we really need both men and women in this world.

Lindsay

HW 23: Apologies to Virginia Woolf

I apologize to Virginia Woolf because she is a wonderful writer and I was asked to write a spoof:

As I walk down the street I see many cars rushing by, with each one my thoughts jump from one thought to a different thought. As I sit on the grass and open my laptop. I opened the Feministing website and a very short article called Ginsburg Speaks Out on Women’s Rights at http://feministing.com/archives/007968.html. I opened it and my eye was caught by the phrase (Woolf 68) “She noticed if Roe was overturned, middle class women would still be able to obtain abortions, but the decision would have a devastating impact on poor women.” How do they classify “poor” women, I wondered (68)? And I read that Ginsburg did not see the court overturning the case of Roe vs. Wade. Why would they ever think of changing the laws? Why shouldn’t women have the right to choose? Why should the women have the right to choose? We need answers not questions.

Lindsay

HW 22: Patriarchy.... Excuse Me???

When I was reading chapter two of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf I noticed that she views the world as being run by patriarchy. She mentioned many different things that gave insight to the patriarchy in England. She talks a lot about the professor, which I think she is meaning any male person. When Woolf says “The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy,” (Woolf 33) she is talking about by just reading the newspaper anyone that did not live in England could tell that men ran the country. A quote I liked as well is when she says “Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority,” (Woolf 34) I like this because it is kind of showing how by putting others down it can make some people feel better about themselves. That is awful, I know, but still it happens.

I went to the Boston Globe website www.boston.com to look at the newspaper to see if I thought the US was run by a patriarchy. I’m not really sure. With the Red Sox recently winning against The Indians sending them into the World Series (GO SOX!!) there are a lot of articles about the Sox. That doesn’t mean we are a patriarchy, because not just men like the Red Sox. There are also articles about pets, O.J. Simpson, the space shuttle launch, fashion, and weddings. It seems to me that it is pretty even and no sex is more dominant over the other anymore. Well that you can tell from the media anyways.

Lindsay

HW 21: RE: Virginia Woolf is So Confusing!

Dear Josh,

Yeah, I know what you mean. A Room of One’s Own is a hard book to understand. Chapter 1 is about Virginia Woolf thinking about how she would write a speech about women and fiction. She is very good at describing her surroundings. She is visiting many places and contemplating what to write about. She talks a lot about places that she is not allowed to enter like the Oxbridge (male) school and the church. I think she is also talking about women’s rights in the sense of being allowed some places and not in others. It is hard though to interpret everything she says. Your English teacher might think this is important because everything that has gone on with women in the past and how women write. I had a lot of trouble understanding it and I can see why you do too. I hope this kind of helped you and gave you a few ideas for your book report. See you soon!

Lindsay

HW 19: The Tangled Web of Influence

After reading the chapter “Web of Influence” by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein there was one paragraph that really stood out to me. This paragraph is on pages 87-88 and talks about how you need to have links to your blog on other blogs to get people to read your own. One sentence that I really like was “Thus, in the blogosphere, the rich (measured in the number of links) get richer, while the poor remain poor.” In other words, people who tend to have more links out there, the more viewers and readers they will have. On the other hand people who have vey little to no amount of links out will have the same result in readers. For example, my blog probably doesn’t have very many links because it is for a class while the blog at www.crookedtimber.org has many links. My conclusion, then, is that people should get the word out on their blogs to get more people to read them!

Lindsay

HW 18: Is Anorexia Becoming Sexy?????

Okay so when you think of anorexia do you think about laughing or that anorexia is sexy?? Well some freaks that made the “Sexy Anna Rexia” costume obviously do. On the site Salon: Broadsheet at http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/10/04/anorexia/index.html there is a picture of the costume as well as a description. There are things like a measuring tape choker and a measuring tape that goes around your waist and a heart pin that says Anna Rexia. The dress is a little black dress that has a skeleton pattern on it. Disturbing much? Yeah I think so. This is probably my least favorite post of the in the past week because it is just disturbing. How can you poke fun at an extremely destructive disease that is hurting or maybe even killing so many of the teen and young adult women in our world? That is just as bad as making a costume out of some other harmful disease, say cancer or even malaria. That is just wrong. The woman that wrote this post said “Even as Anna Rexia makes my skin crawl like no other Halloween costume ever has, I’m also not terribly comfortable getting worked up about a costume for a holiday that is all about embodying our fears” Well, I am and I did! This was a horrible thing and I hope I don’t have to read about a costume like that again.

Lindsay

HW 17b: Influential Blogs

After reading the interviews with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Ana Marie Cox in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I went and visited their blogs DailyKos (dailykos.com) and Wonkette (www.wonkette.com). As much information that DailyKos has, Wonkette has gossip. I think Wonkette would have more of an influence on how I vote in coming elections. I find Wonkette more interesting than DailyKos because she blogs with a voice, not just news stories or statistics. She blogs about things that are interesting and it is more of a relaxed feel to her writing. Recently there was a post about how Mitt Romney pretty much ignored a guy in a wheelchair who has muscular dystrophy when he asked “Would you arrest me and my doctors if I got medical marijuana prescribed to me?” Romney pretty much said that he doesn’t think medical marijuana should be legalized and went on shaking hands of other people. Completely ignoring what the guy had asked. This definitely influenced my vote; it kind of shows how ignorant he is about things. He spoke at my school last year and he shifted his answers to controversial questions like gay rights and abortion and he really didn’t answer the questions asked. Ana Marie Cox writes with a real voice. I enjoyed looking at Wonkette and I think I will continue to look at it in the future.

Lindsay

HW 17: Beyonce, Malaysia, and Midriff???

I am watching a blog called Salon: Broadsheet.The post I read about it called “Should Beyonce bow to Malaysia’s dress code?” at this site http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/10/02/malaysia/index.html . I acknowledge both views in this story. Beyonce isn’t going to do a show in Malaysia (one of her tour spots) because they don’t agree with the revealing outfits. Malaysia made a dress code that you have to cover up clavicle to knee in order to perform. On the other hand Gwen Stefani added more jackets and leotards to her wardrobe to comply with the dress code so she could do her show. This shows two different views of how to deal with this cultural difference. I agree with the way Gwen Stefani handled it. This is their culture. You are invited to perform in another country and you can’t change the way you are dressed to not cause controversy between cultures. No one forced these performers to come do a show in a country that does not allow women to dress the same as they do here; they chose to go to that country by themselves. On the other hand I don’t agree with the part in the article that says that Akon sang “Smack That” (which has some iffy lyrics) earlier in the year and he was not asked to change it. It just shows how women are portrayed in other cultures and how much pressure there is on them to act and dress appropriately.

Lindsay

HW 16: Five Pillars of Convorsational Software

I read an interview with Robert Scoble called “Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein. In this interview he talked about the 5 Pillars of Conversational Software. These are what Scoble thinks are the 5 things that made blogging hot. The first one is the ease of publishing. Anyone can go on the web, take 2 minutes to set up an account with whatever blog site they want to, and start writing about anything that comes to mind. The second one is discoverability. This is relating to how blog authors put tags on their posts to tell people what they are about, people can search for a subject, and certain tagged blogs will come up of that subject. Cross-site conversation is also one of the pillars. This is talking about how sites can link to each other if they blog about the same topics. Permalinking is the fourth pillar. Using permalinking you can put a URL to a certain blog post instead of your homepage and people don’t have to search through all your posts to find a specific one. The last pillar is syndication. Syndication helps you see a large number of sites on your own terms. I was a little confused on this pillar and I wasn’t sure what exactly it meant.

Lindsay

HW 14: Blogging... Copyrighting??

As a result of reading the Joi Ito Interview “Japanese Blogger Champions Internet Democracy” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein my view of blogging has changed a bit. For example, our last blog post had to be about whether blogs were better for business or communication, I chose business. However, I now see that communication is just as important. As an illustration, Ito says “You can do what you want but you’re in my living room, so be respectful because I have to take care of this place.” (Kline and Burstein 144) After all a blog really is your own space to choose what is said and what to throw out. In addition I liked how Ito talked about copyrighting things that people put on the blogs. Specifically when he said that you would be able to give some of the copyrights away if you wanted. Although it is true copyrighting is something that is still up in the air about blogs and is tough subject to pin on things like blogs. In conclusion I enjoyed Ito’s interview and agree with a lot of what he said and I am thinking of going to look at his blog!

Lindsay