"Poetry makes nothing happen"- Geertz Quote

"Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden says in his elegy of Yeats, "it survives in the valley of its saying . . . a way of happening, a mouth." The cockfight too, in this colloquial sense, makes nothing happen. Men go on allegorically humiliating one another and being allegorically humiliated by one another, day after day, glorying quietly in the experience if they have triumphed, crushed only slightly more openly by it if they have not. But no one's status really changes. You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights; you cannot, as an individual, really ascend it at all. Nor can you descend it that way. All you can do is enjoy and savor, or suffer and withstand..."


I found the above quote from Geertz's Deep Play: notes on Balinese cockfight interesting and thought provoking. I think this is an interesting part of the piece because, until this point, Geertz has been studying the cockfight and giving it so much significance that this passage is almost surprising. He comes to the conclusion that the cockfights are almost pointless because they achieve nothing, they change nothing. The cockfights are illegal but why? Is there really a reason for something that doesn't achieve anything to be illegal? Sure, we can argue bestiality and it being inhumane but as I have been learning in my philosophy class- if something is causing a greater happiness than not, why should it be wrong? The Utilitarianism approach to life sums up all of our pains and pleasures and if the pleasures of the issue at hand out weigh the pains than it is accepted by society. It can be argued that Geertz feels the same way about the cockfights in this circumstance. He describes that the men humiliate each other but losing really isn't that bad, they are "crushed only slightly" which in reality doesn't out weigh the pleasure that the cockfights give to the Balinese people. Whether participating or just simply being another person standing in the "superorganism"- as Geertz describes when gathered around a cockfight- the fights themselves really have become a part of the Balinese culture. All people come to watch the fights and it is almost a bonding experience for the Balinese to share the ups and downs of the cockfights with each other. 

Summary of J.Fitzgerald's OWS

Any person who has watched the news in the past few months understands what the Occupy Wall Street movement stands for and is. Jason Fitzgerald's article "Ask Not What Occupy Wall Street Will Do Next; Ask How We Will Change The Status Quo" he answers exactly what the title implies, OWS may not be making much bigger of an uproar as it did when it hit its peak but it will continue to be the whisper we hear when we remember how we are split into a 99% and an elite 1%. Fitzgerald suggests that, although the Occupy Wall Street movement has died down for now, it will not stop until it changes how we all consider each other- as the One-Hundred percent -instead of ninety nine and one. He describes Wall Street as a place that "pretends" to be fair or somewhere where all people can become a part-owner of a private company but this is obviously false. Wall Street is some-what corrupt in the sense that only the wealthy can buy enough shares of stock to actually hold any sort of power which is why the OWS movement was created, to combat the unfair distribution of power in the United States. OWS has set a firm foundation for the rest of the world to create their own Occupy movements. In the article, he mentions how it has spread to our "Homes and Ports" and even to Iowa and has become a sort of image or political attitude rather than just what physically happened back in October and November. OWS has indeed become a movement that will always be on the back burner waiting to boil over once another scandal arises, we just have to wait and see what they do next, if anything at all but even if they never achieve they same kind of fire they did when they all assembled in Zuccotti Park, the movement will always be around until we reach a sense of "us" instead of the "it" and "them" terms Fitzgerald explains at the end of his article.

Strong Reading & Reading With the Grain versus Against the Grain

I would define "strong reading" as using your own past experiences and critical thinking as you read a text to be able to analyze and better understand what the author is trying to convey. To be a strong reader, you have to continuously ask yourself questions about the text like its purpose, themes, audience, and motivation. You also have to take notes, look up vocabulary you do not fully understand the meanings of, and make sure you read at a pace where you can comprehend and remember what it is you are reading (not so fast that it goes in one ear and out the other). Strong readers always challenge themselves by reading a large range of texts by authors with different styles of writing which further pushes them to learn.

The novel Anthem by Ayn Rand has many different themes running through the story line but perhaps the most apparent theme that stood out to me was that of Freedom of the Search for Knowledge and Individuality. I personally agreed with the author on this reoccurring theme so this would be considered reading "with the grain". Rand truly portrays the importance of being an individual and searching for knowledge that each person needs to develop their talents and intelligence. In the novel, the society where the characters lived was oppressed and didn't let them use resources such as books to grow as an individual but once the main character decided he wanted more to life and freedom he left the city with the woman he loved and ventured into the forest where he found a place that resembled a library but was tucked away, showing how the city had pushed intellectual growth away so that all were equal and only knew as much as the next person. I consider this reading with the grain for me because I followed the author's opinion and kept with their perspective on the argument. 

On the other hand, a novel I truly love and might be one of my most recent favorites would be Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. There were many fictional aspects to this novel that I found extremely interesting but i did not agree with the majority of the assumptions made and I did question the authors' motives. This would be considered reading "against the grain" because I did not agree with Collins and the assumptions she makes on what the world might become. This novel, although an easy read, did challenge and force me to make up my own thoughts on what might happen in the future and created doubts.