1st post for Idiot Savant

This will be the first of my ten reflections on the play Idiot Savant.

It has been about 2 weeks now since I have seen this play down in the village and I still seem to think about it very often. The only reason that I could imagine I have for this constant recollection is that I have to develop a reaction to this play for my fourth paper grade. The thing is that I know this is not the reason and I still am at a loss to the simple question of why? Honestly I did not like the play at all mainly because I did not fully understand it. (Granted I did have some thoughts of my own about the performance, but those will be coming in my later blogs.) I did however find the play extremely interesting and I would love to know the actual meaning behind the entire performance. As for whether my take on it was right or not, that does not matter to me, I know how I viewed the play and I think that might have been partially right in all that I was saying but it would still interest me to know the true meaning behind it all. This is because the whole play seemed to be symbolism and deep meaning. What was the point of the giant duck, why did he have to play mini golf, why did the lady come out from behind the table, why did he wear the yellow jacket? There are countless more questions that I have for this play, most of which I have attempted to answer. The fact that this play was so abstract is what makes it so difficult to answer these questions. Also, why Wilem Defoe?

If you want to stick, you have to be different

I was in the city last night and as I was walking around I noticed all of the different sounds and attractions taking place on every sidewalk and street corner. Every single street vendor and stand in the city has there own way of calling you over to them. The salvation army guy had his little bell, while the guy at the hotdog and pretzel stand banged his tongs the cart to cause attraction to himself. They are all different, even the countless people who offer to draw a cartoon picture of yourself, the guys who sell the bootleg DVDs or the people in chinatown who sell you bags and watches all day. The point is that they all have to be different for you to notice them and to remember them for next time if you so chose to go back to them. They will either follow you and tell you what they are selling, yell out prices at you, or call you over saying what they have and how it is a great deal. It is the people on the side of the street who just sit there and do not cause attraction that have the most trouble when tying to sell things. Take the people in central park or in the subways who all play music, how many of them do you actually remember? Probably not a lot because for the most part they are all the same. Granted some are at least entertaining and that makes them memorable, but otherwise you forget about most of them very quickly and easily because they are all the same. If you don't stand out then you re just another person in the city, nothing special. The people who we probably all remember, if you have ever seen them before, are the ones who dress up and paint themselves to look like statues and move and act one you give them money. I remember over the summer there was one person in Times Square who would walk behind people and mock how they walk and act if you put money into a bucket he had in front of him. I only remembered him because he stood out and was different. Granted there are many of them in the city but they all do different things. Also, notice how I remembered he was in Times Square too? It's because Times Square is the prime example of this blog post. The city is known for Times Square because there are always people there and there are constantly new attractions and things going on. Also, there are countless broadway shows being performed on a daily basis. All of this stuff makes it stand out and also the ultimate tourist attraction. This is because they do not want to see the quiet empty side streets, they want to see the action and the bright lights. After all isn't that why they came to the city in the first place? NYC is a big city and if you don't standout then you're not going to make it.

Thanks Garmin

So I was in the city last night and as I was walking past Rockefeller Center I noticed that light show going on outside of Saks 5th Avenue. They had these giant light up snowflakes on the front of the building that would light up at different times to the tune of a christmas song. I do not know the name of it but the tune is very familiar. What I noticed the most as I was watching this light show was that I could not get the Garmin commercial out of my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9WxJ1aN42E&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_fresh+div-HM

There are about 5 different versions of this commercial and this is just one of them. But the point is that Garmin has taken this widely known song and put there own twist on it so now whenever I hear this song I cannot stop thinking about the Garmin commercial. When I was in the city last night I could not get it out of my head. I doubt that I am not the only person who thinks this way about the song so Garmin has ruined this christmas song and taken it to a corporate level and, I feel, has taken the christmas out of the song. Thanks Garmin.

P.S. Here is another version of the song but I don't think that this has ruined the song as much because this is simply a parody which is not played very often. The Garmin commercial I see on T.V. all of the time and the fact that it is used to represent christmas in the commercial has taken away more from christmas because as in this next clip there are no reference to christmas at all. The fact that the Garmin commercial is about christmas and is just another advertisement takes away so much more from christmas and the original song itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBgHTJOsi6c&feature=related

One last note, THINK ABOUT HANSEL AND GRETEL. Don't you think that there is a connection between what I just said and with Hansel and Gretel? All Garmin did was take a widely known song and put there own twist on it to be memorable. Same thing with AT&T. They just took a widely known story and put their own twist onto it. There was no deep meaning behind it, they did the same thing that Garmin did. Use things which stand out to your own advantage! Hansel and Gretel is a classic story about getting lost and now AT&T can jump in and use their new AT&T phone with GPS to add a new twist to the story. Just as Garmin used a well known song to have the audience add a new meaning to it. This is so now every time a person hears that song they will think about Garmin and every time they see Hansel and Gretel they will think about AT&T. Simple as that, both companies have just ruined two well known pieces of art.

Stickiness really did stick

So I was out to lunch the other day with my mom since I had off from school and she began to tell me a story about my neighbor's child. We have known these people for about thirteen years now and their youngest child is about five years old. My mother was over their house the other night and she told me about how the five year old went up to her and starting singing in french. When she told me this I was comepletely surprised considering that he is only five, but he is learning very basic french in his Kindergarten class. The point of my story is that he was only able to sing french because that is how they taught him to remember what they were learning. This is probably the most productive way of teaching because if you sat down a five year old and told him to follow along with a french lesson, 99% of the time the child will remember nothing from that lesson. It is only because that they were able to appeal to him and make him learn in a way that is fun and creative that he was able to remember french. I can vouch for this in two different subjects. I learned a math equation in 10th grade to the melody of "Pop goes the Weasel" and to this day I can still remember the equation perfectly. It was the quadratic equation. Also, when I was in 8th grade I remembered how to say all of the question words in spanish through a simple song to the melody of "Jingle Bells". Even when I used to do my spanish homework I would start to hum the tune and sing the song in my head just so I could remember the words. I still remember how to say them now and I haven't taken spanish class in two years. Isn't it amazing how people can sometimes remember the most random of facts just from learning them in the simplest of ways?

The library now creeps me out.....

So today around 2 o'clock I walked with one of my friends to the Axxin library so I could drop off a book to one of my other friends who i previously borrowed it from. My friend was sitting in the cafe part of the library and as I was walking through there I couldn't help but think about our stalking assignment that we had last week. That assignment has changed my whole outlook on the library and the people in there. I mean our class was just a simple group of college kids who were given an assignment and then quietly dispered into the library. Little did everyone else in the library know that they were being watched intently by this unsuspecting group of teenagers. This is exactly why I felt a little creeped out being in there today because you never do know when someone is watching you. I'd say that our class did a pretty good job at being discrete in what we did because no one was approached by their subject or taken away by public safety for stalking. Yet the more I thought about how good our class did, the more creeped out I felt. Who knows maybe Dr. Lay had another class in there at the time? There would be no way for me to point them out because our subjects for the project were completely unaware of who we were associated with (our class and professor) and more specifically who we were ourselves. This experience has definitely changed my outlook on the library, but it will not stop me from going there. If I see someone who is watching me intently I'd probably just move to another part of the library.

What is Stickiness?

This article I feel was excellent. It served its purpose through describing itself in a way. The ending of the article pulled all of these ideas together for me, in that it created a new hypothesis for my views on this reading. This is because once I read it, it had similar effects on me about Shelley Jackson's piece, but only the part where I understood it and nothing else. It seemed to me that once I finished reading this piece I realized what the writer was doing. They were using stickiness to describe stickiness. By this I mean that the article was an example of stickiness in itself. It was creative by using different examples of stickiness (the urban legends) and by appealing to people, I felt, by being extremely simple. It most of the characteristics which were listed towards the end of the article when they were broken down into six different parts. This article definitely did stick for me. It did so much that I was able to read it in two parts, meaning that I took a break, went to my job and came back a few hours later and remembered what they were talking about enough that I could pick up reading where I left off and post a blog about it, without having to go back and reread most of it.

It even appealed to me in the sense that I agreed with what it was saying for the most part. I think that stickiness is a simple, creative story which appeals highly to people's emotions and also just their sense in general. Meaning that they simply liked it for whatever reason (comedy, truth, etc.) I think that through those ways it is the only way which you will get the majority of the public audience to remember what it is you are making a case about. There might be some people who will remember it for their own personal reason, whether they hate it or have some personal passion for it, but in order to get it to stick with the majority of the public, your case has to be extremely memorable on all levels so that it will indeed appeal to most individuals.

I like to think of the commercials that we saw in class this semester as a prime example of stickiness. If our class was asked tomorrow if they remembered what happened in both the Asian Pantene commercial and the Hansel and Gretel AT&T commercial, my guess is that they would indeed remember it. This is not because we have watched them so much, as it is that they sticked to people. They stuck because they were creative and that is the most important part in all of this. Creativity is needed whether the case is good or bad. Hansel and Gretel stuck because it was creative and different and it was also a fairly decent commercial. The Pantene commercial on the other hand was, I felt, extremely bad, yet we all remember it because it was creative and different. If we think of mass media and how much simply plain bad material there is on television alone today, there are countless cases that are terrible yet still creative. Think of last season on American Idol, the bikini girl who went to the auditions and didn't make it very far at all. Yet at the end of the season people were still talking about her even though she was such a bad singer. Also, the song "LOL :)" (yes, lol smiley face is indeed the title) I personally like, but it is just such a stupid concept of a song, but it is after all creative and this is why it sticks with people, whether they like it or not. I asked some of my friends if they had heard the song and if they liked it or not and out of the four people that I asked, three of them said that they had heard it even though they didn't like it. They only remembered it because it was so creatively bad and because of this, so memorable.

This is simply how mass media works, sometimes the worse it is, the more memorable it is. Yet this is also another way for people to get their point across to people. If you think of it, it might seem more logical for ad campaigns to use more stupid tactics in their commercials simply because they stick to people more. Geico is the perfect example because their caveman ad campaign is easily the worst ad campaign out there now, yet people still remember Geico and continue to use their services all the time. Lets hope, for the sake of mass media and advertising, that ad campaigns don't get more like Geicos and that producers will stick to using good creative ideas in their ads.

Why we stalked.....

I feel that this whole assignment, in a way, was another method to get us to pay attention. I mean that is what stalkers do, they watch every move of their subject to such an extent that it becomes creepy. This is what we did in the library the other day, we sat down, viewed our subjects to great extents and took notes on them. This project was for us to be able to be aware of our surroundings and to be able to notice the things which we would otherwise not overlook.

To me this relates to the video clip from the movie "The Pink Panther" that we watched in class last week. The whole point of that clip, for us anyway, was to think about asking the right questions, whereas the point of this assignment was to notice the right things. Our whole focus in class for the past week or so has been about taking notice, asking the right questions, and being able to deduce meaning from them. All of this is exactly what we were required to do in the library yesterday. Our worksheets asked us to take notes on what our subject was doing, provide metaphors for those actions and then to describe our own take on them (deduce the meaning of it all). having just realized all this just now when I received the email about blog, I now have more of an understanding about what this assignment was truly meant for. It was to get us to open up our senses and to be attentive.

Stalking.....

Today our assignment for english was one which I never thought I would ever receive. We were instructed to meet in the lobby of the library and stalk people. As our class walked in my professor handed us a worksheet to fill out and then it was up to us to find people.

As I was walking through the library I walked right up to the center and sat down on the couches by the row of computers. I think the girl that I was stalking was kind of on to me and probably very creeped out. Her posture in a way gave me that impression. She was sitting there doing her paper, yet she kept aware of her surroundings, mainly me. I was totally not discrete about it either, when I sat on the couch she was the person who was sitting the closest to me at the row of computers. Also, I sat facing her directly to make it even more obvious. The part that I think could have possibly gave it away that I was stalking her was that when I got up to get my coffee I went back to the exact seat in front of her and sat facing her again and continued to take notes. She also kept glancing over her shoulder every two minutes while she was at the computer. I feel that I might have distracted this person greatly from her actual assignment for the sake of my own. Oops. I do feel kind of bad though because she might have had an important paper to do, but I wasn't sitting there for that long so it's alright.

In a way my subject kind of deserved to be stalked because when I was walking over to find a person, she kept glancing over towards me to see what I was doing. It was a general glance it was kind of a "what are you doing over here, I'm just going to watch what you do" kind of glance. It was a little creepy so I decided that it was time for her to be creeped out back and that she was going to be my subject for this assignment. In a way she brought it upon herself because she got my attention by glancing over to me about five times in thirty seconds.

My subject however was not very interesting, she was just another average ordinary student in the library. By this I mean that she looked and dressed like everyone else and also was sitting down typing and keeping to herself, not doing anything out of the ordinary what so ever. My subject was wearing sweatpants, a hoodie, uggs and I am pretty sure she had a blackberry with her too. This to me is what I mean by ordinary, not saying that everyone at Hofstra is like that because they aren't, but because at my high school this was almost how every girl looked day after day, all she was missing was a gigantic iced coffee. She also carried around a bag and a scarf too, along with about three different books that she was using to type her paper. Even after I had been sitting down there and taking notes based on the worksheet that we had, she continued to glance over towards me to see what I was doing. After all I did make it kind of obvious, but the assignment wasn't to be discrete. She certainly wasn't discrete in how she continued to glance at me, but I was not her only focus while I was sitting there. She kept looking at her books and then taking a pause, putting her hands on her head in both frustration and thought it seemed like. After that she'd type out about a sentence or two. I think the entire time I was there she only typed about maybe half a page in total. Other than that she did not have many interactions at all. She did not go on facebook or look down at her phone at all. The only things on her mind were me and the paper that she was typing not very diligently.

My overall take on this assignment was at first it felt extremely odd to be doing, but after a while I just thought of it as a school assignment that had to be done and ruled out in my mind how actually wrong it was, just for the 45 minutes that we had to do this for. It was definitely an interesting assignment though, one which I don't expect to get again.

Welcome back Billy Collins.....

After watching the video of Billy Collins read his poem, it changed my outlook on poetry for a short amount of time. I personally do not like poetry at all, but his poem did appeal to me greatly. This is only because it made a mockery of what love poems stood for and completely made a sham out of them. Honestly when we first watched the video of him for the first time in class together, it took me a few minutes to realize exactly what he was doing, but once I did realize it, I greatly enjoyed the poem. He was able to pick a part aspects of love poems and turn them into nonsense. He used all of the symbolism against itself in a way. By doing this he showed people love poems in a new light. Billy Collins was able to expose love poems for what they truly are, immense amounts of cheesy symbolism. I do feel that by reading the poem to people it had a greater impact on them. If I had sat down to read this poem I probably would have felt as though it was cheesy just like most love poems, but the way that he read it made it come through to me. It was the slightly sarcastic tone in his voice and also his very relaxed almost not caring attitude when reading it that showed people right out there that it's intent was indeed to make fun of love poems. Billy Collins' whole feel for the this poem was even conveyed through reading it. Even though it was his poem, he wanted the audience to laugh, that was how it seemed he measured his success for this poem. If the audience had been silent and emotional about how beautiful the symbolism was in the text, then it would have been a failure on the part of Billy Collins because he would have simply helped out every other poet who writes the junk that he was making fun of. He conveyed his attitude perfectly and had a strong sense of sarcasm in his voice which made it come across to the audience perfectly. By having Billy Collins, one of the greatest poets of our time, turn love poems into a sham, shows me that there is still some hope left in poetry and that we have not turned the english language into the terrible one that George Orwell feared it had become. Also, on a side note, he was not writing for the university at all in this poem, this was for himself and the public. Good job Billy Collins, you've made me not hate poetry as much an more.

Every dog has it's day.....

After reading the article "What The Dog Saw" I felt an extreme sense of relief that it was not another shelley Jackson article. This article was coherent and kept its focus. Granted at some points it did tail off, but only to talk about material which was related to the subject at hand. This article was about Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. It focused on his connection with both dogs and humans as well. It began by telling us different stories of the various dogs which he has encountered and trained. He is able to do this by using his body language to keep the animals in check. His main focus is all about how he presents himself. There are also some professionals mentioned in this article who interpret his body language and how he acts with the animals. At one point it is even mentioned that he is dancing with them. I do not agree with this, I think that his body language is very strong but no where near dancing. He is not literally dancing with the animals, that's a little absurd. His relationship with the animals is all conveyed through his body, otherwise he has no way of communicating with them. Dogs do not speak english. It is all about how he positions himself in front of the animals and in his chair when he sits down, the way that he situates his body forward show that he is in charge and is not backing off. Even when he does sit back, he places his hands in front of him to still keep the same authority in himself. He is a master of body language and is able to convey it nearly perfectly with the dogs.

Cesar also uses three other components which he uses to train the dogs are exercise, discipline and affection. He is able to combine all of these so that the animals become well trained. He takes the dogs on hikes when they stay at his program, he keeps his authority, and he also shows compassion for them as well. When all of these are put together it is almost how we would raise a child. We must show authority and show them who is the boss, but it is also necessary to show them compassion and to be affectionate towards them, because without this we would be overly demanding and controlling and would therefore receive no affection back. This is all necessary to develop a healthy relationship.

Also mentioned in this article is Cesar's relationship with his wife. He does not see marriage as a two way street, he views it as his wife is there to tend to his every wish. His wife does not feel this way and wants him to go therapy where he discovers that he must all make connections with people as well as the dogs.

The last piece that this article leaves you with is when it talk about the 3 year old who is autistic and his care giver. The woman who works with him is also excellent in what she does. She uses music to try and control the child. But more importantly she mimics his own motions and then tries to establish connections with the child through the music being played. By this I mean that she moves the childs legs to the beat of the music in order to try and calm the child down. I personally do not understand how this helps the child that much. I see that she got the child to relax somewhat, but I do not understand how.

This article was overall very well written, but it did lose me at some points. I was partially confused about the part with the baby and his therapist when she begins to work with him. This article also seemed like a hypertext, since it was written online, but more so that it connected other stories as well, all referring back to the original idea about the connections and relationships with people and dogs and people and other people based on the ideas of authority and compassion.

More Shelley Jackson

4) Is Jackson in favor of hypertexts because it is easier to persuade a reader by linking the reader with other texts?

This is one of the questions from Chelsea's blog and also the one that I chose to write about. I think that the Jackson in this piece is truly against hypertest. For me, this was a terrible thing to read because it kept getting off track, and not off track in a good way where there is a side story, but the story itself just got lost in nothing. At points in this article I went back to the beginning of the paragraph that I was reading, just so I could get some sort of understanding as to what I was reading. Every paragraph that she had for the most part started out fine, but as it went further n, I believe that Shelley got lost herself. It only seemed that she started a new paragraph once she had completely gotten of topic and almost as though she was lost in the woods, would jump onto another path, get lost again and find another path. My mind could not handle this. I hate it when writers get off track of their original idea, but it does not bother me as much when authors have side stories to get lost in, not just random metaphors as we see that Shelley has done here.

As I was reading this last night I began to wonder that perhaps Shelley had written this so terribly for a reason. Maybe she wrote this as the epitome of what a hypertext would be like, just as a way that she could completely denounce it. This was the only reason that I was able to come up with for this article being so bad and uncomprehensible. I am curious about the effect that the linear version had on readers, but I would not want to read it to find out myself.

Questions for Shelley Jackson

1. Was that really your intention as I pointed out, to write about a hypertext in a hypertext?

2. Would you have written this in linear text?

3. If you had, do you think that it would have the same effect on people while they were reading it?

4. Why did you chose to use so many metaphors in your article?

5. Do you think that people are able to comprehend better if there are metaphors?

6. Why do all of your paragraphs open up with a negative statement?

Why??

After reading Shelley Jackson's piece entitled "Stitch Bitch" I did not want to read another thing at all. I found this to be extremely confusing and lacking a certain point. It did however have a general concept of "hypertext". This article was for me was a terrible read. Her entire writing was drowned out with way too many metaphors. It began to make me wonder what I was actually reading about at a certain point because she lost me in all of the unnecessary context.

After I had gotten about half way done reading this piece, I for some reason remembered what we read as one our first homework assignments of the year about George Orwell. It was his piece about the english language and indeed how bad it had gotten when in written form. His idea about trying to use big words and metaphors to try and spice up your writing, I feel, parallels mine. I think that Shelley Jackson did exactly this. She lost me in her writing because of how she tried to formulate her ideas. The only parts of her writing which seemed to make the most sense were the first two or maybe three of every new topic. After that, in most paragraphs, she went on and on and began to lose focus of what it was that she was writing about. She kept connecting her topic to different ideas, but they always connected back to her thoughts on hypertext. After reading "Banished Body", (one of the paragraphs in her article) I began to realize what it was that she was trying to do. As I was reading that entire paragraph/list it hit me that she was writing a hypertext while writing about hypertext. By this I mean that all of the things that she listed in "Banished Body" all could be found in her actual article.

"It is unstable. It changes from moment to moment, in its experience both of itself and of the world."

"It has no center, but a roving focus. (It "reads" itself.)"

-Shelley Jackson

It is these two which stood out to me the most, mainly because they are the most obvious in her writing. Granted after reading this list it changed my whole outlook on this article, but I still do not like it. This list merely made me recognize what it was that she was doing. This did help me somewhat while reading it, but I still think that her article was terribly overdone in metaphors, which in the end made me get lost and lose track of what I was in fact reading about.

So Billy Collins.....??

My top six questions:

1. Is there supposed to be any deep symbolism in the objects chosen?

2. Was there any past experience in our life that made you want to mock love poems?

3. Why was it those first two lines that you chose to write about?

4. What was the rest of that poem like?

5. What made you want to criticize someone's writing like that?

6. What magazine did you get the article from?

My favorite question:

2. Was there any past experience in your life that made you want to mock love poems?

My honest guess to this question is that there was not a past experience. I know this is probably not the response that you thought I would use, but I have my reasons for it. Perhaps instead of their being a single past experience in his life, there has been many. Thinking about this seems perfectly logical to me. Being the great poet that he is, Billy Collins has probably not only written countless poems, but he has also probably read a great deal too. Perhaps it was that after reading so many of these love poems that all have no meaning, with their pointless symbolism always thrown in, it was about time, in Billy Collins' mind, that someone should write the total opposite of a love poem. In this piece that Billy Collins wrote, he completely mocks everything that poetry stands for. He turns what could be a love poem into a complete and total bash of the first two lines of someone else's poem. It's unfortunate for the author of the poem that BIlly Collins took the first to lines from to be criticized. There he was probably thinking about how great his poem is, with being published in a magazine and all, and there goes Billy Collins tearing his work apart. Billy Collins turns those first two lines into a complete mess. He makes us all realize in a way that all of this pointless writing which seems to be so deep and have so much meaning in of its symbolism, is actually pointless and has nothing to do with love at all. Just in the symbolism that Collins chooses to use, everything in that poem is turned into a sham. I personally enjoyed Collins' poem because I do not like poetry where authors try to be deep and hide meaning in their words. I prefer my reading to be straight forward, no matter what type of material the reading may be. For me this was the perfect poem because it just made fun of love poems entirely.

Why does Lethem find obsessiveness about influence (aka "plagiarism") a disadvantage for artists?

This article by Lethem is based entirely off of plagiarism and all of its forms. He shows us examples of plagiarism in books, movies, and music. Throughout this article he continues to flood our minds with examples of what should be considered plagiarism, but is not. He opens this article with an example of a story from 1916 which was later reused in another novel forty years later. Another example used is Bob Dylan who uses many lines from movies and plays in his music. Lethems idea on plagiarism is that especially in literature, ideas are going to be reused. The part that he obsesses over in his article is how it is a disadvantage for artists. The idea of usin reoccuring themes is a complete and total block to young artists today. My personal idea on artists today is that they are going to plagiarize in some form or another because it is impossible to not. Themes are a recurring idea and when young artists are given examples whether it be in music, art or literature, they are going to remember some of the ideas and unwilling use them. Or some might chose to just copy ideas directly. Also in his article Lethem writes how even when some things are placed into collages, they simply jog a persons memory. The objects do not serve the full purpose of being put out there to be interpreted by others. Since these ideas have already been used so many countless times in the past, the people who are viewing them now can not have an original feel for the ideas. Granted it is possible that some students might interpret things in an uncommon way, but the basis of that idea was most likely already published or thought of by someone else before them.

One other reason why it might be that Lethem is obsessing in this article is that even though there is always some room for modification in art, today it will most likely be thought of as stealing and plagiarism. He uses examples of Walt Disney in his defense, mentioning how he could have been yelled at for stealing from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. or even the existence of a real mouse. Lethem's point here is that artists should be able to, as he writes, "be free to capture an image without compensating the source." In this he means that people should be free to create without having to worry about who thought of it first and if it was created already. The artist should not have to worry about giving credit for everything tht they do. The problem here is that today almost everything is protected by copyright laws and is so limited in its use by others.

"But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place."

In this Lethem is concluding obviously that the public is losing out in the long run of copyrighting and the prevetion of plagiarism. This is only because on the one side pulling, the artists want to copyright their work and keep that ownership so that no one else can copy it, while on the other side, mass media is trying to take ideas and publicize them into mainstream ones. With both of these sides fighting and being put at a standstill, the public is losing out because we are now presented with more and more bad advertisements and main stream garbage because artists are so particular about what they create so that the media has such a hard time getting to it. An example of how the media has gotten to literature and used it in a positive way is in the Hansel and Gretel commercial. AT&T was able to put a positive and commercialized idea on it. They were able to use art and transform, which it should always happen. Art is never meant to be unchanged, it is art because it is creativity, and as long as there is a human mind somewhere, there will always be room for more change and creativity. An example in which we see the collective public imagination suffering is in any Geico commercial. They have the worst advertisement campaign other than the gecko. The cavemen are a terrible idea I feel and I personally do not like the idea of the pile of money with the googlely eyes either. There are no good ideas for the commercials because they, the media, are not pulling at any forms of art (literature, movies, music, etc.) to get decent ideas. Without any art to get our ideas from, the minds of the public suffer and struggle for creativity.

Mark Twain

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English–it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880

This passage written by Mark Twain is an example of how I feel writing should be. By this I mean that I think writing should be short, sweet and to the point, there is no need for the "fluff and flowers". All this does is drown out your original ideas in words and phrases that are unnecessary and can just completed be avoided. When this happens your audience will begin to lose focus and forget what the original point of your writing actually was. When Mark Twain explains how to use adjective and writes "They weaken when they are close together" he is explaining how when you use too many adjectives together it begins to make your writing lose focus. Do not over describe what you are trying to convey, just make your case clear and do not go overboard with adjectives. This will make your writing less meaningful because you are focusing so much on over describing one detail of your writing when you should focus your time on your writing as a whole.

"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say."
Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903

What Mark Twain is trying to convey here is that you should only begin writing once you have all of your thoughts clearly laid out. When sitting down to write, you do not want to just jump into your writing because you often do not have all of your thoughts organized correctly and will not write your best material. This is a perfect example of how I write, because I go through many drafts of what I want to write before I find the perfect wording for it. Often when I write an essay I will type about 5 different versions of the same sentence until I like what I have. Then eventually I will pick a final version of what I want to keep in my writing.